October 13, 2011 These are challenging times for community college leaders. Many states across the country are facing unprecedented budget reductions in higher education systems. As community colleges receive fewer state dollars, these institutions must develop alternate funding sources. Trustees are faced with difficult decisions as cost pressures mount against the backdrop of state accountability […]
education
Is No Child Left Behind…threatening to leave our nation behind?
September 29, 2011 It has been ten years since the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), but there has been little to no improvement in our country’s education standing amongst other industrialized nations in the world. Last week, President Obama offered those states struggling under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program’s […]
The Race, Prison and Education Connection
September 22, 2011 “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” -Donald Rumsfeld (Former Secretary of Defense and owner […]
Reflecting on 9/11 and its impact on International Students
September 15, 2011 Ten years ago on September 11, 2001, I was on a Thai Airlines flight heading back home to Los Angeles after a successful two-week fact finding trip to South Korea and Japan. I had met with representatives at the South Korean and Japanese Ministries of Education, visited and toured schools and universities […]
A stimulus plan of sorts…colleges paying employers to hire their graduates
Hope your Labor Day weekend was a good one. Thanks to my employer, who threw in a bonus day making it a total of 4 days of R&R, I’m back at my desk rested and ready to push through the remaining months of 2011. Here’s something interesting I came across while perusing the internet and […]
Taking Charge: The Art of Assuming Responsibility
August 18, 2011 It’s been a month since I last blogged, and it’s not because of a lack of material. A few days ago I heard a story on the radio about a guy whose job at one of those high-end boutique hotels in the Big Apple is to collect the mobile phone #s of […]
Is there a doctor in the house?
August 12, 2011 According to a recent report on PRI’s The World, “the U.S. suffers from a shortage of primary care physicians, and the problem is expected to worsen. America’s baby boom generation is aging, and health care reform could put greater demands on doctors as more American gains medical insurance.” How do we intend […]
Working Together: Agents/Recruiters, U.S. Institutions, Credential Evaluation Agencies…the recipe for success
August 4, 2011 There’s been a flurry of on-line discussions, reports and articles on the pros and cons of working with international student recruiters and commission-based agents. The discussion has been passionate and robust to say the least! According to an August 3, 2011 article* by Alan Ruby, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s […]
Gobbledygook: Cracking the Code
July 28, 2011 A monthly rant from the “Frustrated Evaluator” Definition: 1. Gobbledygook or gobbledegook (sometimes gobbledegoo) is any text containing jargon or especially convoluted English that results in it being excessively hard to understand or even incomprehensible. I’m an easy going guy and 90% of the time evaluating international academic documents, something I’ve been doing for nearly 20 years, is […]
We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
A Pith Book Review July 21, 2011 I was already a dedicated fan of Paulo Freire when my professor assigned the book. I had already fallen in love with the paradoxically romantic and pragmatic tale of Freire’s endeavor to effect social change in his homeland Brazil by teaching the most marginalized people to read so […]