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603,307 | thedailycaller--2019-05-27--Harness Your Creative Spirit And Start A Career In Graphic Design With 60 Off This Training | 2019-05-27T00:00:00 | thedailycaller | Harness Your Creative Spirit And Start A Career In Graphic Design With 60% Off This Training | Letting your creative spirit roam free doesn’t mean becoming a starving artist. Graphic design is a booming industry that’s perfect for motivated individuals interested in expressing their inner creativity. Learn how to create stunning visuals with the Graphic Design + Adobe CC Certification School! Adobe CC is a must-have certification for any career involving design and for a limited time, you can get the certification for just$15.60 If you’re interested in landing a lucrative job in the creative sector, this course bundle is your one-stop shop to making that dream a reality. You’ll have lifetime access to 41 hours of premium training that puts you on the fast track to success. This is the perfect opportunity for you to hone essential skills in Adobe Creative Cloud, the world’s leading digital design suite. Even if you’re a complete beginner, the Graphic Design + Adobe CC Certification School will ensure mastery of all the fundamentals. Learn how to transform images and photos into masterpieces using Adobe Photoshop. Next, you’ll work with Adobe InDesign and Illustrator to complete your training. Get started today on the Graphic Design + Adobe CC Certification School. Be sure to use code WEEKEND60 for an additional 60% off the already discounted price. That brings your total down to just $15.60! | The Daily Caller Shop | https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/27/harness-your-creative-spirit-and-start-a-career-in-graphic-design-with-60-off-this-training/ | 2019-05-27 16:19:32+00:00 | 1,558,988,372 | 1,567,540,143 | education | vocational education |
601,188 | thedailycaller--2019-03-31--Land A Lucrative Job In Data Analysis With 31 Hours Of Microsoft Excel Training | 2019-03-31T00:00:00 | thedailycaller | Land A Lucrative Job In Data Analysis With 31 Hours Of Microsoft Excel Training | Don’t underestimate the power of data analysis. It may sound lackluster, but it’s actually one of the hottest and most lucrative fields to start a career in today. If you’re interested in kicking off an exciting new profession, look no further than The Complete Microsoft Data Analysis Expert Bundle. By using the code Madness15 at checkout you can get this software for 99 percent of its MSRP With this 31-hour bundle, you’ll gain hands-on experience working with Microsoft data tools to understand how high-level executive decisions are made. One of the most useful software to know is Microsoft Power BI, which was once only reserved for experienced IT specialists. These courses will prime you to function effectively in this powerful platform in order to extract reports and intel without extensive technical experience. We’re surrounded by hordes of data with no idea what to do with it all. As you get trained in Microsoft Access, Excel, and VBA, you’ll discover how to manage these large data sets. This knowledge provides you the expertise companies are seeking in workers. Get lifetime access to The Complete Microsoft Data Analysis Expert Bundle today. It was originally 84% off, but you can take an additional 15% off by using code MADNESS15. That brings your total down to just $16.99! Like this deal? Check out Vault, the best way to secure your online data for just $9.99/mo. You can find even more great deals like this at The Daily Caller Shop | The Daily Caller Shop | https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/31/land-a-lucrative-job-in-data-analysis-with-31-hours-of-microsoft-excel-training/ | 2019-03-31 14:32:40+00:00 | 1,554,057,160 | 1,567,544,613 | education | vocational education |
603,118 | thedailycaller--2019-05-15--Learn To Code At The Price You Want In This Online Training | 2019-05-15T00:00:00 | thedailycaller | Learn To Code At The Price You Want In This Online Training | Coding is the career of the future. Your earning potential is limitless if you learn a computer language. Instead of taking an expensive course, try this online auction. Pay what you want and you can take home Pay What You Want: The Legendary Learn to Code Bundle that could change your future. Even if you guess less than the average price, you’ll still take home something great. Try bidding in the Daily Caller shop today. Get this software for however much money you think it ends up being worth, an unbelievable deal for the skills available to learn There are many coding languages that are all valuable to list on your resume. In the Pay What You Want: The Legendary Learn to Code Bundle, you’ll have lifetime access to hundreds of hours of teaching and real-life examples so you can apply for jobs right away. You don’t require a background in technology background to learn the following languages: Google Go, HTML, CSS, Java, Angular, Git, Ruby, C#, Python, and React. Each course is a deep dive taught by an experienced instructor. Earn skills that qualify you for a six-figure salary when you bid on the Pay What You Want: The Legendary Learn to Code Bundle Daily Caller shop. | The Daily Caller Shop | https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/15/learn-to-code-at-the-price-you-want-in-this-online-training/ | 2019-05-15 14:52:55+00:00 | 1,557,946,375 | 1,567,540,645 | education | vocational education |
611,448 | thedailyecho--2019-05-07--New nurse training ward opens at Southampton Solent University | 2019-05-07T00:00:00 | thedailyecho | New nurse training ward opens at Southampton Solent University | THE CHIEF nurse for England opened a new nursing simulation suite at a Southampton university yesterday. Lisa Bayliss-Pratt, chief nurse for Health Education England, came to Solent University to open the new six-bed nursing simulation ward, care home and doctor’s surgery, which is part of the university's £100 million campus improvement plan. The facility gives nursing students and apprentices the opportunity to develop and refine their clinical skills, as well as support their developing knowledge of physiological and pharmacology. It also supports the university’s growing portfolio of nursing degrees and apprenticeships. Lisa Bayliss-Pratt said: "I’m really excited by the simulation suite because patient safety has to come first. We should deliver a lot more of our education and training in a formative, simulated way so that when we do engage with patients and people within communities, we are properly prepared, we know where our competencies lie and we can deliver safe and effective care." She added about the university: "The fundamentals that have been demonstrated to me today, providing a warm and friendly welcome and having a really nice environment that makes people feel comfortable, shows me that they are off to a fantastic start within nursing and health careers here at Solent." Professor Graham Baldwin, Solent University’s Vice-Chancellor, said: "It’s great to see this area grow at Solent - from the original FdSc in Health and Social care to the introduction of our nursing associate degree apprenticeships, apprenticeships, a BSc in Adult Nursing, and a mental health nursing course in the very near future. "At some point in our lives we will all come into contact with the nursing profession, which highlights its important for society, the university and us as individuals. Here at Solent, we want to play our part in producing the nurses of the future and making sure that we can continue with the fantastic success that is the NHS." | null | https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/17622211.new-nurse-training-ward-opens-at-southampton-solent-university/?ref=rss | 2019-05-07 05:02:44+00:00 | 1,557,219,764 | 1,567,540,966 | education | vocational education |
663,005 | thedenverpost--2019-06-03--Career training program to stay in operation in Colorado | 2019-06-03T00:00:00 | thedenverpost | Career training program to stay in operation in Colorado | GRAND JUNCTION — The U.S. Department of Labor says the Forest Service will stop operating Job Corps Civilian Conservation Centers, slating nine for closure. The Daily Sentinel reported that 16 of the job centers will stay open under new operators or partnerships, including the center at Grand Mesa High School in Collbran. School principal Wendy Nichols says they’re trying to continue operating the education and career technical training program as normal, but there’s uncertainty for how it will proceed. The Collbran center currently has 166 students enrolled. It operates year-round at no cost to students. The department says the new operators of the centers will set new policies to “offer students the skills they need to earn an independent living and succeed in meaningful in-demand jobs.” | The Associated Press | https://www.denverpost.com/2019/06/03/career-training-program-to-stay-in-operation-in-colorado/ | 2019-06-03 20:58:57+00:00 | 1,559,609,937 | 1,567,539,184 | education | vocational education |
175,791 | eveningstandard--2019-05-29--The best cookery courses in London | 2019-05-29T00:00:00 | eveningstandard | The best cookery courses in London | Need to add some purpose to your superficially fulfilling but fundamentally empty existence? Learn to cook. Call it survivalism, bunkering down from the Brexageddon with a sofrito chopped in the company of like minds and a secure bulwark of tagliatelle, kneaded and rolled by your own fair hands. Call it rejection of the relentless, soul-destroying, health-wrecking, sanity-sapping rat race, one which makes you want to retrain as a jolly, red-cheeked chef plump with butter and shortcrust satisfaction. Maybe it’s just the deluge of cookery shows on telly, or the realisation that we app-addicted urbanites are incapable of completing practical tasks. Whatever — here’s where to learn to cook your way to happiness. As you know from watching Nigella, Tom, Michel et al attacking a pile of onions, proper chopping is not only crucial but dead impressive. Learn how to work those blade angles like a pro and which knife to use where — as well as how to prep, truss and segment a chicken — at Borough Kitchen’s hugely useful applied knife skills course. Honing your pastry or chopping technique is all well and good, but it’s not going to put a hugely impressive three-course dinner party on your table, is it? For that, you need to get into a Building Feasts sesh, where you’ll learn to cook (and eat) all manner of multi-course marvels with minimal stress on your part. The dream. Fancy a career change? Do you harbour deep longings of being elbow-deep in flour, enveloped in the steam of simmering scarlet sauces? Quit your job and go to Leiths. Okay, maybe don’t quit straight away, but certainly take a mini-sabbatical at one of its week-long courses in the fundamentals of cooking, for a sense of what it might be like to go pro. Woah, you don’t want to go pro. You kind of actually just want to have a laugh, with some mates, in really nice surroundings with really nice booze. Off you pop to Bentley’s, the wonderful old-school Mayfair joint, for a brilliantly OTT seafood cookery class including champagne and canapés, a four-course lunch with matched wines and a goody bag. Hello, do you like pasta? Obviously you like pasta. Learn to make the thing you love — and other things, such as foccacia, and tiramisu, and pizza, and ragu — with The Essential Italian course at Marylebone’s wonderfully warm La Cucina Caldesi, founded by brilliant cookbook writers Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi. | Frankie McCoy | https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/cookery-courses-london-a4153181.html | 2019-05-29 15:49:41+00:00 | 1,559,159,381 | 1,567,539,821 | education | vocational education |
443,021 | rawstory--2019-11-07--Learn to master all of Adobe Creative Cloud with these courses | 2019-11-07T00:00:00 | rawstory | Learn to master all of Adobe Creative Cloud with these courses | A great orator can shift the viewpoint of millions of people with a carefully composed speech. But sometimes, images speak louder than words. If you want to learn how to create compelling visual content, the Ultimate Adobe CC Training Bundle provides the perfect education. It contains 12 hands-on video courses, focusing on the software used by top creative professionals (software not included). Get all of this training now for $39 at the Raw Story Store. Whether you dream about starting a career in design or you want to run effective marketing campaigns, this bundle offers some essential know-how. Through 639 video tutorials, you’ll learn the Adobe CC suite inside out. Along the way, you learn the basics of Photoshop, from creating social media posts to retouching photos. Two courses on Illustrator show you how to design logos and beautiful charts, while the InDesign training focuses on brochure and magazine design. You also get a healthy introduction to designing for the web. Courses on Adobe XD and Dreamweaver show you how to create great interfaces, while the HTML5 and After Effects tracks look at animated content. Pick up the bundle now for $39 and get lifetime access to all the courses. | Andrew Uh | https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/learn-to-master-all-of-adobe-creative-cloud-with-these-courses/ | Thu, 07 Nov 2019 05:00:50 +0000 | 1,573,120,850 | 1,573,132,556 | education | vocational education |
663,797 | thedenverpost--2019-07-06--Want to be a college dean or president CU Denver training diverse mid-level professionals to ascen | 2019-07-06T00:00:00 | thedenverpost | Want to be a college dean or president? CU Denver training diverse, mid-level professionals to ascend higher-ed’s ranks | A first-of-its kind program at the University of Colorado Denver is helping people like Lynette Bates become the leader in higher education she wished she knew when she was an undergraduate. Bates grew up in Pueblo County and said she was discouraged from pursuing a college degree by her high school guidance counselor because neither of her parents finished school or earned their GED. Since her understanding of the higher education system was fuzzy, she picked up two jobs after high school and delayed advancing her studies because she thought she needed pay for all of her college tuition up front. “I thought I was unique in not knowing the processes,” said Bates, now the vice president of academic affairs at Trinidad State Junior College. “I realized I am not the only one with this lack of understanding of how higher education works. I wanted to do this degree so that I can better serve the students that I serve.” The CU Denver Leadership for Educational Equity program welcomes Bates among its first cohort this summer. The largely online doctoral course — costing approximately $22,000, excluding books, materials and fees — is targeting folks already involved in higher ed with hopes of shaping the next university dean, president and beyond. The degree aims to bring diversity to positions that Diane Hegeman, the program’s senior instructor, noted were increasingly becoming vacant. Bruce Benson, the 81-year-old who served as CU president for more than a decade, retired last month, leading to a contentious search for his successor, Mark Kennedy, that left many in the higher education community disheartened. Joyce McConnell took the reins from Colorado State University’s longtime president Tony Frank in April. Jeremy Haefner was tapped to lead the University of Denver in June. “The baby boomer leaders in higher education, just like we’re seeing in industries everywhere, are all retiring and exiting,” Hegeman said. “What are we doing to fill that void and training and helping other developing leaders to assume those roles?” Hegeman is putting in the work to answer her question. The degree seeks mid-level professionals ready to move up the career ladder who need a bit more experience — a department chair, a program director or someone in a vice president role with higher aspirations, for example. The courses — subjects like finance, resource allocation, government and policy, conflict resolution, education law and ethics — are viewed through a social justice lens with an emphasis on using technology and data to help all student populations. “For many years in higher education, we focused on access to get as many people into our institution as possible, but we didn’t necessarily utilize technology to make the kind of precise decisions needed to help students,” said Linda Bowman, CU Denver’s interim vice provost and senior vice chancellor for student access and achievement. “We now have the opportunity to use data analytics to project how to best accommodate different populations. “If I am a student who goes back to school and, perhaps, I’m an older student, and I work, and I have family responsibilities, what are the kind of support systems we as an institution need to have available? Utilizing data to find things like this is really important.” Seventeen students from diverse backgrounds are ushering in the program’s inaugural class this summer. Close to half are CU employees looking for ways to grow in their careers, and the rest span the gamut of higher education institutions from public to private, two-year to four-year, local and national. “It’s designed so a working professional is able to be in this program because it utilizes online education,” Bowman said. “It’s offered one course at a time, so you can focus on that course and be working and apply what you learn.” The degree also features off-campus “intensive bootcamps” at which students can meet face-to-face, but all the course work and the doctoral dissertation can be completed online. Bates looks forward to strengthening her leadership skills and fine-tuning her higher education knowledge so she can better serve her rural Colorado students. “This degree I firmly believe will help me be a better administrator,” Bates said. “I believe that higher education is for everyone. I’ve served incredible students who, like myself, were told they wouldn’t go on to higher education… Too many people have assumptions placed on them, and we need to be able to help find pathways for them.” | Elizabeth Hernandez | https://www.denverpost.com/2019/07/06/cu-denver-higher-ed-leadership-training/ | 2019-07-06 12:00:40+00:00 | 1,562,428,840 | 1,567,536,613 | education | vocational education |
689,908 | theguardianuk--2019-02-13--How retraining refugees could help tackle NHS staffing crisis | 2019-02-13T00:00:00 | theguardianuk | How retraining refugees could help tackle NHS staffing crisis | When Horani Othman fled Syria with his Kurdish family in 2012, he arrived in the UK not knowing how he would make ends meet. Sent to live in Birmingham by the Home Office immigration authorities, he and his family were granted indefinite leave to remain last year. Now Othman, 54, is keen to get his career back on track. A pilot project in the Black Country is not only giving him valuable work experience in the UK, it could offer a solution to the growing crisis in NHS staffing levels. Latest figures show that there are more than 100,000 vacancies for doctors and nurses. Brexit threatens to exacerbate the shortages: 9% of licensed doctors in the UK come from the European Economic Area, while in the West Midlands alone, EU nationals account for 10% of all nursing staff. In 2017, Lawrence Kelly, widening participation project manager, at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust set up the Use-It programme to help unemployed, medically qualified refugees and migrants in Sandwell and west Birmingham find work in the NHS. The project offers participants free English language classes and work experience in a clinical environment. In little over a year, Lawrence and his team have recruited almost 200 people to the programme. Many of them have been referred by the nearby Brushstrokes community project. “This far exceeds our initial target of 60 when we set up the programme,” says Kelly. “The feedback from those we are helping has been amazing. People who chose medicine as a career did so because they want to help people. It is frustrating not to be able to practise, due to being displaced from your home country. As they rebuild their lives here, it is good to be able to offer them the tools to improve their English and get back to work.” Othman, a trained pharmacist, is working at the pharmacy in Sandwell hospital as an assistant for 12 weeks. He works there as an assistant under supervision two days a week and is being shown how the systems work and the hospital’s prescription processes. “I work in the store, assisting with the booking, ordering and checking supplies,” he says. “And on the wards, observing the clinical pharmacist at work reviewing patients’ medication. The practice is different from Syria and I learn more about the patients here.” The aim of the work placements is to support participants’ registration with their relevant professional medical body. They earn no money during these attachments, but Othman says it’s still worth it. “It’s unpaid but it’s really good as I feel I am back in my field.” But before Othman can apply to join the General Pharmaceutical Council, he needs to pass the international English language testing system with very high marks. The IELT is a standardised test of English language proficiency for non-native English speakers, covering speaking, reading, writing and listening skills. Othman needs to get high marks in each element to apply to register with the GPC and look for a permanent job. Like many of those on the Use-It programme, he struggles with the written and reading elements of the language course and feels the subject matter isn’t always relevant to his professional needs. “I understand when the texts are on science and medicine but struggle when it is on subjects like insects, animals and dinosaurs,” he says. When I tried the test later, I struggled with it too. So for now, Horani plans to look for assistant work in a pharmacy or dispensary until he’s ready to sit the IELT. Even when the participants pass the language test, there are still numerous hurdles to getting a permanent job. Everyone on the programme has their professional qualifications vetted by the National Recognition Improvement Centre. They then often have to complete a practical test for the relevant professional body. Nikhat Iftikhar, 46, a genito-urinary physcian, specialising in sexual health and HIV, fled Karachi, Pakistan, in 2013, following attacks by Sunni fundamentalists. She has passed the IELT. To meet the requirements of the practical elements of the Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board test set by the General Medical Council, she needs to brush up her medical skills. So as part of the Use-It programme, she has been shadowing sexual health doctors for the past three months. “After five years I’m a little bit rusty,” she says. “I need to be in the work environment again. The placement helps to familiarise me with the system here. And I’ll see the protocols of consulting with patients.” As the next step on her return to work, Use-It is arranging for her to return to GP practice on a two-year foundation training contract with all her further professional studies and registration fees paid. Similar arrangements are in hand for a further two doctors. Now, senior managers plan to roll out the Use-It scheme beyond Sandwell and West Birmingham to the rest of the Black Country. The Black Country Transformation Partnership’s new £300,000 “health overseas professionals” programme is being introduced this year in Dudley, Wolverhampton and west Birmingham, as well as Sandwell, with the aim of recruiting scores of unemployed medically qualified migrants to the scheme and then into permanent NHS jobs. “Finding skilled clinicians in our communities from around the world and helping them to polish and share their expertise is a programme we are committed to for the long term,” says Toby Lewis, chief executive of Sandwell. “The investment is dwarfed by the return, with talented people joining GP, mental health and hospital services locally.” For Mariam Darman, a senior obstetrician and gynaecologist from Kabul, getting back to her job is vital to her self-worth. “I saved people’s lives before. I’d like to do it again. I lose my identity without work.” | Jon Bloomfield | https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/13/refugee-scheme-nhs-staffing-crisis-work-placements | 2019-02-13 07:30:14+00:00 | 1,550,061,014 | 1,567,548,688 | education | vocational education |
710,944 | theguardianuk--2019-09-27--Virtual path: how an aviation training startup got onboard with remote internships | 2019-09-27T00:00:00 | theguardianuk | Virtual path: how an aviation training startup got onboard with remote internships | Claudio Marturano runs Nubis Aviation Training, a compliance training and support platform for the aviation industry. Marturano began studying for an MBA through The Open University (OU) before setting up his own business. He recruited two OU virtual interns, Lily Beach (online marketing and customer relations officer) and Helen Wood (business development officer), via its online vacancy service, OpportunityHub. They’re both now full-time members of staff. How did you hear about the OU? Marturano: I started doing an MBA through the OU because I didn’t have the resources to stop work and go to university full-time. I knew all about OpportunityHub and the ways in which it connects OU students and alumni with career opportunities. As an employer, what made you recruit via the OU? Marturano: Having started my own business, my first thought – when the time came to hire people and think about expanding – was the OU. It was an obvious choice because I know that OU students and graduates have a similar mindset to me – we share a commitment to learning and bettering ourselves, and have the resourcefulness to study at the same time as working. That lends itself well to the demands of growing a business. How did you find Helen and Lily? Marturano: I contacted the OU via OpportunityHub and they put me in touch with several candidates. Helen and Lily were by far the best fit. How easy was it to find the right people? Marturano: It was completely seamless and easy. The OU were fantastic and made it very simple to find the right candidates. They actually did most of the work for us. They took care of everything from collating CVs to contacting candidates. They even put the job advert together. How did the OU compare with other agencies? Marturano: I did work with a couple of other recruitment agencies too and they weren’t nearly as helpful. Were you surprised by the calibre of candidates? Marturano: I’ll be honest, no. I knew the OU would unearth people with impressive skills and the mindset to succeed. What has surprised me is the fact that I went to the OU as a means to an end – I needed an MBA to progress in my career when I was offered a directorship – but I ended up with the team to start and scale my own business! Do you have any advice for other employers? Marturano: Think about what you want from an employee and particularly how you want them to help grow and sustain your business. OU students and graduates don’t want to be average employees – they have the skills and tenacity to become an integral part of your business. How did you find the position? Wood: I joined the OU to do a maths degree and I spent a lot of time on the OpportunityHub looking at jobs and seeing what openings were out there. I came across Claudio’s advert and thought the idea of a virtual internship sounded really interesting. I applied and came onboard as a virtual intern for six weeks. After that, I was delighted when Claudio offered me a full-time job. Beach: When I started international studies with the OU, I immediately began looking for jobs as I’d always planned to work alongside studying for my degree. The online internship seemed perfect for me because you can fit your working hours around your other studies and commitments. What do you do? Wood: I work in business development, looking after the sales and finance side of things. I’m also involved in deciding what direction the business will go in the future. What’s your favourite thing about working? Wood: I’m in my final year of my degree so I’m working full-time alongside studying, and I enjoy that. I also really like having had the opportunity to join the business from the very early stages of its development. It’s been an invaluable experience. Beach: I enjoy the fact that I can bring the skills I am learning through my studies to my working environment. It’s great to have this opportunity through the OU to work alongside studying, gaining and developing vital work experience to use for the future and in any professional setting. What have Lily and Helen brought to your business? Marturano: They have literally helped build the company from scratch. They were very eager and wanted to achieve from the get-go. Within six weeks, we had made a lot of progress and I realised very quickly they would be of real benefit to the business. Soon after they joined, they helped design an infrastructure for our working environment, which brought us from startup to being ready to scale. So together they’ve been a dream team? Marturano: So far, so good, yes! Any challenges? Beach: One thing we initially found a little bit of a challenge was communication, but since then we’ve developed our own communication system and way of sharing new information and keeping track of everything we need to work effectively, from project management to workflow. Marturano: It’s not without its difficulties; you’re doing something brand new and working with people you’ve never met before. But aviation is not a nine-to-five job; you have to work in different time zones and I travel a lot, so having a virtual team that I can communicate with from everywhere has been invaluable. Hang on – you’ve never met your staff? Marturano: We’ve met twice since December, but I didn’t meet Helen or Lily until more than a month after they joined the team. The nature of a virtual internship meant I didn’t need to! And I actually think that’s one of the key advantages of a virtual internship; aside from the fact that it keeps overheads low from an economic point of view, it also means you’re not forced in front of each other just because you work together. Where do you see yourself in five years’ time? Beach: I am enjoying learning about the business, particularly the aviation industry and contributing towards the growth of the company. We recently launched the official website and I am looking forward to attending events and talking about the products. Although it is difficult to say where I’ll be in five years, I hope to continue to develop my skillset and have completed my degree. Wood: I’m really enjoying watching the business grow and helping to develop it. I’m not quite sure where I’ll be in five years’ time. I haven’t planned that far ahead. I am taking one thing at a time, finishing my degree and learning more about the business. Marturano: As an employer it’s wonderful to hear your team say that. They’re already an integral part of the business but that they want to help grow it – well, I couldn’t ask for anything more. In five years’ time, I’d like us to be a sustainable business with lots more people onboard; the go-to for support and training for the aviation industry. This article was amended on 5 November 2019 to clarify Claudio Marturano has yet to complete his MBA. | Heidi Scrimgeour | https://www.theguardian.com/diverse-talent-everywhere/2019/sep/27/virtual-path-how-an-aviation-training-startup-got-onboard-with-remote-internships | Fri, 27 Sep 2019 16:48:33 GMT | 1,569,617,313 | 1,581,640,003 | education | vocational education |
731,314 | thehuffingtonpostuk--2019-01-14--Revealed Hundreds Of Carillion Apprentices Dropped Out Of Training After Collapse | 2019-01-14T00:00:00 | thehuffingtonpostuk | Revealed: Hundreds Of Carillion Apprentices Dropped Out Of Training After Collapse | Hundreds of young apprentices dropped out of their studies and employment following the collapse of construction giant Carillion, new figures confirm. Some 163 construction trainees left education, employment and training altogether after Carillion was declared insolvent, despite a £3million government effort to keep them in work. A further 149 left their education programme to look for other work elsewhere. The figures from the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), obtained by HuffPost UK, reveal that 70% of Carillion’s 1,148 apprentices were moved to alternative programmes or jobs. Many of those assumed to have dropped out could not be contacted by the CITB, which is linked to the Department for Education, following the collapse. Carillion – which struggled under a mounting debt pile – was believed to be “too big to fail” before it went under a year ago in January 2018. It held huge public contracts, from Ministry of Defence deals to multi-million pound NHS works, but was criticised by MPs for “recklessness, hubris and greed”. “The mystery is not that it collapsed, but that it lasted so long,” they said at the time of its collapse. Most of Carillion’s contracts have since been taken on by its rivals. The government was expected to spend around £3m to find new work for the apprentices affected, according to the National Audit Office. At the time of the collapse, the government refused to offer reassurances that apprentices would not lose out. Trade unions said the fact young workers were in fact affected shows the “direct human misery” caused by the firm’s demise. Unite’s assistant general secretary, Gail Cartmail, said: “These are really important figures as they demonstrate the direct human misery and loss of talent caused by Carillion’s collapse. “At a time of acute and growing skills shortages in the construction , the loss of any apprentices further severely weakens the industry and undermines its future. “The government is the construction industry’s largest customer, it was a huge failure of political will that jobs could not be found for over 300 displaced Carillion apprentices. “These figures further underline that the government failed to protect the innocent victims of Carillion’s collapse and that it is has not learnt the lessons from the biggest corporate failure in the UK in modern times.” Deborah Madden, of the CITB, said: “While not every apprentice was redeployed, and in fact some chose to leave construction, the fact that industry came together to help shows that there is a strong commitment to training in construction. “Together we secured this important pipeline of talent and gave over 900 individuals the opportunity to continue in their chosen career.” Meanwhile, Unite is stepping up calls for a criminal investigation into Carillion on the first anniversary of the group going out of business. An ongoing investigation into Carillion’s collapse by the government’s Insolvency Service could see the company’s directors banned from leading businesses. The report by the Official Receiver is expected to be published later this year. Unite has accused the Government of not taking enough action to ensure there wasn’t another “corporate meltdown” at Carillion. The union said the cost to the taxpayer was over £150 million, including redundancy pay and “lucrative” work for accountants. | George Bowden | https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/revealed-hundreds-of-carillion-apprentices-dropped-out-of-training-after-collapse_uk_5c389b05e4b05cb31c41bc60 | 2019-01-14 00:01:21+00:00 | 1,547,442,081 | 1,567,552,519 | education | vocational education |
4,658 | activistpost--2019-05-14--Police Use LexisNexis Facial Recognition To Identify Your Family And Friends | 2019-05-14T00:00:00 | activistpost | Police Use LexisNexis Facial Recognition To Identify Your Family And Friends | What is it going to take for Americans to realize that law enforcement has become an extension of Big Brother? All across the country, police officers are secretly using facial recognition to identify neighbors and people of interest. Police already have a history of abusing criminal record searches like CORI. Ex-State Trooper Michael Szymanski said, “I can’t tell you how many times I saw troopers run their next-door neighbor through CORI, run their old girlfriends’ names, or run someone who they’re having a dispute with,” he said. “I’ve seen a million different guys using CORI inappropriately.” Keep in mind that police abuse of criminal record searches is not limited to just Massachusetts, a Google search for “police abuse criminal records searches” returned more than 114 million hits. What do you think will happen when police use facial recognition smartphones to identify anyone they want? A recent NBC News article titled “How Facial Recognition Became A Routine Policing Tool In America” revealed how difficult it is to find out if police are using facial recognition. The article revealed that “few local law enforcement agencies talk openly about how they use facial recognition.” It also revealed that their is “no mention of facial recognition in arrest reports and court documents” and that is a huge problem. Last week a press release revealed that LexisNexis Risk Solutions acquired Lumen from Numerica Corporation. “The acquisition of the Lumen product line of Numerica continues our 20-year investment and commitment to the public safety sector,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO, Government, LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “We will continue to foster the innovations that have made both LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Numerica leaders in the marketplace. We look forward to working with our joint customers and welcoming the new police agencies, including the Colorado Information Sharing Consortium (CISC).” The article also revealed that police across the country are using Lexis Nexis’s, “Lumen” facial recognition app. to identify a person’s “personal links, vehicle associations, tattoos and much more.” According to Lumen, police officers can use Lumen to pull up pictures of your friends and relatives in seconds! LexisNexis, is one of the country’s largest collectors of personal information on individuals. They profit from collecting everyone’s Social Security Number, birth-date and much much more. Lexis Nexis’s “Why Lumen Mobile” page allows police officers to use their smartphone or tablet to identify “a subject and get a clear view of his or her known associates, vehicles, and involvements.” Wherever you are, you have instant access to information about people, vehicles, events, and locations at the click of a button. If you combine all the information that LexisNexis collects with Lumen’s facial recognition software, the amount of personal information that law enforcement has access to is terrifying. East Germany’s Stasi would be frothing at their mouths to have had this kind of information to spy on everyone. Corporate surveillance and law enforcement working together to track a person’s known associates, relatives, vehicles, SSN etc., is a recipe for disaster. You can read more at the MassPrivateI blog, where this article first appeared. Provide, Protect and Profit in unstable times! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today. | Activist Post | https://www.activistpost.com/2019/05/police-use-lexisnexis-facial-recognition-to-identify-your-family-and-friends.html | 2019-05-14 16:39:21+00:00 | 1,557,866,361 | 1,567,540,664 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
4,710 | activistpost--2019-05-25--The Militarization of Americas Police A Brief History | 2019-05-25T00:00:00 | activistpost | The Militarization of America’s Police: A Brief History | “Get the weapons of war off our streets!” This may sound familiar, as it’s often heard from those attempting to pass more gun control legislation. But what you don’t hear is that it’s simply untrue that “weapons of war” are available to the general public. What is true is that you’d last about three minutes in a conventional war with an AR-15, even with one of the most aggressive builds you can get your hands on. The only people with “weapons of war” on America’s streets are, increasingly, the police. Thanks primarily to the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows law enforcement agencies to get their hands on Department of Defense technology, and the Bush-era War on Terror, American police have received a startling amount of heavy-duty, military-grade hardware. In fact, between 1998 and 2014, the dollar value of military hardware sent to police departments skyrocketed from $9.4 million to a startling $796.8 million. As the police have militarized, focus has shifted from one who keeps the peace to one who enforces the law—an important difference. It’s a subtle, but important, distinction: Is the role of the police to enforce the law or to keep the peace? Consider the difference between the police force of a typical American city and the fictional Andy Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show. The former is concerned primarily with enforcing the law for its own sake and catching as many “lawbreakers” as possible. The latter, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with keeping the peace. Sometimes that means looking the other way when laws get broken. It all began during Prohibition in the 1920s. Organized crime got its first foothold in American life thanks to the lucrative black market in liquor. This was also the golden age of bank robbery with figures like Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger becoming folk heroes. The Thompson submachine gun and the Browning Automatic Rifle were increasingly used by these crime “stars.” On the flipside, the Prohibition Era saw domestic police departments using automatic weapons, armored vehicles, and ammo developed with the express purpose of being able to penetrate the early bulletproof vests worn by gangsters of the era. Overall crime increased by 24 percent during the first two years of Prohibition. This included a 9 percent increase in theft and burglary, a 13 percent increase in homicides, and a 13 percent increase in assault and battery. Because the police were busy fighting the scourge of demon rum, it was difficult for them to target crimes unrelated to this. In fact, a study of South Carolina counties that enforced Prohibition versus those who didn’t found a whopping 30 to 60 percent increase in homicides in the counties that enforced the law. A few decades later, America saw another wave of police militarization during the race riots, including the Watts Riots and the 1967 riots in Detroit, as well as increasingly militarized organized crime—thanks in part to the beginnings of the War on Drugs. Incidents like the 1986 FBI Miami shootout and the North Hollywood shootout of 1997 were game-changers for law enforcement weaponry and equipment—due to officers not having sufficient stopping power during these notorious shootouts. The 1033 Program was enacted in the wake of the 1997 North Hollywood shootout. Created by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997, it allowed law enforcement agencies to get their hands on military hardware. Between 1997 and 2014, $5.1 billion in material was transferred from the Department of Defense to local law enforcement—with ammunition being the most common requisition. About 8,000 law enforcement offices were participating in the program as of 2014. Civil asset forfeiture (CAF) is a major driver in the militarization of the police force. Put simply, CAF is a legal principle that allows police to seize money and property from suspected criminals, which they can do without a warrant because the suspect’s property doesn’t have the presumption of innocence. CAF is effectively a legally allowed form of theft by police officers. Here is a short list of military hardware purchased with CAF funds: Begun in 1965 in Philadelphia, SWAT teams were conceived as a way to restrain urban unrest, deal with hostage situations, or handle barricaded marksmen. The number of SWAT raids in the US grew dramatically from about 3,000 in 1980, to a whopping 50,000 SWAT raids in 2014. Some more startling facts about SWAT teams: | Activist Post | https://www.activistpost.com/2019/05/the-militarization-of-americas-police-a-brief-history.html | 2019-05-25 17:15:11+00:00 | 1,558,818,911 | 1,567,540,176 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
5,227 | activistpost--2019-08-08--Police Used Streetlamps To Spy On The Public More Than 140 Times | 2019-08-08T00:00:00 | activistpost | Police Used Streetlamps To Spy On The Public More Than 140 Times | Gone are the days when cities used streetlamps to simply illuminate sidewalks and streets. Today’s streetlamps are being used to form an inter-connected web of surveillance devices. A recent San Diego Union-Tribune article revealed how San Diego police officers have used streetlamp video surveillance in at least 140 cases and sometimes as frequently as 20 times a month. Let that sink in for a moment; spying streetlamps are real and police have already requested video footage from more than 140 streetlamps. Lt. Jeffery Jordon called spying streetlamps “game changing” and that is exactly how they should be viewed. Streetlamps that are designed to spy on the public, really is a game changer. San Diego’s streetlamps are also equipped with ShotSpotter microphones that police claim are not being used to listen to public conversations. Should we believe them? Could police use ShotSpotter to listen to public conversations? Nearly a decade ago, the East Bay Times revealed how the Oakland Police used ShotSpotter to record public conversations. It was only three years ago when the NJ Transit secretly used DriveCam’s LTYX cameras equipped with microphones to listen to public conversations. So just what is law enforcement using these streetlamps for? No one knows for sure; but a spokesperson for San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said that a citywide policy to regulate the use of the microphones and cameras in streetlamps is “under development.” The San Diego Union-Tribune claims that 100 police officers have direct access to streetlamp surveillance and said that nearly every one of the department’s 1,800 police officers can request access. Just how concerned is the City Council that law enforcement is using streetlamps as surveillance devices? Apparently not very much, as City Councilwoman Monica Montgomery admitted, by saying that she’s “open to exploring” oversight of the program. In what dystopian nightmare are we living in, where listening and watching everything we do in public is “under development” or “open to oversight”? Over the past few years, I have written numerous stories about smart streetlamp/streetlight surveillance. Police are also using streetlamps equipped with things like Smart Nodes and secret facial recognition cameras to identify Bluetooth devices and people. More recently, I warned everyone that law enforcement is using GE’s CityIQ street lights and Intellistreets to identify people. (Click here to learn more about SKYEYE streetlamps.) But this story is far more disturbing than those because as the San Diego Union-Tribune points out, politicians and police think nothing of using streetlamps to track people in real-time. How could police track an alleged attacker to a 7-11 unless they have real-time access to streetlamp videos? | Activist Post | https://www.activistpost.com/2019/08/police-used-streetlamps-to-spy-on-the-public-more-than-140-times.html | 2019-08-08 13:16:19+00:00 | 1,565,284,579 | 1,567,534,559 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
5,669 | activistpost--2019-09-23--Detroit Police Commission Board Approves Use Of Facial Recognition Technology Despite National Backl | 2019-09-23T00:00:00 | activistpost | Detroit Police Commission Board Approves Use Of Facial Recognition Technology Despite National Backlash | The Detroit Board of Police Commissioners voted to approve the Detroit Police Department’s use of controversial facial recognition technology on the public, Courthouse News reported. According to the directive, police would be limited to using the system when officers have “reasonable suspicion” of home invasions and violent crimes involving incidents like shootings, sexual assaults and carjacking. Further, the system doesn’t have assess to check immigration status on individuals and was restricted from accessing live surveillance streaming video or any security camera device. Outside agencies would be allowed access to the information if needed after proper paperwork is filed. The order also clarified the technology will not be used to fully identify a suspect, but as an investigatory lead. However, given the nature of the technology we know that promise is bollocks. A local security officer will be assigned to monitor requests for using the tool and confirm the purge of irrelevant information. Misuse of the system by officers will be considered major misconduct that will require telling the mayor, City Council and Police Board of Commissioners within 24 hours if an incident occurs, Courthouse News reported. Police Commissioners approved the use of the system despite nationwide backlash against use of the technology. Recently Orlando, Florida cancelled its own police trial of Amazon’s Facial Rekognition after unsuccessful results combining a total of 15 months of technical issues with accuracy, bandwidth issues and controversy over the face-scanning technology. It is not known whether Detroit police will be using Amazon’s Facial Rekognition or another form of software. However, all forms of facial recognition software have the same privacy related problems. San Francisco became the first city to ban facial recognition technology being used by the government in May of this year, then Somerville, Massachusetts, and Oakland, California followed suit. The rapid growth of this technology has triggered a much-needed debate to slow down the rollout. Activists, politicians, academics and even police forces are expressing serious concerns over the impact facial recognition could have on our society. Several lawmakers have even chimed in to voice concerns about Amazon’s facial recognition software, expressing worry that it could be misused, The Hill reported. A Senate bill introduced in March would force companies who want to use facial recognition technology on consumers to first get their consent. If that happens, as soon as the ink is dry Amazon’s Ring and Amazon’s Facial Rekognition which heavily relies on facial recognition technology could be banned across the U.S. Congress under the House Oversight Committee recently held a bipartisan discussion on the issue of regulating the use of facial recognition technology and biometric cameras. House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said, “there are virtually no controls …. Whatever walk of life you come from, you may be a part of this [surveillance] process.” The committee’s top Republican Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio.) also expressed “It’s time for a time out” on government use of the surveillance technology. Privacy advocate groups, attorneys, and even more recently Microsoft, which also markets its own facial recognition system, have all raised concerns over the technology, pointing to issues of consent, racial profiling, and the potential to use images gathered through facial recognition cameras as evidence of criminal guilt by law enforcement. The FBI has also failed to assuage concerns of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on its own use of facial recognition technology using the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System. A national survey of 3,151 U.S. adults in December, found only one in four Americans believe the federal government should strictly limit the use of facial recognition biometrics technology. The survey also indicates Americans are more likely to support a trade-off to their own privacy caused by biometric technology if it benefits law enforcement, reduces shoplifting or speeds up airport security lines. Only 18 percent of those polled stated they agreed with strict limitations on facial recognition tech if it comes at the expense of public safety, compared to 55 percent who disagreed with such limitations. However, a poll from the Brookings Institution in September 2018 contradicts that and found half of Americans favored limitations of the use of facial recognition by law enforcement, while 42 percent felt it invaded personal privacy rights. Facial recognition technology is even invading concerts, which Fight For The Future and artists have teamed up to stop the deployment of the tech within concert venues, as Activist Post reported. | Aaron | https://www.activistpost.com/2019/09/detroit-police-commission-board-approves-use-of-facial-recognition-technology-despite-national-backlash.html | 2019-09-23 12:42:37+00:00 | 1,569,256,957 | 1,570,222,379 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
5,824 | activistpost--2019-10-09--Signed as Law: California Bans Facial Recognition on Police Body Cameras | 2019-10-09T00:00:00 | activistpost | Signed as Law: California Bans Facial Recognition on Police Body Cameras | Yesterday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that bans police from using facial recognition and biometric scanners with body-worn cameras for the next three years. The law will not only help protect privacy in California, but it would also hinder one aspect of the federal surveillance state. Assm. Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) introduced Assembly Bill 1215 (AB1215) on Feb. 21. The new law prohibits a law enforcement agency or law enforcement official from installing, activating, or using any biometric surveillance system in connection with an officer camera or data collected by an officer camera. Before the final Senate vote, that chamber amended the bill twice to make the provisions temporary. With the initial amendment, the law would have been automatically repealed on Jan. 1, 2027. A second amendment whittled that backed to 2023. So in effect, AB1215 institutes a 3-year ban on facial recognition combined with body-worn cameras. On May 9, the Assembly approved the measure by a vote of 45-17. The Senate passed AB1215 by a 22-15 vote over heavy opposition from police around the state. On Sept. 12, the Assembly concurred with the Senate amendment by a 47-21 margin. Only three Republicans in both the Assembly and the Senate voted yes on AB1215. With Gov. Newsom’s signature, the new law goes into effect on Jan. 1. “Without my bill, face recognition technology can subject law-abiding citizens to perpetual police line-ups, as their every movement is tracked without consent. Its use, if left unchecked, undermines public trust in government institutions and unduly intrudes on one’s constitutional right to privacy. AB 1215 is an important civil rights measure that will prevent exploitation of vulnerable communities,” Ting wrote in a statement on his website. Passage of this bill takes an important step forward but much work remains. When the provisions of the law sunset in three years, things will return to the status quo – which will mean police using facial recognition on body-cam footage whenever they please with no restrictions or oversight. It’s imperative to continue pushing legislators to make these restrictions permanent. Powerful police lobbies opposed passage of the bill. According to USA Today, no law enforcement agency in California currently uses facial recognition with their body-worn cameras, but police opposed the measure because “a valuable tool could be lost.” Detective Lou Turriaga, director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League played the public safety card in opposing the bill. “Facial recognition could be a valuable tool for us, helping identify felons or even abducted children, “he said. “I understand trying to seek a balance between civil liberties and law enforcement, but a wholesale ban doesn’t help us protect anybody. Why remove that tool from law enforcement? It just doesn’t make sense.” A recent report revealed that the federal government has turned state drivers’ license photos into a giant facial recognition database, putting virtually every driver in America in a perpetual electronic police lineup. The revelations generated widespread outrage, but this story isn’t new. The federal government has been developing a massive, nationwide facial recognition system for years. The FBI rolled out a nationwide facial-recognition program in the fall of 2014, with the goal of building a giant biometric database with pictures provided by the states and corporate friends. In 2016, the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law released “The Perpetual Lineup,” a massive report on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology in the U.S. You can read the complete report at perpetuallineup.org. The organization conducted a year-long investigation and collected more than 15,000 pages of documents through more than 100 public records requests. The report paints a disturbing picture of intense cooperation between the federal government, and state and local law enforcement to develop a massive facial recognition database. There are many technical and legal problems with facial recognition, including significant concerns about the accuracy of the technology, particularly when reading the facial features of minority populations. During a test run by the ACLU of Northern California, facial recognition misidentified 26 members of the California legislature as people in a database of arrest photos. With facial recognition technology, police and other government officials have the capability to track individuals in real-time. These systems allow law enforcement agents to use video cameras and continually scan everybody who walks by. According to the report, several major police departments have expressed an interest in this type of real-time tracking. Documents revealed agencies in at least five major cities, including Los Angeles, either claimed to run real-time face recognition off of street cameras, bought technology with the capability, or expressed written interest in buying it. In all likelihood, the federal government heavily involves itself in helping state and local agencies obtain this technology. The feds provide grant money to local law enforcement agencies for a vast array of surveillance gear, including ALPRs, stingray devices and drones. The federal government essentially encourages and funds a giant nationwide surveillance net and then taps into the information via fusion centers and the Information Sharing Environment (ISE). | Activist Post | https://www.activistpost.com/2019/10/signed-as-law-california-bans-facial-recognition-on-police-body-cameras.html | Wed, 09 Oct 2019 18:09:24 +0000 | 1,570,658,964 | 1,570,659,477 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
