Reimagining The Higher Education Student

Drawing on the perspectives of scholars and researchers from around the world, this book challenges dominant constructions of higher education students. Given the increasing number and diversity of such students, the book offers a timely discussion of the implicit and sometimes subtle ways that they are characterised or defined. Topics vary from the ways that curriculum designers ‘imagine’ learners, the complex and evolving nature of student identity work, through to newspaper and TV representations of university attendees. Reimagining the Higher Education Student seeks to question the accepted or unquestioned nature of ‘being a student’ and instead foreground the contradictions and ‘messiness’ of such ideation. Offering timely insights into the nature of the student experience and providing an understanding of what students may desire from their Higher Education participation, this book covers a range of issues, including: Impressions versus the reality of being a Higher Education student Portrayals of students in various media including newspapers, TV shows and online Generational perspectives on students, and students as family members It is a valuable resource for academics and students both researching and working in higher education, especially those with a focus on identities, their importance and their constructions.

How to rebuild higher education from the ground up for the twenty-first century. Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world's students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.

"The authors argue that really putting student success at the center of attention will require a radical reimagining of higher education. The book makes a provocative set of arguments about what is possible if campuses radically reimagine their culture, practices, structures, and rules with the primary purpose of helping students succeed in college and beyond"--

In this wide-ranging book, Anke Schwittay argues that, in order to inspire and equip students to generate better responses to global challenges, we need a new high education pedagogy that develops their imagination, creativity, emotional sensibilities and practical capabilities.

This book explores emerging populations of mobile international students in order to consider innovative and inclusive approaches for a more equitable and socially just higher education for new generations of international students. It offers critical reflections on the intersections of race, place, and space at universities hosting international students across multiple geographic and cultural contexts. The volume is designed to catalyze debate on how international student learning and exchange needs to be reimagined for new generations of students in a world of increasing complexity and virtual mobility. International student mobility in higher education is intended to serve as an educational experience that speaks to the need for more interculturally sensitive and globally competent learners. However, internationalization practices like study abroad have increasingly been influenced by neoliberalism, and dynamics of commodification and consumerism, emphasizing the private benefits of such experiences in terms of the social and economic benefits to individual participants. This raises the question of inequality in such internationalization practices; who is benefitting from it? As post-secondary institutions around the world become more and more internationalized, what are the undesirable effects of these developments? Given the rapid expansion of research on both internationalization and inequality in higher education, it is foreseeable that this book will become a much-referenced text within the field and profession.

Exposes the intimate relationship between big finance and higher education inequality in America. Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America’s unequal system of higher education.

Reimagining democratic societies, although a demanding task, is one in which higher education must engage. As societies change, our understanding of democracy must also evolve. We need democratic institutions, but also democratic culture and democratic innovation. Citizen participation, as a cornerstone of democracy, must go beyond citizen mobilisation on just a few issues. An educated, committed citizenry deeply involved in creating and sustaining diverse democratic societies is essential for human progress and advancing the quality of life for all. The authors - academics, policy makers and practitioners from Europe and the United States - argue this point, making the case for why democratic reimagination and innovation cannot succeed without higher education and why higher education cannot fulfil its educational, academic and societal missions without working for the common good. Case studies provide examples of how higher education can contribute to reimagining and reinvigorating democracy.

Higher education as we have known it has now and forever dramatically changed and so must the previous models that we once held dear. Leaders must take a fresh look at how their institutions design, implement, and measure practices in strategic enrollment management and expand the model, as never before. Higher Education on the Brink: Reimagining Strategic Enrollment Management in Colleges and Universities combines strategies for enrollment enhancement with significant support for development of alternative revenue streams for overall sustainability and growth. It introduces a new model for launching highly engaged strategic planning processes for colleges and universities. With current, real-world examples, the book details how colleges can be guided by integrated strategic planning processes to recalibrate efforts that yield key results. The major difference in this work is an exacting focus on organizational culture and each facet that defines it. As colleges and universities place new focus on strategically re-imagining higher education and their role in it, Higher Education on the Brink will serve as a guide for determining what difficult questions need to be asked and how to answer those questions in a manner that will position the college for the future with support from the college community, generating increased opportunities for student and operational success.