Immigration Debate: College Students/Illegal Aliens?

Georgia clamps down on illegal immigrants in colleges - CNN.com

Georgia's public colleges have adopted new policies that officials say will prevent illegal immigrants from attending five high-demand schools and from being admitted ahead of legally and academically qualified residents at the rest of the state's public institutions of higher learning.

Rationing Education in a Time of Educational Demand: Which will we choose?

In the excellent summary article by Reeve Hamilton in the Texas Tribune, UNT Chancellor Lee Jackson is one of a number of Chancellors who comment on the upcoming budget cuts for higher education in Texas.  Of all the comments, Jackson's hit the issue most squarely.  The state of Texas cannot have their cake and eat it too.  In other words, you cannot have a burgeoning population that you continue to insist must have access to higher education while at the same time reducing the capacity to handle the growth.  This is contradictory policymaking.  There's not a moral right or wrong side to choose here.  But there is a side to choose here.  Texas leaders must make the hard call between cutting the budget to meet needs by 'rationing' public higher education (the result of cutting resources to colleges and universities dramatically) or promoting more access to higher education for more people.  These values are not easily reconciled. 

Texas University Chancellors Brace for Budget Cuts — Higher Education | The Texas Tribune

What worries UNT’s Jackson is the discussions that have cropped up in states like California, Florida and Nevada — states suffering through even deeper, more protracted budget problems. “They have discussed what are in effect rationing plans,” he says. These include limiting enrollment, restricting transfers from community colleges and deferring pursuits of lofty goals like recruiting top faculty. Such measures have yet to be discussed in Texas, which, Jackson says, has been emphasizing “more enrollments, more degrees, more research and more student access” even as cuts loom. “You can’t have a lot of expectations and not recognize the cost,” he says.

Bill Gates on Course Size and Education Quality

In his speech to the nation's governors at their annual association meeting in Washington, DC., Bill Gates made remarks which are likely to cause heartburn for some and create excitement for others.  Paraphrased: put a good teacher in front of students and the size of the course has less of an impact!

Gates: Spending Cuts Don't Have To Harm Learning : NPR

Even in the midst of large spending cuts, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Monday that schools can improve the performance of students if they put more emphasis on rewarding excellent teaching and less emphasis on paying teachers based on seniority and graduate degrees.

Gates spoke to the nation's governors mindful of the severe financial woes that many of them face as they try to bridge deficits totaling about $125 billion in the coming fiscal year. He said there are some clear do's and don'ts. Among the do's: Lift caps on class sizes and get more students in front of the very best teachers. Those teachers would get paid more with the savings generated from having fewer personnel overall.

"There are people in the field who think class size is the only thing," Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press prior to his speech. "But in fact, the dominant factor is having a great teacher in front of the classroom."

Seeing is believing: the link between education and income

The graphical representation of relationships between education (high school and college) and income (median average by county) is pretty fascinating when viewed on a map.  Intuitively demonstrates what would take a while to understand if you only looked at datasets.

Infographic of the Day: Do Smarter People Make More Money? | Co.Design

We all know, at least vaguely, that a better education leads to better prospects in life. But is that really true? A superb map created by GOOD shows that it is -- but thanks to the ingenuity of the map design, it also manages to reveal a good deal more about the links between education and money.

Smartphone Apps come to the classroom

College 2.0: 6 Top Smartphone Apps to Improve Teaching, Research, and Your Life - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Some of the most innovative applications for hand-held devices, however, have come from professors working on their own. They find ways to adapt popular smartphone software to the classroom setting, or even write their own code.