5,933 | activistpost--2019-11-08--Entire Police Department Now Gone After Good Cops Refused to Enforce Quota System | 2019-11-08T00:00:00 | activistpost | Entire Police Department Now Gone After Good Cops Refused to Enforce Quota System | Collegedale, TN — Most people reading this article know what it is like to have the blue and red lights pop up in your rear view mirror. The last thing going through your mind at this point is the feeling of ‘being protected.’ This feeling comes from the fact that the overwhelming majority of the time a driver sees police lights in their mirror is because they have been targeted for revenue collection—often the result of a quota system—and they are about to be given a ticket, or worse. Police, we are told, are here to keep us safe and protect us from the bad guys. However, public safety all too often takes a back seat to revenue collection. Time and time again, the Free Thought Project has exposed quota schemes in which officers were punished for not writing enough tickets. The most recent ticket writing scheme to be exposed comes of out Collegedale, Tennessee in which multiple police officers claim they were fired for attempting to call out the illegal orders handed down to them to make arrests and write tickets. Former Collegedale police officers Robert Bedell, Kolby Duckett, and David Schilling have all filed lawsuits against the city and its officials for wrongful termination after speaking out against what they refer to as an “illegal quota system.” Now, this month, the last officer left on the force finally resigned. On Friday, Ridgetop Police Chief Bryan Morris submitted his resignation and the town is now without a police force. “Due to the allegations of a quota system being implemented by members of police department administration either written or unwritten, stated or implied, I feel it is necessary for a formal investigationto [sic] be conducted,” read a statement from City Commissioner Ethan White in July when Bedell announced his lawsuit. “Today, I have reached out to District Attorney General Neal Pinkston requesting that he immediately request the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to conduct a full investigation into the Collegedale Police Department’s operating policies.” In September, two more officers, Duckett and Schilling, came forward with the same allegations as Bedell. All three officers were fired without reason when they claimed to be exposing the illegal quota system. Janie Parks Varnell, the attorney representing all three cops, argued the firings were “just another example of the City of Collegedale, Chief Brian Hickman and City Manager Ted Rogers terminating skilled officers simply because those officers brought attention to the illegal quota system implemented by the Department.” She added that “Tennessee law protects public employees who bring attention to the illegal activities of their employers. I will be filing suit against City Manager Ted Rogers, Chief Brian Hickman and the City of Collegedale for the illegal firing of these outstanding officers who were serving and protecting our community by speaking out against unlawful quotas.” See: 177 Different Ways to Generate Extra Income According to Bedell, who was a Collegedale cop from January 2013 to January 2019, in December 2018, the department began directing officers to make a certain number of arrests and citations or face disciplinary actions. Each officer had to complete at least 25 enforcement actions and 100 patrol activities per month, according to the lawsuit. Bedell’s claim was backed up with photo evidence of a department flyer which had specific categories for officers to check off to show they had made their minimum number of arrests, citations, and patrols. When Bedell confronted chief Hickman about the quota system, Hickman told him that he could “either resign from the Department or be terminated,” according to the lawsuit. As the Times Free Press points out, Bedell asked if he’d done something wrong, but Hickman told Bedell he “could not discuss it,” and since Tennessee is an at-will state, Hickman could terminate Bedell at any time, the lawsuit states. Both Duckett and Schilling experienced similar firings and their claims are backed up by Morris. Although the city disputes this claim by Morris, these cops took it upon themselves to secretly record the corruption. The recording, released back in January, does not lie. “I will make a proposal right now. I will give the two bottom guys a raise for the 12-month period and hire back the seventh officer if you write an average of 210 tickets a month. I will do that, but I better see 210 tickets a month,” said Vice Mayor McCaw Johnson. This move to get rid of the police department is unlike other moves we’ve seen where the officers are corrupt and therefore all fired. This time, the example shows what happens in towns across the country who are strapped for revenue. City officials want more money to justify their bureaucratic budgets so they lean on cops to extort the citizens through traffic fines. We have seen this play out time and again. These local governments have long advocated for police departments to prey on poor people to finance themselves. However, this time, it appeared that this department didn’t want to do that—so they were fired and now the chief has quit. “Law enforcement is not about tickets. It’s about trying to cut down on crime. That is a local government taking advantage of its people. That’s not what we are here for,” said officer Shawn Taylor, who conducted the secret recording of officials demanding a quota. “For a city this size and the budget we have, the tickets we are writing is out of hand,” former chief Morris said. Indeed it was. Showing just how out of hand it was are some local stats from a study done by FOX17, who looked at ticket revenue in other towns. When the police department realized the city officials only wanted them for revenue collection, the controversy began—and now we are seeing where it ends. | Activist Post | https://www.activistpost.com/2019/11/entire-police-department-now-gone-after-good-cops-refused-to-enforce-quota-system.html | Fri, 08 Nov 2019 16:49:40 +0000 | 1,573,249,780 | 1,573,258,055 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
58,335 | birminghammail--2019-03-16--Police desperately search for Audi driver after two brothers killed in Wolverhampton crash | 2019-03-16T00:00:00 | birminghammail | Police desperately search for Audi driver after two brothers killed in Wolverhampton crash | Police are still urgently trying to find the driver of a blue Audi S3 after a horror crash which left two young brothers dead. Sanjay Singh, 10, and his 23-month-old brother Pawanveer, from Dudley , were killed when the white BMW being driven by their mother was hit by the Audi S3 as they turned right into Lawnswood Avenue, at around 8.45pm on Thursday (March 14). The driver of the blue Audi left the scene , while a 31-year-old man - who was driving a white Bentley Continental convertible, was arrested at the scene on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving. He has since been released pending further investigation. The death of the two young brothers has devastated communities across the West Midlands. More than 24 hours on from the crash here's what we know: Black Country Live contacted West Midlands Police today (March 16) who confirmed the driver of the blue Audi S3 has still not been traced. The family have released a statement via West Midlands Police. They said: “Our family are grieving over the tragic deaths of our two beautiful children, as well as dealing with the shock of the horrific crash. “We appeal to the general public to come forward as witnesses in order help police find the perpetrator who fled from the scene and to bring him or her to justice. “At this time we would appreciate some privacy and space to grieve over our precious loss. “Your co-operation in this would be very much appreciated.” Detective Sergeant Paul Hughes who is leading the investigation released desperate appeal for the Audi driver to "do the right thing" and come forward. Talking at a press conference yesterday he said: "You may not have been fully aware of the full tragic facts at the time, but you are now. You know what has happened so please do the right thing and come and see us." He added: "The public can always help us and always do. "The driver may have told you what’s gone on, if not, do you know someone who is suddenly without a car? "By not telling us, you're not helping them, us or the family. "We can’t solve these sort of things without the help of the public. Did you see the cars beforehand? Did you witness the collision? Residents in the Lanesfield area near the Birmingham New Road have spoken out about the "dangerous" road that is "atrocious for accidents". Many have called for speed cameras to be set up to reduce the number of accidents. A spokesperson at City of Wolverhampton Council said: “This is a horrific incident which has cost the lives of two innocent children. "Clearly it is inappropriate to speculate on the causes while the police undertake their investigation, but needless to say, we take our road safety duties very seriously. “The City Council constantly monitors speed and accident data to help identify and address areas of concern. We will continue to do this and will be liaising closely with the police to ensure we can help and support them as much as we can. “Our thoughts are with the children’s family and friends and would encourage anyone with information to contact the police as soon as possible.” West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner, David Jamieson, has said he will support any proposals the council puts forward to improve average speed enforcement measures. A note left at the scene reads: “Two beautiful boys taken away so suddenly. You will be missed so much and always remembered. Goodnight, God Bless you superstars. Love from Miss Best (Princess Angel). Another said: “We will all miss your cheeky smile and funny jokes. You’re wearing the shiniest tiara now! I have left your exact one with your flowers. Mrs Worrall left a tribute that read: “Sweet angels, gone too soon. Your smiles and laughter were contagious. We shall miss you so much!” Anyone with information is urged to contact police via Live Chat at west-midlands.police.uk between 8am and midnight or call 101 anytime. Crimestoppers can be called anonymously on 0800 555 111, quoting log number 2580 of March 14. | Oprah Flash | https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/police-desperately-search-audi-driver-15984910 | 2019-03-16 18:31:37+00:00 | 1,552,775,497 | 1,567,545,970 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
93,397 | chicagosuntimes--2019-04-11--Chicago Police gang database is disorganized and outdated IG | 2019-04-11T00:00:00 | chicagosuntimes | Chicago Police gang database is disorganized and outdated: IG | The Chicago Police Department’s “gang database” isn’t so much an effective crime-fighting tool as it is a disorganized hodgepodge of outdated and often unverified information, according to a blistering report released Thursday by the Office of the Inspector General. In fact, according to the OIG, the “database” label is something of a misnomer as the CPD has collected and stored gang data in more than a dozen places in just the last decade. “OIG found that CPD has captured, reported, and visualized gang-related data in at least 18 different forms, records, and systems of records in the past 10 years, although CPD was not able to definitively account for all such information in its possession and control,” the 160-page audit reads. Announcing the release of the report at a City Hall press conference Thursday morning, Chicago Inspector General Joe Ferguson noted the collateral damage a person can face once they’re designated a gang member by the CPD. “The impact that it has on these individuals extends far beyond the intended law enforcement purposes for which CPD collects and utilizes this information,” Ferguson said. The report says that, in its current form, the CPD’s gang data collection and storing methods exacerbate the already strained relationship between law enforcement and minority communities. “These [gang member] designations may contribute to a variety of adverse consequences for individuals and communities in, among others, law enforcement, criminal justice, immigration and employment contexts,” the report added. The audit suggested the City Council consider amending Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, which says that city agencies will not ask for or disclose a person’s immigration status to federal authorities unless that person has been identified as a known gang member either in a law enforcement agency’s database or by their own admission. Thursday, Ferguson also called for the City Council’s Public Safety Committee to have a hearing on the CPD’s gang data practices. Ferguson added that, as it stands now, more than 500 outside agencies currently have unlimited access to the CPD’s gang data. Karen Sheley, director of the ACLU of Illinois’ police practices project, said in a statement: “The city will have a lot of work to do in cleaning up its act on this database. Before it starts, the City Council should call hearings to examine why the department rejected some of the Inspector General’s recommendations and only partially accepted others. “The CPD has outright refused to work with impacted communities in developing a fix to this problem and has also refused to place additional safeguards for juveniles labeled as gang members. Chicagoans deserve to know why.” Among its findings, the OIG noted: • the department “lacks sufficient controls” for creating, storing and sharing gang-related data • the CPD’s gang information practices “lack procedural fairness protections” • the methods by which people are designated gang members “raise significant data quality concerns” • the department’s practices and lack of transparency regarding its gang designations strain police-community relations Chicago’s gang structure has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. The days of groups following a strict hierarchical structure are largely gone, having given way to smaller, splintered factions. And while the drug trade still fuels many gang conflicts in the city — especially on the West Side — interpersonal conflicts among various gang members also drive a substantial portion of the city’s gun violence. The CPD has been slow to adjust to the shifting gang landscape, according to the OIG. The audit listed more than two dozen recommendations that could help the department catch up. Among them: • evaluating whether the people and groups designated as gangs meet the legal criteria • inventorying all gang-related data collection points • more closely monitoring the CPD’s data sharing policy with other law enforcement agencies • requiring officers undertake more training in gang-related data collection • requiring the inclusion of “specified types of evidence required to support the proposed gang designations” • notifying people that they are on the list of gang members and providing them a way to appeal that designation Between January 1997 and November 2018, more than 134,000 people were designated as gang members by Chicago police. Eighty-eight percent of those designations were made because an arrestee told police about their gang affiliation. However, “there were 15,648 individuals for which CPD has never listed a reason for gang designation,” according to the OIG. Additionally, “OIG’s analysis of Gang Arrest Card data found that Black, African American, and Latinx persons comprise 95% of the 134,242 individuals designated as gang members during arrest, and are designated at both younger and older ages as well as issued more Gang Arrest Cards per person than White gang designees.” Last summer, a federal class-action lawsuit was filed against the city by several community groups who are asking a judge to impose far more stringent standards on the CPD as it relates to its gang data collection practices. Speaking at a press conference held a few hours after the OIG audit was released, Sheila Bedi, an attorney representing the community groups suing the city, said the report “vindicated every single claim the plaintiffs filed in their litigation.” “Because of the way this data is gathered, because of the way it is used, there is no legitimate law enforcement purpose to continue to collect this data and the report proves this indisputably,” she added. For its part, the Chicago Police Department, with a few exceptions, largely agreed with the OIG’s recommendations and signaled its intent to create and implement a new system to track gang membership in Chicago. No timetable was established for the new system, and the department said that the current gang data storing methods would remain in place, according to the OIG. “CPD acknowledged that its gang information policies, practices, and technology had impeded the Department’s ability to maintain updated and relevant information,” the audit reads. “It should be noted that these proposed controls and reforms do not apply to the gang information currently maintained by the Department and that this unverified, outdated information will remain available to any officer or department that currently has access to this information.” The OIG also suggested the department engage with community stakeholders and publicly evaluate whether collecting gang membership data “services CPD’s violence reduction efforts.” In an April 5 letter to Joseph Lipari, the city’s deputy inspector general for public safety, police Supt. Eddie Johnson disagreed, saying: “CPD does not concur that a public evaluation is necessary, and further asserts that such an evaluation could put certain gang crime strategies or information at risk and negatively impact the public and officer safety.” Shortly after Ferguson’s press conference Thursday, the CPD released a draft of a new departmental directive that would govern its future gang data collection practices in the proposed “Criminal Enterprise Database.” In the new policy, a person’s admission to being in a gang would have to be recorded for it to be used as the basis for a “gang member” designation. The “gang member” label would also have to meet two of the following criteria: • The person wears distinctive gang markers, such as tattoos or gang colors that “would not reasonably be expected” to be worn by someone not in a gang. • The person uses symbols or signals that are solely associated with gang activity. • The person is identified as a gang member by a person “who has provided reliable information to the Department in the past” and whose claims can be corroborated. • The person is identified as a gang member by a state, local or federal jail or prison. • The person is charged with a crime in which gang membership is “an element of the offense.” To be removed from the proposed gang database, a person would have to go five years without being arrested or charged with “a qualifying criminal offense.” Also, a gang member designation could be removed from a person’s name if the information that led to the label proves to be inaccurate. Jesus Salazar, 37, said that despite leaving his gang 10 years ago, he is still designated as a gang member by the CPD. Salazar now works as a violence intervention program manager at Enlace Chicago, a community group in Little Village. “I’ve been an asset to my community, I’ve been an asset to young folks in my community who have no aspirations but to join a gang,” Salazar said. “And I try to steer them away from gangs. I put my life on the lines through mediations on a daily basis and I try to combat gang violence as much as I can. I’ve been pulled over, harassed because of my designation in the gang database.” • EDITORIAL: Overhaul Chicago’s gang member database — but don’t chuck it • Lawsuit takes aim at Chicago Police’s gang database as ‘unconstitutional’ • Cook County unplugs ‘gang database,’ but critics still have concerns | Sam Charles | https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/chicago-police-gang-database-inspector-general-report/ | 2019-04-11 15:00:54+00:00 | 1,555,009,254 | 1,567,543,138 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
114,414 | cnsnews--2019-08-13--Chinese Anti-Terror Police Seen Assembling Near Hong Kong | 2019-08-13T00:00:00 | cnsnews | Chinese Anti-Terror Police Seen Assembling Near Hong Kong | (CNSNews.com) – Chinese Communist Party outlets have posted videos purporting to show anti-terror paramilitary police personnel and vehicles assembling in a mainland city adjacent to Hong Kong. They did so on the same day as a senior official in Beijing for the first time accused protests in the territory of showing “signs of terrorism.” Amid ongoing criticism from members of Congress, the government on Monday repeated its demand that U.S. politicians “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs.” Under the “one country, two systems” agreement governing the former British colony’s return to Chinese rule in 1997, security falls under the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF), comprising permanent residents of Hong Kong. But the troops assembling in Shenzhen, the mainland city bordering Hong Kong, belong to the People’s Armed Police (PAP), a paramilitary unit which by law responds to “rebellions, riots, serious violent and illegal incidents, terrorist attacks and other social security incidents,” the People’s Daily explained on Monday. That newspaper, and another Communist Party-affiliated paper, Global Times, posted video clips showing a convoy of PAP armored personnel carriers moving towards and assembling in Shenzhen, to a backdrop of martial music. Global Times said the PAP deployment in Shenzhen was “in advance of apparent large-scale exercises.” Unlike the regular police, PAP personnel fall under military command, wear military rather than blue uniforms, and have a rank structure similar to that of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). A week ago, Hong Kong authorities in a statement denied as “totally unfounded” rumors that PLA personnel were being “deployed as Hong Kong Police.” The video images, together with the use of the word “terrorism” to describe actions taken by some of the masses of protestors who have been demonstrating for the past ten weeks, will do nothing to quell fears arising from such rumors. At a press conference in Beijing, the spokesman for the government department responsible for Hong Kong affairs charged that protesters have committed “serious violent crimes and have begun to show signs of terrorism.” “This is a gross violation of Hong Kong’s rule of law and social order,” said Yang Guang, spokesman for the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, who warned that matters have “reached a critical juncture.” Yang said violent crimes must be stamped out, and said Beijing “strongly supports the decisive enforcement of the Hong Kong Police Force.” The HKPF was under fire on Monday for some of its actions over the weekend, including the use of teargas and batons inside an enclosed subway station, assaults against already-subdued protestors, and the deployment of police officers posing as protestors. Defending the force, the territory’s security minister also used the “terrorism” term to describe the actions of some protesters, who had thrown stones and other objects at police – including petrol bombs in a couple of cases. “This is sowing the seed of terror, which I think the police must deal with,” Secretary for Security John Lee told a press conference. Hong Kong’s deputy police commissioner, Tang Ping-keung, acknowledged to reporters that some officers had disguised themselves as protestors – he called them “decoy operatives” – although he declined to say how many there were. He insisted they would not “engage in any unlawful actions.” Also using the word “terrorism” was the central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong, which said in a statement, “If these terrorist atrocities are allowed to spread, Hong Kong will slide into a bottomless abyss.” Mass protests began in early June in response to a proposed law that would allow criminal suspects to be extradited to the mainland to face trial. The territory’s government later suspended the move, but pro-democracy groups want it permanently dropped. Other demands include inquiries into police tactics in responding to the demonstrations. On Monday Hong Kong’s international airport, the world’s eighth-busiest by passenger traffic, canceled all flights after protestors occupied terminals. The U.S. relationship with Hong Kong is governed by the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act, passed in advance of the territory’s return to Chinese rule two years later. Under it, the president may suspend privileges enjoyed by Hong Kong if he determines that it is not “sufficiently autonomous” from the mainland. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Monday pointed to legislation he and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) have authored to reevaluate the bilateral relationship. “America's relationship with Hong Kong is premised on its autonomy from China, and if the Communist Party refuses to ensure that autonomy then the United States should and will reevaluate that relationship,” he said. “The people of Hong Kong are bravely standing up to the Chinese Communist Party as Beijing tries to encroach on their autonomy and freedom,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted. “Any violent crackdown would be completely unacceptable.” “The U.S. has been making various Hong Kong-related accusations that are wanton, fact-distorting and inflammatory,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday. She complained again about U.S. diplomats in Hong Kong meeting with pro-democracy activists – or what she called “anti-China rabble-rousers.” “Hong Kong is part of China, and its affairs are entirely China’s internal affairs,” said Hua. “We urge the U.S. to observe international law and the basic norms governing international relations, and to stop interfering in China's internal affairs at once.” | Patrick Goodenough | https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/chinese-anti-terror-police-seen-assembling-near-hong-kong | 2019-08-13 08:26:01+00:00 | 1,565,699,161 | 1,567,534,261 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
128,552 | dailyheraldchicago--2019-08-19--California governor signs law to limit shootings by police | 2019-08-19T00:00:00 | dailyheraldchicago | California governor signs law to limit shootings by police | SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California is changing its standards for when police can kill under a law signed Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, as it tries to deter police shootings of young minority men that have roiled the nation. "We are doing something today that stretches the boundary of possibility and sends a message to people all across this country that they can do more and they can do better to meet this moment," Newsom said as he stood alongside family members of people killed by police. The law by Democratic Assemblywoman Shirley Weber of San Diego will allow police to use lethal force only when necessary to defend against an imminent threat of death or serious injury to officers or bystanders. But lawmakers dropped an explicit definition of "necessary" that previously had said officers could use deadly force only when there is "no reasonable alternative." One catalyst was last year's fatal shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man suspected of vandalism whose death sparked major protests in the state capital and reverberated nationwide. Despite the public anger, law enforcement objections stalled the bill last year and even some supporters had reservations until it was amended in May. The measure passed with bipartisan support after major police organizations won concessions and ended their vehement opposition. Lawmakers also removed an explicit requirement that officers try to de-escalate confrontations. Law enforcement officials said that would have opened officers to endless second-guessing of what often are split-second life-and-death decisions. The measure still contains the strongest language of any state, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which proposed the bill and negotiated the changes. Weber said the law "changes the culture of policing in California." She was joined on stage by fellow lawmakers and family members of people who have been shot by police, including Clark's family and the mother of Oscar Grant, a man killed by police officers on an Oakland train platform in 2009. It is linked to a pending Senate bill requiring that officers be trained in ways to de-escalate confrontations, alternatives to opening fire and how to interact with people with mental illness or other issues. | null | http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20190819/news/308199910/ | 2019-08-19 22:29:00+00:00 | 1,566,268,140 | 1,567,534,052 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
128,661 | dailyheraldchicago--2019-08-24--Change in state law on police questioning prompted by death of Naperville North student | 2019-08-24T00:00:00 | dailyheraldchicago | Change in state law on police questioning prompted by death of Naperville North student | A change in state law signed Friday by Gov. J.B. Pritzker requiring that a parent or guardian be notified when law enforcement questions a student on school grounds was prompted by the death of a Naperville North High School student. House Bill 2627 says that before detaining and questioning a student under 18 who is suspected of committing a criminal act, a police officer, school resource officer or school security personnel must notify parents and make "reasonable efforts" to ensure they are present. If that isn't possible, a school social worker, psychologist, nurse, guidance counselor or any other mental health professional should be present, according to the amended law, which is effective immediately. If practical, efforts also should be made to have a law enforcement officer trained in "promoting safe interactions and communications with youth" present during questioning. The proposal sponsored by 84th District state Rep. Stephanie Kifowit was in response to the death in January 2017 of 16-year old Corey Walgren. Hours after being questioned by school and police officials, he walked to the top of a five-story parking deck and jumped. The staff had warned him he may have to register as a sex offender because they suspected he made a video of himself having sex with a classmate without her knowledge. Walgren was questioned before his mom was called and headed toward the school. Kifowit earlier this year said she and members of her Youth Citizen Advisory council drafted the bill because Corey's death "really rattled" Naperville-area students. "I think it's a clarification of the law that's really needed," she said Saturday. It acknowledges students shouldn't be alone during questioning. "I think it's a step in the right direction and I think it's an overdue piece of legislation," she said. The governor's signing is a "wonderful first step" to changes in Illinois law the family hopes will save lives, said Corey's father, Doug. "It is very important that parents and guardians are informed and present any time a school resource officer is questioning a minor. A natural next step for us is to pursue a similar change at the national level," he said. Corey's mother, Maureen, said the family believes it is a minor student's right to have a parent present during police questioning but learned there is a gray area regarding school resource officers working in schools. "Courts, schools, parents and police all have varying ideas of what the role is of the SRO and how they should be involved in questioning minors," she said. Work will continue to change the school code to more clearly define the role of school resource officers and how schools use them during investigations and disciplinary incidents, she said. "We don't want any other student to feel the fear and intimidation that Corey felt while he was alone with people of authority," she said. Doug and Maureen Walgren sued two school officials, a school resource officer, Naperville Unit District 203 and the city of Naperville after Corey's death. A federal judge dismissed the action, but the ruling is being appealed. | null | http://www.dailyherald.com/news/20190824/change-in-state-law-on-police-questioning-prompted-by-death-of-naperville-north-student | 2019-08-24 21:34:45+00:00 | 1,566,696,885 | 1,567,533,542 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
137,636 | dcgazette--2019-07-02--Flashback ICE Threatens to Sue City of Portland after Mayor Tells Police to Stand Down During Antif | 2019-07-02T00:00:00 | dcgazette | Flashback: ICE Threatens to Sue City of Portland after Mayor Tells Police to Stand Down During Antifa Siege of Facility | I represent the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council (“Council”). The Council and I assert that your current policy forbidding Portland law enforcement agencies from assisting employees of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (“ICE”) who request law enforcement assistance while at or away from work is a violation of the United States Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. As you are aware, the 14th Amendment forbids the government from denying any person or persons equal protection of the laws. Your policy of not providing police services to employees of ICE creates a class of people based upon their source of income. You have failed to articulate why these people deserve to be the target of your ire and, you have failed to articulate the legitimate government interest protected or supported by your targeting of hardworking citizens. We understand that you have a difference of opinion with the current President of the United States, and some of his policies, but we fail to see why targeting the employees of ICE and leaving them vulnerable to violence, harassment and even death furthers a legitimate government interest. Your policy has created a zone of terror and lawlessness. We ask that you end your policy of not responding to calls for police services from ICE employees immediately. Our membership has been the subjected to threats of physical violence and harassment since you announced your policy. We are requesting a meeting with you to discuss how you can provide law enforcement services to ICE employees. Please feel free to contact me if you would like to schedule a meeting between yourself and my clients. We would like to avoid federal litigation, but we are prepared to protect our membership and their families. | 505335761211 | https://dcgazette.com/2019/flashback-ice-threatens-to-sue-city-of-portland-after-mayor-tells-police-to-stand-down-during-antifa-siege-of-facility/ | 2019-07-02 05:03:33+00:00 | 1,562,058,213 | 1,567,537,270 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
142,969 | drudgereport--2019-02-01--How police make millions by seizing property | 2019-02-01T00:00:00 | drudgereport | How police make millions by seizing property... | When a man barged into Isiah Kinloch’s apartment and broke a bottle over his head, the North Charleston resident called 911. After cops arrived on that day in 2015, they searched the injured man’s home and found an ounce of marijuana. So they took $1,800 in cash from his apartment and kept it. When Eamon Cools-Lartigue was driving on Interstate 85 in Spartanburg County, deputies stopped him for speeding. The Atlanta businessman wasn’t criminally charged in the April 2016 incident. Deputies discovered $29,000 in his car, though, and decided to take it. When Brandy Cooke dropped her friend off at a Myrtle Beach sports bar as a favor, drug enforcement agents swarmed her in the parking lot and found $4,670 in the car. Her friend was wanted in a drug distribution case, but Cooke wasn’t involved. She had no drugs and was never charged in the 2014 bust. Agents seized her money anyway. She worked as a waitress and carried cash because she didn’t have a checking account. She spent more than a year trying to get her money back. The Greenville News and Anderson Independent Mail examined these cases and every other court case involving civil asset forfeiture in South Carolina from 2014-2016. Our examination was aimed at understanding this little-discussed, potentially life-changing power that state law holds over citizens — the ability of officers to seize property from people, even if they aren't charged with a crime. The resulting investigation became TAKEN, a statewide journalism project with an exclusive database and in-depth reporting. It’s the first time a comprehensive forfeiture investigation like this has been done for an entire U.S. state, according to experts. The TAKEN team scoured more than 3,200 forfeiture cases and spoke to dozens of targeted citizens plus more than 50 experts and officials. Additionally, the team contacted every law enforcement agency in the state. This yielded a clear picture of what is happening: Police are systematically seizing cash and property — many times from people who aren’t guilty of a crime — netting millions of dollars each year. South Carolina law enforcement profits from this policing tactic: the bulk of the money ends up in its possession. The intent is to give law enforcement a tool to use against nefarious organizations by grabbing the fruits of their illegal deeds and using the proceeds to fight more crime. Officers gather in places like Spartanburg County for contests with trophies to see who can make the largest or most seizures during highway blitzes. They earn hats, mementos and free dinners, and agencies that participate take home a cut of the forfeiture proceeds. That money adds up. Over three years, law enforcement agencies seized more than $17 million, our investigation shows. “We’ve heard so many awful stories,” said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau. “Having cash makes you vulnerable to an illicit practice by a police organization. “It’s a dirty little secret. It’s so consistent with the issue of how law enforcement functions. They say, ‘Oh yeah, we want to make sure that resources used for the trafficking of drugs are stopped’ … but many of the people they are taking money from are not drug traffickers or even users.” These seizures leave thousands of citizens without their cash and belongings or reliable means to get them back. They target black men most, our investigation found — with crushing consequences when life savings or a small business payroll is taken. Many people never get their money back. Or they have to fight to have their property returned and incur high attorney fees. Police officials respond by saying forfeiture allows them to hamstring crime rings and take money from drug dealers, a move they say hurts trafficking more than taking their drugs. In 2016, when a Myrtle Beach police unit broke up a sophisticated drug ring called the 24/7 Boyz that offered a dispatch system to order drugs and have them delivered on demand, the police used seizure powers. They took cars, firearms, a four-bedroom house and $80,000. They also arrested 12 people. Fifteenth Circuit Solicitor Jimmy Richardson initially prosecuted the case before turning it over to the federal government. In January, 10 of the 12 defendants pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges. Richardson said taking a drug ring’s operating cash strikes a critical blow against traffickers in a way that criminal charges don’t. “A drug enterprise is an onion, it’s a multitude of layers,” he said. “Some tools hurt the traffickers, some hurt the enterprise itself. I feel this hurts the enterprise.” Agencies also said funding for their work would be imperiled without the profit from this tool. Clemson Police Chief Jimmy Dixon said losing those profits could shut down his agency’s K-9 unit entirely. Undercover narcotics operations overall would suffer, Dixon said, citing limits on the department’s operating budget. • Black men pay the price for this program. They represent 13 percent of the state's population. Yet 65 percent of all citizens targeted for civil forfeiture in the state are black males. “These types of civil asset forfeiture practices are going to put a heavier burden on lower-income people,” said Ngozi Ndulue, recently a national NAACP senior director, now working at the Death Penalty Information Center. “And when you add in racial disparities around policing and traffic stops and arrest and prosecution, we know this is going to have a disproportionate effect on black communities.” • If you are white, you are twice as likely to get your money back than if you are black. • Nearly one-fifth of people who had their assets seized weren't charged with a related crime. Out of more than 4,000 people hit with civil forfeiture over three years, 19 percent were never arrested. They may have left a police encounter without so much as a traffic ticket. But they also left without their cash. Roughly the same number — nearly 800 people — were charged with a crime but not convicted. Greenville attorney Jake Erwin said the overarching idea is that the money being seized is earnings from past drug sales, so it's fair game. “In theory, that makes a little bit of sense," he said. "The problem is that they don’t really have to prove that.” In some states, the suspicions behind a civil forfeiture must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in court, but there is no requirement of proof in South Carolina. When a forfeiture is contested, prosecutors only have to show a preponderance of evidence to keep seized goods. Practically anything can be confiscated and sold at auction: jewelry, electronics, firearms, boats, RVs. In South Carolina, 95 percent of forfeiture revenue goes back to law enforcement. The rest is deposited into the state’s general fund. • Most of the money isn’t coming from kingpins or money laundering operations. It’s coming from hundreds of encounters where police take smaller amounts of cash, often when they find regular people with drugs for personal use. Customers, not dealers. More than 55 percent of the time when police seized cash, they took less than $1,000. • Your cash or property can disappear in minutes but take years to get back. The average time between when property is seized and when a prosecutor files for forfeiture is 304 days, with the items in custody the whole time. Often, it’s far longer, well beyond the two-year period state law allows for a civil case to be filed. But only rarely are prosecutors called out for missing the filing window and forced to return property to owners. • The entire burden of recovering property is on the citizens, who must prove the goods belong to them and were obtained legally. Since it’s not a criminal case, an attorney isn’t provided. Citizens are left to figure out a complex court process on their own. Once cases are filed, they have 30 days to respond. Most of the time, they give up. Part 2 of TAKEN: How civil forfeiture errors, delays enrich SC police, hurt people • The bulk of forfeited money finances law enforcement, but there’s little oversight of what is seized or how it’s spent. Police use it to pay for new guns and gear, for training and meals and for food for their police dogs. In one case, the Spartanburg County sheriff kept a top-of-the-line pick-up truck as his official vehicle and sold countless other items at auctions. In many other places, changes are being made: 29 states have taken steps to reform their forfeiture process. Fifteen states now require a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited, according to the Institute for Justice, a non-profit libertarian law firm. South Carolina lawmakers have crafted reform bills in recent General Assembly sessions, but none of the efforts made it out of committee. To critics, South Carolina is the poster child for the injustice inherent in the for-profit civil forfeiture system, said Louis Rulli, a law expert at the University of Pennsylvania. Forfeiture doesn’t square with the rest of the justice system, Rulli said. “How could it be possible that my property could be taken when I am not even charged with any criminal offense? It seems un-American," he said. Those who pay the biggest price are black men. Men like Kinloch. While he was hospitalized for a head injury from a home intruder, North Charleston police removed money from the tattoo artist’s apartment. That department earns 12 percent of their annual operating budget from cash and property seized under civil law, our investigation shows. “The robber didn’t get anything, but the police got everything,” said the 28-year-old Kinloch. Police charged him with possession with intent to distribute after finding the marijuana in his apartment, but the charge was dismissed. Kinloch never got his cash back. Without his $1,800, he couldn’t pay the landlord and was forced out of his home. More: He fought off a robber, but police seized his $1,800 Kinloch isn't alone as a black man facing forfeiture over small, or nonexistent, criminal charges in South Carolina. Our investigation found that black men make up the largest share by far of people targeted for civil forfeiture, much higher than even the drug arrest or incarceration rate for black men. Read about our exclusive findings here: Atlanta musician Johnnie Grant jerked awake in the back seat as blue lights flashed and a Greenville sheriff's deputy leaned in to question his driver. Grant, his photographer and a videographer were on their way to a show in Charlotte in March 2017. The deputy picked out his target among hundreds of cars that pass through the stretch of Interstate 85 near White Horse Road every hour. He said he pulled over the rented Chevrolet Malibu and its three black occupants for following too closely. He and other deputies soon asked the men to step out of the car, searched it and found 1.5 ounces of marijuana inside a jar in the videographer’s backpack. When deputies opened Grant’s bag, they found $8,000 wrapped in rubber bands. All three were charged with marijuana possession, even though the videographer explained it was his personal stash. The deputies took Grant’s cash and told him it was drug money. “If I’d have been white, I guarantee you they wouldn’t have taken my money,” the 30-year-old Grant said. “They probably wouldn’t have even searched my car. They probably wouldn’t have even pulled me over.” It fits the pattern. Black men carry the burden of South Carolina's civil forfeiture program. Almost two-thirds of people targeted by forfeiture are black males, according to TAKEN investigation data analysis. Yet they represent just 13 percent of the general population. Hilary Shelton, the NAACP Washington bureau director, said the organization worries the racial targeting in South Carolina is even worse than has been reported. “Civil asset forfeiture, combined with the historic and consistent problems of racial profiling on our highways and byways, becomes very much part of a troubling equation,” he said. “It’s been used in a racially discriminatory manner. The law must be fully reviewed.” The state has a long history of racial discrimination related to property. Civil forfeiture is a vestige of that history, some critics say. It links to an established trend of targeted law enforcement that puts more police in contact with non-whites, an exposure that can lead to civil forfeiture, experts say. Some departments have built a money-making machine on the backs of this type of targeting. It starts with where police use forfeiture. It's happening in every urban environment in South Carolina. There are only six cities in the state with a population over 50,000. All of them frequently use forfeiture. In smaller towns, only about half the police forces use the tool at all, and most agencies don’t pursue many cases. The system is designed to be applied at scale. The more forfeiture is used, the more money police have at their disposal for equipment, training and for undercover drug purchases. Though the racial disparities in the data exist broadly across the state, the decisions that lead to civil forfeiture are situational. It’s a traffic stop, or a drug investigation that leads to a residence, or increased patrols in low-income or historically black neighborhoods. The TAKEN team used census data to analyze the widest disparities between the number of forfeiture cases with black subjects compared with the number of black residents in an agency’s jurisdiction. The largest racial gaps? The highest disproportionate targeting of black people came from the Myrtle Beach Police Department, followed by the Lexington County Sheriff’s Office and the Charleston Police Department. During 2014-2016, there was one black person targeted for forfeiture by Myrtle Beach police for every 50 black residents who live there. If you roughly extrapolated that rate over a generation, one in five black people would have money or goods taken by police in Myrtle Beach at some point over three decades, despite the fact that the city is mostly white. The city is 69 percent white and just 14 percent black, according to 2014 U.S. Census data. In Greenville County, black people were targeted for forfeiture at a rate of one per every 587 black residents during our three-year study period. In comparison, forfeiture affected one white person per every 4,139 white residents in the county. Greenville County is 69 percent white and 19 percent black, according to U.S. Census data. “It just sort of reinforces an understanding we already knew — that black residents disproportionately come in contact with law enforcement given the way criminal justice policy is oriented in this country,” said Nicole Porter, spokeswoman at The Sentencing Project, a reform advocacy group. A piece of this policing story is tied to the highway and police behavior and assumptions. In one case, a Wellford officer pulled over a black man on Interstate 85 for what he said was failure to maintain a lane. When he discovered cash in the car that day in 2012, the officer called in the top Homeland Security agent in Greenville to help seize it. They’d found what police said were “marijuana particles.” The North Carolina driver, Lee Harris Jr., said it was tobacco. The officers took $7,008 from the glove box. “I call them pirates,” said Lee Harris Sr., the driver's father. The elder Harris is a minister and a military veteran who said the money comes from his bank and from documented Social Security and benefits. Harris said he had left $7,000 in the car when his son went on a trip to Atlanta. He filed a lawsuit, and after a year-and-a-half, he settled. The government kept $2,008 even though Harris' son was never charged with a crime. Sometimes police seize cash when the driver is merely ticketed for a minor violation not related to drugs, according to court records. Ramando Moore was cited for having an open container in Richland County in 2015; he lost $604. Plexton Denard Hunter was pulled over for a seatbelt violation in 2015 in Richland County and had $541 seized. Tesla Carter, another seatbelt violation, this time in Anderson in 2015. She lost $1,361. If you’re black and driving in South Carolina, you are more likely to be stopped by police. In 24 states with available race data by traffic stop, the state had the second highest rate of black motorists stopped by state troopers, according to a 2017 study by the Stanford Open Policing Project. In Greenville County, there were 24 state patrol stops for every 100 black residents of driving age. There were only 15 stops for every 100 white residents in the nine-year study period, according to the project. Officers have a lower threshold to search black drivers than white drivers, the Stanford research shows, evidenced by data that revealed when officers searched drivers, they found contraband more often on white drivers than black ones. Yet the scope of action taken by law enforcement and the justice system against black Americans throughout U.S. history makes it easier for an officer to take from a black person than a white person, said Heather Ann Thompson, a criminal justice and African-American history professor at the University of Michigan and author of “Blood in the Water." It’s the same reason black people are prosecuted more harshly, are incarcerated more often and for longer sentences and face civil fines and penalties more often than whites. They’re just not as likely to be able to marshal resources to fight back against the justice system, she said. “It has everything to do with who has access to good defense lawyers and who’s getting pulled over to begin with,” said Thompson, who’s a leading voice in criminal justice reform. The racial disparity may begin with traffic stops, but it extends well beyond them in South Carolina. How often are black people in this state the victim of civil forfeiture when the police encounter doesn’t involve being pulled over in a car? Excluding known traffic stops, police seized money from black people in two-thirds of all cases compared with one-third for whites, our TAKEN data analysis shows. It’s an even more startling fact when considering South Carolina is 69 percent white. Ella Bromell, a 72-year-old widow from Conway, twice nearly lost her home, though she’s never been convicted of a crime in her life. Yet the city of Conway nearly succeeded in seizing her house because they said she didn’t do enough to stop crime happening on the sidewalk and in her yard. Young men were using her lawn as a location to sell drugs at night, according to court records. The fight between Conway officials and Bromell, who is black, began in 2007 and lasted a decade — culminating in court in 2017 when two judges sided with her and wrote that the city “failed to produce any evidence that the residence was an integral or otherwise fundamental part of illegal drug activity.” Still, Bromell fears the city will try again, despite the police admission in court that they couldn’t say if she was even aware of a single drug sale around her house. Conway City Manager Adam Emrick said the city has contemplated future seizures in the case of Bromell or similar property owners. Losing her home would be the end of her, Bromell said. “I don’t want to go nowhere else.” More: She gave her friend a ride and lost her wages Thurmond Brooker, Bromell’s attorney, said the law is being warped without the public even noticing. “It's being used in a way in which innocent people can have their property taken,” he said. “Little old ladies whose property is being trespassed upon can be victimized for a second time." Why are black citizens like Bromell facing forfeiture more often than their white neighbors? One police official said it’s because there’s more drug crime in the black community. “We go where we’re called,” Greenville Police Chief Ken Miller said. “We police where people are telling us there are problems. We’re not an agency — and I don’t know a police agency — that tries to balance racially its interdiction of drugs off the street.” The bulk of the drugs and weapons calls the city receives are in minority communities, Miller said. He said he won't apologize if police tactics disproportionately engage black men and lead to more seizures. In Greenville County, the Sheriff’s Office initiated 256 forfeiture cases from 2014-2016, of which 150 involved blacks and 85 involved whites. Greenville city police had 89 cases. Of those, 53 involved blacks and 22 involved whites. Miller said the city has spent time and money on racial bias training and is working to better track data on traffic stops. David Smith, one of the architects of the expanded forfeiture laws enacted in the 1980s to fight the War on Drugs, said it’s a great tool for going after significant criminals. Drug lords. White collar masterminds. But increasingly forfeiture has been co-opted by local police forces to take petty cash on the side of the road, he said. Grant, the Atlanta musician, said he understands how police work and knew right away he would fight to get his money back, even if it cost him legal fees. "They knew we were young, and we were black,” Grant said. “They pulled us over, gave us a bogus reason. We didn’t consent to search; they searched anyway.” Grant's drug charge was dismissed, and though he had proof that he earned his money legally — show schedules, payment receipts, contracts — it could have taken another two years before he could challenge the forfeiture in court. So Grant chose to settle rather than wait. The state got $500. He got $7,500 back but had to pay his attorney $2,500. “We’re the ones being railroaded,” Grant said. “It just speaks volumes to where we are as a people.” More: For years, a SC city tried to seize a widow's home. It still might. More: Atlanta rapper fought the law and won Enjoying the TAKEN investigation series? Please support local journalism by subscribing to The News. Have you lost property through civil forfeiture? Or do you have information about the practice we should know? We'd like to hear about it. Or about any investigative tips we could work on. Contact our reporters at [email protected]. Also, check out our Instagram content for TAKEN. BACKGROUND: Journalists in the Greenville News and Anderson Independent Mail newsrooms spent two years on this investigative project. Here's why. | null | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DrudgeReportFeed/~3/llSPL9blq4E/ | 2019-02-01 23:58:38+00:00 | 1,549,083,518 | 1,567,550,025 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
