International Relations, National Security, and Global Competitiveness. Who Needs the Humanities at 'Start-Up U'? - November/December 2012. Stanford says everyone does, and wants to convince the world. Freshman Saya Jenks comes from nearby Menlo Park, but she admits to having initially misjudged Stanford when weighing college choices. She had the Farm pegged as an imperfect place for someone with her interests, which start with theater. When two friends who were a year ahead of her in high school picked the University for its humanities programs, her main reaction was skepticism.
“I thought it was such an engineering school,” Jenks says. Then came the revelations. First, she signed up for a live audition in drama as an arts supplement to her application and landed in front of Dan Klein, ’90, who teaches improvisation in the drama department as well as holding classes and workshops at the Graduate School of Business and the d.school. Photo: Glenn Matsumura 'THE HUMANITIES are of special benefit for young people searching to understand themselves.' -- Debra Satz, Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities and Arts. Humanities+ A Liberal Arts Education | Berkeley Homepage.
Why Study the Liberal Arts? Competition in the marketplace often leads us to question the value of studies that don’t offer a direct track to employment. But a broad-based liberal arts education does more than prepare you for a job. It lays the foundation for a future career while also preparing you to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Whether you choose to read a poem, peer into a microscope, act in a Shakespeare play, decipher a medieval manuscript, or unravel the mysteries of the human brain, you learn more than facts: you learn to think independently and make sound judgments. You expand your horizons, discover new perspectives, and acquire the tools to defend your point of view. To be liberally educated is to be transformed.
Reaching across the disciplines Every field of study is but one of many ways of partitioning knowledge — a part of a much greater whole. Universities offer degrees in a chosen field. A moral and historic compass Building the foundations of a future career. Future of Liberal-Arts Colleges. Easton, Pa. —On Monday morning, a group of accepted applicants heard Daniel H.
Weiss, president of Lafayette College, describe the virtues of residential liberal-arts institutions. He spoke of his college’s commitment to teaching, of its power to prepare students for both work and life. Hours later, in the same auditorium, dozens of college presidents and provosts heard Mr. Weiss deliver a sobering talk about the challenges facing institutions like Lafayette. Mr. These days, more students and parents, as well as pundits and politicians, are questioning the value of a college degree. Mr. In recent years, many colleges have drastically increased their spending on financial aid, which Mr. Other challenges transcend finances. Another challenge: shifting demographics. “The challenge for us is not that diversity is not a great thing—it’s a great thing,” Mr. And then there’s technology. On the heels of those warnings, Eugene M. Mr. Mr. Return to Top. Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities.
Posted on Harvard Business Review: March 31, 2011 12:34 PM How many people in your organization are innovative thinkers who can help with your thorniest strategy problems? How many have a keen understanding of customer needs? How many understand what it takes to assure that employees are engaged at work? If the answer is "not many," welcome to the club. This is because our educational systems focus on teaching science and business students to control, predict, verify, guarantee, and test data. People trained in the humanities who study Shakespeare's poetry, or Cezanne's paintings, say, have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can't be analyzed in conventional ways.
Complexity and ambiguity. Any great work of art—whether literary, philosophical, psychological or visual—challenges a humanist to be curious, to ask open-ended questions, see the big picture. Innovation. Communication and presentation. What else? Debating the Value of College in America. My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university.
The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing. At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives of my Ivy League students. I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?”
College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. I could have answered the question in a different way. Americans for the Arts. Research Studies - Special Topic Trends. Our funding trends reports provide the latest data available on every aspect of U.S. foundation philanthropy. Our team of research experts analyzes and interprets the data on foundations that we collect — providing a national data source unique for its scope, depth, and historical value. Reports available for download are provided in PDF format, which requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States November 2013 According to Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States, foundation support for media is growing at nearly four times the rate of domestic giving in other areas, with 1,012 foundations making 12,040 media-related grants totaling $1.86 billion 2009-2011. The report, produced in collaboration with Media Impact Funders and the John S. and James L.
. - Read the press release - Download the report Free - Explore the data mapping tool Free - Visit the knowledge center Free June 2013 Where Do We Go From Here? October 2012 June 2011. The Foundation Center: Higher and Graduate Educational Institutions. Maggie Morth Communications Manager The Foundation Center e-mail: Web: Foundation Giving for Higher, Graduate, and Professional Educational Institutions Totaled Nearly $7.3 Billion in 2002 —U.S. foundation support for colleges, community colleges, universities, professional schools, and graduate schools totaled an estimated $7.27 billion in 2002, up from $4.2 billion in 1997. "In the current economic climate, many foundations have cut back on the number of extremely large, multi-year commitments they make," noted Loren Renz, vice president for research at the Foundation Center. The can be accessed at no charge from the "Researching Philanthropy" area of the Foundation Center's Web site, .
