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Welcome to The EDU Ledger! We’ve moved from Diverse: Issues In Higher Education.

Section: Opinion

It Takes a Team, Not Superheroes, to Support College Success

Too often we celebrate an incredible high school teacher or school counselor when what we really need to do is take a broader approach to helping students apply and go to college, especially during a pandemic.

May 25, 2021

Lest We Be Fooled, As We Reflect on the One-Year Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder

As critical scholars and DEI strategists, the one-year anniversary of the egregious and pernicious lynching of George Perry Floyd, Jr., committed directly by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, but indirectly, by centuries of systemic racism that has historically targeted Black bodies and communities of color, is an opportunity for us to take a bold stance within this op-ed.

May 24, 2021

How Can We Increase Diversity in STEM? Support Students

As college students graduating in a world defined by climate crisis and public health emergencies, we strongly believe that supporting talented young people from underrepresented groups in STEM (like us) is essential for our generation to tackle the challenges ahead.

May 21, 2021

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Zoom Gave My Teaching New Life

When all our interactions suddenly shifted from in-person to virtual in Spring 2020, I suspected it would stress-test our comfort with being seen and seeing others in a new way, but something else happened that I hadn’t anticipated: This experience over the last year-plus has made me a better, more confident teacher.

May 20, 2021

Extending Respect and Resources to International Students

The higher education sector in the United States benefited for years from the financial pockets of the international community with minimal accountability and consideration for those students, making terminology such as ‘cash cows’ notoriously synonymous with international student enrollments. Historical demand for a U.S. education rose from ideals of versions of the American dream, decades of soft-diplomacy, and as the current academic and economic hegemony. However, last spring proved that the demand can quickly dissipate.

May 18, 2021

Connecting Today’s Course Activities to Tomorrow’s Career Possibilities is Key to Student Re-Engagement

To say that education and learning has been significantly disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic would be an understatement. Students have had to adjust to a new form of being educated while instructors were learning new methods on the fly. It was a patchwork process at best, but it caused a reexamination of existing practices.

May 17, 2021

New Poll Data Puts Biden At Odds with Most Americans on Student Loan Forgiveness

President Joe Biden’s ambitious new plan to expand access to higher education has a key missing piece: it leaves millions struggling with student loan debt to carry that burden alone. As a president who frequently speaks of his working-class upbringing in Scranton, Biden is stuck on incorrect assumptions about loan forgiveness and class—a blind spot in his education policy that is both unpopular and misinformed.

May 17, 2021

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What Could University Statements Convey as a Response to Incidents of Racial/Ethnic Violence?

What exactly do campus constituencies need at crucial moments when incidents of racism occur? Campus constituencies need a combination of compassion and action to address structural racism. Actions need to be sustained; they cannot occur in fits and starts. That is university leaders need to be proactive in fighting racism and not reactive to specific occurrences of racial or ethnic racism.

May 14, 2021

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Community Colleges

Roueche Center Forum: Involving All Faculty in the Guided Pathways Work Is Key

Guided pathways is a reform movement that aims to help community college students graduate, transfer to four-year institutions and attain jobs with value in the labor market by reframing the entire student journey.

May 11, 2021

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Asian American Pacific Islander

AANHPIHM “Poster Boy” Is Accused Student Who Stands Up to Dartmouth

Sirey Zhang is the new higher ed poster boy for Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month. He is blasting away at the negative stereotype of the AANHPIHM person who lacks the courage and good sense to speak up. Zhang’s showing some guts standing up to the bullying of Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

May 10, 2021

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African-American

Can HBCUs Capitalize on the Hemp Rush?

The landscape for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) is rapidly changing amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and new proposals on the horizon at the national level from the Biden administration. It will be incumbent on institutions to adapt their programming to meet the changing needs of the economic environment. They will need to be economic engines as well as learning institutions.

May 6, 2021

One Year After the Shutdown: Education Lessons from COVID-19

A year ago, K-12 classrooms and college campuses across the country shuttered; many still remain closed. As the panic of the pandemic spread, students and teachers stayed home and shifted to “emergency” mode – delivering curriculum in whatever ways they could. This was not online learning; this was emergency remote teaching.

May 5, 2021

Black Male Teachers Should be the Norm, Not the Exception

Our education system, as we know it, is systematically racist. How did we get here? We haven’t been thinking about what is best for kids. Kids perform better in school when they are with teachers of the same race or ethnicity. There are approximately 8 million (15%) Black students in America’s public schools, yet only 7% of teachers are Black. By not providing enough teachers of color for our students we are exacerbating a form of racism in the field; we don’t take that seriously enough.

April 30, 2021

Through Perseverance, North Carolina A&T Journalism Major Lands Coveted Internship at The Washington Post

Lauren Mitchell could become a case study for how to successfully navigate the demands of college life. She also could serve as a reminder, especially to her fellow HBCU colleagues, that it is important to take advantage of every learning opportunity your university offers while also learning to believe in yourself, although every once and a while you might need a little nudge from a friend.

April 29, 2021

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African-American

Why College-Educated Black Women Are Threats in 2021

College-educated Black women are a threat ─ to the white American supremacy and higher education as we know it. Threats are meant to intimidate ─ to threaten is to give signs or warnings, to announce with intent or possibility, to cause to feel insecure or anxious. Threats hang and hover over, invoking fear with purpose. Threats are an indication of something impending. The threat of powerful, college-educated Black women in 2021 is looming. Warning signs ahead!

April 27, 2021

Shaking Up the Athletic Lottery

Sports has long been a fixture in American life generally and in communities of color more specifically. One could argue that there is seemingly more at stake on average for Black athletes because of the economic condition of Black communities in the United States. The cultural embeddedness of the athletic route and the sports dream in the lives of young Black men is something that is taken for granted in many cases. For the small few who make it to play in college or the pros, a glimmer of hope for the masses is given.

April 27, 2021

Diverse Jury Saw George Floyd as Human and Delivered Justice

One aspect of the Derek Chauvin verdicts in the murder of George Floyd that people fail to see is how there’s justice in diversity—if you let diversity work.

April 26, 2021

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Community Colleges

Fostering Social Justice in Higher Education

As the pace of change continues to accelerate, higher education leaders are now under constant pressure to respond to social justice issues within their campuses and surrounding communities. To my generation, education is viewed as the “great equalizer,” but this promise of equality cannot be achieved when fundamental injustice exists.

April 26, 2021