Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

The future of STEM education may be at risk

It’s not every day that high school students get the chance to meet a renowned physicist. But Arkansas high school students spent Tuesday listening to Dr. James Gates, a noted African-American theoretical physicist, talk about his career and the importance of a STEM education, TakePart.com reports.

“There are half of million jobs that can’t find Americans to hire because they don’t have the skills level,” he told the packed auditorium at Philander Smith College in Little Rock. “These are the jobs you most want to have in the future.”

Who could fill those? More students who focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classes in high school and college. Gates is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland in College Park but also serves on President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In that capacity, he advises Obama on myriad topics including the increasing need for STEM education in the United States……Read More

‘First Generation’ documentary raises the question: Is higher education only for the wealthy?

As a former admissions officer at Columbia University, I used to spend the fall traveling to high schools and college fairs spreading the gospel of our world-class education from which I had also benefited, says TakePart. Although the majority of my visits were to elite private schools or well-funded suburban public schools that sent scores of applications to the university every year, I made it a point whenever I could to schedule sessions at urban or rural public schools. My hope was to find promising students that might otherwise be overlooked by our traditional recruiting efforts.  While most of the low-income students I met had close to a perfect academic record, later in the year when their applications arrived on my desk, they looked very different from their wealthier peers. They had lower test scores, fewer if any AP courses, and unpolished essays that made it difficult to justify a coveted spot at our institution. From what the statistics implied, this was not an uncommon scenario. In the United States, less than 10 percent of college students come from the lowest income quartile, and at the 146 most selective schools that number drops to under 3 percent…

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These kids have high rates of homelessness, poverty, pregnancy- but almost all go to college

Kalamazoo, Mich., is home to two area high schools―Central High and Loy Norrix, TakePart reports. The schools’ student bodies exemplify some distressing statistics―one in three falls below the national poverty line, one in 12 is homeless, and among its black students, the city has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the state, The New York Times reports. But those statistics seem almost inconsequential in light of the fact that each of these students―as long as they graduate from high school―is getting free tuition to any public Michigan college or university of their choosing. How is that possible? The Times says it’s because of a mysterious scholarship program called the Kalamazoo Promise. Back in 2005, Janice M. Brown, the city’s superintendent of public schools, announced unnamed donors were pledging to pay the college tuition of every area student who graduated from the district’s high schools. And whoever those donors are, they’ve kept that promise every year since…

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Hunger University: Are college students the new face of food insecurity?

There’s a startling new trend on college campuses, and it’s sweeping the nation: hunger, TakePart reports. This isn’t the “hunger” people talk about when discussing “poor college kids” who survive on ramen noodles and peanut butter. It’s much more serious than that. Increasingly, students at America’s colleges and universities are finding that between multiple part-time jobs, crushing tuition costs, and, of course, their studies, they often wonder what their next meal will be. To tackle food insecurity among students, many colleges and universities have opened food pantries on campus, where struggling students can discretely receive assistance when they need it. Officials at Auburn University recently announced that starting Oct. 1, a room in the school’s busy student center will be turned into a student-run food pantry. The project is a collaboration between Auburn’s Division of Student Affairs and Committee of 19, a hunger-relief group comprised of students. Katherine Hettinger, coordinator for advocacy and case management in Auburn’s Division of Student Affairs, says the idea for a food pantry emerged from her encounters with students who are in crisis – many of them financially…

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Op-Ed: College students can give great schools ‘glass hallways’

Everyone knows that college can be a “melting pot” of ideas and perspectives. And at the start of my freshman year at Princeton, I was particularly excited to meet students from across the country with a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, says a contributor to TakePart.com. I expected traditional forms of diversity—geographic, racial, ethnic, religious, gender and sexuality—but one form that surprised me was the diverse educational background of members of our freshman class. Despite our relative enlightenment about political issues, foreign affairs, and—of course—pop culture, most of us attended high school without any idea of the quality of high schools down the street or across the state. I met students hailing from urban, suburban, and rural schools with vastly different experiences, and some with remarkably similar ones: students from elite prep schools complaining about a focus on AP test prep juxtaposed with students from struggling district schools plagued by daily test prep…

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These 10 colleges leave new graduates with the most debt

Graduates aren’t just leaving college with a diploma and a dream. Many are stepping into the real world with a mountain of student loan debt, TakePart.com reports. Six in 10 students are more than $20,000 in the hole, according to a Rutgers University study conducted on college graduates from 2006 to 2011. Even more shocking a number is the total $1 trillion student loan debt across the country. In a report released this week, the U.S. News & World Report examined the debt levels experienced by 2010 graduates at 1,009 colleges and universities. On average, graduates that year left school with $24,962 in outstanding loans. However, the report reveals that graduates from 10 private colleges are carrying nearly double the national average debt…

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