146,365 | drudgereport--2019-04-06--Police suicides worry law enforcement brass | 2019-04-06T00:00:00 | drudgereport | Police suicides worry law enforcement brass... | Officer Andrew Einstein was supposed to die on May 12, 2012. The former Marine who served two tours overseas, now a cop, had planned it all out. Before going out that night, he laid out his prescription drugs on his bedside table. He was going to get drunk and take all of the pills when he got home. He hoped to never wake up. Einstein, wounded in Afghanistan in 2011, was having problems with post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury, but he was afraid to ask for help. "I thought in my mind if I reached out and asked for help, they would take my badge and my gun," he said, speaking at the Law Enforcement Suicide and Prevention Symposium at NYPD headquarters. Einstein said he got too drunk to take the pills, and his friends put him on the couch when he got home. He woke up the next morning. Einstein's story is not uncommon, according to law enforcement officials and health experts, and it's one more and more police officers are starting to share. Police suicides, according to Blue H.E.L.P., a nonprofit organization that's tracked these figures since 2016, are responsible for more deaths than occur in the line of duty each year. In 2018, that number reached 165, according to Blue H.E.L.P. That number is "conservative," said Miriam Heyman, a researcher with the Ruderman Family Foundation, a nonprofit, philanthropic research organization. There isn't a central database for all police suicides. "Police officers experience trauma on a regular basis -- not just what is on the front line of nightly news," Heyman continued. She went on to say that 10% of police officers have injured or have killed someone in the past three years, and officers experience on average 188 "critical incidents" over the course of their careers. "It's usually not an event, it's a culmination of many events," Anthony Riccio, first deputy superintendent for the Chicago Police Department, said at the event. The event put on by the Police Executive Research Forum brought together federal, state, local and international law enforcement agencies to address the problem. "I can't think of a more important issue," Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told the more than 300 people in the room. Roccio detailed one instance where a police officer drove into a parking lot after she reported for duty and killed herself in her police cruiser. "It's been hard for us," he said, choking up. "We take it personally." "I've never seen it as bad as it is now," he added, citing his 35 years on the force. This year, the CPD already has had three police officer suicides. Einstein told ABC affiliate WPVI that he suffered a serious brain injury due to a grenade blast in Afghanistan. "My life was a wreck, to say the least, and having no purpose, I thought about suicide. But I didn't just think about it. Killing myself became a viable option. I began formulating a plan. It was the worst place I've ever been in my life, by far," he later wrote on the military website American Grit. Einstein credits his service dog, Gunner, and a veterans program with saving his life. "He gave me purpose. Though my life was still a wreck, I had a responsibility to take care of him. He truly saved my life," he wrote. After he came out of a dark place, he returned to being a police officer. But, he said, the threat of suicide didn't end when he put his police uniform back on. "If you are a law enforcement officer, you have a 54% greater chance of dying from suicide," said John Violanti, an epidemiology and environmental health professor and expert on police stress at the University of Buffalo. Breaking the stigma on getting help is the first step, experts said. "You smash the stigma, you save lives," said Jon Adler, a former police officer and the director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the Department of Justice. Supportive families can also help. "We need to educate families on what this job can do -- I think it's extremely important," Violanti added. Some police departments are hiring mental health and wellness experts, while others are turning to peer counseling or outside counseling. Einstein is now an officer at a police department in New Jersey. He said he's grateful for the opportunity -- not just to serve his community, but to have support in understanding his condition and serve to the very best of his ability. If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741-741. | null | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DrudgeReportFeed/~3/Vx4AoHeiVkE/story | 2019-04-06 17:34:39+00:00 | 1,554,586,479 | 1,567,543,815 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
153,891 | drudgereport--2019-11-12--Police struggle to recruit amid poor pay, public perception... | 2019-11-12T00:00:00 | drudgereport | Police struggle to recruit amid poor pay, public perception... | Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. PRINCETON, Iowa — Some days Brian Carsten will pin his badge on at 9 a.m. and not take it off until well after midnight. It’s the reality of his job as the only full-time police officer in this small town on the border with Illinois. Every day is different, as the phone is always ringing with reports of domestic disputes, assaults, mental health crises, burglary or even runaway dogs. Carsten, 52, answers those calls largely alone in this town of about 1,000 people — which can be risky when the nearest backup is up to 15 minutes away. “That's a long time, especially when you're fighting with someone, or you got a high-risk situation,” Carsten said. “You really got to think about that and how you play the call out and how you deal with the person.” And in his limited free time, Carsten, who has more than three decades of experience in law enforcement, moonlights for a handful of nearby police departments. He earns some extra cash and enjoys the change of pace while supporting small rural police departments that are having trouble recruiting and acquiring up-to-date law enforcement resources and technology as they grapple with budget shortfalls. “I don't know that there's any department out there that says, ‘Man, I have enough officers, and I don't have a problem with hiring officers,’" Carsten said. “The smaller towns that I part time at have the same problem that I'm having.” Attracting recruits to work for rural police departments is getting increasingly difficult, especially as most new law enforcement officers are choosing to work in urban areas, which tend to pay better and be better staffed. Police officers earned an average of $56,160 in 2011. That rose to $65,210 in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rural departments, however, struggle to match those salaries. “I don’t see the younger officers, the newer officers, coming into the smaller towns,” Carsten said, noting that pay disparity was one reason. The federal government now considers these problems so bad that it has been getting involved. Over the spring and summer, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS — an agency under the Justice Department that supports community policing — conducted a series of listening sessions with rural law enforcement leaders in South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, Iowa and Montana to help them identify the needs of their departments. COPS Director Phil Keith said Attorney General William Barr had directed him to spend more time in rural communities to focus on issues that affect them. He said antiquated technology and the methamphetamine epidemic are major issues, but the biggest problem may be just having enough qualified officers to do the job. “The competition for deputies and police officers is extremely high,” he said. “There is a general trend where many rural agencies are losing law enforcement staff to larger communities because of benefits and salaries, and the tax base in the rural areas just can’t grow.” COPS is working to help these departments apply for grants and get access to a number of programs, and they’re planning to hold more listening sessions in Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and North Dakota over the next few months. Most troubling to Keith is that many rural departments didn’t have access to bulletproof vests, were working with faulty radios and had no means to update basic technology. He said COPS was working on a new mandate that grants will go to those most in need — not those who submit the best applications. “We can’t just reward those who can afford to pay grant writers to write polished applications,” he said. Still, amid headlines of officer-involved shootings, of officers being found guilty of murder and of charges of police corruption, law enforcement agencies are struggling to convince potential recruits that policing is a career worth pursuing, Carsten said. The Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that works to improve the professionalism of policing, said that 36 percent of its members reported a significant decline in applications for police officer positions over the past five years. Another 27 percent said they’d seen at least a slight decline. Greg Graver, 45, has served as the sheriff of Jones County in Iowa for eight years. His department, which includes 10 deputies, serves about 14,000 people across 577 square miles and 850 miles of county roads. The trouble — as he told the Gazette in Cedar Rapids — is that he has a lot of land to cover, but few people to do it. “We're still a rural county,” Graver said. “You have limited tax base that you can work off, and there's several county departments that are vying for this money. If the county had the money available to us, then we could certainly add six or seven deputy sheriffs.” That’s a concern because there aren’t enough police officers to address the country’s growing population. A Department of Justice report found that the number of officers per capita dropped by about 11 percent from 1997 to 2016, from 2.43 to 2.17 officers per 1,000 residents. In Iowa, that number is even lower. Tim Miller was recently hired as a deputy sheriff in Jones County. Because of the few number of officers, he said he feels like a hindrance sometimes, as they struggle to answer calls coming in from across the county. “You do have to be a jack-of-all-trades,” Miller said, adding that he had to know traffic and motor vehicle law. “Know when you can or cannot enter into a vehicle to search. Then it comes to like a burglary or theft, we can't just take the report and say, ‘Hey, we're going to hand you over to the investigation unit.’ We are the investigation unit. We are the arson unit. We're the medical unit.” It’s those stressors and other concerns — work-related alcoholism, the rising suicide rate among officers and the high rate of divorce in policing — that has Graver, a career officer, worried that his three children might consider following in his footsteps. “I would never tell my kid, no,” Graver said. “I will support whatever my children's decision is. Would it be the career path that I would pick for them? I would say it definitely would not be.” Shako Liu reported from Iowa, and Phil McCausland reported from New York. | null | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DrudgeReportFeed/~3/ZRLtHDEGkuw/rural-police-struggle-recruit-amid-poor-pay-public-perception-n1078496 | Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:16:37 GMT | 1,573,535,797 | 1,573,517,921 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
154,885 | drudgereport--2019-11-26--First robot police dog unleashed... | 2019-11-26T00:00:00 | drudgereport | First robot police dog unleashed... | Cops have long had dogs, and robots, to help them do their jobs. And now, they have a robot dog. Massachusetts State Police is the first law enforcement agency in the country to use Boston Dynamics' dog-like robot, called Spot. While the use of robotic technology is not new for state police, the temporary acquisition of Spot — a customizable robot some have called “terrifying” — is raising questions from civil rights advocates about how much oversight there should be over police robotics programs. The state’s bomb squad had Spot on loan from the Waltham-based Boston Dynamics for three months starting in August until November, according to records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and reviewed by WBUR. The documents do not reveal a lot of details on the robot dog’s exact use, but a state police spokesman said Spot, like the department’s other robots, was used as a “mobile remote observation device” to provide troopers with images of suspicious devices or potentially hazardous locations, like where an armed suspect might be hiding. “Robot technology is a valuable tool for law enforcement because of its ability to provide situational awareness of potentially dangerous environments,” state police spokesman David Procopio wrote. State police say Spot was used in two incidents, in addition to testing. Boston Dynamics vice president for business development Michael Perry said the company wants Spot to have lots of different uses, in industries ranging from oil and gas companies, to construction, to entertainment. He envisions police sending Spot into areas that are too hazardous for a human — a chemical spill, or near a suspected bomb, or into a hostage situation. “Right now, our primary interest is sending the robot into situations where you want to collect information in an environment where it's too dangerous to send a person, but not actually physically interacting with the space,” Perry said. Spot is a “general purpose” robot, with an open API. That means customers — whether a police department or warehouse operator — can customize Spot with its own software. (State police say they didn't use this feature.) It has a 360-degree, low-light camera, and an arm. For all of its potential, Boston Dynamics doesn’t want Spot weaponized. Perry said the lease agreements have a clause requiring the robot not be used in a way that would “physically harm or intimidate people.” “Part of our early evaluation process with customers is making sure that we're on the same page for the usage of the robot,” he said. “So upfront, we're very clear with our customers that we don't want the robot being used in a way that can physically harm somebody.” That’s one of the reasons why the company is opting for lease agreements, rather than a sale, Perry said. Boston Dynamics wants to be selective in which companies get access to Spot — and have the ability to take the equipment back if the lease is violated. Through Procopio, state police said the department never weaponized any of its robots, including Spot. But while Spot and other tactical robots aren’t designed to kill, they still can. In 2016, Dallas Police sent a bomb disposal robot armed with explosives to kill a sniper who had shot at police officers and killed five. Experts said it was the first time a non-military robot had been used to intentionally kill a person. That deadly potential, and lack of transparency about the state police’s overall robotics program, worries Kade Crockford, director of the technology for liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts. Crockford said they want to see a policy from state police about its use of robotics and a conversation about how and when robots should be used. State police didn’t say whether there’s a current policy about the use of robots, and the ACLU’s records request to the agency didn’t turn one up. “We just really don't know enough about how the state police are using this,” Crockford said. “And the technology that can be used in concert with a robotic system like this is almost limitless in terms of what kinds of surveillance and potentially even weaponization operations may be allowed.” | null | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DrudgeReportFeed/~3/RQparr7DHa4/boston-dynamics-robot-dog-massachusetts-state-police | Tue, 26 Nov 2019 12:16:37 GMT | 1,574,788,597 | 1,574,770,680 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
212,401 | foxnews--2019-08-22--North Carolinas Dem governor vetoes bill requiring police cooperation with ICE on illegal immigrant | 2019-08-22T00:00:00 | foxnews | North Carolina's Dem governor vetoes bill requiring police cooperation with ICE on illegal immigrants | In vetoing a bill calling for better state and local cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is favoring the interests of illegal immigrants over basic public safety, the state's Republicans argued Wednesday. Earlier in the day, Cooper, a Democrat, nixed a proposal that would have made it mandatory for state and local law enforcement to comply with detainer requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Under the plan, sheriff’s offices and other law enforcement departments would have been required to hold detainees who are illegal immigrants until ICE personnel could come retrieve them. Those who did not honor the requests would have been subject to dismissal, The Wall Street Journal reported. But those plans were set aside after Cooper opted not to support them. “Law enforcement officers have a sworn responsibility to protect their citizens -- and that includes cooperating with federal authorities,” state Sen. Chuck Edwards, a Republican from Henderson County, told The News & Observer of Raleigh. “Governor Cooper, who prefers to pander to his far-left supporters, we will protect North Carolinians and plan to override his irresponsible veto.” Edwards pointed to last week’s case in Mecklenburg County, where the city of Charlotte is located, in which ICE officers picked up a Honduran man who had been previously arrested on rape and child-sex-offense charges. The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office rejected an ICE detainer request two months ago and released the man from custody after he fulfilled court-ordered conditions, including paying bail, the Journal reported. “This legislation is simply about scoring partisan political points and using fear to divide North Carolina,” the governor said in a statement. “This bill, in addition to being unconstitutional, weakens law enforcement in North Carolina by mandating sheriffs to do the job of federal agents.” The state House voted in favor of the measure Tuesday along party lines. The state Senate approved the bill in June. Republican lawmakers, who have a majority in both houses, could move to override the governor’s veto but would need some Democrats to cross party lines. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Republican state Rep. Destin Hall accused Cooper of being a “sanctuary governor,” referring to "sanctuary city" policies adopted in at least 10 states meant to shield illegal immigrants from deportation and limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, the Journal reported. The issue of immigration is expected to be at the center of state debates as Cooper faces re-election next year. Republicans in North Carolina's House introduced House Bill 370 last year in response to the election of sheriffs in some of North Carolina’s largest and more liberal counties, including Wake, Mecklenburg and Durham, who advocated against ICE during their campaigns, The News & Observer reported. Those sheriffs said they would not hold illegal immigrants after a judge or magistrate approved their release. | Danielle Wallace | http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/politics/~3/Vi6ziLXwgX8/north-carolina-democratic-governor-roy-cooper-vetoes-bill-require-sheriff-law-enforcement-comply-ice-sanctuary | 2019-08-22 05:41:03+00:00 | 1,566,466,863 | 1,567,533,753 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
218,960 | freedombunker--2019-01-10--California Police Fight To Stop New Law Releasing Their Misconduct Records | 2019-01-10T00:00:00 | freedombunker | California Police Fight To Stop New Law Releasing Their Misconduct Records | Thanks to the state's newly implemented public records rules, we're starting to see the first stories detailing misconduct of California police officers. We're also seeing the lengths to which police groups will go to keep those records secret. In Burlingame, up in the Bay Area, media outlets were successful in getting records showing that a police officer, David Granucci, was fired last year after the Burlingame Police Department found out he had offered to help a woman deal with a DUI charge if she'd have sex with him. He appears to have made similar offers to two other women, one of whom apparently went through with it. For decades, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for media outlets or the public to find out exactly what happened with Granucci because a state law in California, pushed through by police unions and signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown back in 1978, blocked the release of disciplinary records. But the rules finally changed last year when Brown, who just concluded his fourth and final term as governor, approved changes that made public police investigation and disciplinary records. The law went into effect with the start of the new year. Some folks are now doing whatever they can to stem the tide of releases. Two California cities, Inglewood and Long Beach, destroyed decades of police records, with both municipalities insisting that it was part of a plan to streamline record-keeping and had nothing to do with the new law. The police commander in Long Beach says they made sure to preserve records pertaining to current employees and only purged records of officers who no longer worked there. It's not clear how that's a good idea, given that officers who get fired for incompetence or misconduct frequently move on to other police departments in other cities, with the public often unaware of their troubled backgrounds. Then there are the lawsuits. Police unions and their representatives are now trying to argue that the transparency law only applies to new records, produced after the start of 2019. There's nothing in the bill itself that says this: It amends existing public records laws to add additional records that law enforcement agencies are required to release. The date of the bill's implementation was the start of the year. The California Supreme Court has declined to hear a suit from San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department employees, in which they argue that the law is not retroactive. But in Los Angeles, a superior court judge did grant an injunction that stops the Los Angeles Police Department from releasing records from prior to Jan. 1, until a hearing to determine whether the law covers records prior to 2019. To be clear here, this new law does not order the public release of all police personnel records. It requires the release of records that pertain to incidents in which a law enforcement officer fires a weapon; an officer-involved incident that results in a person's death or great bodily injury; an officer found to have engaged in sexual assault with a member of the public (this includes any sex act while on duty—relevant to the disclosure of the records about Granucci's firing); and officers found to have engaged in dishonest conduct like concealing evidence, falsifying reports, and/or committing perjury. These are all things the public deserves to know about state employees who have the power to kill them, take their belongings, and deprive them of their freedom. Nevertheless, police unions are fighting to stop law enforcement agencies from releasing this information, claiming that revealing records about their conduct somehow violates their rights. | Ed Krayewski | http://freedombunker.com/2019/01/10/california-police-fight-to-stop-new-law-releasing-their-misconduct-records/ | 2019-01-10 18:40:00+00:00 | 1,547,163,600 | 1,567,553,028 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
221,198 | freedombunker--2019-05-15--San Francisco Bans Police Use of Facial Recognition | 2019-05-15T00:00:00 | freedombunker | San Francisco Bans Police Use of Facial Recognition | The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8 to 1 to ban local law enforcement from using facial recognition technology. Not everyone is pleased. "It is ridiculous to deny the value of this technology in securing airports and border installations," said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University to The New York Times. "It is hard to deny that there is a public safety value to this technology." Well, yes. And the public safety value of putting electronic ankle bracelets on everybody and keeping their location information in a giant database so that police can later find out if an individual was near the site where a crime happened is similarly undeniable. But that doesn't seem like such a good idea. The San Francisco ban was passed, as the Times reports, in response to civil libertarian concerns about the technology's potential abuse by the government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state. Police, on the other hand, argue that facial recognition would now just be a handy investigative tool simply used to identify suspects committing crimes while caught on closed-circuit city and private security cameras. Sounds reasonable, yes? Consider the recent Florida case in which officers used facial recognition technology to identify someone as an allegedly low-level drug dealer by comparing cell phone camera snaps with a mugshot database. The alleged dealer claims that the police got the wrong guy. As part of his defense, the accused man's attorney challenged the accuracy of the technology and asked to see what other booking photos were returned as probable matches by the facial recognition algorithm. The police refused to turn them over. "Their refusal violated the Constitution, which requires prosecutors to disclose information favorable to a defendant," asserts the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Sadly, such police and prosecutorial misfeasance is not all that rare. As bad as this misconduct is, that is not the main concern with widespread government deployment of facial recognition technology. Civil libertarians worry that the technology could morph into pervasive automated authoritarianism in which individuals can be tracked everywhere, in real time, similar to the version being developed by the Chinese government. The Chinese government reportedly aims, as part of its Skynet surveillance system, to add an additional 400 million video cameras to its existing 170 million over the next three years. The cameras employ real time facial recognition technology. As Matt Cagle, a lawyer with the ACLU of Northern California tells the Times, the technology "provides government with unprecedented power to track people going about their daily lives. That's incompatible with a healthy democracy." | Ed Krayewski | http://freedombunker.com/2019/05/15/san-francisco-bans-police-use-of-facial-recognition/ | 2019-05-15 15:10:54+00:00 | 1,557,947,454 | 1,567,540,544 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
221,825 | freedombunker--2019-07-02--California Police Agencies Were Supposed To Make Misconduct Records Public Why Isnt It Happening | 2019-07-02T00:00:00 | freedombunker | California Police Agencies Were Supposed To Make Misconduct Records Public. Why Isn’t It Happening? | California judges ruled earlier this year that a new California law making police misconduct records public is retroactive, so that means law enforcement offices are opening up the file cabinets and sending off photocopies in response to media requests, right? Ha. No. They're continuing to fight by trying to charge massive fees, destroying records, and, in some cases, simply not responding. Reporters from four different California media outlets recently combined forces to explain what's been going on with obstruction efforts against a statewide project where journalists attempt to report on newly available misconduct records. S.B. 1421, passed in the fall of 2018, requires that California law enforcement agencies start making public records of police conduct in cases where officers fired their weapons, killed or seriously injured somebody, engaged in sexual misconduct, or engaged in dishonest conduct while on the job. These were records that have been kept sealed from the public for decades, per state law, preventing the public from knowing whether police officers in their midst had been abusing their power. While there were some very promising initial stories at the start of 2019 as S.B. 1421 was formally implemented, things seem to have gone wrong. Seven months later, many law enforcement agencies within California are not releasing the records as state law mandates. Some, like the California Highway Patrol, have not coughed up a single one. From the Los Angeles Times: Both the Orange County Sheriff's Department and the Long Beach Police Department have yet to release any records to KPCC, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register or KQED. The Los Angeles County Probation Department, which supervises youths held in detention, has declined to release records, claiming disclosure about cases involving minors is prohibited by law. Records from the department, which also supervises adults, could be redacted to remove names of protected individuals. [Los Angeles Sheriff Alex] Villanueva has refused to search for records, instead demanding that reporters identify specific cases they are seeking. The Sheriff's Department released records about one deputy to the Los Angeles Times, a handful of separate files to KPCC, but nothing to the Orange County Register. Villanueva's office has declined to provide any records to Reason about Villanueva himself. When Villanueva ran for office, he claimed that he had been unfairly targeted by higher-ups at the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD) for discipline because he had complained about misconduct by leaders. So Reason, under S.B. 1421, requested his discipline records back in January. Initially, the sheriff's department did not comply because the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs sought an injunction and attempted to argue that S.B. 1421 was not retroactive. Ultimately, that effort failed and multiple judges across the state ruled that the law is indeed retroactive as the bill's sponsor, Democratic State Sen. Nancy Skinner, had intended. In March, the LASD informed Reason that our request for Villanueva's records was being processed. It's now July and we've gotten nothing. In fact, the LASD's public records request office is not replying to emails from Reason requesting updates. It looks as though we're not alone. Some cities and counties decided that January 2019 was the right time to catch up on housekeeping and have destroyed years of old police records over the past few months. Many have insisted that the timing is just a coincidence. But as the Los Angeles Times notes, many of the records from these offices—like Yuba County's Sheriff's Office—had been kept around for much longer than internal guidelines required; it was just after these agencies knew they could be forced to disclose them that such records were destroyed. | Ed Krayewski | http://freedombunker.com/2019/07/02/california-police-agencies-were-supposed-to-make-misconduct-records-public-why-isnt-it-happening/ | 2019-07-02 15:50:57+00:00 | 1,562,097,057 | 1,567,537,153 | crime, law and justice | law enforcement |
158,314 | eveningstandard--2019-01-08--How to code Best free coding courses online to up your digital skills | 2019-01-08T00:00:00 | eveningstandard | How to code: Best free coding courses online to up your digital skills | It’s a cliché we all mock as January rolls around and we promise to exercise more, eat less and be more productive. But for many, a new year is the perfect time to change career paths – with many taking the chance to update CVs and look for new opportunities. As the tech world continues to dominate our daily lives and disrupting how we do things, digital skills are increasingly sought out by employers – so how can the less tech-savvy among us keep up? Learning how to get to grips with the digital world can be daunting, but there are hundreds of self-learning courses on offer to help make sense of digital. Andy Ayim, managing director at Backstage Capital London, said: "Free coding courses are a great example of how technology has been democratised and made more accessible than ever so people can feed their curiosity and learn about coding without facing the financial barrier of a coding school." Here, we have listed some of the most popular coding courses you can take for free to learn the basics and make yourself a top candidate. Perhaps one of the most popular options for people in the first stages of learning how to code with around 25 million users, Codecademy provides online guidance that teaches you how to understand and type algorithms with interactive learning. Users will read up on how to create codes, before being asked to type them out. When you start out, you will be asked exactly what you want to get out of the project, to choose the right course. Codecademy is free for the first 7 days of use This free course starts off by teaching you the basics, before moving on to covering more complex topics. In that sense, you can continue with the course for as much or as little time as you’d like. Its first ‘tier’ of teaching is a Web Development 101 programme which gives you the basic tools to create a website. Then, if you want to keep going, you can learn how to take on databases, write Javascript, HTML and CSS and Ruby. The project also has an online chatroom you can join to talk to other people taking the course. This platform helps you get to grips with HTML, CSS and Javascript. It is the free course run by General Assembly, which also runs paid-for courses and coding bootcamps to give people digital skills they need to succeed in the tech world. When logging onto GA Dash, you are met with a series of projects that you complete using the coding skills you will be taught – for example, building a personal website or creating a responsive blog theme. | Jessica Taylor | https://www.standard.co.uk/futurelondon/skills/free-coding-courses-you-can-take-to-upskill-a4033426.html | 2019-01-08 16:09:00+00:00 | 1,546,981,740 | 1,567,553,412 | education | vocational education |
786,952 | theirishtimes--2019-05-15--9000 free third-level courses to help workers adjust to digitised workplace | 2019-05-15T00:00:00 | theirishtimes | 9,000 free third-level courses to help workers adjust to digitised workplace | Thousands of free or subsidised upskilling course places are being offered to workers seeking to future-proof their skills in areas impacted by digital technology. More than 9,000 courses, ranging from certificate to masters level, will be available in the coming academic year in key areas such as digital skills, soft skills, management and leadership and the workplace of the future. Among the courses on offer through the State-funded Springboard+ programme include cutting-edge training in blockchain, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, virtual reality and smart factory technology. They are typically taught on the premises of universities and institutes of technology or through online or distance learning. The majority of courses commence next autumn, however there are a number of courses that start later in the year and in early 2020. Employees, jobseekers or those returning to work may avail of the courses. These course are free for for people who are unemployed, those who were previously self-employed and returning to the workforce. Courses are also free for people in employment for certificate-level courses, while they must pay 10 per cent of the cost for degree or masters level courses, which is typically several hundred euro. Minister for Education Joe McHugh said these training programmes provide a great opportunity to upskill or reskill in areas in which employers need skilled workers. “As technology evolves, it brings with it new ways of doing business and new economic opportunities,” he said. “The Government recognises that it is essential that people in employment have the opportunity to keep pace with these advances.” The 9,000-plus places on offer under Springboard+ 2019 represents an investment of more than €30m. This is drawn from the National Training Fund - a levy on employers - along wityh funding from the European. Candidates who wish to participate in the programme can find full details of approved courses on the dedicated information and applications website (springboardcourses.ie ). The Springboard+ initiative has until recently been targeted mainly at unemployed people to help them to re-enter the labour market. With jobless rates falling, courses are now being made available to all people irrespective of their employment status. Springboard, which is managed by the Higher Education Authority on behalf of the Department of Education, began in 2011 as part of the Government’s jobs initiative. These courses form part of a wider strategy to boost numbers taking part in lifelong learning Courses are not all at full award at each level and may involve minor awards or special purposes awards. All courses have been required to provide job-readiness training and most offer the opportunity for work placement, project-based learning or industry site visits where appropriate. The courses approved for funding were selected by an independent panel with experts from industry and education following a competitive tendering process. In particular, courses with a proven track record in getting people back into employment were recommended for funding. | null | https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/9-000-free-third-level-courses-to-help-workers-adjust-to-digitised-workplace-1.3893131 | 2019-05-15 11:44:55+00:00 | 1,557,935,095 | 1,567,540,605 | education | vocational education |
129,314 | dailyheraldchicago--2019-10-07--U-46 could offer 23 career pathway programs | 2019-10-07T00:00:00 | dailyheraldchicago | U-46 could offer 23 career pathway programs | Elgin schools officials Monday night got a glimpse of 23 distinct career pathways proposed as part of new academies at the district's five comprehensive high schools and Dream Academy alternative school. Each Elgin Area School District U-46 high school will house the same five college and career academies focusing on the fine arts, human services, business, liberal arts, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields by the 2021-22 school year. Those academies will comprise multiple educational pathways -- a multiyear sequence of courses -- allowing students to explore a field of interest as elective courses during their sophomore, junior and senior years while taking core classes and meeting rigorous college admission requirements. Some pathways will be offered at all schools and others will be unique to one or two buildings based on site or equipment requirements. Among the career pathways currently offered at select high schools are courses in automotive, welding, health care science and manufacturing. Those will be rolled into the new academies. Proposed career pathways by academy are: Students will have the opportunity to earn industry certification, dual college credit and gain internship experience through the pathway programs, said Kinasha Brown, U-46 director of educational pathways. They also can switch once enrolled in a particular pathway and choose courses offered only at select sites, even if it is not available at their home school. For instance, the district recently built a state-of-the-art welding lab at Elgin High School that won't be duplicated elsewhere, Brown said. "We have students that are traveling within the district to attend pathways -- welding, automotive and culinary arts -- that are not offered within their home school," Brown said. These small learning communities will emphasize rigor, relevance to current employment trends, relationships with peers and staff, and college and career readiness skills, officials said. High school freshmen will be required to take a semesterlong seminar course that includes notetaking, study skills and career exploration before selecting an intentionally-designed sequence of courses housed within each academy. "We are looking at the freshman year to be sort of a foundation year," Brown said. Officials are reviewing how district facilities are being used with the goal of preparing for the launch of the new educational pathways. Among the criteria officials used to determine which pathways to offer are local and national employment data, program design, teachers who meet state and industry licensing requirements to teach courses, and student interest based on test scores and surveys through Naviance, a web-based college and career readiness platform used in middle school and high school. The district likely will hire instructors for some pathways and provide professional development for existing staff to be certified, Brown said. Meanwhile, U-46's existing high school academies will become unique magnet programs: STEM at Bartlett; International Baccalaureate Studies at Elgin; Visual and Performing Arts at Larkin; Beacon Academy of Media and Digital Arts at South Elgin; and World Languages International Studies at Streamwood. The programs are in the process of being certified by Magnet Schools of America. Town hall sessions are scheduled this month and next on pathways plans. They will run from 6 to 7:30 p.m. | null | http://www.dailyherald.com/news/20191008/u-46-could-offer-23-career-pathway-programs | Mon, 7 Oct 2019 23:01:22 -0400 | 1,570,503,682 | 1,570,544,560 | education | vocational education |
128,547 | dailyheraldchicago--2019-08-15--Nicor career academy gives grads peace of mind and stability | 2019-08-15T00:00:00 | dailyheraldchicago | Nicor career academy gives grads 'peace of mind and stability' | Wesley Strickland's career path involved a lot of bouncing around before he came to Nicor -- jumping from one school or job to another or balancing multiple at a time. Now it involves a lot of walking, yet more stability, the 27-year-old Lisle native says. Strickland is one of 21 graduates in the first cohort of the Nicor Gas Career Academy, and since Dec. 3, he's been employed as a Nicor meter reader. He's learned the most efficient ways to complete long routes of up to 600 meters a day; the importance of wearing watertight shoes, staying hydrated and packing pepper spray for aggressive dogs; and the locations of the best beef and burger joints in his territory. And he's learned the value of working in an industry he says has staying power. "I really enjoy working with my hands, and Nicor gives you that peace of mind and stability that you can finish a career here," Strickland said. "This, I can depend on." The utility's career academy launched last year as a free workforce education program designed to help fill positions expected to be vacated by retirees. Nearly half the energy workforce will retire within the next 10 years, according to the Center for Energy Workforce Development. So the academy works to transfer on-the-job knowledge from experienced Nicor employees to new ones, spokeswoman Jennifer Golz said. Strickland completed the six-week program last September and was hired by the company less than three months later. "I started in December, so layer up," he said, describing his work attire. His knees took some time to adjust to a job he says is "pretty much like hiking all day." And after eight months, Strickland is getting accustomed to training for a higher position as a utility specialist. Nicor is working on a meter modernization project that by the end of 2020 is expected to change out all 2.2 million meters in its 650-community distribution area, Golz said. The new meters will transmit automatic readings. "This will give more accurate data and timely energy usage information to our customers," Golz said. But automatic transmission will remove the need for the entry-level workers like Strickland to serve as meter readers. So as Nicor employees like Hector Rivas, an upgrade installer, switch out meters and install modules to transmit readings, meter readers like Strickland tag along to observe and learn. On Wednesday, Rivas showed Strickland the five-minute process of removing an old module, then attaching and activating a new one on the side of a brick house in Addison. Hopping out of his company SUV, Rivas brought a bucket for garbage and a box containing the new module up to the home, notified the owner, then made the switch. The longest part of the process, he explained to Strickland, can be getting a mini computer called a Trimble to connect to Wi-Fi to activate the module. After shadowing Rivas on the job, Strickland said he's open to see where a Nicor career can take him. He has skills in graphic design and broadcasting from an associate degree he earned at College of DuPage and an interest in voice acting and stand-up comedy. And from the career program he completed last fall, he says he has an appreciation of the clean energy market. "It gave me a good overview of how natural gas works in Illinois," he said. Nicor plans to continue the career academy, with a new group starting classes Sept. 30. Registration is closed, but for details about the program, visit https://www.nicorgas.com/community/discover-careers-in-energy/educational-partnerships. | null | http://www.dailyherald.com/news/20190815/nicor-career-academy-gives-grads-peace-of-mind-and-stability | 2019-08-15 03:10:34+00:00 | 1,565,853,034 | 1,567,534,174 | education | vocational education |
130,980 | dailyheraldchicago--2019-12-27--Suburban high school students showing strong interest in career and technical education | 2019-12-27T00:00:00 | dailyheraldchicago | Suburban high school students showing strong interest in career and technical education | Stevenson High School senior Gavin Meng and his classmates hatched a plan for their lemonade stand to outsell the competition just before winter break. Meng's team at the Lincolnshire school devoted most of its money to buy lemons for a freshly squeezed product sold at a basic stand while the other group went for an eye-catching inflatable bar, but offered a cheaper powdered lemonade. Each team had a $50 budget and agreed to donate all profits to the Animal Welfare Institute. This competition, however, wasn't just a bunch of teenagers having fun in a school cafeteria. The lemonade stands were an entrepreneurship class marketing assignment as part of Stevenson's career and technical education program. "For me, it's always been engineering or business," said Meng, pausing from his lemonade duties. "So, I'm definitely going to pursue either one of those in college and this is a really good hands-on experience for that." Courses such as Stevenson's entrepreneurship class exemplify the growth in career and technical education (CTE) enrollment at high schools statewide. Of 611,732 high schoolers in Illinois, there were 284,680 enrolled in CTE in 2019 -- an increase of nearly 5,000 since 2016 -- despite overall pupil declines, according to the current State Board of Education report card. The report card shows Stevenson was among the suburban CTE enrollment leaders with 1,962 students. Others with strong CTE enrollment are Huntley High School at 1,806 students and Barrington High School with 1,703 teenagers. Career and technical education courses, typically taken as electives, allow students an opportunity to become well prepared for their majors before starting college or qualify them for some jobs right after high school graduation. Students can even earn college credits in advance in certain courses. Stevenson's director of applied arts, Wendy Custable, said CTE also is valuable when students find out in high school that a certain profession is not for them before entering college. "It's a cheaper route, right?" Custable said. "An example might be in our web development and game development courses. Kids think, 'Ooh, fun, I play games.' Well, there's a lot that goes into those. There's the coding. There's all that design work on the other end. They're like, 'Oh, I didn't know what that meant' or 'I didn't know this is what it entails.'" Erika Schlichter, assistant superintendent for learning and innovation at Huntley Community School District 158, said the high school's career and technical education program continues to evolve. "One of our goals is to make as many CTE classes as possible dual credit so our students could actually get those college transcripts before they leave high school, which is a huge benefit to them financially but also their careers," Schlichter said. Geometry in construction, fashion, small engines and personal finance are some of Huntley High's CTE offerings. Schlichter said trade unions related to automotive work and welding have been contacted in an effort to learn about apprenticeship programs and how Huntley High potentially can help meet employment and other needs. "We're just realizing that there's such a richness there, that it's going to prepare kids to go to a two-year college, a four-year college, directly to careers, really helping them focus on what they want to do and what they want to be and then being able to provide it," Schlichter said. Barrington High School Assistant Principal Ben Rodriguez said he recently observed a student counseling session that illustrated how career and technical education can be part of an overall plan. Rodriguez said the student has a goal of taking higher-level classes at Barrington High and attending college, but the counselor asked whether there was a degree focus or career interests. He said the counselor and student then crafted a plan to include CTE courses for next year. Culinary arts, video production, financial accounting and certified nursing assistant are some of Barrington High's CTE choices. Rodriguez said the school is exploring the possibility of having certain endorsements attached to the culinary arts course that would allow students to enter the field straight from high school. Rodriguez said having students experience "really authentic courses" mirroring a potential career can help guide their future path. He added that Barrington High's CTE offerings are guided by student interests. "Even if a student says, 'You know what, I didn't necessarily like everything about my course in (certified nursing assistant), but I really liked the insurance part of that course,' from there, they could take courses in business and courses related to that," he said. "Even if they're not necessarily going into the medical field, there's still a lot of exposure to a lot of things they could go explore later." | null | http://www.dailyherald.com/news/20191227/suburban-high-school-students-showing-strong-interest-in-career-and-technical-education------------ | Fri, 27 Dec 2019 13:10:23 -0500 | 1,577,470,223 | 1,577,492,912 | education | vocational education |
174,842 | eveningstandard--2019-05-18--Londoner who slept on dining room floor while studying for his dream medical career earns lab placem | 2019-05-18T00:00:00 | eveningstandard | Londoner who slept on dining room floor while studying for his dream medical career earns lab placement at King's College Hospital | A young Londoner who slept on his dining room floor while studying for his dream career has earnt a rare lab placement at King's College Hospital. Stephen Addoco, who had to seek help from a homeless charity as a teenager, will spend time working in the neurology department. The 27-year-old moved to London from Ghana when he was 17, but faced challenges as he tried to create a new life in the capital. While studying for his A Levels, he lived in cramped conditions alongside several family members in a three-bedroom home in east London. He wound up sleeping on the dining room floor and the situation became so difficult that he had to seek help from Centrepoint. The charity eventually helped him secure his own property and Mr Addoco went on to gain a first class honours degree in biomedical sciences from the University of East London. He now wants to become a doctor so he can “be an impact in someone’s life” and says the placement is a step in the right direction. He said: “I didn’t really have my own room or space. I slept in a dining room that was detached from the kitchen, it was uncomfortable. “It was difficult. Most of the time I would have to study in other places.” Mr Addoco moved to the UK to be reunited with his family. But Mr Addoco said he found it "really, really tough” to study in those conditions. He got in touch with Ilford Council, who referred him to the charity. The charity gave Mr Addoco funds to travel to and from his college and university, and helped him move to a property in nearby Redbridge. He also supported himself by working at Tesco, part time. Mr Addoco, now a qualified biomedical scientist, has also won an education award from Centrepoint for his efforts. The award, which was endorsed by Prince William, was given to Mr Addoco because he showed “great strength of character”, according to Seyi Obkin, Centrepoint’s CEO. Speaking about his award, Mr Addoco said: “My dad couldn’t believe it. It felt really, really great. The fact that it was endorsed by Prince William is such a good feeling.” Describing his dreams to work in medicine, he added: “I’ve always wanted to study medicine and become a doctor. “I enjoy making a change in someone’s life, helping them and making someone feel better. I want to be able to make an impact in someone’s life.” | Olivia Tobin | https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/londoner-who-slept-on-dining-room-floor-while-studying-for-his-dream-medical-career-earns-lab-a4145231.html | 2019-05-18 05:28:00+00:00 | 1,558,171,680 | 1,567,540,507 | education | vocational education |
63,687 | birminghammail--2019-06-26--Training provider creates 80 new apprenticeship starts | 2019-06-26T00:00:00 | birminghammail | Training provider creates 80 new apprenticeship starts | A provider of apprenticeships and work-based training has created nearly 80 new apprentice starts since the launch of an employment campaign last year. The Ladder for Greater Birmingham initiative was started in 2018 with the aim of creating 1,000 new apprenticeships in Birmingham and Solihull. The Birmingham office of UK company JTL is behind 79 new starts through the Ladder campaign - with plans to take on a fresh cohort in September. JTL is also one of the region's leaders in the provision of opportunities under the Government's 'Traineeship' programme. Still a relatively new approach, it is aiming to increase the employability skills of young people leaving school or classed as NEETs - not in employment, education or training. Under the campaign, 16 to 18 year olds complete a programme combining work preparation and training alongside real-life work experience with an employer. JTL screens and prepares learners before they are sent out on work experience and it is hoped traineeships will then lead to apprenticeships or job opportunities. The training firm, whose city base is in Aston, has been a big supporter of the Ladder for Greater Birmingham campaign since its launch last summer. The initiative is run by community development group The Vine Trust and training provider Performance Through People with funding from the Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP and Birmingham and Solihull Training Provider Network, with BirminghamLive as media partner. It is running in conjunction with the new Ladder for Birmingham Apprenticeship Awards which takes place on July 4 and will celebrate apprentices, employers and the organisations helping them succeed. JTL placed Birmingham-based trainees Hamza Hussain and William Stewart with construction group Wates on a four-week placement. The programme covers modules such as health and safety and employability skills including interview techniques, communications and CV writing. The pair also spent time on taster days alongside various teams around the business to learn more about the type of work Wates does and the skills it needs. Hamza focused on plumbing and heating, working with a team on void residential properties, while William spent time with electrical, plumbing and carpentry teams before deciding the latter was his preferred route. Ronda D'Aguilar, Wates' customer and community manager, said: "The supervisors in the teams they have been working with were very impressed with their commitment to the experience. "They found the trainees to be highly motivated and very eager to learn. It has been the first time we have worked with JTL on the Traineeship programme. "You don't know how these things will pan out but it has been such a positive experience for us as a business that we would like to continue this on a regular basis. "It's a great way to see how a potential apprentice might get along - almost like an extended interview process - and our experience with Hamza and William has been hugely positive." Following their placements, Hamza and William were offered the chance to apply for an apprenticeship with Wates to start in September. Performance manager Dave Singh added: "For us, this is almost a 'try before you buy' scenario. "We may get 20 to 30 people come in to interview for apprentice positions and it's never easy to gauge how committed somebody will be to the job once they are given a place on an apprenticeship just through an interview process. "With the traineeships, we are able to see how the candidate fits within the company in real time and establish how they get on with other team members over a period, gauging their enthusiasm for the job role we are looking to place them in." Both Hamza and William speak positively about their time on placement with Wates - so much so that Hamza has recommended the process to his brother and cousin. William added: "I liked being able to move around within my placement until I found something I really enjoyed. "Now I can focus on doing what I want to do and be a part of a company that offers me financial security now and in the future." JTL is running a taster day aimed at 16 to 18 year olds, from 11am to 2pm on Thursday June 27, at its training centre in Mill Street, Aston. To register your interest, text your name and age to 07825 937 945. The next Birmingham Traineeship programmes start on July 8 and August 6. | [email protected] (Tamlyn Jones) | https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/training-provider-creates-80-new-16491147 | 2019-06-26 15:06:45+00:00 | 1,561,576,005 | 1,567,537,968 | education | vocational education |
