21st Century Scholar

So here is a real e-mail that I received last week, I thought my response to it might be worth posting, so here it is. I’ve changed the name of the sender for privacy. Dr. Venegas: I am an English and AVID teacher at TW High School. I recently read your profile on the USC school [...]

It is that time of year again. Monday night, after weeks of copying, and researching, and crying over brackets, the NCAA will crown its champion for 2013. The last couple of years, I have reserved my April blog to celebrate and question America’s archetypal view of just what it means to be a college. In [...]

When I look back on the events of education in general and higher education in particular this year I am struck by how much my view of these events depends on how far I look forward. If I am only concerned about the immediate present then the year turned out pretty okay. President Obama was [...]

There was recently a conference in New York City about systems of higher education. I was supposed to speak but after having my plane cancelled three times, and facing the prospect of spending the night in Buffalo in order to get to NYC, I cancelled. They had asked me to speak on a panel entitled [...]

The Great Recession has claimed many victims, but one is seldom mentioned: students under-prepared for college. Three developments cloud these students’ college futures. First came U.S. Senate hearings on for-profit higher education. The institutions were pummeled for low graduation rates, saddling students with hefty debt, and not living up to their employment promises. In California, [...]

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I teach a class on finance in higher education during the summer. This year, on the last night of class, one of the students said quite passionately: “When are we going to make this end? When are we going to do something to show that we aren’t okay with [...]

Hugo Tapia, our stellar Pullias Center Outreach Advisor, returned from a school site this week lamenting the fact that the college counselor position at one of our partner schools had been cut. A group of us gathered around the water cooler, sharing intel about similar positions that had been cut and other counseling positions that [...]

Today is the last day of SummerTIME, the Pullias Center’s annual intensive four-week writing and college knowledge program for first-generation, low-income Los Angeles-area students starting college in the fall. The entire SummerTIME crew—Pullias staff members, grad and undergrad students, college writing instructors, and lots of volunteers—works diligently to prepare these students for the academic, social, [...]

Here is our new video focusing on increasing access to postsecondary education in California.

The 23 campus system currently pays a president a low of $259,000 and a high of $400,000. A few presidents switched campuses this year and they got big salary boosts because they were going to lead bigger campuses. Not surprisingly, the faculty think the salaries are outrageous, especially after they have barely gotten a raise [...]