Early education in a tight spot; Funding falls for first time in years

College enrollments are continuing to fall by an average of 2.3 percent, except at four-year, private, nonprofit institutions, reports the National Student Clearinghouse. Community colleges lost 3.6 percent of students from spring 2012 to 2013. Full-time enrollment declined by 5.2 percent and part-time enrollment by 2.6 percent. The number of traditional-age students went down by only 1.7 [...]

Community college leaders are trying to double the number of graduates by 2020 to meet President Obama’s targets. It’s not easy, writes Stacy Collett in Community College Journal. For administrators at Harper College in Illinois, 10,604 is the magic number—it’s the college’s share of the 5 million additional community college graduates President Obama challenged the [...]

  Justin Reich, a history teacher and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center who writes the “EdTechResearcher” blog for Education Week, is one of the smartest critical thinkers out there on education and technology, and I’m proud to call him a friend as well. Last week he gave a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center that intersects [...]

Twenty-five percent of ACT test takers in 2012 were prepared for college, according to ACT’s 2012 Condition of College and Career Readiness report. Sixty-seven percent were ready to pass a college writing course, 52 percent were prepared to read a social science textbook, 46 percent were ready for college algebra and 31 were likely to pass [...]

It’s better in to live in your mother’s basement, drink beer and play video games all day than to major in English or sociology, go into debt and then live in the basement, says Aaron Clarey, author of  Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major.

Would-be rock stars in Britain will be able to earn a two-year degree in heavy metal music at New College Nottingham. A group called the Campaign for Real Education says the degree is a waste of time, reports BBC News. Liam Maloy, a lecturer in music performance, said students will learn how to compose and perform [...]

Lisa Dieker went around the room asking her middle-school students what they did over the weekend. CJ went to see the movie “Here Comes the Boom” with her boyfriend. Ed played in a basketball game and Kevin posted new dance videos to YouTube. “Did you work on any art projects?” Dieker asked Maria, a girl [...]

Somewhere midway through his sophomore year of college at Florida Atlantic University, Christopher Clevenger started to question his aeronautical engineering major. He liked the coursework, and was doing well at it, but when he thought about his job prospects, the future seemed bleak. “It would be me, a computer screen and a phone,” he said. [...]

ORLANDO―Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida (UCF) had spread out over the room in small groups. One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed [...]

INGLEWOOD, Calif.—In the back of a tenth-grade geometry classroom on a recent morning at Washington Preparatory High School, nine miles southeast of Los Angeles, Landon Yurica and Alycia Jones bent over the papers in front of them. At 23 and 24, respectively, the two could almost blend in as students as they tried the assignment [...]

NORTHRIDGE, Calif.— It took less than a minute for Mario Martinez to finish the first six questions of the algebra exam that his professor, Ivan Cheng, had just handed to him. The high school-level test was supposed to be a good example of an exam, so that the graduate students in Cheng’s math methods course [...]

NORTHRIDGE, Calif.—On a recent afternoon at California State University, Northridge, Nancy Prosenjak was attempting to quiet the graduate students spread out across conference tables in the back of her classroom. She was still missing nearly a third of the class, but she was eager to debrief with her students about their first day of student [...]