67,476 | birminghammail--2019-11-01--Midlands towns invited to apply for share of £3.6bn for jobs, training and transport | 2019-11-01T00:00:00 | birminghammail | Midlands towns invited to apply for share of £3.6bn for jobs, training and transport | The Government has invited towns across the Midlands and the North to apply for a share of £3.6bn in funding, in what it describes as a plan to “rebalance the national economy and level up our regions”. But it admitted that towns had been neglected in the past - as successive governments concentrated on pouring investment into big cities. A total of 101 towns have been invited to apply for a share of the cash. They include Bloxwich in the Black Country; Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire; Dudley; Hereford; Kidsgrove in Staffordshire; Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire; Nuneaton in Warwickshire; Redditch in Worcestershire; Rowley Regis in the Black Country; Smethwick in the Black Country; Telford in Shropshire; Walsall; West Bromwich; Wolverhampton and Worcester. Robert Jenrick, the Local Government Secretary, said: “We know that a bright and prosperous future lies ahead for the whole of the United Kingdom. However, for too long, the benefits of this unprecedented growth in many of our world-renowned cities has not been felt as strongly by communities in our towns and rural areas.” And a report published by the Government to launch the scheme said: “Successive Governments have often focused on cities as engines of economic growth.” Councils will first need to bid for a share of the money by drawing up plans explaining how they would spend it, and have today been allocated up to £173,000 for each town to help them do this. The Government’s report sets out some examples of projects that money could be spent on. They include • Improving transport links to major economic assets, such as large manufacturers. This would help firms win contracts as suppliers • Making it easier for people to reach the local train station, which is often the way to get the nearest big city. This can help people in towns access jobs in cities. • Redeveloping vacant sites - such as empty factories - for new business and leisure uses • Making it easier for people to access training, such as developing sites which have office space and training facilities next door to each other • General improvements to quality of life, which can encourage businesses to locate to an area The report warns: “While some towns have prospered through their links to growing cities, generally residential towns – including commuter towns – have seen declining populations. For those still living in shrinking towns, social mobility often falters, even when compared to the most deprived communities in cities. “Where this is accompanied by declining quality of employment opportunities that can be accessed in towns, it can lead to feelings of being ‘left-behind’. In addition, the decline in retail offer and business closures often leaves a very visible mark on town centres and the wider built environment.” Mr Jenrick said: “This government is committed to levelling up all parts of the country. We created the £3.6bn Towns Fund to help businesses grow, connect communities and give people the skills they need to succeed. “But no place is exactly the same. That is why we want to help local people to decide how this investment of up to £25 million in each town can be used to help create new businesses, new jobs and new homes for generations to come.” | [email protected] (Jonathan Walker) | https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/midlands-towns-invited-apply-share-17183866 | Fri, 1 Nov 2019 11:37:31 +0000 | 1,572,611,537 | 1,572,611,537 | education | vocational education |
166,641 | eveningstandard--2019-02-28--How can I get a job in the digital industry Upskill Digital CEO Gori Yahaya on training London | 2019-02-28T00:00:00 | eveningstandard | How can I get a job in the digital industry? Upskill Digital CEO Gori Yahaya on training London | London is the largest tech hub in the UK and the challenge is on to ensure Londoners are geared up for a bright digital future. While start-ups are flourishing in East London’s Tech City near Shoreditch, the race is on to get even more people to adapt to new technologies and to help youngsters realise how their social media skills could function in the workplace. There’s plenty we still have to learn. Future London spoke to Gori Yahaya, Founder and CEO of Upskill Digital to hear more about ensuring London stays ahead of the digital revolution. “I feel London being a big metropolitan city, we have access to amazing things, we’re quite hungry and ambitious to get our hands on with different things, but the city is often overwhelming,” says Gori. “It’s hard to know the best way to use the facilities. So you need support.” Working with Future London partners, Google Digital Garage, Gori is delivering digital skills sessions across the city’s harder to reach places to ensure all Londoners can develop their skills. “It’s amazing, and going to be great to reach prospective people. Going into youth centres in Hackney, the kids are great on social media, but what they need for the workplace is that business acumen to drive impact in their job. “There are lots of big start-ups in London, but we still need to be at the forefront to combat those education challenges and encourage talent. There’s still a lot we can learn.” Gori has owned Upskill Digital for four years now and worked with a number of start-ups to help develop their digital presence. “It’s all about training and getting hands on,” he says. “You need to have charismatic digital experts and reach lots of people by making it relatable. You don’t go straight in by telling them to build a website, it’s often too technical, has too many parts and the process is too complicated. There are lots of great platforms out there that you can build quickly instead. “The big difference now is you need your audience to find you. The old saying “build it and they will come” just doesn’t work online in the same way. “And there is this intimidation towards technology as people don’t know exactly how it works. They need humans to show them and get them feeling comfortable, people they find relatable to show them what the outcomes can be.” According to Gori, it’s all about engaging with local communities. “We see all ages, from older people overcoming the first step by asking ‘I need to know how to do this’ to young people who still need to upskill themselves. It’s not just about being able to use Instagram, but also having that business acumen – looking at how to turn your skills to a business context,” says Gori. “Getting into the industry can be hard. You can’t be what you can’t see. But if you find someone you can relate to, and see how those skills are useful to you, it’s so important. Different backgrounds, ages, races and genders – we need to make sure everyone feels empowered enough to take control and that we get into those harder to reach places and put the extra work in with communities and youth centres, because a diversity of thought brings better ideas.” | null | https://www.standard.co.uk/futurelondon/skills/upskill-digital-tech-city-shoreditch-google-a4079526.html | 2019-02-28 16:28:31+00:00 | 1,551,389,311 | 1,567,546,977 | education | vocational education |
205,982 | fortune--2019-09-09--How to Tell If Your Job Is a Stepping Stone to a Career | 2019-09-09T00:00:00 | fortune | How to Tell If Your Job Is a Stepping Stone to a Career | When it comes to seeing a path forward in their current roles, half of employees feel like they have a career while half feel they have “just a job,” according to an August 2019 survey from CareerBuilder. But what is the difference between seeking your vocation as a work-a-day role versus a stepping stone to bigger things? And does it matter? Considering that the same survey found that 32% of employees plan to leave their roles this year, it does matter for companies that want to attract and retain talent, says Michelle Armer, chief people officer with CareerBuilder. She was surprised at the findings. “From a talent acquisition perspective, that’s very encouraging. From a talent retention perspective, that’s really scary,” she says. When people talk about having a “career,” they’re typically referring to having a role that offers “meaningful progression over time,” says career coach Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. However, having a “job” it’s more of a placeholder —a way to make money that may or may not be aligned with their ultimate goals for themselves. Work often creates a sense of purpose which can lead to greater overall satisfaction, Clark says. In fact, a 2018 Pew Research Center report said that career ranked second only to family in what gives people meaning to their lives. “If you feel that you have a career and a professional purpose that you're working towards, that is certainly preferable to feeling like you're just punching the clock,” Clark says. Career coach Allison Holzer, co-author of Dare to Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration in Work and in Life points to the research report “Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relationships to their Work.” The report identified three categories of work orientation: those who have a job essentially do it for the money; those with careers have a deeper personal investment and measure achievement through advancement and money; and those with callings do their work because of the fulfilment it brings, regardless of reward. Holzer also posits whether there might be a generational component to the findings. She points to research that millennials want to feel like their work is meaningful and part of a solution. That may be more of a motivating factor in how they choose to earn money than being on an upward trajectory, she says. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people who feel like they aren’t on a career track are heading for the door. Armer says understanding the employee’s mindset is important. People may change their opinions about their career paths or growth opportunities at different stages in their lives, she says. Sometimes, an individual may be highly engaged in their career for a period of time. Then, something may happen in their personal lives that takes priority. Or, they may be spending more time pursuing interests outside of work. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re looking for a new opportunity. “There is something extremely noble in somebody that wants to come to work and give excellent output and results and make an impact in the work that they do, but then they're also satisfied going home,” Armer says. For managers seeking to keep talented employees, whether they’re looking for a regular paycheck or a path to the CEO’s office, the first step lies in understanding their motivation. “It’s crucially important for employers to understand what motivates their employees,” Clark says. Whether you’re blocking an employee who’s seeking a career path or pushing another one who’s looking for a way to earn money while spending 35 to 40 hours a week likely isn’t going to make anyone happy. Look at your employees as individuals and help them establish the kind of work relationship they want. Shifts in performance management techniques can help, Holzer says. As more companies abandon the annual performance review for more regular check-ins and feedback, managers have more opportunities to take the pulse of their team members and find out where they are. Armer agrees. “As an employer, you want to be agile as to the percent of your population that feels like, ‘Right now I'm in rapid growth mode. I want to develop and continue to grow in my career.’ And then there might be some people that just think, ‘Now is not the right time,’” she says. But, don’t pigeonhole people —their feelings may change over time. And, regardless of the role the employee wishes to take, if the individual is someone you want to retain, provide them with the support and training they need be successful, Clark says. The CareerBuilder survey reinforces the importance of doing so. More than half of respondents (58%) say their companies don’t offer enough opportunities to learn new skills and help them move up in their career. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of employees who work at places that don’t offer educational opportunities would take advantage of them if they were offered. Talented employees have different needs and motivations when it comes to the way they spend their workdays. Understanding those individual attributes and ensuring they remain connected with the meaning in their work, is the key to motivating them, regardless of whether they’re on a career or job-focused path. —Yes, you can find a good job without a college degree —Why is job hunting (still) so slow? —How to deliver an apology your colleague will actually want to hear —3 ways to wow a tech recruiter —Job applicants with a “comprehensive” LinkedIn profile 71% more likely to get interviews Get Fortune’s RaceAhead newsletter for sharp insights on corporate culture and diversity. | Gwen Moran | https://fortune.com/2019/09/09/how-to-find-a-career-job/ | 2019-09-09 16:15:08+00:00 | 1,568,060,108 | 1,569,330,688 | education | vocational education |
361,272 | newsweek--2019-01-28--5 LinkedIn Strategies to Help Grow Your Career | 2019-01-28T00:00:00 | newsweek | 5 LinkedIn Strategies to Help Grow Your Career | As a job seeker (or a consultant), leveraging LinkedIn could be a viable way to boost your digital presence and build a personal brand. While 5 strategies won’t suffice for a complete revamp, here are the top 5 categories that you can focus on. LinkedIn provides a vast set of internal tools for building one’s profile. Make sure you fill out all areas and provide enough value in order to demonstrate your skills and qualifications in the best possible manner. Browse a few profiles of industry leaders and influencers in your field. Leverage some of the best practices and adjust them for your profile. LinkedIn lets you publish regular posts (similarly to other social networks) and write articles (formerly their LinkedIn Pulse platform). HubSpot suggests posting once a day on LinkedIn around 10–11am. With articles, it’s a bit tricky. Different influencers report various results regarding their success rates. I’ve seen success stories varying from once a week to every day (for highly successful personal blogs). Aiming for at least once a week would let you benefit from the aggregating volume that keeps receiving traction over time. Moreover, LinkedIn launched video updates and they keep featuring that proactively. Recording daily educational videos (or every few days) will most likely receive more attention than standard textual posts. Tag other people who will get notified once mentioned - especially if you discuss more active LinkedIn members. If you want to build your portfolio for work purposes, make sure your topics are closely related with your specialty. You want to end up with a complete profile that screams “professional” and is focused on what you do and are eager to do. “Build it and they will come” sounds great in theory, but isn’t as efficient in practice. Connect your emails and other social accounts and grow your existing network through peers using other mediums. Reach out to former colleagues of yours, fellow students, teachers, and people you’ve met at conferences. Join LinkedIn groups and interact with people. Comment on discussions, share topics on your own feed, mention other team members. Most people would be sending invitations every now and then - and don’t be afraid to ask for a connection request after a couple of interactions. Pro tip: There are certain groups including LION in their titles - which stands for “LinkedIn Open Networkers”. Those folks are actively networking with as many people as possible. This may increasingly grow your network over the next months and bring a solid volume of 2nd level connections. LinkedIn supports both endorsements and recommendations. Here’s the formal overview for each features: A skill endorsement is a one-click way for your connections to endorse the skills listed on your profile. There is not an automatic way to request an endorsement and only skills already listed can be endorsed. A written recommendation isn't included with this feature. Learn more about skill endorsements. A recommendation is a written statement of endorsement from a connection. You can request recommendations from your connections, as well as proactively recommend your connections. Learn more about recommendations. Recommendations work better than job references as they are public and connected to a specific profile on LinkedIn. This is highly valuable and those may come from former colleagues, managers, teachers, or other peers that you have worked with. Endorsements don’t carry as much weight, but could be helpful when you want to showcase expertise in a certain area. For instance, as the owner of a WordPress tech agency who has built hundreds of plugins and contributed to the WordPress core numerous times, my network has testified of my skill set: When over a hundred people confirm your expertise (including their own profiles), that confirms your knowledge which makes it more likely to land a relevant offer. This works both ways, of course—help your other peers and upvote their skills and they may return the favor as well. All of that works flawlessly and you may soon start receiving regular job offers. But if you want to push it further, follow the top companies in your field that you are interested in. Add some of their employees in your network as well. And probably join some relevant groups, too. This would give you the competitive advantage of following job posts on LinkedIn once they come and see similar statuses published on a company’s page or shared by their employees. This head start could be invaluable if you are among the first applicants submitting their resume to the hiring managers. Other press releases or industry news may be helpful as well. If a startup has announced a recent funding, they may soon be looking for new team members. Reach out to the hiring manager or one of the founders and talk to them about possible opportunities. | null | https://www.newsweek.com/linkedin-linked-strategies-1305873?utm_source=Public&utm_medium=Feed&utm_campaign=Distribution | 2019-01-28 17:33:31+00:00 | 1,548,714,811 | 1,567,550,484 | education | vocational education |
44,956 | bbcuk--2019-11-12--Labour promises free jobs retraining for adults | 2019-11-12T00:00:00 | bbcuk | Labour promises free jobs retraining for adults | Labour is promising a £3bn plan to offer adults in England free access to retraining to help their job chances and to tackle skills shortages. Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner wants to "throw open the door" to adults wanting to learn new skills. The Lib Dems are promising a £10,000 training grant for each adult, which it calls a "skills wallet". The Conservatives have a National Retraining Scheme for adults needing to update their skills for work. With concerns about automation threatening jobs and warnings from employers about a lack of skilled staff, the political parties are setting out their stalls for adult education and retraining. The CBI business group welcomed making training a priority, saying: "Adult participation in education is at its lowest for two decades." The Edge vocational education charity warned the current skills shortage was costing UK businesses £4.4bn per year. On Tuesday, Labour's election campaign set out plans to spend an extra £3bn per year to provide free access to vocational learning for adults - which it hopes will reach an extra 300,000 people per year. Ms Rayner says it will help people "who want to change career, are made redundant or didn't get the qualifications they needed when they were younger". "For many, adult education is too expensive, too time-consuming or too difficult to get into," she says. Labour would offer adults up to six years of training, such as for vocational qualifications in the healthcare and engineering sectors or adults wanting to go back to college to get academic qualifications. Employees would also have a right to paid time off for education and training and there are promises to improve careers advice for adults. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Ms Rayner said she wanted to "change the culture" so that "learning is part of everyday life, rather than something that is done to you at a particular point". It was a "long overdue investment", she said, improving the skills of young people and adults, rather relying on skilled workers from abroad. The shadow education secretary said access to adult education would be open to all and would be "free at the point of use" without means testing, with funding to come from changes to taxes for high earners and businesses. Ms Rayner also restated Labour's commitment to scrapping tuition fees for university students in England. "We will abolish tuition fees, no ifs, no buts." She rejected concerns from vice chancellors about whether university funding would be protected, accusing them of receiving "wild amounts" of pay, and saying they were paid much more than the prime minister. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn says education should be "like an escalator running alongside you throughout life, that you can get on and off whenever you want". The Liberal Democrats have put forward their plans for adult education - based on the idea of individuals having a "skills wallet" to pay for training, with government funding being available to be drawn down at different stages of life. At the age of 25, there would be £4,000 put into the skills wallet, £3,000 at the age of 40 and then £3,000 at the age of 55. • National Retraining Scheme for workers who lose jobs to automation • 'I left school with no exams, but that didn't mean I was thick' "In an ever changing workplace, people often need to develop new skills but the cost of courses and qualifications shuts too many people out," Lib Dem business spokesman Sam Gyimah says. The Conservatives in government have begun to test plans for a National Retraining Scheme, supported by £100m announced in last year's Budget. This is intended to help people train for changing jobs and alternative careers if their jobs are threatened by automation. There are some local pilot tests for the retraining scheme, available to adults without degrees in low-income jobs. It is scheduled to be rolled out more widely in 2020. The Conservatives also highlighted their plans for new vocational qualifications, called T-levels. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said Labour was "making promises that it simply won't be able to fulfil". But Jo Grady, leader of the UCU lecturers' union, warned of "steep falls" in numbers of adult students. "For too many years, adult learning has been a sorely neglected part of our education system," she said. Neil Bates, who chairs the Edge vocational educational charity, said employers would want to tackle the £4.4bn cost of skills shortages - and individuals needed to have the skills for "secure, well paid, sustainable jobs". The chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, Stephen Evans, who was a member of Labour's Lifelong Learning Commission, warned that currently "the number of adults taking part in learning at its lowest levels on record". "Worse still, it is the adults who could most benefit from access to training opportunities who are least likely to participate," he said. Employers have complained of skills shortages and Matthew Fell, the CBI's chief policy director, said it was important "lifelong learning is rising to the top of the political agenda". He said businesses would also welcome support for technical education and giving it a status "on par with academic learning". All the parties know their record on adult education is pretty poor, writes Sophie Hutchinson. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in the past 15 years, overall spending on classroom-based courses has fallen by two-thirds, as have the number of adult learners. The adult education budget fell by 32% between 2003-04 and 2009-10 under Labour and by a further 47% from 2009-10 to 2018-19 under the coalition and the Conservatives. Labour now says it would reverse that and more, coming close to doubling the current adult education budget, taking it back to levels similar to 2003. The Lib Dems also want a boost to lifelong learning - with a "skills wallet" for money for adults to spend on learning. But there will be a challenge ensuring this is spent on genuine courses - as a previous Individual Learning Account scheme faced widespread fraud. | null | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50378666 | Tue, 12 Nov 2019 10:50:00 GMT | 1,573,573,800 | 1,573,561,498 | education | vocational education |
615,789 | thedailyecho--2019-12-11--Fareham College up for award for training builders | 2019-12-11T00:00:00 | thedailyecho | Fareham College up for award for training builders | A COLLEGE in Hampshire is being saluted for responding to employers’ needs by training young people for the civil engineering and construction trades. Development worth an estimated £15billion is planned in the county over the next five years but the construction sector is unable to meet the demand for the necessary skills. Fareham College worked with the Solent Civil Engineering Group to design a Civil Engineering and Groundworks Training Initiative. It consists of an apprenticeship programme, workforce upskilling and a purpose-built Civil Engineering Training Centre. The initiative has earned Fareham College selection as a finalist in the Association of Colleges Beacon Awards. It is up for the City & Guilds Award for College Engagement with Employers. The not-for-profit Association of Colleges (AoC) is the national voice for further education, sixth form, tertiary and specialist colleges in England. Andrew Kaye, principal and chief executive of Fareham College, said: “Employability is at the heart of the Fareham College mindset. Working together with employers to directly address a recognised sector challenge, through the development of a skilled workforce, is invaluable for our students, for our employers and for the local and regional economic development as a whole. “To be recognised for our efforts towards employer engagement as a finalist in the AoC Beacon Awards is an excellent achievement for the college and our partners.” The college says its £4.1million Civil Engineering Training Centre will deliver a wide range of apprenticeships and professional development courses. David Richadson, director of CETC and construction at the college, said: “The Civil Engineering Training Centre offers unique civil engineering apprenticeship programmes and professional training. This state-of-the-art facility is pioneering a change in the way in which construction industry training will be delivered, allowing us to provide long-term support to this important sector.” Applications to study at the Civil Engineering Training Centre are now open to start training in March 2020. Applications close on Friday, January 17. The AoC Beacon Award winners will be announced at the TES FE Awards in association with the AoC Beacon Awards national ceremony in London on Friday, March 20. | null | https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/18093400.fareham-college-award-training-builders/?ref=rss | Wed, 11 Dec 2019 05:11:44 +0000 | 1,576,059,104 | 1,576,067,069 | education | vocational education |
600,813 | thedailycaller--2019-03-21--Get 65 Hours Of Training On Salesforce For Just 20 | 2019-03-21T00:00:00 | thedailycaller | Get 65 Hours Of Training On Salesforce For Just $20 | Salesforce is one of the most in-demand skills in today’s technology-driven economy. Don’t get left behind. The Salesforce Certification Training Bundle will give you the tools you need to launch yourself up the corporate ladder. Formerly $900, the course was reduced to $29.99. In a limited time deal, the course is on sale for $19.99 in the Daily Caller shop today. Save over $850 for a limited time when you get this Salesforce Certification Training Bundle in the Daily Caller Shop The Salesforce Certification Training Bundle offers an introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Data Science with no prior coding experience necessary. The 26 courses are in plain English so even beginners can become experts. The Salesforce Cloud Consultation will earn you entry in IT’s hottest new field. These skills will allow you to make your own hours as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies. The Salesforce Platform App Builder Developer 401 Certification gives you the tools to create your own apps without any coding experience. You could create the next billion dollar company after completing the 195 lessons. Keeping up with the newest technology is essential to moving up in your career. The Salesforce Certification Training Bundle doesn’t just give you the skills for a new job, it will train you to start your own company. Take charge of your future when you buy the course for 90% off. In a special offer, this course bundle is only $19.99 in the Daily Caller shop. Like this deal? Check out Vault, the best way to secure your online data for just $9.99/mo. You can find even more great deals like this at The Daily Caller Shop. | The Daily Caller Shop | https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/21/get-65-hours-of-training-on-salesforce-for-just-20/ | 2019-03-21 20:40:29+00:00 | 1,553,215,229 | 1,567,545,428 | education | vocational education |
1,079,901 | usnews--2019-11-24--Virtual Assessment to Expand Driver Training in Ohio | 2019-11-24T00:00:00 | usnews | Virtual Assessment to Expand Driver Training in Ohio | COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio will use over 400 virtual driving terminals placed at driver schools and examination locations to determine the skills that would-be drivers need to work on. The Columbus Dispatch reports that data could lead to changes in the state’s driver-training program. Gov. Mike DeWine says the terminals are not simulators but meant as diagnostic tools. Drivers will still have to pass on-road exams to get their licenses. DeWine says the data will be shared with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. During a 14-month pilot project, researchers at the hospital had seen that drivers who used the terminals had done better in their on-road exams. The state plans to follow the records of participating drivers to combine the data with future crash and citation reports. Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | Associated Press | https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/ohio/articles/2019-11-24/virtual-assessment-to-expand-driver-training-in-ohio | Sun, 24 Nov 2019 22:14:34 GMT | 1,574,651,674 | 1,574,644,918 | education | vocational education |
994,756 | thetelegraph--2019-01-07--Foreign Office to publish training course online for first time so public can learn art of diplomacy | 2019-01-07T00:00:00 | thetelegraph | Foreign Office to publish training course online for first time so public can learn art of diplomacy | For centuries, the skills of British diplomats have been the envy of the world, with discussions about their strategies and tactics taking place behind closed doors. But now the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) will for the first time publish its training course online so that any member of the public can learn the art of diplomacy. The induction course, titled Diplomacy in the 21st century, teaches valuable lessons such as think carefully about turning down a meeting with someone, even if they seem “boring” and “unimportant”, because they may be the country’s future leader. Those who enroll on the free online course will also learn diplomatic tradecraft such as protocol and networking, as well as “digital diplomacy” and useful social media tools. Martin Bell, deputy director at the FCO’s diplomatic academy, is featured on the course’s introductory video saying: “My two tips on networking would be around never forgetting that you might have a revolution in your country tomorrow. “So the person who wants to see you today, who seems very unimportant and perhaps even boring, might become incredibly important tomorrow.” The course, developed in partnership with the Open University, will form part of the induction to the Foreign Office that is given to all new employees at embassies around the world. | Camilla Turner | https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2019/01/07/foreign-office-publish-training-course-online-first-time-public/ | 2019-01-07 21:17:41+00:00 | 1,546,913,861 | 1,567,553,596 | education | vocational education |
106,784 | cnn--2019-10-08--Biden higher education plan includes two years of free community college | 2019-10-08T00:00:00 | cnn | Biden higher education plan includes two years of free community college | The former vice president's plan, unveiled Tuesday morning, also aims to cut student loan obligations -- particularly for those with public service jobs. The plan formalizes measures that Biden has frequently discussed on the campaign trail. It builds on the existing higher education framework, rather than including further-reaching proposals such as four years of free college and wiping away all student debt. It's also a step away from what Biden called for in 2015, as he announced he would not run for president in 2016. He said then that "we need to commit to 16 years of free public education for all our children" and the nation should "make the same commitment to a college education today that we made to a high school education 100 years ago." Instead, it builds on the two-year proposal that Biden and former President Barack Obama had advocated for while in office. Similarly, Biden's plans on student debt are less ambitious than his two main progressive challengers. Sanders has proposed wiping away all $1.6 trillion of existing US student loan debt, while Warren says she would eliminate 95% of that debt. Biden, instead, proposes waiving $10,000 per year -- up to five years -- for those with public service jobs, such as teachers and members of the military. He would guarantee that those earning less than $25,000 owe nothing on their undergraduate federal student loans, while everyone else's payments are capped at 5% of their discretionary income above $25,000 -- halving the current 10% cap. Biden's plan also includes new spending aimed at improving access to college for low-income individuals, minorities and undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. It would double the maximum value of Pell Grants and includes new money for historically black colleges and universities and for tribal colleges and universities. Biden's campaign has put his wife, Jill Biden, a longtime community college professor in northern Virginia, at the forefront of its higher education plan. "My students inspire me," she told reporters on a call previewing her husband's higher education plan. "They're single parents and veterans. They juggle multiple jobs and care for their families. Many of them are first-generation college students. They work so hard and ask for only one thing in return: opportunity. And every American deserves that." | null | http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_allpolitics/~3/3q6e1urDJCQ/index.html | Tue, 08 Oct 2019 09:30:58 GMT | 1,570,541,458 | 1,570,542,862 | education | vocational education |
112,639 | cnsnews--2019-05-15--Walter Williams Higher Education in America | 2019-05-15T00:00:00 | cnsnews | Walter Williams: Higher Education in America | Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University Richard Vedder's new book, "Restoring the Promise," published by the Independent Institute based in Oakland, California, is about the crisis in higher education. He summarizes the three major problems faced by America's colleges and universities. First, our universities "are vastly too expensive, often costing twice as much per student compared with institutions in other industrialized democracies." Second, though there are some important exceptions, students "on average are learning relatively little, spend little time in academic preparation and in some disciplines are indoctrinated by highly subjective ideology." Third, "there is a mismatch between student occupational expectations after graduation and labor market realities." College graduates often find themselves employed as baristas, retail clerks and taxi drivers. The extraordinary high college cost not only saddles students with debt, it causes them to defer activities such as getting married and starting a family, buying a home and saving for retirement. Research done by the New York Federal Reserve Banks and the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that each dollar of federal aid to college leads to a tuition increase of 60 cents. For the high cost of college, what do students learn? A seminal study, "Academically Adrift," by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, after surveying 2,300 students at various colleges, argues that very little improvement in critical reasoning skills occurs in college. Adult literacy is falling among college graduates. Large proportions of college graduates do not know simple facts, such as the half-century in which the Civil War occurred. There are some exceptions to this academic incompetency, most notably in technical areas such as engineering, nursing, architecture and accounting, where colleges teach vocationally useful material. Vedder says that student ineptitude is not surprising since they spend little time in classrooms and studying. It's even less surprising when one considers student high school preparation. According to 2010 and 2013 NAEP test scores, only 37 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading, 25 percent in math, 12 percent in history, 20 percent in geography and 24 percent in civics. What happens when many of these students graduate saddled with debt? The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in an October 2018 report, finds that many students are underemployed, filling jobs that can be done with a high school education. More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, janitors and salesmen. In addition to this kind of resource misallocation, 40 percent or more college students fail to graduate in six years. It is not unreasonable to ask whether college attendance was a wise use of these students' time and the resources of their parents and taxpayers. Vedder has several important ideas for higher education reform. First, we should put an end to the university monopoly on certifying educational and vocational competency. Non-college organizations could package academic courses and award degrees based upon external examinations. Regarding financial aid, colleges should be forced to share in covering loan defaults, namely they need to have some skin in the game. More importantly, Vedder says that we should end or revise the federal student aid program. Vedder ends "Restoring the Promise" with a number of proposals with which I agree: —College administrative staff often exceeds the teaching staff. Vedder says, "I doubt there is a major campus in America where you couldn't eliminate very conservatively 10 percent of the administrative payroll (in dollar terms) without materially impacting academic performance." —Reevaluate academic tenure. Tenure is an employment benefit that has costs, and faculty members should be forced to make tradeoffs between it and other forms of university compensation. —Colleges of education, with their overall poor academic quality, are an embarrassment on most campuses and should be eliminated. —End speech codes on college campuses by using the University of Chicago Principles on free speech. —The most important measure of academic reforms is to make university governing boards independent and meaningful. In my opinion, most academic governing boards are little more than yes men for the president and provost. Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. | Walter E. Williams | https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/walter-e-williams/walter-williams-higher-education-america | 2019-05-15 12:53:41+00:00 | 1,557,939,221 | 1,567,540,558 | education | vocational education |
119,862 | conservativehome--2019-12-18--The Politics of And. Growing the Majority 2) Further education and higher education | 2019-12-18T00:00:00 | conservativehome | The Politics of And. Growing the Majority 2) Further education and higher education | The phrase is Tim Montgomerie’s. He used to deploy it roughly as follows. Yes, politics means making choices. But they doesn’t always have to be either/or. The Conservatives can have immigration control and international development. Green growth and more fracking. Same-sex marriage and transferable tax allowances. The new majority Tory Government won’t necessarily smile on these examples. But it will want to follow the principle. To this end, ConservativeHome is reviving The Politics Of And. In one series, we will examine Securing the Majority. In another, Growing the Majority. Boris Johnson will want to do both. It is a leitmotif of this series that there are actions which the new Government will want to take which are good for their own sake. But which will also have the side-effect of helping to secure or grow the majority. One of these is developing its policy on higher and further education. For us, there are three main issues. First, a sense that the balance between the two isn’t right. As Alison Wolf put it on this site, “public spending per student is more than six times as high in universities as it is in the nation’s colleges. This imbalance looks even harder to justify in the light of regional inequalities.” Second, there is what is usually and inaccurately labelled a free speech problem in Universities. Free speech is not precisely the issue. Rather, it is ensuring that higher education is a “safe space”, to borrow the jargon, for students with conservative, libertarian, centre-right or even liberal views: that they are made to feel no more or less welcome on campus than anyone else. The issue is already live in relation to Jewish students. Finally, there is the Conservative Party’s own internal housekeeping. There has been no organised push among academics of any note since Leon Brittan undertook one for Margaret Thatcher during the late 1970s. That should change. The Tory manifesto is coy about higher education, pledging to “consider carefully” the “thoughtful recommendations of the Augur Review. Wolf was a member of the August Panel and her piece for us is still a must-read. “Today’s young people are effectively offered a single choice. A full degree, now – or nothing,” she wrote. “Overall, Augar’s recommendations are designed to reverse this idiocy.” She wants “more money for the neediest – cash to get further education back on its feet, to invigorate technical education, to allow adults to retrain and progress, and to reinstate maintenance grants for the poorest students”. Nick Timothy wanted to close some universities. Our columnist Neil O’Brien suggests reducing “access to courses that deliver low economic value in terms of graduate earnings premia”. On free speech and all that, there is new guidance for Universities, produced in the wake of a free speech summit. The question is whether it takes full account of the problem that we are trying to describe. When Sam Gyimah was Universities Minister, he warned as follows: “Let’s say you happen to be quite right-wing, but your lecturer disagrees with your politics. You can suddenly become quite conscious about expressing your views because they mark your essays and grade you.” We would be very nervous were we a conservative student at a University taught by a lecturer who, say, is prone to mouth off about “the Tories” on social media. These will say that they have a right to free speech. We say that they have a pastoral responsibility to all their students. On the final point about Conservative academics, there is a fledgling network. It was originally set up when David Cameron was Prime Minister; went into abeyance under Theresa May, but is still very much around. Downing Street should take an interest in it. Boris Johnson will need higher and further education Ministers who are across these issues – and who are capable, as Gyimah was in his Tory days, of touring the Universities (in this instance to make the case for conservatism); working with Tory academics; ensuring the free speech guidance is adhered to; responding to Augur. We hope that Number Ten resists the temptation to take higher education policy out of the Education Department again, though we’re not confident on this point. Chris Skidmore has been in and out of the Universities Minister brief, which Jesse Norman or O’Brien himself could also do. | Paul Goodman | https://www.conservativehome.com/majority_conservatism/2019/12/the-politics-of-and-growing-the-majority-2-further-education-and-higher-education.html | Wed, 18 Dec 2019 11:00:53 +0000 | 1,576,684,853 | 1,576,672,670 | education | vocational education |
221,838 | freedombunker--2019-07-02--Think for Yourself and Question the Benefits of Higher Education | 2019-07-02T00:00:00 | freedombunker | Think for Yourself and Question the Benefits of Higher Education | Graduation season has once again concluded, and 1.9 million Americans have left college behind and graduated with a bachelor's degree. The social and cultural pressures to attend college are high, and the financial expense to do so is just as acute. Major presidential candidates gin up their base by empathetically promising to absolve the self-inflicted financial troubles of student loans, blissfully punishing those who made sound financial college decisions. While presidential candidates are showcasing the victims of so-called nefarious student loans, celebrities are bribing university officials with millions of dollars simply to grant their children admission to state schools. Why has America become so obsessed with an 8x11-inch piece of paper? With the advent of the internet, all the information in the history of the world is practically at our fingertips. We tend to forget much of what we learned in college a short while after graduation, anyway, and the companies we work for are often more than willing to take the tax write-off to train employees with the skills they actually need. In light of these realities, it’s time to recognize that a four-year college education should no longer be considered a prerequisite, or even a favored pathway, to the “good life.” The human drive toward attaining the “good life,” winning accolades, and earning respect from peers is nothing new. From the University of Karueein (859 AD) to the University of Phoenix Online, humans are attempting to better themselves through experience and education. Originally, higher education was intended to produce academics—the world’s philosophers and researchers. Its purpose was primarily the pursuit of knowledge and attainment of objective truth to assist in the interpretation of this reality. When one degree fails to provide an attractive job, the debt-laden recent grad will sometimes decide to gamble on another and hope to hit the jackpot. But in 2019, in the United States of America, the guiding intent of higher education appears to have changed entirely. College degrees are about opening the door to the ideal job post-graduation (usually with a bit of binge-drinking and other extracurriculars thrown in for good measure). The college experience has become a path toward financial stability and not the method for attaining and discovering knowledge for knowledge’s sake. With this incentive shift toward monetary outcomes as the point of one’s college experience, individuals and the culture at large are placing increasing emphasis on graduating at any cost. At times, when the four-year degree fails to provide an attractive job, the debt-laden recent grad will decide to gamble on the next degree with the hope of hitting the employment jackpot. And the costs can be high—enormous student loans, the opportunity cost of the time spent in college, or even the risk of incriminating oneself in a bribery scheme. In fact, 44 million borrowers have collectively over 1.5 trillion in student loan debt, and the average student now graduates with $37,172 in student loans. The federal government is routinely providing loans that would not be available in the private sector because of the associated risk. Except for individuals in STEM programs, the likelihood that a recent graduate will find a job closely related to their major is incredibly slim, and the return on investment (four years of time and $100,000 in costs) is arguably non-existent. The time and money spent to attain a college degree allow graduates to make a claim to a higher authority of one’s capabilities. In today’s generally atomized, fragmented, and city-centric society, most employers don’t live in a community where a young person’s skills and maturity are known and trusted. In this world, the diploma’s claim to authority seems to be necessary and convenient. However, people are starting to doubt the diploma’s authority due to degree inflation (i.e., nearly everyone has one). Further, if a student can gain admission to a university based on bribery when he or she otherwise wouldn’t have met the entrance criteria but the student can still pass all the course work, then the academic credentials of the institution cannot be trusted. The college degree becomes an elitist and classist rubber stamp of approval that further separates those with means from those without. Corporations can easily provide an alternative to this culturally imposed debt trap, and many are starting to do so. They can accept competent applicants fresh out of high school and train them to perform the needed jobs. This model benefits the non-college educated individual (or the pre-college educated individual) because he or she can both earn an income and gain four years of employment experience rather than attending college full-time. The model also enables greater flexibility and profitability for corporations (with subsequent benefits to the people those businesses serve) because they can pay non-college educated individuals less since these new hires aren’t desperate to recoup financial losses from a college degree. If the social pressures toward a four-year college degree taper off, a majority of rational actors could be expected to jump at these opportunities and leave true academics to the academy. There remains a genuine need for academics and for institutions of higher learning, research, and discussion. However, individuals who attend these institutions should be those who are seeking the truth, developing their knowledge base, and strengthening their critical thinking—not simply treating college as their only path toward the American dream or general maturation. The current societal obsession with college degrees frequently creates barriers to entry and heavy negative trade-offs. Human maturation and personal development should and will occur regardless of the situation or context in which people find themselves. But the academy is a place for research, development, and thought that does not innately or immediately bring with it financial reward. If there is a financial reward associated with it, market forces will fund such endeavors. The current societal obsession with college degrees frequently creates more barriers to entry and heavy negative trade-offs for individuals who are simply looking to work hard and support their families. Whether America’s rising generation engages in “dirty jobs” or white collar jobs, college degrees should become a nice-to-have and not a must-have. | Sean McBride | http://freedombunker.com/2019/07/02/think-for-yourself-and-question-the-benefits-of-higher-education/ | 2019-07-02 13:00:34+00:00 | 1,562,086,834 | 1,567,537,153 | education | vocational education |
262,858 | instapundit--2019-05-30--HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE Historian Celebrates Grant Of Tenure With Tweetstorm Decrying Hist | 2019-05-30T00:00:00 | instapundit | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Historian Celebrates Grant Of Tenure With Tweetstorm Decrying ‘Hist… | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Historian Celebrates Grant Of Tenure With Tweetstorm Decrying ‘History Of Racism And Anti-Semitism At University Of Minnesota.’ She thinks she’s being bold, but she’s actually demonstrating that the filter worked as designed. | Glenn Reynolds | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pjmedia/instapundit/~3/j2TkPT8KJ44/ | 2019-05-30 22:57:55+00:00 | 1,559,271,475 | 1,567,539,655 | education | vocational education |
265,635 | instapundit--2019-08-03--HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE Of the 200 top-paid public employees in Arizona 199 work in higher | 2019-08-03T00:00:00 | instapundit | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Of the 200 top-paid public employees in Arizona, 199 work in higher… | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Of the 200 top-paid public employees in Arizona, 199 work in higher ed. InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com | Glenn Reynolds | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pjmedia/instapundit/~3/p_4KoINKANw/ | 2019-08-03 14:30:15+00:00 | 1,564,857,015 | 1,567,534,923 | education | vocational education |
272,002 | instapundit--2019-12-16--HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Cat Lewis: Why Universities Suck At Online Classes. “The typical | 2019-12-16T00:00:00 | instapundit | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Cat Lewis: Why Universities Suck At Online Classes. “The typical … | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Cat Lewis: Why Universities Suck At Online Classes. “The typical Youtube success story involves months, if not years, of ‘failing’ content. Every time the creator tries something new, they are rewarded or punished for it immediately. Successful Youtube educators learn painstakingly, video by video, what works and what does not. This does not happen at universities.” | Glenn Reynolds | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pjmedia/instapundit/~3/WO8QgT39mFs/ | Mon, 16 Dec 2019 03:06:12 +0000 | 1,576,483,572 | 1,576,498,898 | education | vocational education |
286,480 | lewrockwell--2019-05-15--Higher Education in America | 2019-05-15T00:00:00 | lewrockwell | Higher Education in America | Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University Richard Vedder’s new book, “Restoring the Promise,” published by the Independent Institute based in Oakland, California, is about the crisis in higher education. He summarizes the three major problems faced by America’s colleges and universities. First, our universities “are vastly too expensive, often costing twice as much per student compared with institutions in other industrialized democracies.” Second, though there are some important exceptions, students “on average are learning relatively little, spend little time in academic preparation and in some disciplines are indoctrinated by highly subjective ideology.” Third, “there is a mismatch between student occupational expectations after graduation and labor market realities.” College graduates often find themselves employed as baristas, retail clerks and taxi drivers. The extraordinary high college cost not only saddles students with debt, it causes them to defer activities such as getting married and starting a family, buying a home and saving for retirement. Research done by the New York Federal Reserve Banks and the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that each dollar of federal aid to college leads to a tuition increase of 60 cents. For the high cost of college, what do students learn? A seminal study, “Academically Adrift,” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, after surveying 2,300 students at various colleges, argues that very little improvement in critical reasoning skills occurs in college. Adult literacy is falling among college graduates. Large proportions of college graduates do not know simple facts, such as the half-century in which the Civil War occurred. There are some exceptions to this academic incompetency, most notably in technical areas such as engineering, nursing, architecture and accounting, where colleges teach vocationally useful material. Vedder says that student ineptitude is not surprising since they spend little time in classrooms and studying. It’s even less surprising when one considers student high school preparation. According to 2010 and 2013 NAEP test scores, only 37% of 12th-graders were proficient in reading, 25% in math, 12% in history, 20% in geography and 24% in civics. What happens when many of these students graduate saddled with debt? The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in an October 2018 report, finds that many students are underemployed, filling jobs that can be done with a high school education. More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, janitors and salesmen. In addition to this kind of resource misallocation, 40% or more college students fail to graduate in six years. It is not unreasonable to ask whether college attendance was a wise use of these students’ time and the resources of their parents and taxpayers. Vedder has several important ideas for higher education reform. First, we should put an end to the university monopoly on certifying educational and vocational competency. Non-college organizations could package academic courses and award degrees based upon external examinations. Regarding financial aid, colleges should be forced to share in covering loan defaults, namely they need to have some skin in the game. More importantly, Vedder says that we should end or revise the federal student aid program. Vedder ends “Restoring the Promise” with a number of proposals with which I agree: —College administrative staff often exceeds the teaching staff. Vedder says, “I doubt there is a major campus in America where you couldn’t eliminate very conservatively 10 percent of the administrative payroll (in dollar terms) without materially impacting academic performance.” —Reevaluate academic tenure. Tenure is an employment benefit that has costs, and faculty members should be forced to make tradeoffs between it and other forms of university compensation. —Colleges of education, with their overall poor academic quality, are an embarrassment on most campuses and should be eliminated. —End speech codes on college campuses by using the University of Chicago Principles on free speech. —The most important measure of academic reforms is to make university governing boards independent and meaningful. In my opinion, most academic governing boards are little more than yes men for the president and provost. The Best of Walter E. Williams | Walter E. Williams | https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/05/walter-e-williams/higher-education-in-america/ | 2019-05-15 04:01:00+00:00 | 1,557,907,260 | 1,567,540,659 | education | vocational education |
