The Key with Inside Higher Ed

This week’s episode of Voices of Student Success features Jody Greene, associate campus provost for academic success at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on the relationship between faculty and student success, how UCSC is empowering faculty to practice equitable course design and the future of academic success. Hosted by  Inside Higher Ed  Student Success Reporter Ashley Mowreader. This e...

This week’s episode of Voices of Student Success features Adelí Durón, the inaugural director of the Latinx Resource Center at the University of California, Irvine, on its mission and how she works to ensure student voices inform programming, engagement and center leadership. Hosted by  Inside Higher Ed  Student Success Reporter Ashley Mowreader. This episode is sponsored by InsideTrack .

Three years ago, Inside Higher Ed created a podcast to try to give its audience insight into how the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting colleges, employees and students, with a particular focus on the more “invisible” students who too often fly under the radar of journalists and campus leaders.  This week’s episode, The Key’s 100th, features a discussion with Paul Fain, who as Inside Higher Ed’s news...

“Gateway courses” are supposed to clear the path to fields of study, but for millions of students who struggle in those key classes, they often shut the door prematurely. This week's episode of The Key digs into early efforts to develop courseware for 20 high enrollment courses that can make or break whether students from all backgrounds persist and ultimately complete their educations. The goal o...

The complex, confusing process by which students move between colleges has been an acknowledged barrier impeding postsecondary completion, particularly for underrepresented students. The issue is drawing increasing attention from policy makers, given rising concerns about value and equity. This week’s episode of The Key looks at some of the transfer work being done by the major college and univers...

The Key continues to share Inside Higher Ed’s latest collaboration with Times Higher Education – Campus Podcast . Eve Riskin, dean of undergraduate education at Stevens Institute of Technology, talks about the power of mentorship, diversity in excellence and what she, as an electrical engineer and computer scientist, thinks about the emergence of generative AI. Episode sponsored by Stevens Institu...

The Key shares Inside Higher Ed’s latest collaboration with Times Higher Education – Campus Podcast . This interview features Montclair State University President Jonathan Koppell as he discusses how universities can be more proactive in rebuilding public trust in higher education. It’s tied to accessibility and degree completion, he argues, and universities need to acknowledge their failures in m...

This week’s episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast, builds off a great conversation that took place earlier this month at Digital Universities U.S. , an event Inside Higher Ed co-hosted in Chicago with our partners from Times Higher Education. The conversation featured leaders from three very different institutions talking about how their institutions create online or ble...

As public support belief in the value of higher education has steadily declined in recent years, most of the attention for turning that around has been on improving the career readiness of graduates and making college more affordable. But an emergent group of college leaders believes the real key may be to ensure that all learners, regardless of background, have experiences in college that help th...

Are we in the midst of a mental health “crisis” for college students and other young people? How should campus administrators and faculty members be thinking about the mental health of their students and their roles in addressing it? And do we perhaps need to reframe the discussion around what “mental health” even is? This week’s episode of The Key explores an issue that has been at or near the to...

Terry Hartle retired last fall after 30 years as the chief government and public affairs officer at the American Council on Education, where he had a front-row seat to virtually every important higher education policy discussion. In this week’s episode of The Key, Hartle talks about the partisanship and inertia that afflicts today’s politics, politicians’ increased questioning and oversight of hig...

Does the possible sale of the University of Phoenix to a public university system signal the demise of the for-profit higher education sector that Phoenix once epitomized?   This week’s episode of The Key analyzes the implications of recent news that a nonprofit affiliated with the University of Arkansas System might buy the former giant among for-profit colleges. Joining the discussion are Kevin...

In 2010, a book called DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education envisioned a wholesale shift in how people learned. More than a decade later, how has that panned out? This week’s episode features a conversation with Anya Kamenetz, the author and journalist who in 2010 tapped into an emerging set of issues around student debt, rapid technological change and pol...

During the pandemic, many colleges and universities embraced a form of blended learning called HyFlex, to mixed reviews. Is it likely to be part of colleges’ instructional strategy going forward? This week’s episode of The Key explores HyFlex, in which students in a classroom learn synchronously alongside a cohort of peers studying remotely. HyFlex moved from a fringe phenomenon to the mainstream...

Colleges are under growing pressure to prove their “value” to students, parents, legislators and others. The scrutiny can be uncomfortable, but more institutions are responding with serious efforts to measure and explain their value. This week’s episode of The Key, the last in a three-part series on value in higher education, examines the data and metrics we’re using now – and those we might use g...

As recently as a decade ago, the concept of “value” rarely found its way into discussions about federal and state policymaking about higher education. Now it’s unusual to hear a meaningful conversation that doesn’t raise the issue. This week’s episode of The Key, the second in a three-part series on the value of higher education, examines how politicians and policy makers are responding to growing...

For decades, colleges and universities enjoyed almost unquestioned public support as some of America’s most important institutions. Like most institutions, they’ve been knocked off that pedestal in recent years, amid growing questions not about whether higher education remains important but whether it’s available, affordable and valuable enough. This week’s episode of The Key is the first in a thr...

Most business officers are upbeat about their colleges’ financial future. Why is that so, and are they right to be so optimistic? This week's episode of The Key features a discussion about Inside Higher Ed’s 2022 Survey of College and University Business Officers , which generally found college chief financial officers feeling pretty good about how their institutions are faring and how they’re pos...

Many people in higher education recoil at the idea of merging institutions, and it’s little wonder: in most such arrangements, one institution swallows the other, which virtually disappears. But that doesn’t mean the alternative is for every college to remain an island unto itself. Recent events – last month’s merger between Saint Joseph’s University and University of the Sciences in Philadelphia,...

College and university enrollments – particularly at community colleges – continue to plummet. Have they bottomed out? Will they recover if the economy cools off as expected? Has enrollment dropped to a new lower plateau that’s likely to be the baseline going forward? This week’s episode of The Key explores the 7.5 percent decline that college enrollments have suffered since the pandemic, with a f...

How are colleges and universities going about rethinking their teaching and learning strategies in the wake of widescale experimentation with digital instruction? This week’s episode is the last of a three-part series on digital teaching and learning, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The first two episodes explored how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped what researchers and practition...

The last two years disrupted many aspects of higher education, and the educational technology market -- and the relationship between colleges and companies – are no exception. This week’s episode of The Key explores how well the many hundreds of ed-tech companies that work with colleges, professors and students actually meet the needs of the institutions and their people, where they fall short, an...

This week’s episode of The Key explores whether and how the landscape of digital teaching and learning has been changed by the last two years of global pandemic, recession, upheaval over racial justice, and more. Participants in the conversation are Shanna Smith Jaggars, assistant vice provost of research and program assessment in Ohio State University’s Office of Student Academic Success, and Jes...

Student loan debt forgiveness. Free community college. Pell Grants for short-term programs. Those are just some of the higher education issues occupying the federal policy landscape in Washington. This week’s episode of The Key features a conversation with Under Secretary James Kvaal, the Education Department’s senior official on higher education. He discusses the administration’s current thinking...

Has higher education’s forced experimentation with remote learning changed how students, professors, colleges and the public view online education? And will it make them more or less likely to participate in it?  This week's episode of The Key explores Inside Higher Ed’s recent report, The Evolving Conversation About Quality in Online Learning.” The report examines a wide range of issues around th...