Richard Featherstone's List: Higher Education

• Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services
• the production of high school graduates has fallen from its 3.4 million peak in 2011 to a current 3.2 million–and is likely to stay there until 2020
• Academic Impressions
• Campus Strategies

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• public universities had the most even division between male and female students, with a male-female ratio of 43.6–56.4.

• y 2012, the share of young women enrolled in college immediately after high school had increased to 71%, but it remained unchanged for young men at 61%.

• College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y.
• managing social media for a local credit union
• In the firm’s 2011 survey of 20,000 students (about half of whom had interned that year), about 35 percent who interned had majors outside one leading to a professional degree.
• Of the 987 English students who interned and said their academic program was in “English language and literature/letters,” 17.5 percent said their academic major required it, 2.1 percent said their institution required it, and 24.4 percent said an internship was an elective for which they could earn credit. For the rest, 63.9 percent, internships remained purely optional.
• Of the English students whose academic program required them to intern, three-quarters attended either a private college with enrollment of 2,000 or fewer (26.2 percent), a public college with enrollment of 5,000 or fewer (4.9 percent), or a public college that enrolled between 5,000 and 15,000 students (27.9 percent). Most of the students whose institution, not department, required the internship attended small privates (28.6 percent) or large publics (35.7 percent).
• Anecdotally, it appears that the number of liberal arts majors that are being required to intern before graduating is on the rise
• Michael True, the Messiah College Internship Center director
• Clemson University
• the extent to which an internship meets any given criteria about degree or career applicability is less important than its being something the student is interested and invested in
• John Dewey: Experiential learning opportunities would mean that "the whole pupil is engaged; the artificial gap between life in school and out is reduced."

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• Most of us teach at places, though, where students are after a credential, and where your colleagues—who you thought would be really smart—are people you don't even like all that much. Plus, you feel underappreciated. The president of the college doesn't even know your name."
• "After a while, you begin to think, I actually just want to teach my classes, be a good steward of the university, and go home and have my life," she says. "I decided I didn't want to give up sleep, hobbies, movies, or TV anymore."
• "When it is good, it is great," she says of the job. "There is nothing like a summer day, writing in your office, looking at data with your shorts and a T-shirt on with the breeze in the window."

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