China now tops the list of countries with the largest annual number of scientific publications. At the same time, China also leads the list of countries with the highest proportion of scientific publication retractions. The rise in this academic misconduct in China has given Chinese researchers a bad reputation and likely led to lower manuscript…

The circulation of head football coaches is a well-established practice, and with it, salary costs are significantly outpacing other spending as institutions compete in the pursuit of prestige. This movement of college football coaches is known in the popular press as the "coaching carousel." The carousel is a fitting metaphor for a…

A few years ago, in "Student Success in College (SSiC)," the authors profiled twenty colleges and universities that were unusually effective in fostering student engagement and success, defined as better-than-predicted scores on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and better-than-predicted graduation rates. These schools are…

This article is written for scholars, researchers, and academic leaders who have a passion to share their knowledge outside the classroom, laboratory, or institution. They want to make a difference and believe that the information they possess and ideas they have to offer have a public importance. Based on his book "Pitch Perfect:…

The world of higher education is a world of sorting, selecting, and ranking--on both sides of the market. Colleges select students to recruit and then to admit; students choose where to apply and which offer to accept. The sorting process that gets the most attention is in the higher reaches of the market, where it is not too much to say that…

Publishing is the sleeping beast that faculty at college like the College of St. Catherine, a 5,000-student women's college in Minnesota's Twin Cities, have tiptoed around for years. Here, as in many institutions devoted to undergraduate teaching, professors could once amble undisturbed along the promotion path equipped only with pedagogical…

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has compiled its classification of higher-education institutions for more than 30 years. In the most recent incarnation of the classification, the foundation has transformed its taxonomy to better reflect the variety of colleges and universities across the United States. The new…