570,723 | tass--2019-09-11--Russia increases representation in Times Higher Education global rankings | 2019-09-11T00:00:00 | tass | Russia increases representation in Times Higher Education global rankings | LONDON, September 11. /TASS/. A total of 39 Russian universities made it into the 2020 edition of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, four more than last year, the survey’s authors said on Wednesday. The Lomonosov Moscow State University remains Russia’s highest-placed entry in the rankings, which list 1,300 higher education institutions from 92 countries. This year, Russia’s top entry climbed 10 places, to the 189th place. According to the authors of the survey, the university’s improvement is "primarily due to an increase in its research environment score, while its industry income and teaching environment scores remain strong." "However, in common with many Russian institutions, the university is held back by a poor citation impact score compared to its global rivals - and actually receives a lower score on this measure compared with last year," THE said. The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology has risen into the 201-250 band, up from 251-300, while the Higher School of Economics climbed into the 251-300 band from the 301-350 cohort. St Petersburg’s ITMO University ranks as the best outside of the capital, improving its score over last year to enter the 401-500 band (up from 501-600) alongside the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI. Overall, Russia has five new entries, the highest-ranked of them being National Mineral Resources University in the 801-1,000 band. THE chief knowledge officer Phil Baty noted the success of higher education from Russia against the backdrop of intense global rivalry. "Russia has faced extremely stiff higher education competition in recent years, so it is encouraging that several of the country’s best universities have been able to improve their standing in the ranking this year," the expert said. "But Russian institutions still underperform in key metrics against international rivals, most notably in the area of citation impact, which sadly undermines the positive progress that many of them have made elsewhere." "Russian universities must not only work hard to improve their international relations and partnerships, but must also ensure that they can hold on to their most capable people and boost their research quality," he added. Russia overtook Australia in terms of number of universities, but is still the 11th most-represented country, having itself been overtaken by Iran. In the latest edition of the survey, the University of Oxford tops the global rankings for the fourth year running, while the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) rises from fifth to second. The University of Cambridge is third. Overall, the top 10 features universities exclusively from the United States and the United Kingdom. The research is based on 13 performance indicators, divided into five major groups: teaching (the learning environment); research (volume, income and reputation); citations (research influence); industry income (knowledge transfer); and international outlook (staff, students, research) Russian universities attribute the country’s growing representation to their successful educational policies and active cooperation with science and research centers and business partners. The press service of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, which remains Russia’s longtime leader in the rankings, said its standings improved due to implementation of a development program. "MSU’s indicator of teaching saw the biggest progress, increasing to 78.2 points and making it world’s No. 23 in that regard," an MSU spokesperson said. "We employ leaders in science, global and Russian IT-industry, and brilliant teachers. However, I would like to note that climbing to high positions in rankings is not our goal in itself. At the same time, rankings can provide an opportunity to take an unbiased look at our activities and help us to promptly respond to various challenges, retaining the leadership positions in education and science," Moscow State University Rector Victor Sadovnichy said. | null | https://tass.com/science/1077761 | 2019-09-11 22:16:45+00:00 | 1,568,254,605 | 1,569,330,393 | education | vocational education |
578,784 | theatlantic--2019-07-05--Higher Education Has Become a Partisan Issue | 2019-07-05T00:00:00 | theatlantic | Higher Education Has Become a Partisan Issue | Over the past 25 years, since Newt Gingrich helped Republicans reclaim the gavel in the House of Representatives, Americans have become more politically polarized. Not only do members of one party view the other party as wrong, but they more frequently view them as a “threat to the nation’s well-being.” Americans don’t trust the other side, and more and more they mistrust institutions too, including the media and higher education. Polls have shown that confidence in higher education, overall, has decreased in the past few years. A Pew Research Center survey found that 61 percent of Americans are worried about the path America’s colleges and universities are on. Democrats think that the cost of tuition is too high and, to a much lesser extent, that students are not getting the skills they need for the workplace. But Republicans overwhelmingly hold negative views of the sector; 73 percent thought higher education was going in the wrong direction, as opposed to 52 percent of Democrats. A 2018 Gallup poll found that only 39 percent of Republicans expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the sector, down 17 percentage points from 2015. For many Republicans, mistrust of Democrats and mistrust of institutions collide when it comes to higher education, because they see colleges and universities as having a liberal bent. They point to surveys showing that college leadership leans liberal, and that liberal professors outnumber conservative ones on campuses. The latest corroboration for some conservatives was Harvard’s decision to rescind admission to Kyle Kashuv, a Parkland survivor and conservative activist, because of racist messages he sent via Google Docs while in high school. For some, this drove home the message that liberals, and universities, practice selective forgiveness, allowing for the former sins of liberal institutions and people (see: Harvard University’s own past) but not doing the same for conservatives. Read: Kyle Kashuv becomes a symbol to conservatives who say the left can’t forgive It’s been an open question for some time whether this partisan mistrust would translate into tangible, monetary penalties for higher education. One answer came last fall, when voters in Montana took to the polls to decide whether they would continue to tax themselves to support higher education. The tax, known as the six-mill levy, has been voted on once every decade since 1948, and this vote was seen as a bellwether for public sentiment on higher education. Though the measure had been passing narrowly in preceding years, voters in 2018 again decided to continue taxing themselves to support their state universities. The support was likely the result of an interesting phenomenon that occurs when the conversation is not about “higher education” as a monolith but about people’s local colleges. Even though people may feel dubious about higher education more broadly, they can see the good that their local schools do and often feel favorably toward them as a result. | Adam Harris | https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/07/alaska-governor-vetoes-higher-education-funding/593368/?utm_source=feed | 2019-07-05 16:07:26+00:00 | 1,562,357,246 | 1,567,536,753 | education | vocational education |
668,338 | theduran--2019-09-10--The higher education scam | 2019-09-10T00:00:00 | theduran | The higher education scam | In the 1930s about 2% of young people in the United Kingdom went to university. That figure is now approaching 50%. In which era was it more of a distinction? It is patent that a degree has become declasse in both senses. I hear you say that only 2% of people went on to university in the 1930s because most people were financially obligated to leave school in their mid teens. University was simply not on the radar of most people. There is much truth in this. Further, you might argue that these days people receive more years of education and that is desirable. These people gain from tertiary education. Again there is some merit to this argument. The Butler Education Act of 1944 provided for a huge expansion of third level education. This was predicated on the Beveridge Report of 1943. The report was prepared by the eponymous Sir William Beveridge. Not co-incidentally Sir William was Master of University College Oxford. He was also a Liberal MP. In those days Oxford and Cambridge provided half of all the university places in the United Kingdom. The Oxbridge dons who envisaged a major increase in the number of university places imagined that they would be founding more universities of a similar quality to Oxford and Cambridge. They were gravely. mistaken. Until 1828 England had only two universities. Then University College London was founded. It was followed by Durham in quick succession. By the end of the century the major cities in England all had their own university – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and so forth. Scotland had four universities dating back to the Middle Ages. Wales did not have a university until the late 19th century. Ireland had Trinity College Dublin since 1592. In the early 1960s only 4% of young people went on to university. The government then contemplated a major expansion of higher education. Auberon Waugh harrumphed ‘more means worse’. It did not have to be so but that was the way it transpired. Universities could have been expanded without sacrificing quality. At first there was little reduction in standards. As we are to see in time standards were thrown out altogether. The degree classification system was introduced at Oxford at the dawn of the 1800s. It rapidly spread throughout the realm and then the empire. Perhaps a tenth of graduates were awarded a first class degree. In some universities that figure is approaching 50%. Undergraduates and postgraduates are wont to complain if they do not receive a 2:1 or first. It must have been the don’s fault. The student can only have been poorly taught. It cannot possibly be that he or she lacked the aptitude or application. In fairness, there is the occasional academic who is not good at teaching. But at university a student is expected to be an adult. He or she must taken responsibility for learning. In the good old days such complaints would not have been entertained. To become an academic in the UK a PhD is almost a prerequisite. There are additional qualifications in teaching for academics. These are very demanding so it is hard to imagine that a below part academic would slip through the net. Why do academics need a PhD? As recently as they 1990s there were quite a few who were plain mister or miss. The necessity of obtaining a doctorate is yet another symptom of qualification inflation. Not long ago if someone had a first from Oxford or Cambridge he or she might be offered a fellowship straightaway. The college knew that this person was bright enough. The young fellow would start to tutor immediately and write academic papers too. In fairness there are some good reasons why grades appear to have been inflated. Yes grade inflation is real. But there is another factor. If someone graduated even 30 years ago he or she was in a small minority. A decently paying white collar job was all but assured. These days everyone worth his salt has a degree. Therefore, things are more competitive. Undergraduates are wont to study harder. A degree in itself is no passport to a job even a poorly paid one. Academics have told me how they have to massage grades rather roughly. Management has a whip on their backs to do so. There is no failure. It is called deferred success. The rot set in decades ago. The rate of decline has sped up. It has been estimated that in 30 years time every single graduate will be awarded a first. Thatcher said that undergraduates must be perceived as customers. They must get value for money. Universities are afraid of them. The students are the masters. It is a non-violent version of the Cultural Revolution in China. A student can bang his fist on the table and demand this and that. The university does not want to upset a valued client. The fundamental mistake has been to consider universities to be part of the economy. In previous centuries their role was regarded as educational. That is now seen as quaint. For Thatcher it was all profit and loss. She did not think education had any inherent value. Universities ought to be about learning not earning. If you want to get rich then go and make money. If you want to be educated go to university. It is possible to do both. But do not mistake the primary purpose of university. To be fair to Thatcher she had a point when she said that certain universities were self-serving and unproductive. At Oxford and Cambridge some bibulous dons cared only for claret and conversation. They cared little for undergraduates whom they regarded as an annoyance at best. They produced few shoddy monographs. However, there were very few who were this bad. Maggie Thatcher also saw universities as being a nationalized industry. In fact universities were never state owned. She was suspicious of academics as left wingers. She was correct that a great many were and are left wing. More than a few are outright communists. When John Major became prime minister the United Kingdom has roughly 40 universities. The UK also had about 40 polytechnics. A polytechnic could award a bachelor’s degree as its highest qualification. Polytechnics mostly gave diplomas and certificates. The students there generally studied technical subjects such as art, hairdressing, makeup, dance, metal work, woodwork, plumbing and technical drawing. In 1992 John Major decided on a complete overhaul. He was the least educated prime minister the UK ever had. James Callaghan had no higher education but he still cherished education and was widely read. Major proved himself to be a staggering ignoramus. He upgraded all the polytechnics to university status. At a stroke he hugely diminished the standing of British universities. Printing more money does not enrich us all. Printing more degrees does not enrich us educationally. You might say I am not comparing like with like. If more people attain a high standard of education then though ought to be given a degree in recognition of that. Here I agree. I do not advocate returning to the 1930s when only 2% of people went to university. There has got to be a happy medium between that and the ludicrous situation we are in now when anyone can be awarded a degree. In the early 1980s we had it about right. It is preposterous that universities can choose what degree class to award. There is clearly a conflict of interest here. It looks best for the university on the league table to award as many firsts as possible. Why wouldn’t you? Everyone else is doing it. If you are a student and you see people complain and get higher grades you might be tempted to likewise. You would be a fool not to. FIDDLE the system. Universities need students. How do they attract them? Providing superb education from distinguished academics ought to be the way. There are less noble strategies. Award high classes of degree to as many as possible. Do not fail any student no matter how idle or incapable. Give them freebies. Some hand out free laptops. But there is no such thing as a free lunch. These students are in debt for university. It will have to be paid back. In fact these people are burdening themselves with tens of thousands of pounds of debt. The government estimates a third of it will never be repaid. It is driving up the deficit. It is also taking money away from the NHS and armed forces. I am not demeaning people in their teens and early 20s. There are just as many gifted young people as ever. Many of them are diligent. Their achievements should not be belittled. The trouble is that it is hard to tell who is a high achiever from class of degree. There are some who truly deserve a first. There are others who do not. Awarding first class degrees to second class students does a disservice to those who genuinely merit firsts. Money is squandered on glossy advertising. Brochures have said how many one night stands students have. I am not judgmental about promiscuity. I am simply saying it should not be part of a university’s pitch. When Thatcher became PM 10% of people went to university. Full funding was feasible. As the number of people in higher education reached 50% of youngsters the same level of funding was unaffordable. Treating universities as businesses is fundamentally wrong. The approach to degrees has been stack em high sell em cheap. They are cheap in the sense that they are easy. Conversely their price has increased markedly. It is hard to believe that until the late 1990s undergraduates paid not a penny in fees. Further, they were even given maintenance grants in the early 1990s. Even if your parents were millionaires you were given money to live on by the government. It was not a loan. The amount of money that the government spends on undergraduates is lower in real terms than ever before. Yet we are told the results are better than ever. Smell a rat? This is utterly impossible. Full disclosure: I was awarded a 2:1 in my first bachelor’s degree in 1999. Had I done it 10 years earlier I probably would have got a 2:2. Had I done it now I might even have landed a first. In my second bachelor’s I was given a 2:2. Ten years earlier that would have been a third. Nowadays would it be a 2:1? I did a master’s and was awarded a 2:2. I should not even have been admitted to the course. The course director assured me that no one fails. There is not bottom line! In my linguistics MA I was taught the parts of speech! Admittedly there were some challenging parts of the course too. There are structured PhDs. Having so much helps defeats the objective of a PhD. When business imperatives and educational imperatives collide it is the former that wins out every single time. Educational standards will always be sacrificed to market forces. It is all a sham. Master’s degrees used to be a rarity. Now they are handed out like billy-o. Armies of substandard graduates are around. Unsurprisingly they cannot find jobs commensurate with their qualifications. Put simply there are only so many graduate jobs. ‘But we paid for our degrees’. You cannot buy a brain. Academic freedom is under attack. Woe betide any academic with the courage to say that people are all too often grades that their work does not merit. The ridiculous ‘Rhodes must fall’ campaign took place at Oxford. Some snowflakes demanded the removal of the statue of a 19th century imperialist. These students could have chosen not to apply to Oxford if the statue was so offensive. In a rare example of backbone the university refused to remove the image. All too often universities bow the knee to bully boy tactics. There are safe spaces and trigger warnings. Muslims students often vociferously complain about anything that reflects poorly on Islam. Academic pay is abysmal and so is there status. In a marked contrast the administrators are paid higher than ever. It is all about bums on seats. The more students the more money. Much money is wasted on aesthetics. Students have better accommodation than ever. That is not a bad thing. But it is not a sensible way to spend money. These student halls are empty half the time. This exacerbates the housing crisis. You can perform abysmally in school and still get a degree. I knew 18 year olds who were semi-literate. Shockingly they were later awarded degrees. People who failed all their A levels are sometimes accepted by universities. Why should they run when they cannot walk? Failing all your A levels really takes some doing. We ought to accept that most people are not academic. There is no shame in that. We cannot all be scholars just as we cannot all be athletes or musicians. Some lucky souls can be all of these things. Gifts are not distributed equally. Many people have been sold a pup. They have been conned into thinking that taking on £40 000 of debt for an almost worthless degree will guarantee them a handsomely remunerated job. Notice that educational benefits are hardly mentioned in a university’s pitch. The big idea is that sending masses of people to ‘uni’ will boost the economy. There is little truth in this. In fact all this unmanageable debt is a drain on the economy. The Republic of Ireland has the highest university attendance rte in the world. That did not stop the crash of 2008. Some very prosperous nations have low graduation rates: Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands have it about 20%. There are countries with much higher university attendance rates like Georgia that are not rich at all. Some well meaning left wing politicians in the 1960s set the ball rolling. In many cases they grew up working class. Third level education had been all but inaccessible to their parents. The Labour politicians wanted to bring the blessings of higher education to more people. It was a praiseworthy goal. But they were overzealous and went too far. There has been a Dutch auction on standards. Students achieve less because less is expected of them. Universities ought to have exacting standards. A little failure in your teens is good for you. It inoculates a person against the adversity he or she will encounter in the workplace. There are superb universities in the UK but very few. Much depends on the subject. Medicine and Veterinary Medicine are truly scholastic subjects. Standards for these subjects remain very high. Course are dumbed down and stripped of difficult content. With new subjects there is no agreed corpus of knowledge. So they can be dumbed down more easily. What is media studies? No one knows. Therefore it can be made easier without giving the game away. In Chemistry you cannot do without the Periodic Table of Elements. That is why traditional subjects have not been gutted in the same way new fangled ones have. Note how the UK has fewer graduates in STEM subjects precisely because they cannot be made too simple. We have in some respects experienced the Americanisation of higher education. The US has some of the top universities in the world. But even in the Ivy League there is corruption. Legatees are accepted due to bribes. Sorry I mean donations. Academic freedom is curtailed. There is a marriage of convenience between regressive capitalism and far left cultural theory. Academics dare not transgress certain mores or their careers are over. University is more expensive than ever but less worthwhile. As they say a century ago college taught ancient Greek. Now it teaches remedial English. At least in the US the government is not paying for all this bunkum. The government gives the university less money than ever but demands more control. The government wants to bring in racist discrimination as policy. There are codes of conduct. Free speech is under assault. Students are to be mollycoddled. They cannot get up to high jinks. They are subjected to sub Marxist and feminist indoctrination. These are loony left fads from the United States. In schools the same malaise has played out. Grade inflation plagues schools. A new grading system has sought to hide this. Tonnes of bureaucracy have ruined schooling and driven out many excellent teachers. O levels were hard. In 1988 they became GCSEs which we much easier. Too many people got an A grade. Then an A * was introduced. The same happened to A levels. So many people got an A * that they whole system has been scrapped. The UK is returning to a numerical system it had in the 1970s. This time 9 is the best grade and 1 is the worst. It is permanent revolution. No wonder people are confused. These problems have been around for decades. Michael Gove as Education Secretary made a small attempt to reverse grade inflation. There were howls of outrage. As Gove said 50% of children are below average but try telling that to a middle class London parent. I did once and the woman was genuinely perplexed.# All must have prizes! It is like Garrison Keeler’s satire about Lake Woebegone. The average is high and everyone is above it. I am not being snooty about my abilities. I am a disaster in several subjects. If I had been around in the time of O levels I would have failed Maths, Latin and perhaps other subjects. Why are school grades higher when everyone stays in school till 18 now? Grade inflation is the main factor. There are others. There is teaching to test. It is extremely hard to become a teacher. It is organizationally difficult. It is not scholastically challenging. There are some brilliant and dedicated teachers. Schools vary enormously. But in many of them teachers are verbally abused non stop. Small wonder there is a teacher recruitment crisis. It is very hard to get science graduates to teach. For 20 years Oxford had to teach Maths students extra classes before the start of term. That is because school Maths is no longer taxing enough. Universities say they cannot identify brilliant applicants because hordes of pupils have all top grades. An academic at a London university told me a third of his undergraduates should not be there. Sullen and idle they will denounce him to the authorities if he does not give them a 2:1 or better for each essay. It is not all gloom. There are cerebral and hard working students as there always were. University education ought to be pared back. So much money could have saved. The UK has two of the most renowned universities on the planet. We ought to view Oxford and Cambridge as national treasure. The government should be happy to pay whatever it takes to maintain their status. But the government is chicken shit. They bow to populist prejudice. They fail to fund varsity properly. As for grades – it is no use awarding a first to 50% of students even if they have attained the requisite standard. A degree class is partly to tell people apart. Therefore there must be a cap on the % who can be awarded each class. Cheap popularity by awarding higher and higher grades much end. The UK needs rigour in school exams. A law to prevent grade inflation must be introduced – i.e. a cap on the % who can get each grade. | George Callaghan | https://theduran.com/the-higher-education-scam/ | 2019-09-10 06:00:34+00:00 | 1,568,109,634 | 1,569,330,614 | education | vocational education |
721,029 | thehill--2019-03-18--White House proposes limits on student loan borrowing as part of higher education reforms | 2019-03-18T00:00:00 | thehill | White House proposes limits on student loan borrowing as part of higher education reforms | The Trump administration on Monday proposed placing limits on federal student borrowing programs as part of a series of initiatives to amend the Higher Education Act. "We need to modernize our higher education system to make it affordable, flexible and more outcome oriented so that all Americans, young and old, can learn the skills they need to secure and retain good-paying jobs," White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump Ivana (Ivanka) Marie Trump Advocate says Trump administration's new proposal would do 'absolutely nothing' to alleviate student debt White House proposes limits on student loan borrowing as part of higher education reforms New Zealand suspect wrote in manifesto he supported Trump 'as a symbol of renewed white identity' MORE said during a call with reporters. A number of the proposals seek to change the borrowing and loan repayment process. A senior administration official said the White House wants to institute a limit on loans through the PLUS program, which graduate students and parents of undergraduates use to help pay for college or trade school. The official did not say what the loan cap would be, but that it could vary by program rather than by institution. The administration is also calling for Congress to simplify loan repayment programs, in part by condensing five income-driven repayment plans into one plan that would cap monthly payments at 12.5 percent of the borrower's discretionary income. The proposals are the first major priorities from President Trump Donald John TrumpDem lawmaker says Electoral College was 'conceived' as way to perpetuate slavery Stanley Cup champion Washington Capitals to visit White House on Monday Transportation Dept requests formal audit of Boeing 737 Max certification MORE's White House touching on the Higher Education Act, which was last significantly amended in 2008. The recommendations come from the National Council for the American Worker, an advisory board created via executive order in July. The Department of Education under President Trump has garnered criticism from some corners for its rollback of Obama-era regulations aimed at protecting borrowers from predatory loan practices. But the White House asserted on Monday that the proposed changes to the Higher Education Act would ultimately benefit students seeking to enter the workforce. "We think these are absolutely critical reforms and really the most comprehensive approach to higher ed reform in over a decade," Ivanka Trump told reporters. "So we’re very excited to work with members on both sides of the aisle to advance these and other important education initiatives." Other proposals outlined in the administration's plan focus on improving access to information about various institutions, allowing low-income students and workers to use Pell grants for certain short-term workforce programs and reforming the federal work study program so that it better aligns with students' career goals. "Members of Congress who are committed to ensuring Americans thrive in today’s strong, modern, and growing economy should support and pass these reforms," press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. Congress must take up the White House proposals and pass legislation before they become law. Ivanka Trump said Sen. Lamar Alexander Andrew (Lamar) Lamar AlexanderWhite House proposes limits on student loan borrowing as part of higher education reforms The 25 Republicans who defied Trump on emergency declaration Trump issues first veto, warning of 'reckless' resolution MORE (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has expressed support for the White House's stated priorities. Alexander has said he will not seek reelection in 2020, providing an additional sense of urgency in getting the proposed reforms through Congress. Alexander said in a statement that the White House proposals are "helpful" for him as he works with committee ranking member Sen. Patty Murray Patricia (Patty) Lynn MurrayWhite House proposes limits on student loan borrowing as part of higher education reforms Jury orders Johnson & Johnson to pay M to woman who claimed baby powder gave her cancer Overnight Health Care - Presented by Kidney Care Partners - FDA chief Scott Gottlieb resigns | House Dems to take up drug pricing bills next week | Planned Parenthood, doctors group sue over Trump abortion rule MORE (D-Wash.), and that he hopes to bring legislation to the full Senate before the summer. | Brett Samuels | https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/434564-white-house-proposes-limits-on-student-loan-borrowing-as-part-of | 2019-03-18 17:34:58+00:00 | 1,552,944,898 | 1,567,545,861 | education | vocational education |
784,863 | theirishtimes--2019-02-25--Higher education is being turned into an extended form of secondary school | 2019-02-25T00:00:00 | theirishtimes | Higher education is being turned into an extended form of secondary school | Hardly a week goes by without a senior academic or opposition politician commenting on the “crisis” in the Irish higher education system. The crisis, it seems, is one of funding, the argument being that state funding has declined so much that we are close to a tipping point where the quality of our institutions will start to plummet. However, just as in Zeno’s paradox where Achilles can never quite catch the tortoise, we never seem to actually reach the point where we are willing to admit that quality is, in fact, declining. Others point to the fact that we are falling in the international rankings but our “get-out-of-jail card” is the fact that it is generally accepted that, although influential, one’s position in the rankings is a poor proxy for quality, especially in broad area of teaching and learning. So, is there really a crisis of quality - now - and is it caused by a lack of funding? I believe there is a problem, not necessarily a crisis, and it has little to do with funding. The fundamental problem in higher education is that standards are declining due to a combination of poor student engagement, a quiet and almost unconscious dumbing down, a gradual and quite deliberate move to turn higher education into an extended form of secondary school, and an over-emphasis on initiatives that have little or nothing to do with education. Anyone who doubts that there is a problem with student engagement should talk to students some time. They will freely admit that although they might spend a reasonable amount of time doing assignments during the semester, they do little or no actual study until just before the exams. In effect they study topics once and cognitive science tells us that knowledge acquired once is rapidly forgotten. Students are aided in this approach by the fact that in the semesterised system, they are tested on small “chunks” of material in short (two-hour) exams and because of the increased emphasis on continuous assessment many students only need to achieve very low marks to pass or even do reasonably well in the subject. There is one ray of hope, however, and it is this: work placements seem to transform students. Recently when I asked my final year students what the highlight of their studies had been so far, every single one them replied that it was their nine-month stint in industry. Maybe that’s telling us something. Is the system being dumbed down? Talk to academics, from any discipline, and most will express a sort of weariness at the relentless drift towards mediocrity. This process is not being driven by the perennial bad guys, namely “management”. It’s more a case of the cumulative effect of a large number of influences: the poor basic skills of incoming students and the fact that we are failing to impart these skills; a sense that it is better for students to learn something at a low level than very little at a high level; an increased tendency for students and external examiners alike to see challenging assessments as unfair; a recognition that rote learning is alive and well in higher education and that to ask the unexpected is to risk mass failure and the inquisition that will follow. Yet, despite all of this, employers seem to be happy with the quality of graduates these days so maybe the word “crisis” is being overused. All of this is occurring against a background in which a teaching and learning “mafia” has emerged in higher education. This group of academics see fellow academics purely as teachers and students as pupils. They make careers out of making university education far more complicated than it needs to be and they are determined to find solutions to ill-defined or non-existent problems, usually by employing so-called “student-centred” methods for which there is little or no evidence. The result is that academics and the administrators supporting them are overburdened with bureaucracy. The best example of this is the fixation with “learning outcomes”, something that forces academics to write, and administrators to manage, long module descriptors which students never read and which add absolutely nothing of value to the students’ learning. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe it’s all about signalling to the world how organised and committed we are. Finally, it is worth asking what universities are for. If you ask the person on the street what a university is for, they’ll probably say “education”. But the mission of universities has expanded greatly in recent years and not just because governments have demanded it, but because the universities, who now operate in a higher education market, saw this expansion as an opportunity. It was interesting to note that when, last year, Trinity announced a plan to develop a €1 billion innovation campus, nobody stopped to ask if that really is what a university should be doing? It seems that we have sleepwalked into a time where it is taken for granted that the job of universities is not just to educate but to drive short to medium term economic growth. And we’ve done so at the very time when universities say the quality of the education that they can deliver is about to tumble. Perhaps we need to learn to prioritise. Dr Greg Foley is an associate professor at Dublin City University’s school of biotechnology. He is writing in a personal capacity | null | https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/higher-education-is-being-turned-into-an-extended-form-of-secondary-school-1.3803854 | 2019-02-25 19:32:50+00:00 | 1,551,141,170 | 1,567,547,411 | education | vocational education |
751,751 | theindependent--2019-03-18--We know how higher education fails black students so whataposs stopping us from fixing it | 2019-03-18T00:00:00 | theindependent | We know how higher education fails black students, so what's stopping us from fixing it? | Almost every elder I know has uttered a version of the sentence: “Jobs like those are not for people like us,” as if we’d all been conditioned to think we were only meant to go down one rigid path while others excelled and prevailed in all sorts of avenues. It wasn’t until I was 15 that it finally clicked that, unfortunately, we have been taught to think like that, because that’s exactly how racial inequality works in society. It’s fair to say a lot of us are simply products of our environment. Britain is supposedly an increasingly diverse country, but we never seem to have had a curriculum that reflects that. Quite frankly, there isn’t enough focus on the role of higher education curricula in furthering racial equality in Britain, and that needs to change now. In October last year for example, the Royal Historical Society published a report on race, ethnicity and equality within the teaching industry. According to Advance HE’s Equality Challenge Unit, Bame students and staff are underrepresented in UK history departments, which has had a great effect on the quality of teaching, learning and research on history in the UK. The report recommends “pragmatic” steps to enhance the representation and experience of Bame students and suggests schools and university curriculums offering diverse histories are taking correct measures in engaging with a wider and diverse pool of students. If we take a look at a report published in 2011 which showed that of over 14,000 university professors in the UK, only 50 were black and overwhelmingly, outside the humanities disciplines, it’s clear we’ve long needed systematic attention to racial and ethnic inequality. But the issues go much deeper than physical representation. We need to make vast improvements through literature, after-school clubs and lessons too. The goal of inclusivity can’t solely be reached by waiting for annual observances like black history month or world culture day to roll around in order to discuss the accolades of different communities. One such institution defying those practices is Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2015, the university took the bold step of introducing the first ever master’s degree course in the world that solely focuses on black British literature. This year, it became the first university in the UK to launch a black British history master’s. The black British writing MA is co-convened and co-taught by Dr Deirdre Osborne, reader in English literature and drama, and professor Joan Anim-Addo, professor of English and Caribbean literature, the only black woman professor of comparative literature in the UK. Ms Osborne and Ms Anim-Addo discovered black British writing is taught more outside the UK (for example, in Germany, Italy, the US and Belgium) than it is here, and were pushed to join forces to create a postgraduate degree with the aim of catering to those people who have missed out on a vital part of British culture not universally taught or represented. Despite being first introduced in 2015, many students are still unaware that the course exists – partly due to a lack of independent research and virtually no media coverage, but also due to the constant assumption that no institution would focus on the contributions of Bame people in Britain. Even now that the country’s first black history postgrad is due to launch in September, it has hardly been covered. I’d even go as far as suggesting it’s being ignored, and I think that in itself is a problem. I spoke to Dr Osborne on why inclusivity in all forms is so important and she said: “To have no or limited access to a fuller picture of literary history, to be diminished, disregarded or erased is cultural starvation. “Why exist only on rations that will not nurture everyone? In terms of cultural citizenship and social worth and self-esteem, the absence or misrepresentation – even distortion – this engenders creates negative effects across generations, until they become ‘familiar’ and normalised. This is cemented in the school system. “There are many teachers who understand this, and do want to change it, but the national curriculum needs prising open and then, in higher education, their expectations must be met.” If we’re ever going to truly reach a stage of racial equality within institutions, the impetus has to come from everyone. We have to unite to improve the situation – the issue of racial equality cannot be solved by Bame communities alone. We need privileged and non-black communities who truly believe in equality to also play their part in celebrating, researching and discussing our well-earned achievements throughout history. The recognition that the best of contemporary British life has benefited from the toil and culture of postwar migrants, and has evolved in ways undreamt of, is overdue. Excluding the work and history of these people would be an affront to that legacy. Goldsmiths has done what no other institution has been brave enough to do, but it cannot end here – schools, business and the media need to learn and watch the impact this course will have on both the black community and other communities. At a time like this where the young are vulnerable, it’s important to ensure representation within a classroom, curriculum and society is available. By educating them on what their ancestors or community have achieved, they can be inspired to continue on in the traditions that are often withheld from them. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. | Abbianca Makoni | https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/black-students-university-diversity-higher-education-goldsmiths-deirdre-osborne-a8828056.html | 2019-03-18 12:29:00+00:00 | 1,552,926,540 | 1,567,545,774 | education | vocational education |
735,533 | thehuffingtonpostuk--2019-08-24--Snobbery Against Colleges As Higher Education Institutions Must End | 2019-08-24T00:00:00 | thehuffingtonpostuk | Snobbery Against Colleges As Higher Education Institutions Must End | As students discovered their GCSE and A-level grades this month, there was one results day that you might have missed. While the BTEC results day received more coverage than normal this year – featuring on the BBC and other news outlets – the event is still far less celebrated than other exams, despite it being just as important for our young people. In my early career, I worked in a construction FE College and later worked at the Sheffield College. I have seen first-hand the importance of these institutions. I am also deeply passionate about the opportunities that further education offers for our young people. Colleges like Sheffield College continue to be crucial in driving social mobility and providing the skills necessary to boost local and regional economies. They offer a place to provide qualifications and skills to meet the demands of the city’s growing economy through high quality education and technical training. The young people who may be studying in the locality that they live in are the nurses, the bricklayers, the hairdressers, the secretaries, the engineers, the care workers, the police officers of the future. Many go onto university and bring the hands-on experience they have gained to further studies. Others will establish their own businesses. All of these will bring an important boost to our economy and tax base. Further education is supremely adaptable to the changes in our society and already offers comprehensive technical courses. Building skills which will be invaluable for the next industrial revolution if we are to be successful and competitive in area such as Artificial intelligence. Indeed, a post-Brexit Britain will require a strategy to teach, skill and re-skill our population to fill in roles in hospitality, in manufacturing, engineering, care and other vital sectors. Vocational training is vital for our young people and should be at the heart of our communities. Unfortunately, this government has failed to support the work of the FE sector. Further Education – disproportionately made up of working-class students, has, predictably and depressingly, fared worst and the outcomes are telling. In the last ten years, total enrolments for adults dropped from 5.1m to 1.9m. A drop of 62%. Cuts to the adult education budget mean that there are less people skilled in professions vital for economic success now and in the future. Since 2010 we have seen the resources for Further Education plummet. A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that since 2010 funding per student aged 16-18 in further education has fallen by 8% in real terms and is now at the same level as during the late 2000’s. The funding squeeze is also certainly impacting morale for staff at colleges, too. College lecturers are now paid on average less than 80% the rate of school staff. Association of College’s latest workforce survey suggests that average lecturer pay in colleges is £30,100 which is significantly less than average school teacher pay and average university academic pay. This snobbery against colleges must end and a new dawn for colleges must break, recognizing their true importance to our communities and local economies. The new Prime Minister has been on a recent spending splurge – I hope he will put his money where his mouth is and support the vital services our colleges and other further education institutions offer across the country. Gill Furniss is the MP for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough and Shadow Business Minister | Gill Furniss | https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/btec-colleges_uk_5d5fd94ee4b0b59d25735ecb | 2019-08-24 05:30:05+00:00 | 1,566,639,005 | 1,567,533,492 | education | vocational education |
888,777 | therussophileorg--2019-09-30--American Higher Education Is Even More Corrupt Than It Looks | 2019-09-30T00:00:00 | therussophileorg | American Higher Education Is Even More Corrupt Than It Looks | This [post](https://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Truthdig/ChrisHedges/~3/uW55W4-JQ-o/) was originally published on [this site](https://feeds.feedburner.com/Truthdig/ChrisHedges) _This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and New York magazine._ The unhappy heroine of “The Mistakes Madeline Made,” which premiered Off Broadway in 2006, hates working as one of 15 personal assistants to a financier and his family. The patriarch, she observes, “runs his home the way he runs his hedge fund — using a model to protect his family against the possibility of loss or waste or even just the unexpected.” His “Household System” demands perfection: Even the hunt for a duplicate pair of New Balance sneakers is to be executed with the logistical finesse of a Navy SEAL strike. The play was written by Elizabeth Meriwether, who would go on to create the sitcom “New Girl” for Fox. Her fictionalized account of her brief stint working for the Wall Street billionaire David E. Shaw never reached a wide audience, but the script became samizdat among the harried members of Shaw staff — as the family’s highly compensated, Ivy-educated, hierarchical cadre is known. Her disgruntled protagonist’s job making sure “nothing bad can ever happen to this family” has felt familiar to some of Meriwether’s successors. The 68-year-old Shaw made his estimated $7.3 billion fortune by bringing the computing revolution to finance. D.E. Shaw & Co., the legendary hedge fund that bears his name, pairs proprietary trading algorithms with obsessive risk management. Less well publicized, however, are the various ways in which Shaw has applied his fund’s risk-averse, quantitative approach to nearly every aspect of his life. Employees tell stories about Shaw wanting Chinese food or a comfortable mattress, and Shaw staff exhaustively researching and testing the options in advance. It was company lore that before Shaw traveled, an assistant would take the exact same trip — same car service, same airport, same seat on the plane — to eliminate any inefficiencies. Shaw has been said to purchase tickets for several different flights on the same day in case his plans change. He has even devised a model to protect his family from the possibility of loss or disappointment (what some might call the stuff of life itself) in that most uncertain of contemporary futures markets — namely, the college-admissions process. Like other couples of ample means, Shaw and his wife, financial journalist Beth Kobliner, have sent their three children to an elite prep school, supported them with hyperqualified nannies and tutors, and encouraged their extracurricular interests. But while the typical snowplow parent quietly eliminates potential obstacles by clearing the road ahead, Shaw and Kobliner have seemingly bulldozed an entire mountain. Even though their children were by all accounts excellent students, the Shaws pursued a remarkably elaborate and expensive pattern of philanthropy to seven of the most renowned universities in the country. Starting in 2011, when the oldest of their three children was about two years away from applying to college, the Shaw Family Endowment Fund donated $1 million annually to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford and at least $500,000 each to Columbia and Brown. The pattern persisted through 2017, the most recent year for which public filings are available, with a bump in giving to Columbia to $1 million a year in 2016 and 2017. The foundation, which lists Kobliner as president and Shaw as treasurer and secretary, has also contributed $200,000 annually to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2013. The total donations for “general” purposes across seven years and seven elite schools are $37.3 million, which represents 62% of the foundation’s giving over that period. At minimum, experts in higher-education fundraising say, Shaw and Kobliner’s strategy improved their children’s chances of getting into at least one of the country’s top universities. At best, it would allow them to choose whichever blue-chip school they preferred, making selecting a college as easy as ordering from a takeout menu. Most American tycoons who sweeten their children’s admissions prospects rely on a major donation to a single college, often their alma mater. And yet, from a hedge funder’s perspective, investing in multiple colleges is a classic asymmetric bet — one with minimal risk and massive potential upside. “For someone of his mentality, making a portfolio bet would make a lot of sense,” said one former Ivy League development officer. “I can tell you that within the hedge-fund community and private-equity community, this wouldn’t be unusual. It’s common for people to be giving to two or three or four schools.” (Just how many of these donations are made is hard to know because, while those from foundations like the Shaws’ are typically publicly reported, gifts from individuals are not.) As Parke Muth, an independent counselor and former associate dean of admissions at the University of Virginia, explained, the very wealthy “are accustomed to diversifying their investments, and they apply that same philosophy to their kids’ choices.” For his own college education, David Shaw, who grew up in Los Angeles, went to the University of California, San Diego, where he studied math, physics and information science. In 1973, he entered Stanford’s Ph.D. program in computer science. After earning his doctorate, he got a job teaching at Columbia. One former colleague remembers that Shaw arrived in New York driving a Ferrari and had his own public-relations representative, which was unusual for a faculty member. Profiles of Shaw over the years have reported that he left Columbia because Morgan Stanley & Co. made him an offer that was too good to refuse, but that may have been only part of the equation. He was also in his up-or-out year at Columbia, and his promising research project on an experimental supercomputer was perceived to have run into difficulties. “I don’t believe he was going to get tenure,” said Stephen Unger, emeritus professor of computer science. “His clock was running out.” (Through a spokesperson, the Shaw family declined to be interviewed for this story.) At Morgan Stanley, Shaw realized that computers could do far more than simply help humans gain a financial edge; if programmed correctly, they could replace our faulty intuitions entirely. In 1988, he left Morgan Stanley to found D.E. Shaw & Co., which he conceived of as a research firm that happened to study the intersection of computing and finance. The company’s proprietary algorithms scoured markets across the world for tiny price anomalies. Shaw “pursued numerical precision with a zealous intensity,” Sebastian Mallaby writes in his 2010 book on hedge-fund giants, “More Money Than God.” “It was no good telling him that a programming task might take three to eight weeks; you had to say that it would take 5.25 but with an error of two weeks.” The conventional wisdom in the hedge-fund world is to bet big. DESCO, as Shaw’s firm is known internally, did things differently. Its philosophy, explained one former trader at the firm, is to “bet small and bet many, many times.” Traders are advised never to make a bet that could cripple the firm. “They definitely practice what I would call extreme diversification,” the trader added. “It permeates the culture.” To fill its storied ranks, D.E. Shaw & Co. depended on the same criteria elite colleges use in their own admissions processes. No matter one’s age or status, every applicant — from secretarial workers to traders lured from top mathematics and physics departments — had to submit their SAT scores. “It was incredibly insulting to recruit professors from MIT and ask them for their SAT scores and high school GPA,” a recruiter recalls. “They would be like, ‘I’m a tenured professor, why are you asking?’” When former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Lawrence Summers applied for a job at the firm in 2006, he was required to solve brainteasers. Housed in a glass skyscraper near Times Square, D.E. Shaw & Co. ranks as one of the five highest-grossing hedge funds of all time. The company employs around 1,200 people, including 87 Ph.D.s and 25 International Math Olympiad medalists. At one point in the aughts, of the five employees in the D.E. Shaw mailroom, three had degrees from Columbia and one was a concert pianist from Carnegie Mellon, according to a former worker. Among its alums are John Overdeck and David Siegel, who left to form their own legendary quant firm, Two Sigma, as well as Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, MacKenzie Tuttle. Eric Schmidt, the former Google chairman, owns a 20% stake in the firm, which he has said “feels like Silicon Valley in Manhattan.” Shaw owns almost all of the rest. Although Shaw left the day-to-day management of the hedge fund nearly two decades ago, he’s still the chairman, and it remains molded in his image: decidedly elitist, tight-lipped and risk-averse. The firm has always operated in stealth mode, keen to protect its secret formulas. “Shaw mostly prohibited us from talking to colleagues in other groups — or sometimes even our own office mates — about what we were doing,” Cathy O’Neil, who worked at DESCO as a quant from 2007 to 2009, wrote in her 2016 book, “Weapons of Math Destruction.” (As soon as most applicants arrived at their first interview, they signed nondisclosure agreements. If hired, they signed more, which may be why former employees spoke with us anonymously.) This secrecy and vigilance extended to the company’s extreme caution on legal and compliance issues. One of Shaw’s common sayings, repeated at an annual training session by a compliance officer, was that it was important to avoid risks and legal trouble because Shaw wanted to make sure that his kids could go to college. “He used to say that semifacetiously, as a way of saying, ‘I’m depending on this firm for my future income,’” one former employee recalled. The management of the Shaw family’s foundation reflects this prudence. At the end of 2017, more than 90% of its investments were in short-term Treasury bills. Shaw left the hedge fund in 2001 to found D.E. Shaw Research, which applied computer simulations to the arduous process of drug development. At both places, former employees said Shaw cared about saving time almost as much as he cared about minimizing risk. “The one thing you can’t get back is his time,” a former employee who worked at the hedge fund recalled. “So you spend as much of your time to get him back his time. My bosses would tell me that if my spending eight hours on something would save David five minutes, it would absolutely be a good use of my time.” Shaw, who often dressed in cargo shorts, a T-shirt and New Balance sneakers, wanted to make sure that wherever he went, he could stroll in and begin working. Desks and computers were set up to his liking. His guidelines for visitors to his office were equally specific. In the early 1990s, he became frustrated that people who came by when he was busy would walk away before he could see who they were and what they wanted. In a two-and-a-half-page interoffice memo titled “Stopping by David’s Office,” he detailed his solution: hand signals. To indicate that Shaw should return a visit, he wrote, “the visitor points back over his or her shoulder.” To indicate the opposite, “the visitor makes the ‘don’t bother’ or ‘no thanks’ sign, moving his or her hand back and forth, with palm showing, as if cleaning a window, while possibly shaking his or her head and/or wrinkling his or her nose.” Shaw’s hand signals were parodied in an advice column in the company’s internal newsletter. Columnist “MarySue” explained to “Frustrated in Finop” how to interpret Shaw’s gestures. “You saw a basic left-right combination, which means ‘I’m on the phone with Bill Clinton (left shoulder point) and the Dalai Lama (right ear pull) right now.’” Shaw and Kobliner, then a staff writer for Money magazine, were married in New York in 1993. Two years later, they had their first child, Rebecca, now 23, followed by Adam, 21, and Jacob, a high school sophomore. In orchestrating his family life, Shaw borrowed the methods of his hedge fund, much as “The Mistakes Madeline Made” describes. Many of the personal assistants on Shaw staff had impressive credentials. “It felt like getting into college all over again to get a job there,” a former staffer recalled. “It felt like a huge accomplishment.” Hiring for Shaw staff was done separately from that of the firm but was comparably rigorous. Recruiters would sometimes swap out mathematical brainteasers for hypothetical problems that might arise for the family: If David is concerned about ticks, how would you prevent them from invading his property? David doesn’t like fluoride: How would you figure out the bottled- water brands that have the least? If money were not an issue, how would you design a safety helmet for a child? Once hired, Shaw staff soon learned that many of these questions were far from hypothetical. One staffer remembered being told to find a rug for a child’s bedroom that was both cost-effective and “the best.” “Everything was like that,” the staffer said. Shaw also instructed his staff to protect the family’s 38,000-square-foot Hastings-on-Hudson estate from Lyme disease. One proposal supposedly involved building a moat — dry and lined with sheer glass — that would prevent tick-carrying squirrels and deer from entering the property. As in the corporate world, responsibilities for different tasks and specialties, such as medical research, travel and child care, were divvied up among various Shaw staff; some assisted other assistants. “Devoted professional couple with three wonderful, school-aged children,” read one ad the family posted in 2011, “seeks highly intelligent, amiable, responsible individual to serve as part-time personal assistant helping with child care, educational enrichment, and certain other activities at various times during afternoons, evenings, and weekends.” The ad went on to explain that the assistant would have a private room on a different floor from the family’s apartment and that “an aptitude for math and science is a plus, though not required.” The existence of this fleet-footed band of assistants — armed with advanced degrees and six-figure salaries and fighting an ever-losing battle against contingency — appears to have been a well-kept secret. Even the children’s friends who visited the Shaws’ apartment on the Upper West Side were not aware that the family owned other apartments in the building brimming with personal staff. Shaw staffers confirmed that the standard was as Meriwether depicted it: perfection. Those who didn’t measure up suffered the consequences. Meriwether, who joined Shaw staff as a 22-year-old Yale graduate, was fired after forgetting to put snacks — bottled water and Asian pears sliced a quarter of an inch thick — into the car that picked the children up from school, according to two people familiar with the incident. While Shaw was shifting his focus to medical research, Kobliner was expanding her personal-finance franchise. In books like “Make Your Kid a Money Genius (Even If You’re Not)” and “Get a Financial Life,” she fashioned herself as a self-help guru for the financially dazed and dispossessed. Kobliner has described her “mission” in life as encouraging people to have “open, honest conversations about money.” She advises parents who give charitably to include their children in those decisions and warns that “giving shouldn’t mean taking from others.” One of her areas of expertise is how to pay for college. In her writing, media interviews and YouTube videos, she cautions parents not to “follow the herd with your donating dollars” or pin their hopes for their children on getting into brand-name colleges. “Don’t believe the hype,” she tells them. “You might find yourself obsessing over those annual college rankings. Don’t take them too seriously.” The sensible solution, she argues, is for families to “pick a few financial safety schools” — public universities close to home. A degree from an elite college, she reminds readers, may not translate into higher earnings in later life. “The Ivy League isn’t necessarily the gravy train.” This is not quite the message imparted by Horace Mann, the exclusive prep school where the Shaws sent their children. At Horace Mann, the need to battle for slots at the nation’s most prestigious colleges is ingrained in students from an early age. Peers of the Shaw children remember classmates talking about where they wanted to go to college — and understanding that they might very well not go there — as early as the sixth grade. “It is difficult to dodge the school’s reputation as a ‘pressure cooker,’ college-obsessed school when, for example, a seventh-grade class has divided into teams named after the eight Ivy League institutions,” noted an editorial in the school’s newspaper, The Record, in a 2014 issue printed shortly before Rebecca Shaw’s graduation. Conversations around choosing classes and clubs were tied to which would be most useful for college applications. Among her extracurriculars, Rebecca founded the Anti-Bullying Leadership Network. The summer before applying to college, she organized a conference on bullying at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center auditorium, where she spoke alongside leading academics and experts. “The speakers seemed like something that came to be through Rebecca’s parents’ connections,” one former classmate said. Over the years, some of their institutions had been recipients of the Shaws’ giving. Speakers included Lisa S. Coico, president of City College (the Shaw foundation has donated $3 million to the school to endow a chair in Kobliner’s father’s name); Thomas Kelly, the head of Horace Mann (to which the family has donated at least $3.9 million); and Sarah Hurwitz, special assistant to then-President Barack Obama. Shaw is one of the country’s top donors to the Democratic Party. Both he and Kobliner served on presidential advisory committees, and Rebecca later authored a guest post about the Anti-Bullying Leadership Network on an Obama White House blog. By the time Rebecca applied to college, the family foundation had been donating millions to premier universities for at least two years. Large giving to multiple colleges isn’t as redundant as it may sound. “People sometimes feel, A million dollars should give me a lot of clout,” said Ron Brown, former director of gift planning at Princeton. “In the scheme of things, not so much. … A million-dollar gift doesn’t have the impact it used to have 20 years ago.” At the same time, prestigious colleges have become even harder to get into. In 2015, for example, more than 8,000 students with perfect grade-point averages applied to Harvard, which admits about 2,000 candidates each year. “It’s quite a rarefied pool,” William Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, later observed. Harvard admitted only 4.5% of applicants this year, half of its acceptance rate a decade ago. Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Brown all accepted fewer than 7% of applicants in 2019. Since certain groups, including alumni children and recruited athletes, are admitted at considerably higher rates, the odds against other applicants who don’t enjoy any such preference are even longer. It was these anxieties that the independent college counselor Rick Singer infamously exploited in his wealthy clientele. Singer told his clients they could no longer rely on a major gift to one university — what he called the “back door” to college admissions. Instead, he sold them on the “side door” of fraud, persuading dozens of rich families to pay him a total of more than $25 million to secure spots at schools like USC, Georgetown, Yale and Stanford through inflating test scores and bribing college coaches. At least 52 people, including 35 parents, have been charged in the scheme, nicknamed “Varsity Blues” by the FBI. Fifteen parents have pleaded guilty, including actress Felicity Huffman, who was sentenced in September to 14 days in prison for paying $15,000 to inflate her daughter’s SAT score. Shaw and Kobliner’s giving strategy was a lawful — if exceedingly more expensive — response to the same upper-class angst. In essence, they created multiple back doors. At a time of renewed debate about whether colleges are vehicles of social mobility or a means of reproducing class privilege, such a philanthropic adaptation suggests that the ultrarich won’t easily surrender their advantages. It “looks like a clever plan, but not illegal,” said William Zabel, a New York attorney who spent two decades as the head of Princeton’s planned-giving advisory committee. Others questioned whether Shaw’s donations were intended to gain an edge for his children. Mark Lipton, a professor of management at the New School who has worked with the hedge fund, said that while Shaw cares deeply about his family, “he’s a real meritocracy fan. My hunch is that he invests in his kids from Day One so they can get in at these schools on their own. What’s so self- evident, whether it’s for his own kids or not, is the extraordinary importance he puts on the best higher education.” Spokespeople for the universities enriched by the Shaws’ family foundation said they too are meritocracy fans and seek “applicants of exceptional ability and character,” as Harvard’s Rachael Dane put it. Yale, said spokesperson Karen Peart, “takes great care in its admissions process, and we stand behind the merit of all of our students.” Ernest Miranda of Stanford said “a donation does not purchase a place” there. “Stanford does not accept gifts if it knows a gift is being made with the intention of influencing the admissions process.” Nevertheless, the Shaws’ pattern of giving has several signs that experts associate with parental campaigns to boost their children’s chances. Neither Shaw nor Kobliner graduated from Harvard, Yale or Princeton, three of the four universities to which the foundation has made annual seven-figure gifts. Their favoring of institutions they didn’t attend runs counter to the traditional practice of wealthy Americans. When donors have no previous ties to a university, explained Brown, the former director of gift planning at Princeton, gifts are usually restricted to a specific academic purpose, such as funding a research program in their field of interest or a friend’s faculty chair. The Shaw family foundation has made dozens of smaller, targeted gifts to medical or computer-science research at schools over the years, yet its largest annual donations to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Brown, Columbia and MIT have been unrestricted. Such general-purpose gifts, which are especially prized by universities, tend to be relatively small. In 2018, only 3% of total giving to Stanford and 4% to Yale was unrestricted, according to Ann Kaplan, who oversees a fundraising survey at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. In other words, a major unrestricted donation to a school, especially from someone who had no connection with it, would stand out. “It would be a flag,” Brown said. “Someone would ask him: ‘We’re very grateful for these gifts, but tell me why. Why now? What do you hope to accomplish?’” Brown and Baker said development offices at elite universities generally won’t discuss a large gift with a prospective donor who has a child applying or about to apply, because admitting the student would look like a quid pro quo. When Shaw began giving, his daughter was just outside that window. More than likely, each university’s development office would have notified its admissions counterparts of applicants whose parents, like the Shaws, had become major donors. “It’s obvious he picked the four schools he’d rather get into with a million dollars a year and the lesser schools with half a million a year,” said Zabel, the former head of Princeton’s planned-giving advisory committee. “If it didn’t help at Yale, he wouldn’t mind if it helped at Princeton. It’s pretty clear he’s hedging his bets.” Zabel now specializes in setting up private foundations for wealthy clients, some of whom have donated to two or three colleges to help their children get in but never as many as six or seven. Muth, the former University of Virginia admissions dean, said he knew of several Asian billionaires who gave millions to multiple elite universities to which their children were applying in recent years. Dismayed by their efforts to buy acceptances, Muth declined to work with them. Well-heeled parents ply universities with donations even when their children, like Rebecca and Adam, are high achievers. “Friends of mine who wield a lot of influence, I tell them, ‘Just don’t do it,’ but they find it irresistible,” explained the former Ivy League development officer. “It’s a tragedy, actually. People will tell you that it’s a prisoner’s dilemma and that you just have to play by the rules of a perverted system.” Rebecca and Adam excelled academically at Horace Mann, no small feat given its notoriously challenging curriculum. They were National Merit finalists, scoring in the top 1% on the sophomore-year PSAT test. Both belonged to the Cum Laude Society, ranking in the top 20% of their class. Adam received honors in computing and communications, English, Japanese, mathematics and science; Rebecca received honors in English, mathematics and psychology. In her senior year, Rebecca won the school’s community-service award and co-wrote and co- directed “Upper West Side Story,” a high school-themed musical that parodied the school’s culture. Jacob, the Shaws’ youngest child, goes to Horace Mann and attended Stanford’s summer jazz program for teens. Kobliner and Jacob co-authored a children’s book, “Jacob’s Eye Patch,” in 2013, the year he turned 9. Editorial guidance and illustrations were provided by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and screenwriter Jules Feiffer. (“They live in a large, makes-you-want-to-kill apartment, it’s so spacious and gorgeous,” said the 90-year-old Feiffer. “They offered me real money, and I was in the market for real money.”) In the fall of her senior year, Rebecca was accepted early at Yale. In 2016, Adam — who classmates say was also accepted at Stanford and Harvard — joined her in New Haven. Adam has served as president of the Yale chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, an honor society for history students. Rebecca majored in psychology. At Yale’s graduation ceremony in 2018, she and her boyfriend performed a comedy skit titled “Moving On,” in which she pretended to break up with him. It went viral on YouTube with over 4 million views, and this year she was hired as a writer on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” Yale’s acceptance of Adam and Rebecca gratified Kobliner, who had applied there herself and been rejected. “I walk around Yale and tell all their friends that I didn’t get in,” Kobliner, who attended Brown instead, said in a 2018 radio interview. In her columns, she has advised readers on how to handle such rejections with equanimity. “Getting into your ninth-choice school might not feel as good as opening an envelope — or a DM — from the exclusive private college of your fantasies,” she wrote on her blog in March. “But no matter where your kid goes, she’ll have experiences, make friends, and learn things that will change her life. And that makes for an amazing picture, even if it’s not one you can post on the ’gram.” _ProPublica research reporter[Doris Burke](https://www.propublica.org/people /doris-burke) contributed to this story._ | William Holland | https://www.therussophile.org/american-higher-education-is-even-more-corrupt-than-it-looks.html/ | 2019-09-30 20:01:52+00:00 | 1,569,888,112 | 1,570,221,892 | education | vocational education |
1,108,058 | windowoneurasiablog--2019-06-20--Soloveys Resignation from MGIMO Highlights Kremlin Moves to Impose Ideological Control on Higher Ed | 2019-06-20T00:00:00 | windowoneurasiablog | Solovey’s Resignation from MGIMO Highlights Kremlin Moves to Impose Ideological Control on Higher Education | Staunton, June 20 – Valery Solovey’s dramatic announcement that he was resigning from MGIMO before he might be fired is not an isolated case but rather part of a new Kremlin drive to impose tighter controls over the expert community, many of whose members work for higher educational institutions full or part time. “For political reasons,” he continued, “the institute no longer wants to have a relationship with me. I understand this attitude. And I will be grateful,” the scholar-commentator said, “if in the future no one will associate me with MGIMO.” Solovey indicated that he plans to write a book and will not be returning to teaching. “Russia is entering a period of major changes, and I intend to take a most active part in them. Stay tuned,” he concluded. Solovey is only the most prominent of political analysts to lose a position because of his views. Earlier this month, several political scientists at the Higher School of Economics lost their employment when their positions were made redundant by the folding in of that department into a larger section of the university. Many people have been angered by this extension of ideological control, another way the powers that be have of imposing their views besides control of access to the media and censorship of electronic and print media ( But as Aleksey Chesnakov, director of the Center for Political Conjunction, notes, fundamental weaknesses in the organization of the social sciences in general and political science in particular make it easy for the powers that be to take these steps, often in ways that do not attract attention and resistance ( | paul goble ([email protected]) | http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/06/soloveys-resignation-from-mgimo.html | 2019-06-20 17:55:00.001000+00:00 | 1,561,067,700 | 1,567,538,567 | education | vocational education |
1,111,652 | yahoonews--2019-04-30--If God existed Id have gotten into Penn Meet the Trump official working on higher education pol | 2019-04-30T00:00:00 | yahoonews | 'If God existed, I'd have gotten into Penn': Meet the Trump official working on higher education policy | WASHINGTON — What does it take to get a job working on higher education policy in the White House? Ambition helps. So does, apparently, writing an awkwardly honest book about failing to gain admittance to an Ivy League college. At least that seemed to do the trick for 23-year-old Eli Nachmany, whose self-published memoir “Good Enough” appears to be his sole contribution in the field of higher education before coming to work in the Office of American Innovation, which is overseen by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, earlier this spring. In any other administration, the recruitment of Nachmany to work on one of the most pressing and divisive issues in American culture would have been remarkable. Higher education was handled in the Obama administration by Ted Mitchell, who had been the president of Occidental College and the California State Board of Education. Trump came to Washington vowing to slim down the federal bureaucracy. He would do so without the coterie of longtime political loyalists and policy experts usually attached to a winning presidential candidate. But Trump never lived up to his promise that he would hire “the best people” to work in his administration. Meanwhile, his Presidential Personnel Office, which vets political appointees, has been depicted as a fraternity house run by recent college graduates hosting drinking games in their Eisenhower Executive Office Building suite. Nachmany’s hiring also underscores the lack of a coherent White House plan on higher education. President Trump has rolled back various Obama-era reforms, including those having to do with college loans, sexual assault and oversight, but he has advanced no new policy of his own. Even before coming to the White House, Nachmany enjoyed a relative level of prominence within the Trump administration, having been hired at the tender age of 21 to serve as a speechwriter for Ryan Zinke, the Interior secretary who was forced to resign from his position last December amid ethics investigations. The news of his move to the White House was initially reported by Politico Playbook, which described Nachmany as “detailed” to the White House from the Department of Interior. At the White House, Nachmany is working in the Office of American Innovation, Kushner’s secretive policy shop, which lacks even a website. Nor does it have a clear agenda on higher education, which is also among the issues handled by the Domestic Policy Council, another White House office. Kushner has shown an interest in how colleges are accredited, but White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere would not say on the record whether that remained Kushner’s focus, or whether Nachmany would be working on that issue. None of the relevant parties could explain to Yahoo News what qualifications Nachmany has to work on higher education at the uppermost reaches of American government. “We are excited that he has the opportunity to contribute his talents to the White House and the Office of American Innovation,” Interior spokesman Alex Hinson told Yahoo News. Nachmany himself did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Higher education is in desperate need of innovation. Nachmany’s posting at the White House came just as federal authorities uncovered a massive cheating ring that would allow the children of wealthy parents to gain admittance to elite universities. At the same time, cumulative student debt has reached $1.5 trillion, even as the uses of a traditional college education are increasingly being questioned by high technology leaders and others. But those do not appear to be Nachmany’s concerns, judging by his sole contribution on the topic. “Good Enough” — the clearest guide to Nachmany’s thoughts on higher education — was published in 2015 by Outskirts Press, a self-publishing company based in Denver. The 140-page book has 11 reviews on Amazon, with an average rating of 2.5 stars. One of the book’s rare five-star reviews comes from Nachmany himself and consists of a single sentence: “I wrote this book.” The product of a comfortable New Jersey suburb, Nachmany’s book reflects some of the societal issues later exposed by the college cheating scandal: the self-regard of well-off whites, the inordinate concern with ranking and status. Despite a middling high school record, Nachmany was confident that he would get into the college of his choice. “I had grown up believing I was Ivy League material,” he writes in Good Enough, adding a little later, “I thought I’d get into Penn because I was Eli Nachmany.” The main theme of “Good Enough” is the author’s quest to get into University of Chicago — or the University of Pennsylvania, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or Fordham University, or the University of Michigan, or Villanova University, or Case Western Reserve University or Franklin & Marshall College. The failure to get into any of these colleges left Nachmany embittered. “I want to be so successful that they ended up regretting not being able to have their name on my Wikipedia page,” Nachmany writes after being rejected from the University of Chicago, a school famous for producing and serving as an academic home to more Nobel Prize laureates than almost any other institution in the world. By his own admission, Nachmany was not exactly Nobel material while a student at Demarest High School in Demarest, N.J., a wealthy bedroom community for professionals many of whom work in Manhattan. The average household income there is about $150,000, triple the national average. Nachmany venerates Penn, the college Trump graduated from after beginning his studies at Fordham. In Trump’s case, a donation from his father may have allowed the future president to make the move. A $1 million donation from Charles Kushner may have similarly helped his son — Jared — gain admission to Harvard, despite an unimpressive high school record. Trump frequently touts his own educational accomplishments. “You know, people don’t understand. I went to an Ivy League college,” he said in 2017. “I was a nice student. I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.” He has frequently highlighted the elite educational backgrounds of judges he has nominated and politicians he has endorsed. Yet an Ivy League education remains out of reach for most Americans, even as the allure of such an education remains as strong as ever: 304,909 people applied for seats at the eight Ivy League schools for the incoming class that will graduate in 2022. The average acceptance rate for an Ivy League college was 7.04 percent last year. Nachmany, who is now one of the few White House officials explicitly working on higher education, does not appear to be perturbed by the state of things, judging by his book. “I wanted clout,” he wrote, describing his motivation behind his college applications in the fall of 2012. “I wanted a brand name university that would impress people.” It is not clear yet how that desire for clout will translate into Nachmany’s work at the White House. Unlike the parents caught up in Operation Varsity Blue, the college cheating scandal, he does not resort to means that were improper or illegal. But like many Americans who have been told that admission to a “good” college is imperative for happiness and success, he seeks for every possible way to get himself into a top-tier school. For example, he decides that football would be his “back door” to Chicago, even as he continues to lust for a spot at Trump’s alma mater. Spoiler alert: Nachmany’s lackluster record keeps him from getting into the schools he so badly wanted to attend. It also keeps him from getting into some of the schools he did not especially want to attend, including Fordham and Villanova. This disappointment grew, leading to an existential crisis.“If God existed, I’d have gotten into Penn,” he reasons. There are flashes of self-awareness, as when Nachmany visits Elon University in North Carolina after being accepted there. Nachmany is put off by the racial homogeneity of the student body, writing, “How was I going to grow as a person over the next four years, socially and culturally, if most of my classmates looked the same?” Now he will be working for an administration that is fighting to promote race-neutral admissions at universities, urging them to scrap affirmative action policies that seek to diversify student bodies. Trump has also proposed cutting federal financial aid. Nachmany finally ends up at NYU’s continuing education school, now called its School of Professional and Continuing Studies. “The only opinion that mattered was mine and I opined that I was good enough,” Nachmany writes near the conclusion of “Good Enough.” “I decided to disregard objectivity and proceed with my opinion as though it were fact.” At NYU, Nachmany interned for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, then for Christie’s presidential campaign, until that imploded in the winter of 2016. He did press-related work on the Trump campaign throughout that summer and fall of 2016, then worked as an event coordinator for the presidential inauguration before returning to NYU to complete his studies in the spring of 2017. That June, he joined the Department of the Interior, where he served as a speechwriter for Zinke. Nachmany’s sojourn in the Trump administration may be temporary. After graduating with distinction from NYU, he earned admission to Harvard Law School, which he has deferred for a year. What he will do after law school is unclear, but Nachmany has said that he may want to run for elective office. 'It's already begun': Feedback loops will make climate change even worse, scientists say Revealed: The U.S. military's 36 code-named operations in Africa Biden lost big in 2008. Is he a better candidate now? | null | https://news.yahoo.com/if-god-existed-id-have-gotten-into-penn-meet-the-trump-appointee-working-on-higher-education-policy-090000704.html | 2019-04-30 09:00:23+00:00 | 1,556,629,223 | 1,567,541,621 | education | vocational education |
1,112,635 | yahoonews--2019-10-11--Latinx Heritage Month: ‘You’re not smart enough to go to college’: How first-generation Latinx stude | 2019-10-11T00:00:00 | yahoonews | Latinx Heritage Month: ‘You’re not smart enough to go to college’: How first-generation Latinx students are overcoming the odds in pursuit of higher education | Yahoo News brings you this exclusive video in celebration of Latinx Heritage Month. Among the first-time college goers who are settling in to their new surroundings is University of Pennsylvania freshman Michelle Mahecha Perez. Her journey to the Ivy League was no easy feat. The overall acceptance rate for Perez’s UPenn class of 2023 was a record-low 7.4 percent. And as a low-income Latina and first in her family to go to college, Perez had additional obstacles to overcome. When she was growing up, her mother emphasized the importance of education and how it has the possibility to change her life. That’s why she will remember March 28, 2019 — the day she was accepted to UPenn — as the “best day” of her life. Her parents immigrated to the United States 20 years ago from Colombia. “They obviously had to leave behind their family, their jobs, life as they knew it. They had to start over completely, and they had this dream of having a child that would one day be bilingual and have the opportunities that they didn’t,” Perez said in an interview with Yahoo News. “I love my parents, they’ve been the best support system, but obviously it’s hard because neither of them went to college.” “When I was applying to colleges ... I had no idea where to start,” Perez said. She also attended a public high school that didn’t offer specific support for students applying to college. “I would try my hardest to navigate the things that I did know, like the SAT, but my parents couldn’t afford tutors. They couldn’t afford to send me to a prep class, so I had to do it all on my own.” Navigating the college application process, Perez battled some inner thoughts: “I always had this thing in the back of my head of like, ‘You can't afford college.’ And there was constantly this idea of ‘Oh, well you’re first-generation, like you’re not smart enough to go to college.’” According to a Pew Research study, Hispanic college enrollment in public and private colleges increased 180 percent from 1.3 million in 1999 to 3.6 million in 2016. Even though progress is being made, Hispanics still lag behind blacks, Asians and whites in obtaining four-year degrees, according to Pew. “Many Latino students are first-generation college goers, and that brings with it multiple opportunities and challenges. The challenges are that you really have to be prepared to be very resourceful,” Sarita Brown told Yahoo News. Brown is the president and co-founder of Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating Latino success in higher education. Perez’s turning point came when she discovered a flyer for Latino U, an organization that helps first-generation low-income Latinx students attend college. “Latino U really helped my [family] understand what college is in America, and how the process works. … My relationship with my parents has only flourished since then because they’ve seen what it really takes to get here,” said Perez. “For Latinx students or for students of color period, I think it’s kind of an uphill battle because we’re trying to function in a system that wasn’t necessarily made for us,” Mara Dorta told Yahoo News. Dorta, who has a master’s degree from New York University, experienced a similar journey to Perez being the first in her family to navigate the college application process. “My parents immigrated here from Puerto Rico back in the ’60s. … They made a family in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and we survived all six of us in a two-bedroom tenement.” She attended a public high school and faired well academically, but wasn’t given the tools to prepare for an exam like the SAT. Discouraged by her guidance counselor, she only applied to two state schools and got into one in Buffalo, N.Y. “It was a terrible fit. … I had no resources on campus. I didn’t know where to go, who to reach out to, to try to find community,” Dorta recalled. She ended up leaving in 2000 and felt like “a complete failure.” Dorta reconnected with a friend from Buffalo who was working at New York University and told her about tuition remission. “That’s where my journey kind of really blossomed. … I managed to finish my bachelor’s in four years working full-time and part-time.” Seven years after she received her bachelor’s, she earned an M.A. from NYU in educational leadership, politics and advocacy. Mara Dorta, who received her M.A. from NYU in educational leadership, politics and advocacy, poses in her NYU gown. “I’m now the director of college access and leadership at the YWCA Brooklyn. I get to work with amazing young women from all over Brooklyn, just like me still figuring this out, whose parents maybe don’t know the system, but we’re helping them navigate it.” “Approximately 97 percent of the Latino students in America today are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and that number has not changed,” said Brown. “It’s worth talking about it because there is so much emphasis on immigration, and the emphasis unfortunately has not been positive. … The politics aside, framing of borders aside, we are part of this country’s life force, and as a student population we are eager to participate. … The next generation of students is essential to the life of this country.” | null | https://news.yahoo.com/latinx-heritage-month-youre-not-smart-enough-to-go-to-college-how-firstgeneration-latinx-students-are-overcoming-the-odds-in-pursuit-of-higher-education-152458347.html | Fri, 11 Oct 2019 11:24:58 -0400 | 1,570,807,498 | 1,570,833,274 | education | vocational education |
223,790 | freedombunker--2019-12-04--Fraud in Higher Education | 2019-12-04T00:00:00 | freedombunker | Fraud in Higher Education | This year’s education scandal saw parents shelling out megabucks to gain college admittance for their children. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 50 people with participating in a scheme to get their children into colleges by cheating on entrance exams or bribing athletic coaches. They paid William Singer, a college-prep professional, more than $25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators and to change test scores on college admittance exams such as the SAT and ACT. As disgusting as this grossly dishonest behavior is, it is only the tiny tip of fraud in higher education. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, “More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes.” According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent.” Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test’s readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science). It’s clear that high schools confer diplomas that attest that a student can read, write and do math at a 12th-grade level when, in fact, most cannot. That means most high diplomas represent fraudulent documents. But when high school graduates enter college, what happens? To get a hint, we can turn to an article by Craig E. Klafter, “Good Grieve! America’s Grade Inflation Culture,” published in the Fall 2019 edition of Academic Questions. In 1940, only 15% of all grades awarded were A’s. By 2018, the average grade point average at some of the nation’s leading colleges was A-minus. For example, the average GPA at Brown University (3.75), Stanford (3.68), Harvard College (3.63), Yale University (3.63), Columbia University (3.6), University of California, Berkeley (3.59). The falling standards witnessed at our primary and secondary levels are becoming increasingly the case at tertiary levels. “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” is a study conducted by Professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. They found that 45% of 2,300 students at 24 colleges showed no significant improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.” An article in News Forum for Lawyers titled “Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent” cites a study done by the American Institutes for Research that revealed that over 75% of two-year college students and 50% of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks. About 20% of four-year college students demonstrated only basic mathematical ability, while a steeper 30% of two-year college students could not progress past elementary arithmetic. NBC News reported that Fortune 500 companies spend about $3 billion annually to train employees in “basic English.” Here is a list of some other actual college courses that have been taught at U.S. colleges in recent years: “What If Harry Potter Is Real?” “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame,” “Philosophy and Star Trek,” “Learning from YouTube,” “How To Watch Television,” and “Oh, Look, a Chicken!” The questions that immediately come to mind are these: What kind of professor would teach such courses, and what kind of student would spend his time taking such courses? Most importantly, what kind of college president and board of trustees would permit classes in such nonsense? The fact that unscrupulous parents paid millions for special favors from college administrators to enroll their children pales in comparison to the poor educational outcomes, not to mention the gross indoctrination of young people by leftist professors. The post Fraud in Higher Education appeared first on LewRockwell. | Walter E. Williams | http://freedombunker.com/2019/12/03/fraud-in-higher-education/ | Wed, 04 Dec 2019 04:01:00 +0000 | 1,575,450,060 | 1,575,462,772 | education | vocational education |
256,614 | instapundit--2019-02-09--HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE Now its not just rape and skyrocketing tuition to worry about it | 2019-02-09T00:00:00 | instapundit | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Now it’s not just rape and skyrocketing tuition to worry about, it’… | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Now it’s not just rape and skyrocketing tuition to worry about, it’s also soaring rates of mental illness among college students. “We are seeing an epidemic of mental illness on college campuses across the country. According to national data, 40% of undergraduate students have felt so depressed within the past year that it’s been difficult for them to function, 10% have seriously considered suicide, and these numbers are higher than the numbers for kids and young adults of the same age who are not attending college.” | Glenn Reynolds | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pjmedia/instapundit/~3/1XUQlkXgfSg/ | 2019-02-09 15:00:44+00:00 | 1,549,742,444 | 1,567,549,066 | education | vocational education |
269,033 | instapundit--2019-10-16--HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Gig Academy. “Over the past two decades, higher education empl | 2019-10-16T00:00:00 | instapundit | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Gig Academy. “Over the past two decades, higher education empl… | HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Gig Academy. “Over the past two decades, higher education employment has undergone a radical transformation with faculty becoming contingent, staff being outsourced, and postdocs and graduate students becoming a larger share of the workforce. For example, the faculty has shifted from one composed mostly of tenure-track, full-time employees to one made up of contingent, part-time teachers. Non-tenure-track instructors now make up 70 percent of college faculty. Their pay for teaching eight courses averages $22,400 a year—less than the annual salary of most fast-food workers.” As I’ve said before, if Trump were smart he’d make an issue of this. It would divide a major source of his opposition. | Glenn Reynolds | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pjmedia/instapundit/~3/NNkHrhOnP5w/ | Wed, 16 Oct 2019 11:31:08 +0000 | 1,571,239,868 | 1,571,229,559 | education | vocational education |
284,797 | latimes--2019-11-30--California higher education hangs in the balance as UC, Cal State search for new leaders | 2019-11-30T00:00:00 | latimes | California higher education hangs in the balance as UC, Cal State search for new leaders | In a rare confluence that will shape the future of California higher education, the state’s two top university jobs are open, high-profile vacancies that position its leaders as national pacesetters because of the size and status of the two systems. The dual searches at the University of California and California State University have generated a daunting list of desired job qualifications. The new chiefs will be expected to figure out how to meet enormous admission demands, increase student diversity, raise academic achievement, lower costs, secure stable sources of money and deal with fierce politics. All this while improving the quality and prestige of two of the nation’s most popular and renowned public university systems. And this must be accomplished with limited state funding and salaries well below their comparable peers. “They probably are two of the most important institutions on the planet in terms of their role and mission,” said Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University who is viewed as one of the nation’s most innovative higher education leaders and is often mentioned as a potential candidate for the UC job. The native Californian said he was too busy “doing my job as hard as I can” to even think about either position. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, summed up the ideal skills as “walking on water with a thick skin.” The two jobs — open after the recent announcements by UC President Janet Napolitano and Cal State Chancellor Timothy P. White that they will step down next summer — share broad similarities and significant differences. Cal State is the largest and most diverse four-year university system in the nation, educating 482,000 students on 23 campuses who are drawn from the top 40% of California’s annual high school graduates. The system is often referred to as the “job engine” of California, filling many of the state’s most pressing workforce needs, including half of the teachers and more than half of the nurses. The 10-campus UC system educates 280,000 students who rank in the top 12.5% of the state’s senior class and is California’s lead generator of PhDs, in addition to its bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The system is distinguished by its massive and top-ranked research enterprise, five medical centers, three affiliated national laboratories and an overall budget of $37.2 billion, bigger than those of more than 30 states. Both systems enroll far higher proportions of low-income and first-generation students than do similar universities in other states. But both are struggling to close achievement gaps for low-income, first-generation and underrepresented minority students. The UC job is “probably the most complex and challenging job in higher education,” said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Assn. of American Universities, which represents North America’s top 65 research universities. “It could also be a very exciting job because the platform the UC system has is enormous and enormously important.” Napolitano has been credited with using that platform to support immigrant students and sexual assault survivors. But some higher education leaders say the next UC president must step up to champion an even broader task: marshaling public support for the value of a university education amid mounting skepticism about rising costs and perceived political biases. The UC regents recently released a list of 29 criteria for the next leader based on closed-door consultations with committees of students, staff, faculty and alumni. The top two criteria have drawn particular attention: knowledge of the academic enterprise and a demonstrated track record promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. The regents themselves are believed to be the most diverse board in UC history, with both Chairman John A. Pérez and Vice Chairwoman Cecilia Estolano of Mexican descent and nearly half of the 26 voting board members Latino, African American and Asian American. Pérez has said UC particularly needs to work harder to increase geographical diversity, as most students come from urban areas. Faculty were thrilled by the regents’ stated preference for candidates with “exceptional academic administrative experience” and the highest possible degree in their field. At recent faculty town halls at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara, participants lamented that regents ignored their desire for an academic in the last presidential search six years ago when they selected Napolitano, then U.S. Homeland Security secretary and a former Arizona governor. Although many faculty eventually came to appreciate Napolitano, they said it took time for her to learn how to manage the UC system and consult with them on key issues as required by the UC tradition of shared governance, which gives the Academic Senate a uniquely powerful voice in university operations. Other top priorities named in a UC Santa Barbara faculty survey were a commitment to academic freedom, shared governance, research, graduate education and budgetary transparency. At both sessions, faculty members complained about the “secrecy” of past search processes. Regents, however, have announced that they would hold open public forums at UC Davis on Dec. 13 and at UCLA on Jan. 14. Cal State has held four public forums, with two more planned at its campuses in San Marcos on Dec. 3 and in Fresno on Dec. 5. At a recent Long Beach forum, speakers said they wanted the next chancellor to champion full access to all eligible applicants, more faculty diversity, support for students with disabilities and increased programs for prison inmates. For their part, UC students want a leader who is familiar with California public education and will commit to meet regularly with them, as Napolitano did, said Varsha Sarveshwar, a UC Berkeley senior and president of the UC Student Assn. Top issues, she said, include affordable housing, food security and meeting the basic needs of all students. UC insiders say hundreds of names will probably be submitted for an initial look before the field is narrowed to serious candidates and a decision is made by regents, possibly next spring. Potential candidates named at the faculty meetings included Crow and F. King Alexander, president of Lousiana State University who previously headed Cal State Long Beach for seven years and has made a national mark with his advocacy of greater federal partnerships and state public funding for higher education. In an interview, Alexander said key challenges for California higher education were the enormous demand for seats in university systems with limited capacity and state funding levels that, while recovered from deep cuts after the Great Recession, remain well below levels two decades ago. While more online learning is part of the answer, he said, the state must increase funding “if it wants to remain the nation’s beacon of affordable higher education.” Asked if he was interested in either job, Alexander said he is leaving his options “open” — adding that his wife is “particularly fond of the weather in Long Beach.” “It’s a great place,” he said. “California public higher education is kind of like the Rose Bowl — the granddaddy of them all.” Crow is both widely admired for his visionary rebuild of traditional higher education models and criticized for his aggressive use of educational technology. In an interview, he said UC and Cal State both need to figure out how to better use technology and innovation to vastly open access to both traditional college students and adult learners. He also said campuses need more freedom to launch entrepreneurial projects and partnerships that can help them raise money and lessen dependence on state funding. Crow has used all of those approaches at ASU, building enrollment to 120,000 students — more than one-third of them online — in what he calls a New American University model that offers wide access over the selectivity favored by many elite universities. “The old model has run its course,” Crow said. “It’s time for new ways to engage while not giving up one iota of quality or one iota of excellence.” Other names mentioned for the UC job include Michael Drake, who is stepping down next year from the helm of Ohio State University and who previously served as chancellor of UC Irvine and UC vice chancellor for health affairs. Under his leadership, Ohio State set all-time highs in student retention and graduation rates, diversity, applications and research expenditures while reducing debt burdens. He also launched a tuition guarantee program for each incoming class of students, a model that UC regents are currently considering. Drake could not be reached for comment. Past and present UC chancellors and Cal State presidents may also be considered. Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said former legislators and governors should not be overlooked because educators who came up through the ranks are not always willing to shake up the status quo as needed. UC, he said, needs a leader willing to look at the system’s at-times inefficient use of facilities and relatively light teaching loads. For outside candidates, one potential sticking point could be pay. In 2018, Napolitano earned $627,000 in total compensation and White $493,000, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education database. Drake earned $1.2 million and Crow $1.1 million, two of 17 university leaders whose pay topped seven figures. Pay at top private universities is even higher. “The challenge for all public universities is that many, many candidates view those [top] positions as patently unattractive,” said Richard Chait, a Harvard University professor emeritus of higher education. “Public university presidents are embroiled in a thicket of politics, constantly in the crosshairs, and the money is not there.” But Robert Anderson, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers, predicted plenty of candidates will be drawn to the California opportunities in order to make a difference in such a large, diverse state and “move the needle both nationally and globally.” “I really don’t believe someone will come to this job for a paycheck,” said Mitchell of the American Education Council. “The right person will come to this job for a mission and a legacy.” | Teresa Watanabe, Nina Agrawal | https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-30/california-higher-education-hangs-in-the-balance-as-uc-cal-state-search-for-new-leaders | Sat, 30 Nov 2019 11:35:21 -0500 | 1,575,131,721 | 1,575,139,923 | education | vocational education |
455,397 | redstate--2019-03-31--Higher Education and the Diversocracy | 2019-03-31T00:00:00 | redstate | Higher Education and the Diversocracy | ========= ========= Like what you see? Then visit my story archive. Follow @streiffredstate I’m on Facebook. Drop by and join the fun there. ========= ========= There is no money to be made or votes to be accumulated telling people the truth when it comes to the failure of today’s schools which fail to adequately prepare students for college, a career, or a job. The main culprit in the demise of America’s educational system can be blamed on a growing army of bureaucrats, especially in higher education, and their blind adherence to the concept of diversity at all costs. These are the “diversocrats” who have invaded the educational system. For years, they dominated the social sciences and humanities. Not content, they are now invading the hard sciences. The currency of the diversocrat is racism, mostly imagined. It is not the amount of pigmentation in one’s skin nor the country of origin of their parent that is denying students opportunity. It is the failure of the social structure in the communities of failing schools along with economic disadvantages and lousy unionized public schools. We are privy to a barrage of charges regarding a lack of diversity in schools and charges of discrimination. The reason is simple: a problem must be created and gussied up with big words in order to justify the existence and expansion of the diversity complex. When it comes to higher education, in order to appease the diversity bureaucrats, universities must consider proportional representation among the student body. It is telling that a failure to achieve such a student body is predicated upon a mathematical metric- proportional representation-, but they likewise discard a more important metric that has been proven over the years to be the best predictor of academic success in college: the SAT. In 2015, Princeton conducted a study comparing SAT scores and college admission standards as they applied to different ethnicities. They discovered that the scores of blacks are boosted by an average of 230 points, Hispanics by 180 points, and Asians deducted by 50 points. This is systematic bias in favor of less-qualified applicants which will, down the road, magnify the current harm. So given these facts, what is a diversocrat to do? The answer is simple: deny that the SAT is predictive of college success and undermine the one determinant that predicts success. For example, the University of Chicago has already announced that they would no longer be considering SAT scores when it comes to college admission. The reason: they wanted to increase student body diversity. One can expect a ripple effect of admitting less qualified applicants: the usefulness of a degree, the monetary cost to society, the skills of graduates, and quality of the faculty and courses. Why should we even care? Why should colleges and universities base admission on a SAT score? Perhaps the biggest reason is to ensure that the country has an adequate future supply of STEM graduates. This is one area where even the most hardline immigration restrictionist agrees there is a need in the labor pool. When you use race or ethnicity over SAT scores in admissions, you get these facts: Only 16% of blacks or Hispanics who enter the STEM fields in college graduate with a degree in that field (about one-half the rate for Asians or whites). Yet as the Princeton study revealed, we actually penalize those most likely to get a degree in a STEM field when it comes to admission. In the name of diversity, we are effectively shutting out those most likely to meet the need in STEM fields thus perpetuating a need from foreign sources for these fields. Another tool of the diversocrat is to trot out the privilege card. This is rather disingenuous considering that more than half of all students are nonwhite and slightly less than half of all job applicants are nonwhite. In fact, when underrepresented minorities are numerical minorities when it comes to academic success at all levels, it makes even more sense that merit be reestablished as the sole criteria for college admission. Instead, the diversocrat aims to force a less-qualified applicant into a position where they are at a decided competitive disadvantage. This creates all sorts of havoc in the educational system. It creates bitterness and cynicism in the more qualified applicant who was passed over. It often ends in failure for those given the opportunity where their chances of success were slim from the beginning. Entire industries and institutions are undermined to make room for less qualified people. Corporations are now bending over backwards to prove they are inclusive and diverse. It makes no sense for a company to be “racist.” They survive by hiring the most qualified applicants regardless of race or ethnicity. But instead, the diversocrats trot out well-worn phrases like “institutional racism” and the like. If minority communities really want to achieve academic success, it would pay great dividends to cease invoking the specter of racism at every turn. Instead, it may better serve minority communities for their leaders to address the social failures of their communities. Two very salient features that guarantee academic success are gang activity and family status. But, it is just much easier for these leaders to yell “racism” and strong-arm the government to spend more money on failure. | davenj1 | https://www.redstate.com/diary/davenj1/2019/03/31/higher-education-diversocracy/ | 2019-03-31 13:29:26+00:00 | 1,554,053,366 | 1,567,544,604 | education | vocational education |
526,718 | sputnik--2019-02-25--Russia Aims to Implement Dual Diploma Certificate with India in Higher Education | 2019-02-25T00:00:00 | sputnik | Russia Aims to Implement Dual Diploma Certificate with India in Higher Education | New Delhi (Sputnik): In a bid to provide impetus to collaboration in higher education, Russia has proposed a dual diploma certificate with Indian institutions that will provide relief to those Indian students who go to Russia for higher education. Currently, in the absence of a mutual recognition agreement with India, students who have pursued higher education in Russia face difficulties especially in the field of medicine. India and Russia have been discussing the proposed agreement regarding mutual acceptance of degrees and diplomas for years. READ MORE: Prof on US Space Force Creation: It May Have Grave Consequences for Humankind "We have been talking to some of the semi-government institutions in India to implement dual diploma certificate", Mikhail Pogosyan, rector of the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), told Sputnik on Monday. "At present, everybody knows that the institute (MAI) is a renowned and world-class university and so are its graduates. Although there is no formal document covering the recognition process, still it has a world-renowned name. The signing of necessary documents towards this is very important and it will be beneficial for all spheres of education", said Pogosyan added. Besides providing world-class education in engineering, MAI also cooperates with leading Russian and foreign industry-based corporations such as COMAC, ENAC, Safran, BrahMos Aerospace, HAL, PJSC, United Aircraft Corporation, Roscosmos, Rostec and others. Given the current status of industrial cooperation in the field of military aviation and rocket building, and at the same time looking into the future, the Russian institutions hope that the Indian need for proper theoretical and practical skill-sets in these areas will be catered to in a big way. MAI is Russia's leading aerospace university and holds the official status of National Research University. | null | https://sputniknews.com/asia/201902251072725861-russia-dual-diploma-india/ | 2019-02-25 19:20:00+00:00 | 1,551,140,400 | 1,567,547,435 | education | vocational education |
