Topic: Diversity, equity, and inclusion

A Conversation with Dr. Shakima M. Clency, Adan Hussain, and Christin Kloski of the Kessler Scholars Collaborative. The Kessler Scholars Collaborative supports and connects more than 1,000 Kessler Scholars across 16 institutions, transforming the college experience and supporting degree attainment for first-generation and limited-income students. The Kessler Scholars Program follows a cohort-based model. This means that, in addition to financial support, Kessler Scholars at each institution receive academic, professional, and personal guidance to help them not just access higher…

As Veteran’s Day approaches, there is renewed attention paid to those individuals who have served in our nation’s military and to the ways our nation repays that service. The majority of military service members often cite education benefits as one of their primary motivations for joining the military. However, once they leave the service, many veterans are not making best use of those benefits due to undermatching, whereby students attend institutions where they…

Introduction On Thursday, September 19, 2024 in New York City, The Teagle Foundation, Warrior Scholar Project (WSP), and Ithaka S+R convened a group of higher education and philanthropic leaders for an off-the-record, roundtable discussion focused on the unique value military veterans bring to college campuses, the barriers institutions face in recruiting and supporting them, and the role nonprofit partners and education funders could play in bolstering these efforts. Committed to the proposition that an expansion of postsecondary educational opportunities for…

The American Talent Initiative (ATI) is committed to creating postsecondary opportunities for low- and moderate-income students and expanding this group’s access to high-graduation-rate institutions. ATI supports its member institutions by organizing communities of practice to enable peer-to-peer sharing among institutions, collecting and analyzing data to identify trends and best-practices, creating practical analytic tools to develop effective financial aid strategies, and advising presidents on ways to increase the pipeline of low- and moderate-income students into their institutions. To further this…

To what degree are faculty facing challenges to academic freedom in their instructional practices? Are there topics they avoid when talking to their fellow faculty or students? Do they feel safe on campus and supported by their institution? These are some of the topics we probed in a special section of a national survey of US Faculty fielded earlier this year.

The inaugural 2023-24 cohort of the Digital Innovation for Equity & Excellence in College Admissions (DIEECA) community seeks to open additional postsecondary pathways for the pool of well-prepared, diverse high school graduates in the United States. Composed of 12 highly selective colleges and universities from the American Talent Initiative, these institutions are leveraging technology solutions to devise novel strategies that enhance the recruitment and enrollment of students from low- and…

As numerous surveys make clear, America’s trust in higher education institutions continues to decline, a sentiment that is coming from all political directions. The chaos on college campuses across the country in response to pro-Palestinian encampments, leading to conflict with police, student and faculty arrests, and canceled commencements, will further erode the public’s support. These events have highlighted the tensions on campuses between commitments to free speech and the right to peaceful protest and policies protecting against harassment and…

In the Fall of 2023, Ithaka S+R reached out to 15 library leaders at public research universities throughout the United States and asked them to speak about their current experiences regarding censorship, self-censorship, and academic freedom. Today, we are publishing our anonymized findings from these semi-structured interviews.

As we’ve explored in our previous work, academic libraries build collections in the context of their parent institutions—primarily to support the institution’s research, teaching, and learning mission. They also build collections that document and preserve the cultural and scientific heritage of our society to represent a wide range of perspectives. In these efforts, universities and their libraries are developing approaches that address calls for greater diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) with a focus on creating space for the…

Last week, Catharine Bond Hill, Ithaka S+R’s managing director, sat down with Bloomberg News’ Scarlet Fu on “The Close” to talk about the shifting landscape of college admissions at highly selective institutions in the wake of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. In the clip below, Cappy discusses strategies college and universities can take to increase diversity on campus, including increasing need-based aid, revisiting admissions policies that privilege high-income students, and recruiting veterans. Further reading Alternative Strategies to…

A Collaborative Update and Call to Action for the Education in Prisons and Jails Research Community Given recent policy changes and expanded access to postsecondary education, technology options for education programs in prisons and jails are increasing at all levels. Education technology vendors are responding to these changes with new platforms, instructional content, and devices that can be used to support education programming inside facilities. At the same time, there is a growing need for research on the use of…

In the third installment of our series on issues of disability, accessibility, and accommodations in postsecondary education in prison programs, we spoke with Ben Wright on his personal experience with disability and higher education in prison and the many challenges people with disabilities face inside. This follows our interview with Dr. Jenifer K. Montag, Director of Disability Services, at Marion Technical College, which highlights the issues that service providers face. Last April,…

The US military affords servicemembers a variety of opportunities to engage in postsecondary education, taking courses and earning academic credit, during and following their service. Those opportunities are a prominent selling point for enlistment and remain a priority for those considering joining up. There is a bitter irony in the high value that many service members put on these benefits because they do not yet know how difficult it will be to use the credits they have earned to complete…

Last month, my colleagues and I spoke with institutional representatives from five different institutions: Columbia University, Cornell University, Syracuse University, Texas A&M, and the University of Chicago. These institutions all have a strong commitment to student veteran enrollment, but are at different stages of the process. For example, Cornell and UChicago have been actively scaling up the enrollment of veterans over the last few years, while Texas A&M has long enrolled many hundreds of veterans each year. At Columbia and…