Legacy admissions – a practice in which colleges give special consideration to children of alumni when deciding who to admit – have been making headlines. Colleges are increasingly being called on to rethink the merits of the practice – and some colleges are beginning to heed those calls. Here, Nadirah Farah Foley, a postdoctoral associate at […] … learn more→
Blog Archives
Why do colleges use legacy admissions? 5 questions answered
What’s all this reading about then – starting the PhD
When you begin the PhD you will be told to read, and read a lot. But you’ll find not any old approach to reading will do. It’s a particular kind of reading that’s expected. So it’s important to get a grip on the complex task that you are being asked to do. In the first […] … learn more→
Deportation threats for some students come from within schools
When Bilal, a recent immigrant from South Asia, started his sophomore year at a high school in a large southern U.S. city in 2014, it wasn’t a welcoming experience. Upon entering the school, Bilal had to go through a metal detector. Then a school police officer patted him down. Bilal did not understand why a […] … learn more→
As international students start trickling back, the new year will be crunch time
It’s looking much more likely that international students will be able to return for the first semester next year, with international travel for Australians opening up from November 1. From that date, there will be no cap on the number of fully vaccinated citizens and permanent residents able to fly into New South Wales. In response to […] … learn more→
Open educational resources, a challenge for the future
In a knowledge-based economy, the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination to as many people as possible play a central role. This is the objective pursued by the Open Education movement, which works to develop free educational resources. According to Unesco, these resources include “teaching, learning or research materials in the public domain or published with an intellectual […] … learn more→
Future of college will involve fewer professors
At a large private university in Northern California, a business professor uses an avatar to lecture on a virtual stage. Meanwhile, at a Southern university, graduate students in an artificial intelligence course discover that one of their nine teaching assistants is a virtual avatar, Jill Watson, also known as Watson, IBM’s question-answering computer system. Of the 10,000 messages […] … learn more→
How a maximum security prison offers a pathway to academic excellence and a PhD
The person taking notes during our meeting, we later learn, is averaging a high distinction in their studies for a bachelor degree. If this level of performance is maintained this student is heading for a university medal – an award recognising exceptional academic achievement. Clearly this is a highly motivated student. Our PhD candidate was […] … learn more→
Understanding academic writing – starting the PhD
Writing is a crucial aspect of doctoral work – indeed all the scholarly work you will undertake from now on. Writing is integral to scholarship. Whether you are in or out of higher education, if you are researching, you are writing. Writing and its associated activities reading and talking, are the major ways in which […] … learn more→
Australia’s multilingual identity is an asset for selling our English-language teaching to the world
It is rarely appreciated that Australia makes money not just from what it digs out of the earth but also from what comes out of its mouth: English. The Australian government released a draft strategy for the English-language teaching sector in early 2020. It was put on hold due to the pandemic, but we now have an […] … learn more→
Working from home made women academics feel worse than ever about juggling roles
Academic guilt is well-established in literature on the work of women scholars who are simultaneously mothers and lecturers, homemakers and researchers, nurturers and administrators. It’s a sense of not being able to cope with conflicting demands on one’s time and is often accompanied by negative self-judgement. In South Africa and around the world, women academics had to […] … learn more→