598,430 | thedailycaller--2019-01-27--UGA Became The Birthplace Of Public Higher Education 234 Years Ago | 2019-01-27T00:00:00 | thedailycaller | UGA Became The Birthplace Of Public Higher Education 234 Years Ago | The University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia, became the birthplace of public higher education on Jan. 27, 1785 — 234 years ago. This was the first time an educational system was run by the state rather than by a religious institution. The General Assembly of Georgia earmarked 40,000 acres of land to be endowed for an institution of higher education in 1784, according to UGA’s website. Yale University graduate Abraham Baldwin was UGA’s first president and was part of drafting the charter in 1784. The university was not established until 1801 and the first class graduated in 1804. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, however, says it is the “first public university in the nation” on its website. The long-held dispute seems to be over the establishment date. UNC-Chapel Hill was established in 1789 with the first students arriving in 1795. “UNC is the nation’s first public college to admit students,” UGA Executive Director of Media Communications Greg Trevor said to The Daily Caller News Foundation over email. The College of William and Mary in Virginia also believes it is the first public university since it was chartered in 1693. But the university was private for more than 250 years. William and Mary shut down after the Civil War due to financial troubles. The college started accepting funds from the state in 1906. It still is the second oldest university in the county behind Harvard University in Massachusetts. UGA’s curriculum at the time of its founding was traditional classical studies. It was expanded to include law courses in 1843 and then included agriculture and mechanical arts after receiving federal funds in 1872. Nearly 15 million students attend public colleges or universities with more than 300,000 students who are part of the University System of Georgia, according to the university’s website. (RELATED: Elite Universities Hide Information On Funding From Ultraconservative Nation Of Qatar) More than 60 percent of university-based research is done by public universities and more than two-thirds of first generation students attend public universities, according to American Association of State Colleges and Universities data reported by UGA. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected]. | Neetu Chandak | https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/27/uga-birthplace-public-education/ | 2019-01-27 13:24:36+00:00 | 1,548,613,476 | 1,567,550,697 | education | vocational education |
706,830 | theguardianuk--2019-07-31--Private higher education college goes into administration | 2019-07-31T00:00:00 | theguardianuk | Private higher education college goes into administration | One of the biggest private providers of higher education in England has gone into administration, leaving students stranded on unfinished courses and looking for alternative places to study. GSM London, which offered undergraduate and postgraduate business courses at its campuses in Greenwich and Greenford, told its 3,500 students that all tuition, classes and exams would stop at the end of September. The for-profit college said it had been unable to recruit and retain sufficient student numbers to remain afloat in what it described as “highly challenging market conditions”. A GSM statement said: “Our students will be supported as far as possible while efforts are made to provide them with informed options for where they may be able to continue their studies beyond the end of the current teaching semester. “Discussions are already under way with other higher education providers to identify options, and information, advice and guidance will be provided to students as soon as the details have been finalised.” GSM’s demise will be seen as a blow to government attempts to open up the higher education sector to private providers as part of its marketisation of the higher education sector. It also reflects the growing financial pressures on universities. The University and College Union, which represents university and college workers, called on the government to look again at what it described as the “funding free-for-all” around private providers. “UCU has repeatedly highlighted concerns about the marketisation of education and the rapid increase in poorly regulated private providers,” said its acting general secretary, Paul Cottrell. “We hope that the government finally takes note and looks again at the funding a free-for-all among private providers who enjoy a competitive advantage in being under-regulated, but will always put profit before education.” GSM, which awarded degrees validated by the University of Plymouth, has claimed a longstanding commitment to widening access to, and participation in, higher education, offering a route to degree-level study for students from a wide range of non-traditional academic backgrounds. With insufficient numbers, however, it was forced to seek out additional funding, securing capital cash injections of £22m in the last three years. Efforts to find a new buyer earlier this year failed and administrators were appointed. A Department for Education (DfE) spokesperson said: “We are working closely with the provider and all relevant sector bodies to ensure the students affected are given the support and advice they need to continue their studies. “We want a broad, sustainable market in higher education which offers students flexibility and a wide range of high-quality choices for where and what they study. Whilst the vast majority of institutions are in good financial health, the DfE and [the universities regulator] the Office for Students have been clear that neither will bail out failing providers.” Nearly one in four universities in England were in deficit last year. The number of universities in England with operating deficits in 2017-18 increased to 32, compared with 24 the year before and 10 in 2015-16. Across the UK, the number reporting deficits rose to 47, compared with 40 in 2016-17. Commenting on the collapse of GSM, the Office for Students said: “We understand that this news will be worrying for the students and staff at GSM. We understand that some students who are nearing the end of their studies will be able to stay at GSM but it is likely that most will need to transfer to another higher education provider. “We are, therefore, working with the DfE and partners across the higher education sector to ensure that students are supported and are able to make informed choices about the options that are available to them to transfer and continue their studies, or receive appropriate recognition for their academic achievements to date.” | Sally Weale Education correspondent | https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/31/private-higher-education-college-goes-into-administration | 2019-07-31 18:38:47+00:00 | 1,564,612,727 | 1,567,535,257 | education | vocational education |
1,110,397 | wnd--2019-12-03--The bigger higher education scandal | 2019-12-03T00:00:00 | wnd | The bigger higher education scandal | This year's education scandal saw parents shelling out megabucks to gain college admittance for their children. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 50 people with participating in a scheme to get their children into colleges by cheating on entrance exams or bribing athletic coaches. They paid William Singer, a college-prep professional, more than $25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators and to change test scores on college admittance exams such as the SAT and ACT. As disgusting as this grossly dishonest behavior is, it is only the tiny tip of fraud in higher education. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, "More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes." According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, "when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent." Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test's readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science). It's clear that high schools confer diplomas that attest that a student can read, write and do math at a 12th-grade level when, in fact, most cannot. That means most high diplomas represent fraudulent documents. But when high school graduates enter college, what happens? To get a hint, we can turn to an article by Craig E. Klafter, "Good Grieve! America's Grade Inflation Culture," published in the Fall 2019 edition of Academic Questions. In 1940, only 15% of all grades awarded were A's. By 2018, the average grade point average at some of the nation's leading colleges was A-minus. For example, the average GPA at Brown University (3.75), Stanford (3.68), Harvard College (3.63), Yale University (3.63), Columbia University (3.6), University of California, Berkeley (3.59). The falling standards witnessed at our primary and secondary levels are becoming increasingly the case at tertiary levels. "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" is a study conducted by professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. They found that 45% of 2,300 students at 24 colleges showed no significant improvement in "critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years." TRENDING: Ex-Clinton employee Ronan Farrow says Hillary changed as Weinstein scandal threatened her money An article in News Forum for Lawyers titled "Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent" cites a study done by the American Institutes for Research that revealed that over 75% of two-year college students and 50% of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks. About 20% of four-year college students demonstrated only basic mathematical ability, while a steeper 30% of two-year college students could not progress past elementary arithmetic. NBC News reported that Fortune 500 companies spend about $3 billion annually to train employees in "basic English." Here is a list of some other actual college courses that have been taught at U.S. colleges in recent years: "What If Harry Potter Is Real?" "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame," "Philosophy and Star Trek," "Learning from YouTube," "How To Watch Television," and "Oh, Look, a Chicken!" The questions that immediately come to mind are these: What kind of professor would teach such courses, and what kind of student would spend his time taking such courses? Most importantly, what kind of college president and board of trustees would permit classes in such nonsense? The fact that unscrupulous parents paid millions for special favors from college administrators to enroll their children pales in comparison to the poor educational outcomes, not to mention the gross indoctrination of young people by leftist professors. | Walter Williams | https://www.wnd.com/2019/12/bigger-higher-education-scandal/ | Tue, 03 Dec 2019 23:52:56 +0000 | 1,575,435,176 | 1,575,420,788 | education | vocational education |
1,010,194 | thetelegraph--2019-07-04--First higher education institution is stripped access to student loans amid concerns over low qualit | 2019-07-04T00:00:00 | thetelegraph | First higher education institution is stripped access to student loans amid concerns over low quality degrees | The first higher education institution has been stripped of its access to student loans amid concerns over low quality degrees. The Bloomsbury Institute, which is based in central London and run by a for-profit company, offers degrees in business, accountancy and law. But the higher education watchdog, the Office for Students (OfS) announced on Thursday that it has refused the registration application of the institute, citing concerns about the “quality of student outcomes”. Almost a third (29.3 per cent) of students dropped out before completing their degrees, according to the latest data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) which showed that out of 730 full time students, 215 failed to complete their courses in 2016/17. The OfS said it was also not satisfied with the graduate employment rates for students after completing degrees at the institution. Nick Hillman, director of the higher education policy institute, said this is likely to be the first of a “handful” of institutions that will have its application to register declined. He said that the move is “completely unprecedented” adding that the reputational consequences are “quite severe”. Every higher education provider has to register with the OfS in order to receive public funds, recruit international students, award degrees and call itself a university. | Camilla Turner | https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/04/first-higher-education-institution-stripped-access-student-loans/ | 2019-07-04 16:26:04+00:00 | 1,562,271,964 | 1,567,536,900 | education | vocational education |
1,115,559 | zerohedge--2019-11-12--'Solutions Are Obvious' - The US Higher Education System Is Broken | 2019-11-12T00:00:00 | zerohedge | 'Solutions Are Obvious' - The US Higher Education System Is Broken | Authored by 'Solutions Are Obvious' via The Burning Platform blog, The US higher education system is broken. In many cases, it produces individuals with useless degrees purchased at outrageous cost. The system itself is an infestation of ultra liberal professors, spineless administrators and a student body that becomes more and more radicalized and detached from reality the more courses they take. The higher education system is the incubator for the anti white, anti male, anti Trump, pro freak, pro censorship, anti gun, pro socialist, anti conservative, pro unlimited immigration, pro free everything mentality that pervades what purports to be the evening news. It infantilizes young adults to produce a steady stream of victims and mental midgets completely unprepared to meet the real adult world. In short, it produces the Democrat voter. All is not lost, however. By and large, STEM graduates are less affected by the SJW mental aberration as their critical thinking abilities are necessarily on a higher plane to be able to cope with a curriculum that is more than just opinion. STEM fields have empirically based phenomena to comprehend and must use known tested methods of reasoning and logic to handle the problems and situations a particular field is called upon to investigate. Although STEM students are typically forced to sit through nonsense classes and regurgitate what the instructors deem critical information, they instinctively know its BS and promptly forget it once the class is over. They’re typically not permanently scared. The problem lies with the ‘Basket Weaving’ majors where no proof of anything is required or even possible as it’s all just opinion and supposition. The Humanities / Social Sciences / Liberal Arts courses offer an easy path towards a degree, many of which are absolutely worthless. It’s actually a shame that some of them do lead to living wage and beyond employment options that end up producing many of the fraudulent professions society is encumbered by like Economics, Psychiatry and other specializations that can’t prove anything past common sense. I’ll concentrate primarily on what to do to eliminate only the most egregious fraudulent degrees that are currently plaguing society. The concept of tenure needs to be eliminated. No one should be guaranteed a livelihood by managing to hit some arbitrary mark and thereafter have no responsibility for doing a good job as reviewed by their employer. The education profession needs to get rid of the dead wood clogging the system and consuming resources. All higher education facilities should be mandated to provide their graduates with job opportunities via an employment agency owned and operated by the institution, not a contracted for service. The schools should be totally responsible for finding each graduate a position in the degree field of study for 5 years post graduation. If the institution is unable to place a graduate, then the former student is entitled to a full refund of all tuition paid for a proven obviously useless degree plus 5 times tuition paid for the waste of time involved and to provide the former student with a funds cushion to get retrained in something with a future. In the case where a graduate is unemployable for no reason the school is responsible for or where there is a dispute over responsibility, a 3rd party would be called upon to make a judgment. If this were implemented, Gender Studies, Recreational Science, Hospitality Science, Museum Curator, Drama Studies and similar courses would disappear overnight from most campuses along with the faculty that teach the classes. The schools know these are for the most part BS courses and know that the chances of someone getting employed with one of the basket weaving degrees is so low that it would be financially too risky to offer the course. Gone would be the professors teaching these nonsense courses. Gone would be the lenders to provide the student loans, guaranteed by the Fed Gov which steals the funds from the general public. Gone would be the students mentally or some other way incapable of STEM degrees with no option but to consider vocational training or learn how to say – ‘Do you want fries with that’. Gone would be the windfall profits higher ed facilities have enjoyed in recent decades. Gone would be the unsustainable building boom for facilities completely unrelated to teaching but used as enticements to attract low IQ students easily dazzled by shiny objects. Gone would be the nonsense classes STEM students are now forced to take. Gone would be the environment were the purveyors of bullshit get to indoctrinate the latest crop of weak susceptible minds. Some may claim this violated free market principles. I would counter that the advancement of institutionalized fraud is not in the society’s best interests. If a student were to sign away his/her rights to compensation and effectively opt for today’s environment, then that would absolve the institution of responsibility. The free market would be restored as long as informed consent is involved. In addition, it should be obvious that no one should be able to get an advanced degree in a field that can’t prove it’s basic precepts. As mentioned previously, something like Economics is almost entirely BS. Economists can’t prove anything past common sense and can’t even provide a proper postmortem after an economic catastrophe. Likewise, Psychiatry has not a single empirical test for the hundreds of conditions listed in their DSM. Psychiatry is opinion masquerading as science and is simply an outlet for Big Pharma to push their mind altering poisons. The large majority of mass shooters have been on prescription only psychoactive drugs. Other fields that I generally refer to as the ‘story telling’ professions should likewise be reigned in. Paleontology, Anthropology, Cosmology, large portions of Geology and many more fields are largely based on a plausible story as their foundation, sans evidence. Absolute proof for their assertions is impossible and consequently it should be impossible to get a degree above Bachelors in these disciplines. No one should claim to be an expert (PhD) in a field that is based on opinion. In the off chance that something like Climate Science might someday actually be able to provide proof of their assertions, it, as an example, should be able to produce Bachelors graduates that can attempt to further the field but would no longer be able to fool the public into thinking they know what’s going on due to their bogus PhD pedigree. | Tyler Durden | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/COSaPYTTVNs/solutions-are-obvious-us-higher-education-system-broken | Tue, 12 Nov 2019 02:45:00 +0000 | 1,573,544,700 | 1,573,563,331 | education | vocational education |
119,198 | conservativehome--2019-09-20--Richard Bingley Five pillars of higher education success driven by Conservative reforms | 2019-09-20T00:00:00 | conservativehome | Richard Bingley: Five pillars of higher education success driven by Conservative reforms | Richard Bingley is the Managing Director of a private Higher Education Institution and former Director of a public sector UK University Business School. For almost a decade, I’ve read numerous policy documents and op-ed pieces about the supposed dire state of UK higher education. Despite the fact that the UK founded three of the world’s top ten universities and checks in at number two on the QS World Ranking of higher education systems. Often such pontifications are by left-leaning societal advisers or consultants who – no matter how bright and passionate – perhaps have never taught within a university, nor gained the appropriate postgraduate qualification to do so. Their solutions are often to strangle our sector with yet more regulation or formal reviews. They usually involve cutting the tuition fees and/or not trusting the tutor to deliver in class. Paradoxically, the longer I’ve worked in higher education – in both the public and private sector side – the more straightforward I’ve found it to understand the fee-paying customer. Most rightly want, and deserve, connectivity with experienced, industry-facing tutors, practical curricula relevant to the world of work, and the opportunity to realistically apply for decent job opportunities at the end. So, let’s be clear: British higher education is at a far stronger place than perhaps it has ever been. The most recent Conservative government innovations have been refreshing both for providers (well, those who are ambitious for their learners) and also for consumers. They have introduced market realism and real-world innovation. Higher Degree Apprenticeships (HDAs) stand to transform vast sections of the sector, with a major shift away from an outdated textbook approach toward teaching practicalities and underpinning theory hand-in-glove with employers. Graduates with HDAs will get jobs, quite simply because most already are employed by their sponsor. The downside for higher education is that apprenticeships are too cumbersome to manage and the margin for the teaching institution is far too thin to incentivise widespread engagement or to build in student protection contingencies if something goes wrong. The newly established Office for Students (OfS), which has already taken a robust intervention to ‘rescue’ a failing provider, has geared itself towards widening access and thinning down the frequency of intensive regulatory reviews, whilst the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has empowered learners to understand the roles and responsibilities of higher education providers. Quite simply, if marketing is incorrect, then service providers will be held to account (often by publishing corrections and repaying a portion of money to the consumer.) After all, if a learner is paying almost £30,000 for course fees over three years, they surely should have the rights of any comparable consumer. Most practical academics will tell you that there are common characteristics that drive forward higher-performing education institutions (note, that I didn’t use the word ‘ranking’). Aligned to most reforms described above, my five pillars for success are: 1) Effective, broad-based, governance. Independent-minded, qualified experts, key stakeholders, industry networks and paying customers (student reps) are at the heart of oversight and formal strategic advice. The institution and its staff intuitively know and subscribe to its core mission, inherent strengths and collective sense of purpose. 2) Focus on what matters. The institution’s senior management does not chase ever-changing shadows of market behaviour driven by today’s preposterous levels of media hype. Too many higher education Institutions mimic poor restaurants by offering a vast array of half-baked course products, unrelated to their unique origins and specialisms. 3) Discipline. Learners… turn up on time and be prepared. Turn off the phone. Tutors… informal and formal assessment promptly marked with personal, constructive feed-back. Non-attendees removed and Student Finance informed. The demoralisation of good performers, because bad performers are tolerated, should never be permitted 4) Quality of teaching. Tutors must exude authority. Authority is usually only earned from learners if a) the tutor can point to pre-existing high-achievement in both academia and the ‘real world’, and b) the tutor can apply their career achievement into the classroom in an engaging, structured manner. All tutors must be credible ‘captains of ship’. If you can’t command an audience, don’t apply to a profession which is all about working one! 5) Intensive academic support. If ministers want to widen access and ensure that learners can excel, intensive support of student engagement must be invested in. Academic support is costly and plans outlined in the recent Augar Review to significantly reduce student fees raises a problem in this regard. Further sector concerns around finance are magnified by Jeremy Corbyn’s policy to scrap tuition fees altogether, and directly fund higher education by £9.5bn (funded by increasing income tax for those above £80,000). This is an unrealistic throwback, and would prove totally unworkable and destructive. Firstly, the funding pot is too small for the modern-day global business that is British higher education provision. Second, removing consumer power is likely to make degree programmes less job-market focused, and reverse employability progress made during the past decade. If universities and colleges struggle to gain income from teaching, the top-end will revert principally to research. (Most research that is not ‘world class’ is money down an endless drain: it earns, and pays for, nothing.) Meanwhile other teaching-intensive institutions, usually the more accessible former-polytechnics and private providers, often sited within Labour’s own heartlands (if any exist these days) will collapse. In the real world of higher education, cash flow generated by tuition fees matter. It provides more institutional stability and also drives up internationalisation and diversity, both within the teaching curriculum and among the audiences that an institution can reach out to and attract. If providers struggle further to attract or retain decent lecturers (particularly those with industry experience and contacts – remember, this is a global employment market!), and academic staff development budgets are trimmed further, how can this ultimately help the learner? For a ‘real world’ example in how a student fee cut might impact upon the coal-face, consider as follows: a Grade 9 ‘Lecturer with little or no classroom teaching experience, nor industry work experience, nor post-grad teaching certificate, is appointed to an undergraduate teaching post at £30,000 per annum. This is likely to occur because a Grade 10 ‘Senior Lecturer’ (circa £50,000 per annum), with much stronger career and academic credentials, including industry experience and contacts, had, in effect, made themselves too expensive for the sector. This is where we are heading back to under Corbyn’s existing proposal. Lower fees and more regulation aren’t always the best fix. Strong governance, strong institutional identity, strong discipline, strong teaching and strong academic support, always are. | Richard Bingley | https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2019/09/richard-bingley-five-pillars-of-higher-education-success-driven-by-conservative-reforms.html | 2019-09-20 10:30:21+00:00 | 1,568,989,821 | 1,569,590,578 | education | vocational education |
1,095,022 | washingtonpost--2019-10-16--Hits and misses in the House higher education bill | 2019-10-16T00:00:00 | washingtonpost | Hits and misses in the House higher education bill | Under the current student loan plan, borrowers can have their monthly payment capped to a percentage of their earnings, with the balance forgiven after 20 to 25 years. Existing plans allow borrowers to pay nothing if they lack discretionary income, meaning they lack any earnings above 150 percent of the federal poverty line ($18,735 for a single person). House Democrats would increase the repayment threshold to 250 percent, about $31,225 for an individual, in 2019. And after 20 years of payments, including months when the payment is zero, the borrower would have the balance forgiven. Those changes could result in the federal government forgiving more debt. In a review of the bill, policy analysts at the think tank New America said raising the threshold “establishes a higher baseline that ensures borrowers have the resources needed to provide for necessities like food and housing.” Under the proposed measure, participants’ income would be automatically recertified on an annual basis, rather than requiring borrowers to manually provide the information to remain in the program. Borrowers routinely fall out of repayment plans when they fail to verify their income every year, often resulting in higher monthly payments until the issue is resolved. House Democrats would also automatically enroll people who are more than 120 days delinquent on their loans into the income-driven plan, a change that could ensure borrowers avoid default. Colleges with long-standing participation and track records of helping students with children graduate would be eligible for more money when appropriations for the program exceed $140 million a year. Schools could receive up to 20 percent of their annual grant award as a bonus. To make the bonus effective, the Education Department would need to update the way it measures whether students benefiting from the program are continuing their studies or graduating. A recent Government Accountability Office report noted that the existing calculation fails to include students who transferred from a community college to a four-year institution. The sudden loss of housing, not having enough to eat or even car repairs can derail students from remaining in college and earning a degree. Schools have been experimenting with emergency grants for years to retain students pushed to the edge of dropping out by an unforeseen hardship. The bill also changes the allocation formula of the supplemental grant program to direct money to colleges based on the percentage of low-income students, not how long the school has participated in the program. Pell Grant increase: House Democrats want to boost the maximum Pell Grant award for low-income students by $500 and tie increases to inflation so the value of the grant doesn’t diminish. This would result in a total award of $6,695 for fiscal year 2021 and an estimated award of $8,305 by fiscal 2029, according to the bill. The purchasing power of Pell, the primary source of federal grant aid for millions of students whose families typically earn less than $60,000 a year, has waned amid rising college costs. The maximum Pell Grant now covers 29 percent of the cost of attending a four-year public university, compared with 79 percent in 1975 and 42 percent in 2001, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “This bill makes a down payment on college affordability through increasing Pell, but ultimately we’ll need much larger investments in the program to make college affordable for low-income students and families,” said Wil Del Pilar, vice president of higher education at the Education Trust, an advocacy group. House Education Committee aides say the boost to Pell should be viewed in the context of other increases in grant aid that, taken as a whole, would drive down the cost of college for low-income students. The measure contains no provision to cap the fees collection agencies can charge or prevent states from suspending a defaulted borrower’s professional license. Although the federal government offers ways to resolve a default, borrowers can still face fees of up to 25 percent of the loan balance. | Danielle Douglas-Gabriel | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/higher-education/hits-and-misses-in-the-house-higher-education-bill/2019/10/16/ec983c0b-4b48-468e-bdb8-92677f28c09a_story.html | Wed, 16 Oct 2019 17:50:51 EDT | 1,571,262,651 | 1,571,263,910 | education | vocational education |
1,043,502 | thinkprogress--2019-01-07--Education Department plans to release proposals deregulating higher education | 2019-01-07T00:00:00 | thinkprogress | Education Department plans to release proposals deregulating higher education | The Trump administration plans to release a draft of proposals to further deregulate higher education on Monday. The Education Department reportedly intends to reduce the responsibilities of accreditors for colleges and universities — effectively gutting consumer protections for college students. The department is taking aim at protections for students receiving distance education, the credit hour standard, and oversight of faculty communication with students. Antoinette Flores, associate director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, said the proposals may seem insignificant and technical, but the targeted regulations are “the building blocks for consumer protection” in higher education. She said the department is reducing oversight of accrediting agencies and transparency requirements of institutions. (Editor’s note: ThinkProgress is an editorially independent newsroom housed at theCenter for American Progress.) “The department is saying this is all about innovation. What it’s doing is it’s making it very easy for non-accredited, unvetted institutional providers to access federal student aid money. It’s making it very easy to become an accreditor with no experience,” Flores said. The department’s proposals will go through negotiated rulemaking beginning on January 14. During this time, Congress is preparing for conversations over the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which will touch on many of the issues the department’s proposals focus on. Flores said it seemed odd for the department to push these sweeping changes now, when Congress is set to consider these same issues in public hearings. One of the biggest changes that the department proposed was to get rid of the prohibition on colleges that receive federal funds outsourcing more than 50 percent of their programs to non-accredited providers. Flores said this would be like Purdue University giving all of its operations for a program to a for-profit college chain. “That means students could potentially be buying something and getting something else entirely and it’s not really clear who is providing the education,” she said. “They don’t really have any restrictions or oversight on these kinds of agreements so a school could outsource its programs to a coding boot camp that the federal government, states, and accreditors have zero oversight of or accountability for. It’s kind of like a shell game.” It would also eliminate the Obama-era credit-hour definition and would let colleges and accreditors decide on how to evaluate a student’s progress. That means, for example, that schools can inflate credit hours and charge students significantly more money, something Flores said has happened in the past. There would also be a rewrite of the “regular and substantive interaction,” which requires distance programs, like online learning, to ensure there is “regular and substantive” instructor and student interaction. “When you eliminate that, it basically means that institutions can provide online textbooks, jack up charges, and students are getting a low quality option for more money,” Flores said. The rulemaking would also drop some restrictions on religious colleges. This means accreditors can’t do anything about colleges that don’t meet accreditation standards as long as it is a “result of an institution’s adherence to its religious mission in any of its policies and practices,” according to Politico. Many of the targeted regulations were created around the time of the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, and were focused on ensuring for-profit colleges didn’t commit abuses, Flores added. President George H.W. Bush said the law would “crack down on sham schools that have defrauded students and the American taxpayer.” Since Betsy DeVos took control of the Education Department, the department has taken many steps to deregulate higher education, particularly in ways that benefit for-profit colleges and harm students defrauded by for-profit colleges. The department dismantled a team investigating for-profit colleges. It moved to cancel the gainful employment rule, which restricted educational companies’ access to student loan dollars if they didn’t prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation, as well as the borrower defense to repayment rule, which created a process for students to seek cancellation of loans if their schools defrauded them. The department announced for-profit colleges no longer have to follow requirements to post median earnings on websites and has introduced proposed rules to replace Obama-era regulation of for-profit colleges. There is a possibility, however, that the department’s most recent proposals will falter as some of their previous efforts to deregulate higher education have. In September of 2018, U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss ruled that DeVos’ actions to stall protections for defrauded students were illegal. Moss said her decision to move forward without a rulemaking process was “procedurally invalid” and “arbitrary and capricious.” DeVos did not have better luck in the courts when it came to creating a new system for defrauded students to receive relief. In October of 2018, U.S. District Judge Sallie Kim certified that more than 100,000 students defrauded by Corinthian Colleges make up a class to bring a lawsuit against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos after the department created a new tiered system that would prevent some defrauded students from receiving full loan forgiveness. The department also missed an important deadline to overhaul rules regarding for-profit colleges, including the gainful employment rule. “I think what we’ve learned from borrower defense and gainful employment is that this department does not exactly have a great track record for doing these things successfully,” Flores said. “They’re riddled with errors and problems so I would kind of expect that to be the same here. Flores added, “They aren’t really including states here at the negotiating table and a lot of these regulations impact state laws. It’s kind of unprecedented in recent regulatory history for the department not to have a seat for states or attorneys general or consumer advocates.” | Casey Quinlan | https://thinkprogress.org/education-department-proposals-could-mean-students-get-low-quality-option-for-more-money-9fb6ba80744c/ | 2019-01-07 20:11:52+00:00 | 1,546,909,912 | 1,567,553,643 | education | vocational education |
360,311 | newsweek--2019-01-16--How Gen Z Entrepreneurs Are Leaning Into Higher Education | 2019-01-16T00:00:00 | newsweek | How Gen Z Entrepreneurs Are Leaning Into Higher Education | Today’s college students—dubbed Generation Z—are beginning to make their mark on the workplace with a distinctly unconventional and often irreverent approach to problem-solving. In my day-to-day interactions with our students, I find that this group doesn’t only ask “Why?” they ask “How can I fix that?” And their curiosity, independence, energy and assertiveness are transforming the entrepreneurial space. These post-millennials are less like the bumbling geeks from the cast of the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley” and more in the spirit of a focused problem-solver like a young MacGyver, who would rather invent and innovate as a means to learning and discovery. What’s energizing to a university president like me is watching this transformation take place as more and more undergraduates are partnering with public institutions and fueling the next wave of ingenuity. A 2011 survey by Gallup found 77 percent of students in grades 5 through 12 said they want to be their own boss and 45 percent planned to start their own business. Today, many of those students are now in college. For example, when I first met Hunter Swisher as an undergraduate plant pathology student at Penn State, he was busy turning scientific turfgrass research that he learned about in class into a commercial product and startup company. Swisher saw commercial potential in his professor’s research and worked closely with him to transfer that knowledge into a possible viable product. Swisher connected with the university’s startup incubator and vast alumni network, put in the work, and became a CEO of his own small business before he walked across the stage at commencement in 2016. Today, his company Phospholutions has five employees and counting and their treatment is being used on more than 50 golf courses in 10 states. Swisher is not alone in pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams while still in college. He is just one of many entrepreneurs starting their own companies by leveraging resources at their colleges and universities. Penn State, Indiana University, University of North Carolina, Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, Ohio State and other leading public institutions all have thriving entrepreneurial centers that are available to all students, as well as community members and businesses. Penn State alone has opened 21 entrepreneurial spaces across Pennsylvania, and in just two years, we’ve engaged with more than 4,500 students. Moving scientific discoveries into a breakthrough business opportunity is powering economic growth and creating jobs. Consider that nationally—in 2017 alone—the Association of University Technology Managers reported: Undergraduate students at public universities are fueling this trend Traditionally, higher education has focused their investment on faculty entrepreneurs, hoping to find a breakthrough like the next Gatorade (University of Florida) or Lyrica (Northwestern University). Since universities don’t own the rights to undergraduate intellectual property, there has been less incentive to support these efforts. While we universities are taking a risk on students without a guaranteed immediate return on investment, we think the potential outcomes – for example in alumni support and building our local economies – are worth it. With their minds set on this entrepreneurial future, a common narrative has emerged that students are skipping college to start their own businesses. In reality, 8 in 10 students believe college is important to achieving their career goals. Sixty-three percent of those same students—all between the ages of 16 and 19—said they want to learn about entrepreneurship in college, including how to start a business. Land-grant and public institutions are contributing the practical education that can contribute to economic growth and development. Indeed, generally speaking talent-driven innovation was identified as the most important factor by the Deloitte-U.S. Council on Competitiveness. Through skills training and engaged entrepreneurial experiences, students are realizing the profound impact they can have by solving a problem as well as overcoming obstacles, failures and flops—all under the umbrella of university guidance and resource support. Research and education have always opened doors that benefit the nation we serve. Today, public colleges and universities are well-positioned to transform our economy and infuse it with innovation and energy. As chair of the Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU) newly formed Commission on Economic and Community Engagement (CECE), I’m working with universities and our government partners to identify key areas crucial to maximizing the impact of public research universities. By the end of this year, tens of millions of Generation Zers will enter the workforce. The challenge for higher education will be how to help the world of business to better harness the many talents, energy and inquisitiveness that Generation Zers bring to the table. The many partnerships that universities have formed with entrepreneurial students serve as an important first step toward this goal. Editor’s note: this piece has been updated to reflect accurately Phospholutions’ current commercial agreements. Eric J. Barron is president of Pennsylvania State University. This article is republished from the Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. | null | https://www.newsweek.com/generation-z-entrepreneurs-higher-education-1293116?utm_source=Public&utm_medium=Feed&utm_campaign=Distribution | 2019-01-16 16:58:36+00:00 | 1,547,675,916 | 1,567,552,149 | education | vocational education |
44,220 | bbcuk--2019-10-13--The Swansea University class with Olympic athletes | 2019-10-13T00:00:00 | bbcuk | The Swansea University class with Olympic athletes | A group of seven former Olympians is set to be the last students to take on a degree at a Welsh university before the course moves to Belgium. The course - a master's in sports ethics and integrity at Swansea University - aims to teach future sports administrators about anti-doping, illegal betting and child protection. The class of 26 has won two Olympic gold medals, three silvers and a bronze, and one student holds the fifth-longest standing world record in athletics history. That man is Kevin Young, a 400m hurdler whose time of 46.78s at the 1992 games in Barcelona has still not been beaten. • Tokyo 2020 Olympics: With one year to go what are the key stories to watch? • Naomi Osaka: World number three to give up US citizenship to represent Japan at Olympics "I can't believe that was 27 years ago" he said. "It seems like yesterday I was standing on the podium and it's crazy my record has stood for so long. "As athletes we're always looking to recreate the buzz of nights like that, and it can be pretty depressing once you're retired, but this sort of course is - not the same feeling - but a good feeling, being able to give something back to the sports which gave us so much." He is joined in his class by silver medal-winning swimmer Allison Wagner, Grenadian runner Alleyne Francique, taekwondo artitst Sharon Jewell, Australian luger Hannah Campbell-Pegg, middle-distance runner Nikki Hamblin from New Zealand and five-time Olympian Bosede Kaffo, who represented Nigeria in table tennis five times. The course is part of the EU's Erasmus Mundus scheme and aims to launch the students into "high-level sporting administration and governance careers". Over two years the students will take modules at five partner universities across Europe, but coming to Wales has been a surprise for some of the former athletes, with Mr Young thinking the course was online. "I packed in a hurry, I thought to bring my medal to show people, but didn't think to pack a coat," he added. But despite the downpours he has enjoyed other parts of Welsh culture, namely an early morning trip to the pub to watch Wales beat Australia 29-25 in the Rugby World Cup in Japan. But there will not be any more Olympians coming to Wales for the course in future years. Prof Mike McNamee, who runs the course, said: "With the spectre of hard Brexit on the horizon we have had to negotiate with our partners in Belgium to take over the coordinating role. "It's great that I'm still the programme director and based here in Swansea University, but Swansea has had to surrender its lead role, which is a tragedy because we conceived of the entire programme." | null | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-49971370 | Sun, 13 Oct 2019 01:46:24 GMT | 1,570,945,584 | 1,570,970,646 | education | vocational education |
782,755 | theirishtimes--2019-01-01--New technological university Irelands largest third-level body | 2019-01-01T00:00:00 | theirishtimes | New technological university Ireland’s largest third-level body | Ireland’s first technological university has been formally established by law and is now the country’s largest third-level institution. Technological University Dublin officially came into being on January 1st and has 28,000 students and more than 3,000 staff. The main campus for the university – formed from the merger of Dublin Institute of Technology, IT Tallaght and IT Blanchardstown – will be in Grangegorman. However, it will continue to operate out of existing campuses at Tallaght and Blanchardstown. Last month, a senior UCD academic, Prof David FitzPatrick, was appointed as president of TU Dublin. His term of office officially began on January 1st. He was principal of UCD’s college of engineering and architecture, and dean of engineering, as well as provost of the Beijing-Dublin International College, a joint venture between UCD and Beijing University of Technology. Prof Fitzpatrick is likely to face a daunting challenge in fulfilling the combined potential of the three separate institutions. Staff across all three colleges, for example, have been guaranteed that they will not be reassigned to another of the merging institutions, which limits the potential for change. The move to create technological universities in Ireland follows a trend across Europe to create larger third-level institutions with greater scale, strength and expertise. Critics, however, say the move amounts to little more than a nameplate change and claim the criteria required to secure technological university status have been “dumbed down”. A number of other institutes of technology form part of three other separate groups in Munster, Connacht-Ulster and the southeast which are bidding to also become technological universities. | null | https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/new-technological-university-ireland-s-largest-third-level-body-1.3745525 | 2019-01-01 20:24:13+00:00 | 1,546,392,253 | 1,567,554,301 | education | vocational education |
1,057,530 | truepundit--2019-11-15--FBI: University of Michigan researcher stole technical data, sent to brother ‘linked to Iran’s nucle | 2019-11-15T00:00:00 | truepundit | FBI: University of Michigan researcher stole technical data, sent to brother ‘linked to Iran’s nuclear weapons industry’ | That’s the word a “senior company official” used to describe the potential fallout from an Iranian-American researcher at the University of Michigan who stole confidential files about a secret aerospace supercomputer and sent them to his brother in Iran, where the brother works on nuclear missiles, according to the FBI. Federal agents arrested Ypsilanti engineer and UM employee Amin Hasanzadeh late last month on charges of interstate transportation of stolen property, fraud and misuse of visas, permits or other documents – the former for sending trade secrets to Iran, and the latter for lying about serving in the Iranian military. Hasandzadeh appeared last week for a bond hearing in Detroit, where a judge denied a request for bail pending trial. The Detroit News reports: He is charged with stealing technical data from an unidentified company in Metro Detroit and sending it to his brother, who is linked to Iran’s nuclear weapons industry. Hasanzadeh, an Iranian military veteran, was allegedly involved in a yearlong plan to steal confidential data about a secret project involving an aerospace industry supercomputer, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday. The 42-year-old, a lawful permanent resident in the U.S., allegedly started sending trade secrets and important files on the company’s top projects to his brother less than a week after starting with the company. – READ MORE | admin | https://truepundit.com/fbi-university-of-michigan-researcher-stole-technical-data-sent-to-brother-linked-to-irans-nuclear-weapons-industry/ | Fri, 15 Nov 2019 11:56:06 +0000 | 1,573,836,966 | 1,573,821,950 | education | vocational education |
76,968 | breitbart--2019-12-06--University of Scranton Refuses Recognition for Turning Point USA Group | 2019-12-06T00:00:00 | breitbart | University of Scranton Refuses Recognition for Turning Point USA Group | Administrators at the University of Scranton are allowing the school’s student government to ban Turning Point USA (TPUSA) from campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling on the university to uphold its students’ First Amendment rights. After University of Scranton’s administration promised a group of conservative students that their TPUSA organization would be recognized on campus, administrators instead sided with the school’s student government, which decided to ban the conservative student group, according to a statement by FIRE on Thursday. FIRE is now calling on the university to “defend students’ right to form political groups free from political discrimination,” adding that the school “must respect its students’ ability to hold viewpoints that members of the student government may deem unpopular.” “Yikes, nope, denied,” said University of Scranton student government president in response to a social media post about creating a TPUSA group on campus, according to FIRE, which added that the president further implied that even if the conservative students received enough student government support to become an officially recognized group, he would unilaterally veto the vote. After allegedly being told in October that TPUSA Scranton had been approved, student government members later rescinded approval in a closed-door meeting, whereafter they told TPUSA members that they did not, in fact, approve the conservative group. According to FIRE, the school’s student government said that TPUSA Scranton had won a majority vote, but that they needed two-thirds — a super-majority — of student government’s approval in order to become an officially recognized student organization on campus. “It is irrelevant whether the threshold vote required is a simple or a two-thirds majority,” said FIRE attorney Katlyn Patton in a letter to the university administration. “The two-thirds majority requirement simply allows a smaller faction to refuse rights based on viewpoint. In either event, the result is impermissible at an institution that promises its students freedom of expression.” “Becoming a recognized student group at the University of Scranton should not be a popularity contest,” she added. “The rejection of TPUSA Scranton after several hours of discussion and a secret meeting is a clear result of viewpoint discrimination — and FIRE will defend all students, regardless of political ideology, who want to express their views by forming a student organization.” While the University of Scranton is a private school, FIRE noted that the university is still “both morally and contractually bound to honor the explicit promises of freedom of expression it makes to its students.” The organization further noted that the university’s “Statement of Philosophy” states that “[f]reedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of the individual must be preserved.” “While our goals on campus were to promote political activism, engage in friendly discussion, and even participate in community service, it was made clear that our voices have been silenced,” said student Noah Kraft, the prospective treasurer of TPUSA Scranton. FIRE said that it first wrote the university president, Scott R. Pilarz, on November 13, and received a response from the school on November 26, informing the organization that the school will be refusing to defend its students’ rights. “It’s a shame that the University of Scranton’s administration has failed to recognize that some members of our student Senate have abandoned the idea of representing the interests of their constituents,” said student Cody Morgan, the prospective president of TPUSA Scranton. “Instead, they used the power of their office to push their own political agendas and ideologies, which are in no way reflective of the majority of the student body, to suppress the voices and ideas of students who share opposing viewpoints,” he added. While many universities allow their student governments to have a certain degree of autonomy, school administrators have also been known to intervene and override resolutions that may involve student government members exuding their personal political biases through the decisions that they make regarding their conservative peers. Earlier this year at Texas State University, for example, the university president reiterated the importance of free speech in a statement elaborating on why the school will not allow its student senators to ban TPUSA from campus, despite the student government voting to do so. You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram. | Alana Mastrangelo | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breitbart/~3/XJJSdR1V3sE/ | Fri, 06 Dec 2019 18:22:06 +0000 | 1,575,674,526 | 1,575,677,303 | education | vocational education |
77,481 | breitbart--2019-12-15--91-Year-Old Grandma Graduates from University of Alabama | 2019-12-15T00:00:00 | breitbart | 91-Year-Old Grandma Graduates from University of Alabama | A 91-year-old grandmother in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, achieved a lifelong goal Saturday after putting it off for the past 73 years. Jaqueline Baird Tucker began her college education in 1946 but left school because she wanted to start a family, according to WBALTV. Her granddaughter, Elisabeth, knew she had always regretted not finishing her degree, so she wrote a letter last year to the University of Alabama and asked if they could help make Jaqueline’s dream come true. Since then, she has worked tirelessly to be able to walk across the stage on graduation day to receive her bachelor’s degree in Human Environmental Sciences, which she did Saturday afternoon. “The University of Alabama will award some 2,280 degrees during fall commencement Dec. 14,” the university’s website read. “With a beautiful campus, dozens of challenging academic programs, expert and world-renown faculty and numerous opportunities for service and growth, The University of Alabama is a place where legends are made.” In May 2018, a similar instance occurred when 87-year-old Patricia Cassity graduated from the university with a bachelors of science from the College of Human Environmental Science, according to CBS 42. Patricia had left school without finishing her education in 1947, just one year after Jaqueline did the same. “In my last quarter, I decided to bolt and get away from all pressure and restraints and parents telling me what to do, and that age, I thought I knew more than they did so I went to Alaska to work for the U.S. Air Force,” she said. Patricia also married and raised a family but that did not mean she felt no regret over not getting her degree. So when her husband passed away, she decided to go back to school. “They had to get transcript out of the archive and I thought that will take forever. Is it in the attic in a box? Or down in the basement? They were able to pull it right out,” Patricia recalled. To her surprise, she had already completed the coursework required for the degree but was never told. “It’s hard to put into words. It’s closure for 70 years I thought about it and it’s really happening,” she commented, adding “I’ll probably get a job and say I’m a college graduate.” | Amy Furr | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breitbart/~3/2quGVUPmhiY/ | Sun, 15 Dec 2019 20:43:38 +0000 | 1,576,460,618 | 1,576,454,881 | education | vocational education |
