Blogs

I think I had an idea for a blog post in mind this morning — I was going to write about my daughter’s upcoming travels, the semester-plus that she’s spent with us, and the bittersweet sense I have of sending her off (yet again!) into the world not fully prepared, but nonetheless ready. But right around noon I learned of a sudden death — the mother of someone Nick has been in school with since kindergarten — and whatever idea I might have had was immediately gone. While this mother and I didn’t know each other well, we’d been in each other’s houses, years ago, when the kids were small and still had play dates and birthday parties. We’d seen each other at PTA events over the years. It was that kind of relationship.

So this summer, try to take some time off. Give yourself a few breaks away from schoolwork, away from your smart phone, and focus on leisure and focus on recharging. GradHacker is going to be taking a break for the rest of July to recharge, so shouldn't you?

Recently, I was talking to a friend of the family. A middle-aged woman with a PhD, she's fluent in three languages and has spent a reasonable portion of her life in Europe. One question that came up was why, in certain countries, people might be disallowed from spending their own money to buy health care that the relevant national health care system might deem to be unnecessary or of low priority.

What if, instead of politics, or the news industry, Aaron Sorkin took on higher education?

We hear all the time that we are entering the "post PC era." Computers are out. Tablets are in. We will no longer be lugging around heavy machines with failure prone hard drives and bloated client applications. We will be carrying around thin and light screens (keyboard optional) that are portals to our cloud based apps and data.

Some thoughts about Fidelis, an education startup that -- unlike a lot of the other ones that seem to be getting all the buzz -- isn't focused on the content of college, but on the community.

An announcement was made few days ago that my University has increased its allocation for the Doctoral Studies Fund. Said Fund provides full support to faculty members getting into Ph.D. programs in the Philippines and abroad. No surprise that the announcement was met with lukewarm response by my younger colleagues. At the recent review of our 5-year faculty development plan, those who were supposed to go have all decided not to.

The increasing intensity of the competition on the college entrance examination is a reflection of mass higher education. Since 1999, China’s higher education system has experienced rapid expansion. With more than 2500 institutions of higher education and more than 30 million tertiary-level students, China is the largest higher education system in the world in its scale. In June 2012, 9.15 million students took the gaokao, the college entrance examination.