21st Century Scholar

Only six days until 529 day! 5/29 is 529 day … and May is actually 529 month—so as someone who writes about financial aid, I shouldn’t end the month without at least mentioning them. What is a 529? It’s a college savings plan that can begin for kids from the day that they are born [...]

From the beginning, I was really thankful for the opportunity to represent my institution.   And then this happened:   And we can’t forget this:     “Tweet-ups” were wonderful:   Meeting with mentors was certainly illuminating:   Live tweeting was one of the biggest highlights, especially during the phenomenal presidential session given by my [...]

I wrote the Foreword to Damon William’s Examining Strategic Diversity Leadership: Activating Change and Transformation in Higher Education (Stylus, 2013). Here’s what I said: In his epic The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois commented that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Damon Williams [...]

Kurt Vonnegut once said to a group of eager writing students, “Probably all of you are good enough to make it as writers. But it’s likely that only one of you has what it takes to endure the constant rejection.” I’m not sure I would reduce academic life to such a straightforward statement, but he’s [...]

What can I honestly say about AERA 2013? This was a serious inquiry as I looked to my notepad from sessions and realized that for the first time I had relatively few notes on paper from a conference.  As I scrolled through my tweets I realized I highly enjoyed the conference through Twitter while still [...]

How the higher ed world changes in such a short time. K–12 education has been in “crisis” much of my adult life, but usually higher education has been spared the Hollywood-like metaphors. “A nation at risk” paralleled other 20th century reports that forecast calamity because particular goals had not been reached in K–12 education. The [...]

Because newly-minted Ph.D. graduates far outweigh the number of tenure-track positions [read about the sobering statistics here], many will have to travel if they want a job in academia. From my own experiences with friends and colleagues, graduate students deal with the possibility in different ways. Some have families and friends and roots. Travel is [...]

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 [...]

We all know that stereotypes exist. Some are funny—white men can’t jump. Others remain from a distant past—all professors wear bow ties, tweed jackets, and smoke pipes. And others are pernicious—African American students don’t do well on standardized tests. Stereotypes also tend to speak as much about the group not mentioned as the group mentioned. [...]

As faculty members and co-directors of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California, we lead action research using CUE’s Equity Scorecard. The mission of our center is to create the “tools” needed for colleges and universities to bring about racial/ethnic equity in students’ collegiate experiences and outcomes. In the action [...]