129,927 | dailyheraldchicago--2019-11-11--Officials: Indiana University's online enrollment is growing | 2019-11-11T00:00:00 | dailyheraldchicago | Officials: Indiana University's online enrollment is growing | BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University officials say enrollment in online courses has soared during the past decade across the school's campuses even as overall student enrollment has dropped. School research shows total enrollment of degree-seeking students at IU campuses fell by nearly 5% from the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2019. But The Herald-Times reports that the number of students taking at least one online course has more than doubled during the same time. IU's online education director Chris Foley noted that most students who take online classes are undergraduates and typically in their early 20s. Administrators say IU must continue to prioritize growth in its online space as students' expectations change and the university prepares for a decline in the number of high school graduates. | null | http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20191111/news/311119898/ | Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:05:00 -0500 | 1,573,517,100 | 1,573,518,202 | education | vocational education |
159,641 | eveningstandard--2019-01-15--UK university in social media blackout - and urges students to do same | 2019-01-15T00:00:00 | eveningstandard | UK university in social media blackout - and urges students to do same | A UK university is taking the “unprecedented step” of switching off its social media channels to encourage students to do their own digital detox. De Montfort University, in Leicester, is going on a social media blackout between Wednesday and Monday. The university is trying to draw attention to the impact of “unrestrained” social media use on mental health. During the five-day period, it wants students to join in the experiment to see if it makes a difference. Vice-chancellor Prof Dominic Shellard said: “I have been really struck and shocked by the degree to which their over-engagement with social media is having a negative impact on their mental health. “The last thing we are doing at night is flicking through our Twitter feeds. We wake up in the middle of the night and we are looking at our Instagram. “Some of us, me in particular, have lost the ability to sit quietly for three minutes and not be flicking through their phone.” He added: “We are going to use it [the blackout] as an experiment to see if it makes any difference.” | James Morris | https://www.standard.co.uk/news/education/uk-university-in-social-media-blackout-and-urges-students-to-do-same-a4039791.html | 2019-01-15 17:52:44+00:00 | 1,547,592,764 | 1,567,552,349 | education | vocational education |
185,029 | eveningstandard--2019-09-21--London Interdisciplinary School Applications set to open for new revolutionary university tackling | 2019-09-21T00:00:00 | eveningstandard | London Interdisciplinary School: Applications set to open for new revolutionary university tackling today's real world problems | A new revolutionary London university, which aims to tackle real world problems, will open applications next week for its first ever student intake in September 2020. The London Interdisciplinary School is launching a university model that connects academic theory to practical problem solving for some of the world's most pressing issues. LIS has already partnered with Virgin, the Metropolitan Police, Jacobs and McKinsey as well as being backed by The Funding Circle and smoothie giant, Innocent. These will also offer students paid placements on London living wage. Its single degree, Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods, will make connections to many subjects on the way to solving a global crisis. Plastic pollution, ageing in society, childhood obesity, climate change, supply chains, and knife crime are just some of the topics explored. "Poetry is neuroscience. There is creative combinations everywhere," says the university's Academic Lead Carl Gombrich - a former UCL professor for Interdisciplinary Education, who successfully launched its cutting-edge Arts and Science degree. Co-founder and CEO Ed Fidoe, who left McKinsey in 2012 to set up School 21 in Stratford, also said: "Take fast fashion - you need to understand materials, economics, aesthetic and design. "But you also need to know about social media and technology, as well as ethical behaviour like not wearing an item once then throwing it away. "Only through understanding all these different disciplines, do you start to understand fast fashion." Mr Gombrich also pointed out that world has changed so much in the last 20 years because of the internet, yet most universities have not adapted from the 19th Century model. "With students, they still chop and put them into boxes," he said. "But you can learn poetry, then equally learn machine learning and data science. "What we are seeing now is that students, more than ever, feel a connection to what is going on in the real world but are in an academic environment that is not necessarily connecting to it." "The big difference with traditional universities is that you are problem-based and have to learn these interdisciplinary methods, which are quantitative and qualitative," Mr Fidoe added. The LIS campus location will be announced later this year, although bosses say it will be located in London's Zone 1 or 2, with students living as close as possible to "create a community". For 2020, pupils can apply directly to the school on a yet-to-be confirmed date next week until January - so it can be in addition to their UCAS five. The entry requirements are focused on diversity with no grade minimum bar set for grades. The university looks at the context of education, personal background and family to understand the individual's achievement given their starting point in life. On Saturday, the school is holding one of its themed "Discovery Days" in Whitechapel, where 40 school pupils get to grill the team about job prospects, the student set-up and how the degree works. They will also do an interdisciplinary workshop to approach problems surrounding fast fashion. The university has already been flooded with interest from sixth formers around the country. One prospective student, Tiffany Pethick said: ""Why am I excited to apply? To be frank, the global problems we face scare me. And what scares me even more? The little that is being done to tackle them. "LIS poses as a breath of fresh air - a place where like-minded people can tackle current problems in a stimulating and creative environment. I want to offer solutions, rather than complaining about what we already know." Meanwhile Zeynep Sahin said: “I believe a person is more than a few letters on a piece of paper, and those letters shouldn't be the sole decider of our futures. "LIS is really the university that looks at the individual rather than the grades and makes you believe that we are finally breaking out of the traditional university and education system." Edward Walker added: “The main reason for my interest in LIS is that I don't want to limited to studying the world from one perspective. It's important to consider every component and viewpoint to truly understand and solve an issue.” | Rebecca Speare-Cole | https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/applications-set-to-open-for-revolutionary-new-london-university-tackling-today-s-real-world-a4242681.html | 2019-09-21 06:22:59+00:00 | 1,569,061,379 | 1,570,222,539 | education | vocational education |
189,469 | eveningstandard--2019-11-15--Nine-year-old set to become youngest ever university graduate | 2019-11-15T00:00:00 | eveningstandard | Nine-year-old set to become youngest ever university graduate | A nine-year-old boy is about to become the youngest ever university graduate if he completes his electrical engineering degree next month. Laurent Simons, from Amsterdam, who has an IQ of at least 145 and a photographic memory, is close to finishing his studies at the Eindhoven University of Technology, which he started in March. His tutor, said Laurent, who finished secondary school aged eight, was three times more intelligent than his next cleverest student. This will smash the world record held since 1994 by Michael Kearney, who graduated from the University of Alabama aged ten. Laurent wants to continue his studies in California because of the weather, but his father Alexander is keen to consider moving to the UK at the University of Oxford or Cambridge. His father, a 37-year-old dentist, told the Telegraph:"Oxford and Cambridge are also in the major league and it would be very much more convenient for us." Laurent, who enjoys science and mathematics, hopes to become a heart surgeon or an astronaut when he's older. Sjoerd Hulshof, education director of the TUE bachelor's degree, told CNN: "Special students that have good reasons for doing so can arrange an adjusted schedule. In much the same way we help students who participate in top sport." "Laurent is the fastest student we have ever had here. Not only is he hyper intelligent but also a very sympathetic boy." | Ted Hennessey | https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/nineyearold-set-to-become-youngest-ever-university-graduate-a4288391.html | Fri, 15 Nov 2019 18:02:25 GMT | 1,573,858,945 | 1,573,864,717 | education | vocational education |
214,126 | france24--2019-01-20--Taking universal out of university Why foreign student fees challenge Frances education model | 2019-01-20T00:00:00 | france24 | Taking universal out of university: Why foreign student fees challenge France’s education model | France’s decision to hike tuition fees for international students more than tenfold has triggered a standoff with universities and revived a debate about the role of state-funded higher education and its responsibility to the French-speaking world. When Abdalah Faye looked beyond his native Senegal for a place to pursue his university studies, there was only ever one destination on his mind: France, the former colonial power and traditional destination for expatriate students from the West African country. “France and Senegal share a common language, a common history, our education system is copied on the French, we value French diplomas more than our own, and France is home to many of my fellow countrymen,” said the 27-year-old politics student, listing the reasons that brought him to France. And then there’s the money issue. Higher education in France has long been much cheaper than in other Western countries – in fact almost free, for foreigners and French nationals alike. “France is the country that gives everyone an equal chance,” said Faye, who is pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), west of Paris. “That includes the children of farmers from the remotest corners of Senegal, who couldn’t possibly think of studying in America, Canada or elsewhere.” Home to centuries-old universities such as the Sorbonne in Paris, as well as leading business schools, France is the world's top non-English-speaking destination for students, though it ranks well behind the United States and Britain, and is now trailing Australia too. The number of foreign students at French universities fell by 8.5 percent between 2011 and 2016 and the country has seen increased competition from Germany, Russia, Canada and China. In order to address the “shifting balance of power” in global education, France’s government has unveiled a plan, dubbed “Welcome to France”, to lure more international students. Measures include simplifying student visa regulations, offering more English-language courses and improving accommodation, in an effort to increase the number of foreign students from roughly 300,000 today to more than half a million by 2027. But the revamped “welcome” will come at a cost for international students, who have so far enjoyed near-free higher education, just like French and EU nationals. When the new academic year begins in September, non-EU students will see their annual fees for a bachelor degree jump from €170 ($195) to €2,770, while the cost of a master’s or doctoral degree will go from the current €243 per year to €3,770 – a 1,600% increase. Announcing the measures back in November, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe stressed that France would still “subsidise two thirds of the cost of studies" – averaging at just over €10,000 per year for each student. "And the fees will remain well below the €8,000 to €13,000 charged by the Dutch or the tens of thousands of pounds paid in Britain," he added. But that is small comfort for the likes of Faye, who already struggles to make ends meet while working the maximum 20 hours per week authorised for foreign students. “I never took a cent from my family back home,” Faye told FRANCE 24. “I already have to skip classes to work so that I can afford my food and rent. There is no way I can afford the fees as well.” The decision to massively increase tuition fees has been described as a “paradigm shift” by France’s Conference of University Presidents, an umbrella organisation representing the heads of France’s 75 universities. The conference has been cautious in its response, welcoming many of the government’s measures while warning that top students from abroad should not be priced out of the system. The body also warned that the prospect of increased income from fees should not be used as a pretext for a decline in state funding – a persistent concern in a country attached to the principle of publicly-funded education. The response from individual university presidents has been more critical, with several openly defying the government. By mid-January, seven universities had announced they would not charge international students higher fees in the forthcoming academic year, prompting a rebuke from the higher education minister, Frédérique Vidal, who stressed their “duty of obedience and loyalty” as civil servants. French universities are allowed to waive fees for up to 10 percent of their students, meaning they will have some leeway to refuse to apply the increased fees without actually flouting the law. Some university heads pointed to a lack the information and consultation surrounding the reform, noting that the government’s top-down approach contradicted its stated aim to strengthen universities’ autonomy in what remains a highly centralised system. “There was no discussion with the academic world,” lamented Nathalie Dompnier, president of Lyon 2 University. “We discovered the figures in November and received no explanation for the increase in fees and how it was calculated. […] We don’t know what financial support measures will be put in place, so we will not implement the fee increase.” Others decried a measure that “discriminates” against foreign students and introduces a form of “selection by money”. “France honours itself by showing it can welcome students from poor backgrounds, we must not turn back on this principle,” said Nadia Dupont, an administrator in charge of training at the University of Rennes-II, in western France. Supporters of the hiked fees say there is a principled case for ensuring foreigners contribute to funding a costly education system. “In so far as state higher education in France is essentially financed through public funds and thus by taxpayers, it is appears logical to ask for a contribution from the students (and parents) who do not pay taxes,” writes Professor Jérôme Caby of the Sorbonne Business School in Paris. However, a study commissioned in 2014 by Campus France, a government body in charge of promoting French universities abroad, has shown that foreign students have a beneficial impact on the local economy: while the state spends €3 billion each year on their education, they contribute €4.65 billion to the French economy. As Daniela Susanibar Rosas, a law student at Paris-1 University, told the FRANCE 24 Debate show: “We work here, we pay rent, we move the economy – there are small cities in France that work only because they are student cities.” Jean-Claude Lewandowski, an education specialist, said the fees hike will only be successful if the reform meets three conditions: a huge expansion in bursaries and loans, a sweeping cut in administrative obstacles (notably visa restrictions and access to housing), and better integration of newcomers. “Aside from the issue of tuition fees, foreign students are often poorly welcomed in France,” Lewandowski wrote on his blog, citing expensive accommodation, run-down campuses and a lack of communication with local students and staff members. In this respect, he added, the prime minister’s promises to ease visa restrictions, expand scholarships, and offer newcomers more French-language classes signal a positive step. Critics of the hiked fees have been less than impressed with the prime minister’s suggestion that foreigners regarded free education as being cheap in quality – and that the top students would therefore look elsewhere. “Philippe thinks that introducing higher fees will make France more attractive because international students associate price with value,” writes education expert Juliette Torabian in the Times’ Higher Education Supplement. Whereas “research suggests that international recruitment is most sensitive to perceived quality of teaching and institutional reputations. While universities in some countries charge higher international fees, they also provide students with a high return via their good reputations with employers and the quality of their facilities, accommodation and pastoral and academic support.” Analysts at the OECD say raising tuition fees can be a “double-edged sword”, sometimes leading to a steep decline in the number of international applicants. While New Zealand was able to offset higher fees with a generous scholarship policy and expanded working rights for foreign students, a dramatic increase in fees for foreigners in Sweden in 2011 coincided with an 80% slump in applications from abroad. “A reduction in the number of international students can potentially harm a tertiary education system, as international students do not only bring their financial contribution, but also a diversity of perspectives and cultures that improves the educational experience of all students,” write OECD analysts Daniel Sanchez-Serra and Gabriele Marconi. “Discrimination by nationality can also harm the student experience by creating divides between students,” they add. In some cases, attempts to discriminate between national and foreign students have actually brought the two closer together – in protest. Last year Belgian students successfully rallied against plans to charge higher fees for international students, forcing the government to back down. Similarly, since Philippe’s announcement in November, French students have staged a number of protests – the largest drawing crowds of several hundred – to denounce an “unfair and discriminatory measure” and express their “fraternity” with foreign students. Much of the criticism levelled at the government’s plan revolves around the universal mission that education is invested with under France’s republican tradition, a mission that underpins the extensive network of French schools scattered across the globe. In this case, it is coupled with an element of post-colonial responsibility, or guilt, towards former dominions. In a Le Monde op-ed signed by more than 60 professors and lecturers, French academics said the fees would inevitably lead to a decline in the number of African students – who currently account for 45% France’s of international students – enrolling in the country’s universities, noting that the vast majority would no longer be able to afford higher education in France. By denying African students “a dignified welcome, France gives up on its privileged relationship with the African intellectuals, engineers and executives of tomorrow,” the authors wrote, lamenting a measure that will accelerate “France’s loss of credibility on the continent”. Already Africa’s brightest minds are being lured to China, India and Middle Eastern countries where “Islamist ideologies hold sway”, they said, adding: “France’s decision to turn its back on African youth signals the abandonment of the universalist […] message carried by French social sciences on the African continent.” According to researchers Lama Kabbanji and Sorana Toma, of the Institute for Development Research and the University of Paris-Saclay respectively, the introduction of tuition fees is in line with a decade-old policy of “chosen immigration”, which has resulted in a relative decline in the number of immigrants from poorer countries and students from Africa. Lawmaker M’jid El Guerrab, who represents French nationals in West and North Africa, including Senegal and Morocco, said such measures would only increase the “Francophobic” sentiment witnessed among youths in his vast constituency, and the sense that “they are unwanted” in France. “For some Moroccan families, the fees announced by Edouard Philippe are the equivalent of a year’s salary,” El Guerrab told Jeune Afrique, noting that less than 1% of Moroccan students in France currently benefit from scholarships. “French universities will therefore become the exclusive preserve of the wealthy, and this selection by money is not in line with our republican tradition.” For Faye, the Senegalese student, the new government policy reflects changing attitudes in France, and a hardening stance on immigration in particular. “France no longer wants to give privileged access to people from its former colonies, it wants wealthier students,” he said, adding: “But the wealthy don’t come to France – they go to America.” | Benjamin DODMAN | https://www.france24.com/en/20190120-france-education-university-tuition-fees-international-foreign-students-africa | 2019-01-20 17:04:11+00:00 | 1,548,021,851 | 1,567,551,678 | education | vocational education |
385,580 | npr--2019-05-28--After Tumult Over Nassar Scandal Michigan State University Gets A New President | 2019-05-28T00:00:00 | npr | After Tumult Over Nassar Scandal, Michigan State University Gets A New President | After Tumult Over Nassar Scandal, Michigan State University Gets A New President Michigan State University's board of trustees unanimously voted to name Dr. Samuel L. Stanley Jr. the 21st president of MSU during a special meeting on Tuesday morning. His term begins Aug. 1. Stanley has been president of Stony Brook University in New York since 2009. The appointment comes after more than a year of instability in the university's presidency. In January 2018, Lou Anna Simon resigned after serving 13 years as MSU's president. Her departure came hours after Larry Nassar, a former MSU sports doctor, was sentenced to a 40- to 175-year prison term for sexual abuse. Simon is charged with two felony and two misdemeanor counts. She is accused of lying to investigators about when she knew of Nassar's sex crimes. Her preliminary hearing started in February and will continue in June. Former Michigan Gov. John Engler then served as interim president of MSU. In January, his tumultuous term as the school's interim president came to an end following heavy backlash to comments he made to the Detroit News regarding survivors of Nassar's abuse. Stanley earned a bachelor's degree in biological sciences at the University of Chicago and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1980. Stanley subsequently spent many years researching infectious diseases. According to Stony Brook University: Prior to joining Stony Brook University as president, Stanley was vice chancellor for research at Washington University. Stanley is married to Ellen Li, a biomedical researcher and gastroenterologist. They have four children. MSU's Executive Vice President for Administration Satish Udpa has been serving as MSU's acting president. | Reginald Hardwick | https://www.npr.org/2019/05/28/727542112/after-tumult-over-nassar-scandal-michigan-state-university-gets-a-new-president?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news | 2019-05-28 16:04:00+00:00 | 1,559,073,840 | 1,567,540,040 | education | vocational education |
231,101 | globalresearch--2019-09-24--American Torture Techniques Were Developed At McGill University | 2019-09-24T00:00:00 | globalresearch | American Torture Techniques Were Developed At McGill University | One executive order in particular, planned for the near future, is poised to resurrect one of the darkest chapters in recent American history. I’m talking about the potential reopening of CIA “black sites”—secret prisons where detainees were systematically tortured during the War on Terror. In 2009, President Obama ordered that these black sites be closed, consigning the episode, perhaps prematurely, to history—alongside a long list of past American crimes. Accompanying it on that list is a similarly chilling episode that played out right here in Montreal, but which has since been largely forgotten. Nestled cozily at the foot of Mount Royal, in the middle of the McGill University campus, is the Allan Memorial Institute. Sixty years ago, the now-weathered building was an unlikely accomplice to a series of human experiments designed to study methods of drug-induced mind control. It was the height of the Cold War. The American military was convinced that the Soviets were brainwashing its captive soldiers. Afraid of conducting research on U.S. soil, the CIA worked to set up human experiments in Canada and found willing collaborators at McGill University. The experiments were part of a top secret program called MKUltra, covertly funded by the CIA and headed by the psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, former head of the Canadian Psychiatrists Association. The project was part of a broader initiative by the U.S. government to counter alleged Soviet advances in the field of psychological manipulation. Project MKUltra eventually ceased. All evidence of its existence was quietly tucked under the rug. It was only in the late 1970s, when a trove of previously classified information was released through a Freedom of Information Act request, that the full extent of the crimes committed at the Allen were revealed. The findings were grim. Over the course of seven years, Dr. Cameron and his team committed ghastly affronts to human dignity. Patients would enter seeking help for standard mental health issues—postpartum depression, anxiety, even marriage counseling— and would be made to sign contracts giving Dr. Cameron full discretion over what treatments they received. Patients had near-lethal amount of electric shock treatments applied on a daily basis. Megadoses of drugs such as LSD were administered regularly. Patients were subject to full sensory deprivation techniques—taking place in horse stables converted into solitary confinement cells—in an attempt to break down their senses of time and space. They were put into induced comas that lasted for weeks at a time. While patients were comatose in what were referred to as “sleep rooms,” Cameron would place tape recorders beneath their pillows and play statements on a loop. The result was that the victims—many of whom were involved unwittingly—were reduced to inert, vegetable-like states, leaving them with no memory at all of their lives before and during the experimentation. Dr. Cameron, who at that time was the president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, pioneered a procedure called depatterning, which was to become the basis for his research at Allen Memorial. Cameron theorized that, using the techniques mentioned, a person’s brain could be completely wiped and reprogrammed. He justified the torture by hypothesizing that it could cure schizophrenia and other mental disorders. In the end, Project MKUltra failed to produce a Manchurian Candidate. Cameron was unable to forge a new human being from the empty shells he created. Yet while it failed in its stated goals of brainwashing subjects, the research conducted did serve the American military. It created scientific torture techniques that would be used in the U.S.’s military campaigns. In the 1980s, as America was sponsoring dirty wars against real and imagined communists in Latin America, the CIA trained anti-communist governments and right-wing paramilitaries in torture techniques. Through a Freedom of Information request, the press got a hold of a CIA document called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, which formed the basis of these trainings. The Kubark manual—originally written in 1963, the year MKUltra ended—is a 128-page document that makes multiple references to experiments at McGill University, notably those involving sensory deprivation. It describes how to place subjects into stress positions, how to use electric shock, and other torture techniques used to break down resistant sources of information. These are the same techniques that were later used by the U.S. armed forces in the CIA’s black sites during the War on Terror. Much like the proposed reopening of those black sites today, the MKUltra project was the result of an unfounded sense of paranoia and fear and came with a tremendous human cost. And if Trump is willing to forage these sordid depths once again, it begs the question: what role will Canada play this time? It actively developed the torture techniques used against America’s real and phantom enemies during the Cold War—will Canada continue to turn a blind eye? The filmmaker Chris Marker once said, “Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.” I have long had a feeling that inanimate objects also retain such memories. If so, the weathered walls of the Allan Memorial Institute would have a lot to divulge to all of us, for they have witnessed, first hand, the true banality of evil. Maybe then we would be cured of our willful amnesia. | Edward McCary | https://www.globalresearch.ca/american-torture-techniques-were-developed-at-mcgill/5690054 | 2019-09-24 14:51:51+00:00 | 1,569,351,111 | 1,570,222,324 | education | vocational education |
313,948 | mercurynews--2019-06-19--Fremont tech university in compliance over job placements accreditor says | 2019-06-19T00:00:00 | mercurynews | Fremont tech university in compliance over job placements, accreditor says | Los Gatos: Freeway shooting is third in 24 hours | Ethan Baron | https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/19/fremont-tech-university-in-compliance-over-job-placements-accreditor-says/ | 2019-06-19 21:00:53+00:00 | 1,560,992,453 | 1,567,538,715 | education | vocational education |
4,573 | activistpost--2019-04-30--To Prevent a Robot Apocalypse We Must Study Machine Behavior | 2019-04-30T00:00:00 | activistpost | To Prevent a Robot Apocalypse, We Must Study “Machine Behavior” | Experts have been warning us about potential dangers associated with artificial intelligence for quite some time. But is it too late to do anything about the impending rise of the machines? Once the stuff of far-fetched dystopian science fiction, the idea of robot overlords taking over the world at some point now seems inevitable. The late Dr. Stephen Hawking issued some harsh and terrifying words of caution back in 2014: Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, warned that we could see some terrifying issues within the next few years: The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. Please note that I am normally super pro technology and have never raised this issue until recent months. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don’t understand. The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast — it is growing at a pace close to exponential. I am not alone in thinking we should be worried. The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. They recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen… (source) Last week, a team of researchers made a case for a wide-ranging scientific research agenda aimed at understanding the behavior of artificial intelligence systems. The group, led by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, published a paper in Nature in which they called for a new field of research called “machine behavior.” The new field would take the study of artificial intelligence “well beyond computer science and engineering into biology, economics, psychology, and other behavioral and social sciences,” according to an MIT Media Lab press release. Scientists have studied human behavior for decades, and now it is time to apply that kind of research to intelligent machines, the group explained. Because artificial intelligence is doing more collective ‘thinking,’ the same interdisciplinary approach needs to be applied to understanding machine behavior, the authors say. “We need more open, trustworthy, reliable investigation into the impact intelligent machines are having on society, and so research needs to incorporate expertise and knowledge from beyond the fields that have traditionally studied it,” said Iyad Rahwan, who leads the Scalable Cooperation group at the Media Lab. This is particularly concerning, especially considering we already know that AI can hate without human input and that robots have no sense of humor and might kill us over a joke. “We’re seeing an emergence of machines as agents in human society; these are social machines that are making decisions that have real value implications in society,” says David Lazer, who is one of the authors of the paper, as well as University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Sciences at Northeastern. We interact numerous times each day with thinking machines, as the press release explains: We may ask Siri to find the dry cleaner nearest to our home, tell Alexa to order dish soap, or get a medical diagnosis generated by an algorithm. Many such tools that make life easier are in fact “thinking” on their own, acquiring knowledge and building on it and even communicating with other thinking machines to make ever more complex judgments and decisions—and in ways that not even the programmers who wrote their code can fully explain. Imagine, for instance, a news feed run by a deep neural net recommends an article to you from a gardening magazine, even though you’re not a gardener. “If I asked the engineer who designed the algorithm, that engineer would not be able to state in a comprehensive and causal way why that algorithm decided to recommend that article to you,” said Nick Obradovich, a research scientist in the Scalable Cooperation group and one of the lead authors of the Nature paper. Parents often think of their children’s interaction with the family personal assistant as charming or funny. But what happens when the assistant, rich with cutting-edge AI, responds to a child’s fourth or fifth question about T. Rex by suggesting, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had this dinosaur as a toy?” “What’s driving that recommendation?” Rahwan said. “Is the device trying to do something to enrich the child’s experience—or to enrich the company selling the toy dinosaur? It’s very hard to answer that question.” (source) What hasn’t been examined as closely is how these algorithms work. How do they evolve with use? How do machines develop a specific behavior? How do algorithms function within a specific social or cultural environment? These issues need to be studied, the group says. There is a significant barrier to the type of research the group is proposing, however: But even if big tech companies decided to share information about their algorithms and otherwise allow researchers more access to them, there is an even bigger barrier to research and investigation, which is that AI agents can acquire novel behaviors as they interact with the world around them and with other agents. The behaviors learned from such interactions are virtually impossible to predict, and even when solutions can be described mathematically, they can be “so lengthy and complex as to be indecipherable,” according to the paper. (source) And, there are ethical concerns surrounding how AI makes decisions: Say, for instance, a hypothetical self-driving car is sold as being the safest on the market. One of the factors that makes it safer is that it “knows” when a big truck pulls up along its left side and automatically moves itself three inches to the right while still remaining in its own lane. But what if a cyclist or motorcycle happens to be pulling up on the right at the same time and is thus killed because of this safety feature? “If you were able to look at the statistics and look at the behavior of the car in the aggregate, it might be killing three times the number of cyclists over a million rides than another model,” Rahwan said. “As a computer scientist, how are you going to program the choice between the safety of the occupants of the car and the safety of those outside the car? You can’t just engineer the car to be ‘safe’—safe for whom?” (source) The researchers explain that it will take experts from a host of scientific disciplines to study the way machines behave in the real world, as a press release from Northeastern University states. “The process of understanding how online dating algorithms are changing the societal institution of marriage, or determining whether our interaction with artificial intelligence affects our human development, will require more than just the mathematicians and engineers who built those algorithms.” What do you think? Do you think artificial intelligence will eventually make humans obsolete? What do you think that will be like? How and when will it happen? Please share your thoughts in the comments. Dagny Taggart is the pseudonym of an experienced journalist who needs to maintain anonymity to keep her job in the public eye. Dagny is non-partisan and aims to expose the half-truths, misrepresentations, and blatant lies of the MSM. This article was sourced from The Organic Prepper. Provide, protect and profit from what is coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today. | Activist Post | https://www.activistpost.com/2019/04/to-prevent-a-robot-apocalypse-we-must-study-machine-behavior.html | 2019-04-30 15:16:13+00:00 | 1,556,651,773 | 1,567,541,582 | science and technology | social sciences |
6,236 | activistpost--2019-12-12--Day 2: Academic Backing Of Technocracy | 2019-12-12T00:00:00 | activistpost | Day 2: Academic Backing Of Technocracy | Dr. Francis Schaeffer was an historian, Christian philosopher and one of the greatest thinkers of the last century. In Episode X (the final segment) of his video series, How Should We Then Live?, he stated that society was falling into a moral abyss with no fixed absolutes to provide form and structure for living. To replace that necessary structure and thereby avoid utter societal chaos, he accurately and clearly recognized that such absolutes would be supplied by an increasingly authoritarian, technocratic elite. (Yes, Schaeffer actually used the word “technocratic”.) In other words, as people lost the ability to self-regulate their own life and behavior, someone or something would step into the vacuum and do it for them. A younger contemporary of Schaeffer was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era when he was a political science professor at Columbia University in the late 1960s. Brzezinski was the polar opposite of Schaeffer in that he eschewed Christianity, Christian philosophy and even the existence of God. Brzezinski came to virtually the same conclusion as Schaeffer (for entirely different reasons) when he wrote, Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits. (emphasis added) Since Schaeffer was an avid reader, he likely had read Brzezinski’s work, but I can find no proof of that. He did, however, read Daniel Bell’s seminal 1973 book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. Bell had received his PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1961. We know he was well acquainted with Brzezinski’s work because he thoroughly critiqued it in his own book. There are two reasons that I bring up Bell: first, he was a self-professed apologist for Technocracy and second, Schaeffer held up Bell’s book toward the end of Episode X and quoted from page 480: Bell was indeed a big thinker in the same vein as Brzezinski; both were Technocrats and both were educated at Columbia University where Technocracy was originally conceived in 1932. Bell, however, was much more direct than Brzezinski when he wrote, It was Bell who first popularized and developed the concept of the “post-industrial” society: Bell’s 489-page “essay in social forecasting” presented the big picture of the future. It was ominously written in the same year (1973) that the Trilateral Commission was co-founded by Brzezinski and David Rockefeller. Now, I had already cited Bell’s works in both of my books on Technocracy, but I had fallen short in examining who or what might have stimulated Bell to write his book in the first place. This became my 2019 surprise as I picked up my own copy of Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (the same edition that Schaeffer referenced above) and read its Preface more carefully: My greatest debt, institutionally, is to the Russell Sage Foundation and its president, Orville Brim. A grant from the foundation in 1967 at first released me from one-third of my teaching schedule at Columbia, and allowed me to organize an experimental graduate seminar at Columbia on modes of forecasting. The foundation also subsidized my research in the next few years. In 1969-1970 I spent a sabbatical year as a visiting fellow at the foundation, where this book began to take shape. (emphasis added) Essentially, Bell was employed by the Russell Sage Foundation as he fleshed out his book. The Russell Sage Foundation, launched in 1907, is one of the oldest foundations in America. It started as an ultra-progressive champion of “social sciences” and has been continuously connected to the most progressive elements of the global elite ever since. Its website currently states, Not surprisingly, the historical archives of the Russell Sage Foundation are housed at the Rockefeller Archive Center in New York. The academic support for modern Technocracy is obvious and easily traced. The literature is pointed and definitive: they all envisaged a technocratic elite rising to dominate populations. Given this vision, it is no surprise that the Trilateral Commission sprang forth in 1973 to “make it so” – with “Captain Brzezinski” at the helm as its first Executive Director. You can read more from Patrick Wood at his site Technocracy News & Trends, where this article first appeared. Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Become an Activist Post Patron for as little as $1 per month at Patreon. Follow us on SoMee, Flote, Minds, Twitter, and Steemit. Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today. | Activist Post | https://www.activistpost.com/2019/12/day-2-academic-backing-of-technocracy.html | Thu, 12 Dec 2019 16:49:26 +0000 | 1,576,187,366 | 1,576,195,606 | science and technology | social sciences |
7,861 | aljazeera--2019-01-09--North Koreas Kim ends China visit as Trump summit looms | 2019-01-09T00:00:00 | aljazeera | North Korea's Kim ends China visit as Trump summit looms | North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has left Beijing, ending a trip to China seen as preparation for his expected summit with US President Donald Trump later this year. Kim arrived in the Chinese capital on Tuesday for his fourth visit to Pyongyang's key ally, reportedly visiting a factory and meeting President Xi Jinping. The North Korean leader's motorcade was spotted arriving at the Beijing central railway station early on Wednesday afternoon, and Kim's train departed shortly after for the day-long ride back to the border, according to news agencies. The unannounced trip was largely shrouded in secrecy. Beyond confirming Kim's presence in Beijing, neither North Korea or China provided any details on the visit. Kim spent one hour with Xi on Tuesday - believed to be the North Korean leader's birthday - and the two later dined with their wives at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. The discussions focused on Kim's expected meeting with Trump, Yonhap said. In a New Year speech, Kim warned that Pyongyang may change its approach to nuclear talks if Washington persists with sanctions. Relations between China and North Korea had deteriorated in recent years over Pyongyang's nuclear activities, but Kim has made sure to keep Xi informed about his dealings with the US and South Korea as ties appear to have warmed. "In order to resist the high pressure of the US, he must communicate with Xi in advance to see what steps he can take to deal with Trump," Beijing-based independent political commentator Hua Po told the AFP news agency. "Kim needs the support of Xi so as to ask the US to make substantial steps, such as providing assistance to North Korea and normalising relations with North Korea," Hua said. Kim chose China for his maiden official trip abroad last year before holding meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Trump. Trump said on Sunday that the US and North Korea are negotiating the location for their next summit. Discussions between the US and North Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal have stalled since Kim and Trump's high-profile summit in Singapore in June where they issued a vaguely-worded declaration about denuclearisation. The US insists that United Nations sanctions must remain in place until North Korea gives up its weapons, while Pyongyang wants them eased immediately. China also wants the sanctions to be relaxed. "For North Korea itself, 2019 is his strategic turning point. If he wants to shift his focus to the development of the economy, he needs China's cooperation," said Lu Chao, a North Korea expert at China's Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences. "China will also introduce some successful experiences to Kim to help North Korea achieve economic transformation and realise the denuclearisation of the peninsula as soon as possible," Lu added. In his New Year speech, Kim focussed on his country's economy, saying that improving people's lives was his top priority and tackling energy shortages was an urgent task. The visit coincided with negotiations between US and Chinese officials in Beijing to resolve a bruising trade war between the world's two biggest economies. Some analysts say China could use its cooperation on North Korea as a bargaining chip in the US trade talks. But Hua said Kim's visit would have a "limited" effect on the trade negotiations. "The Sino-US trade negotiations are a matter between China and the US. The weight of North Korea is limited and cannot play a decisive role," he said. | null | https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/01/north-korea-kim-ends-china-visit-trump-summit-looms-190109071937724.html | 2019-01-09 08:59:25+00:00 | 1,547,042,365 | 1,567,553,309 | science and technology | social sciences |
9,130 | aljazeera--2019-01-31--Venezuelas Guaido lays out broad vision for the country | 2019-01-31T00:00:00 | aljazeera | Venezuela's Guaido lays out broad vision for the country | Venezuela's self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido presented the opposition's broad vision for the country's future on Thursday, as the political crisis in the country deepened. "We have a plan, well thought out, structured," Guaido said at the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences in the Central University of Venezuela on Thursday, noting that "it is the sum of many sacrifices". The "National Plan" focuses on the opposition's vision for the economy and oil resources, but it also tackles public services, security, governability and society. Guaido said there would be something for everyone in society to do as Venezuela moved forward, including the military. "The armed forces also have a role in the reconstruction of the country," he said. Last week, Guaido swore himself in as interim president before a crowd of his supporters. The proclamation came after the opposition-controlled National Assembly declared President Nicolas Maduro's second-term "illegitimate". Maduro accuses Guaido of leading a US-backed coup and says the United States, among other countries, are waging an economic war aimed at removing him from power. In Thursday's speech, Guaido divided the plan into three phases: the "cessation of the usurpation", the establishment of a "transitional government" and free elections. According to Guaido, the priorities include the coordination of humanitarian assistance, the restoration of public services and an effort to tackle people's dependency on subsidies. Guaido indicated that there would be no dialogue with Maduro or anyone in his government. "We will never lend ourselves to false dialogues in any place," he said, adding that protests would continue throughout the country. "The organised, systematic and sustained protests will continue until this dictatorship falls." Translation: Today we present #PlanPaís. The route for the country we want to build together. We have the agreement, the will and the professionals to immediately address the problems of Venezuelans, Guaido wrote on Twitter. Towards the end of his speech, Guaido said that agents of Special Action Forces (FAES) were at his home. "I will hold you responsible for any threat that you could make to my 20-month old daughter," Guaido said. The US, which backs Guaido, has warned of "serious consequences" if Maduro's government harms him. Guaido later appeared at his building with his wife and daughter, saying "they will not intimidate this family". Neighbours said men who identified themselves as belonging to the FAES arrived at the gate of his apartment building in a white four-wheel drive. There was no obvious police presence by the time journalists arrived at Guaido's house. The political fight between Maduro and Guaido has drawn in foreign powers. On one side of the tussle for control of Venezuela - an OPEC (The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) member, with the world's largest oil reserves but in dire financial straits - Guaido and Western backers led by the US are insisting on an immediate transition and fresh elections. On the other, Maduro, with backing from Russia, China and Turkey, says he will remain for his second six-year term despite accusations of fraud in his reelection last year and the economic meltdown. Maduro, who first took office in 2013, has faced waves of protests in recent years as he presided over a collapsing economy, with hyperinflation and chronic food shortages. He enjoys the support of the military and some Venezuelans. Some three million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015, according to the UN. | null | https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/01/venezuela-guaido-lays-broad-vision-country-190131175355984.html | 2019-01-31 20:27:28+00:00 | 1,548,984,448 | 1,567,550,135 | science and technology | social sciences |
10,075 | aljazeera--2019-02-20--Abortion rights campaigners flood the streets of Buenos Aires | 2019-02-20T00:00:00 | aljazeera | Abortion rights campaigners flood the streets of Buenos Aires | Thousands of women rallied in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires on Tuesday to relaunch a campaign for legal abortion after an abortion rights bill suffered a setback in the Senate last year. Waving green handkerchiefs, women chanted and held banners that read, "We all abort, the rich girls stay quiet, and the poor die." Campaigners aim to keep the debate alive in the civil society and to push for new legislation. "Today, there is a social decriminalisation of abortion. We had positive results in the Congress [last year]," an activist told the AFP news agency. "Unfortunately, the Senate is not responding as representatives of the people, but is responding to the conservative hierarchies of each province." A new bill will be submitted to the government on International Women's Day - March 8, AFP reported. Translation: This will become law! #Safeandlegalabortion #legalabortionnow Abortion is legal in Argentina only in cases of rape or when the pregnancy poses a risk to a woman's health. Rights groups have also criticised a requirement for a judge's permission, which often results in lengthy delays or denial of the procedure. Last year's bill sought to legalise elective abortion for pregnancies of up to 14 weeks. Momentum for new legislation grew after President Mauricio Macri said he would not stand in the way of the debate. Argentina's abortion rights movement, backed by feminist groups, argue that legalisation would end unregulated abortions that government data show as one of the leading causes of maternal deaths. Despite Tuesday's mass protest, it is unclear whether the government will promote a debate during an electoral year that has divided the country, and normally leads to mass demonstrations. "We are still here, fighting and resisting because within that Congress there are people who do not know anything about what women go through in the most humble neighbourhoods because there is another way to access abortion but it does not have to be done like that," professor and activist Antonella Castiglione, told the Reuters news agency. "Abortion has to be legal at hospitals so that no woman dies because of an illegal, unsafe abortion, in very poor conditions." More than 60 percent of Argentinians - especially young people - are in favour of legalising abortion, according to a poll by the social sciences faculty of the University of Buenos Aires. An estimated 500,000 unsafe abortions are performed annually in the South American country. Argentina recorded 245 cases of maternal mortality in 2016, according to official figures quoted by the website Infobae. Of these, 43 were due to abortions or miscarriages. | null | https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/abortion-rights-campaigners-flood-streets-buenos-aires-190220143549930.html | 2019-02-20 18:45:17+00:00 | 1,550,706,317 | 1,567,547,914 | science and technology | social sciences |
11,057 | aljazeera--2019-03-20--Muslim countries urged to press China end crackdown of Uighurs | 2019-03-20T00:00:00 | aljazeera | Muslim countries urged to press China end crackdown of Uighurs | Doha, Qatar - A group of visiting Uighur Muslim scholars originally from China's Xinjiang province has urged Muslim-majority countries to press China to end its "cultural war" against their ethnic compatriots. According to a United Nations panel, more than one million Uighurs and other Muslims are held in what rights groups and activists call mass detention centres in the remote western region - a charge denied by Beijing. During a visit to Qatar's capital, Doha, leaders from the Turkey-based Society of the Muslim Scholars of East Turkistan (SMSET) accused Beijing of engaging in systematic human rights violations of Uighurs in a bid to erase their cultural and religious heritage. "The Chinese government is waging a cultural war against our people by trying to force us to abandon our Muslim faith and our heritage to become atheists and communists like the majority Chinese society," the SMSET's Abdel Khaleq Uighur said on Tuesday. In January, China passed a new law that sought to "Sinicise" Islam within the next five years, the latest move by Beijing to rewrite how the religion is practised. Sinification is a process of melting non-Chinese communities into the majority Han Chinese culture. No major Muslim country has publicly condemned China for the alleged mass incarceration of Uighurs and other ethnic Muslim minorities except Turkey, which has called on China to shut the camps. Beijing calls the camps "reeducation centres". The Uighurs, whose homeland is in the heart of the ancient Silk Road, say Beijing sees their presence as an obstacle to its economic development and westward expansion through its flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Launched in 2013, the massive investment drive aims to finance and build infrastructure in some 80 countries around the world, including in the Middle East and parts of Eurasia. "With high-speed rail and other upgraded land transport developments, China strives to promote land and maritime trade simultaneously between China and the Middle East," Wang Jian, a professor of history and international political economy at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said in a paper published in 2017. Mohamad Mahmoud, of the SMET, argued that China's promises of vast wealth and economic development from its BRI projects have prevented Muslim-majority countries from addressing the crackdown on Uighurs. "I hope that Muslim countries can overcome their fears of China and address its gross human rights abuses against our community," he said. According to a 2018 Amnesty report, open or even private displays of religious and cultural affiliation, including growing a beard, wearing a veil or headscarf, regular prayer, fasting or avoidance of alcohol, or possessing books or articles about Islam or Uighur culture can be considered "extremist" under the regulation. Last week, the Chinese government published a lengthy policy paper outlining and defending its policy against the Uighurs as "deradicalisation" measures. The paper admitted the arrest of 13,000 Muslim Uighurs since 2014. Responding to government claims of "terrorism and radicalism" in the region, Mahmoud said the Chinese government claims are not true. "Our people are not seeking separation and there is no terrorism or armed insurgency in East Turkistan," he said. "The only terrorism in the region comes from the Chinese government itself," added Mahmoud. | null | https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/scholars-urge-muslim-countries-press-china-uighur-crackdown-190320102839967.html | 2019-03-20 18:18:59+00:00 | 1,553,120,339 | 1,567,545,535 | science and technology | social sciences |
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