Report Documents Trends in Foundation Giving for Higher and Graduate Educational Institutions Among key findings from the report: More than nine out of ten foundations (94 percent) in the 2001 sample awarded grants to higher and graduate educational institutions. Return to Press Releases. Report on Foundation Support Humanities. Humanities' Share of Foundation Giving Slips Over Past Decade —Giving by private foundations to the humanities more than doubled during the past decade, according to a new study conducted and published by the Foundation Center in collaboration with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The report, finds that funding for fields such as art history, history and archeology, languages and linguistics, area studies, and the humanistic social sciences increased two and one-half times (149.8 percent) from $134.1 million in 1992 to $335 million in 2002. At the same time the report notes that, despite the overall increase, some scholarly disciplines actually lost ground over the ten year period.
Support for the humanities grew more slowly than overall foundation giving during this period (up 199.8 percent), and the share of giving for the humanities slipped from 2.5 percent in the early 1990s to 2.1 percent in 2002. Report Includes Brief History of Foundation Support for the Humanities. Survey on Higher Education. By Karin Fischer The American higher-education system has long been seen as a leader in the world, but confidence in its future and its enduring value may be beginning to crack along economic lines, according to two major surveys of the American public and college presidents conducted this spring.
Public anxiety over college costs is at an all-time high. And low-income college graduates or those burdened by student-loan debt are questioning the value of their degrees, or saying the cost of college has delayed other life decisions. Among college presidents, the rising price of college is not the only worry. But perhaps the most troublesome finding from the surveys is this: More than a third of presidents think the industry they lead is heading in the wrong direction. Without a change in course, presidents fear, American higher education's standing around the globe could erode. "We should be worried," said Nancy L. But they occupy a tiny space in American higher education. Disruptive Change. Graduates on the Value of HigherEd Degree. By Eric Hoover Scholastic skepticism is contagious.
Pundits and parents alike continue to second-guess the value of a college degree. After all, the recession has changed the way many Americans look at big-ticket purchases; plenty of families worry that today's expenses will not pay off tomorrow. Not surprisingly, today's cost-conscious public views college price tags with a wary eye. According to the Pew Research Center survey of the American public, only 35 percent said colleges were doing a "good" job in terms of providing value to students and parents; 42 percent said "only fair," and 15 percent said "poor. " A curious thing happened when college graduates were asked about the value of their own degrees, however. Why? In the Pew survey, all respondents were asked about the "main purpose" of college. These findings echo the words graduates often use to describe the benefits of their college experiences. Evan Bloom's diploma will tell you only so much about him.
Mr. Mr. Still, Ms. Ms. Most Presidents Favor No Tenure for Majority of Faculty - Surveys of the Public and Presidents. By Jack Stripling The deteriorating number of tenured positions in higher education is a common source of concern for faculty, but few college presidents seem perturbed by the trend. Less than a quarter of college leaders who responded to a Pew Research Center survey, done in association with The Chronicle, said they would prefer full-time, tenured professors to make up most of the faculty at their institutions. Instead, 69 percent said they would prefer that a majority of faculty work under long-term or annual contracts. Leaders of private four-year institutions were less enamored of tenure than were their public peers. Forty percent of leaders of four-year private colleges who responded to the survey, conducted this spring, expressed a preference for faculty with long-term contracts, while 30 percent favored tenure.
At four-year public institutions, half of the presidents surveyed said they preferred tenured faculty. Cathy A. Benefits of Contracts Mr. James D. Jason D. Kent J. Mr. Presidents on Signifiers of College Quality. By David Glenn In a year when public concern about the cost and purpose of college education is rising, a new survey has revealed an undercurrent of anxiety among college presidents about the quality of teaching and learning on their campuses. More than a quarter of the presidents in the Pew Research Center survey, done in association with The Chronicle, said they worried that their faculty members were grading too leniently. More than half said students spent less time studying than they did a decade ago.
And when asked how the public should assess a college's quality, the presidents did not show much faith in the student-engagement surveys and student-learning examinations that have come to prominence in the last decade. Instead, the yardsticks that got the most support were measures whose reliability is often questioned: graduation rates and accreditation. "Presidents clearly don't think there are surveys or tests out there that really get them to effective assessment," said Mr. Ms. Comment on the Future of College Eduation. By Daniel Yankelovich This issue of The Chronicle features two important surveys of higher education: one with college presidents and one with the public. These new data give us a chance to take a second look at some of the trends I discussed in an article for The Chronicle in November 2005. At that time, those trends appeared to be pushing higher education into a new era of turmoil, crisis, and challenge.
In sharp contrast to my 2005 article, the tone of the two new Chronicle surveys suggests to me the opposite of turmoil and crisis. Though some Americans grumble about not getting great value for their money, the vast majority are pretty well satisfied with the performance of higher education. Most Americans who have been exposed to higher education feel that their investment has been a sound one. A majority of college presidents believe that higher education is moving in the right direction. The college presidents do acknowledge that higher education confronts many problems. Higher Education in 2011 - Surveys of the Public and Presidents. 2 Major Surveys of the American Public and College Presidents Download both surveys as .PDF files: Presidents | The Public How the Surveys Were Done The findings shown on these pages came from two surveys by the Pew Research Center—one of college chief executives, conducted in association with The Chronicle, and one of the public.
Pew collected responses from 1,055 college leaders from mid-March to mid-April, almost all of whom took the survey online. They included heads of public, private, four-year, two-year, and for-profit institutions. Pew’s survey takers contacted those leaders using a list of names and e-mail addresses supplied by The Chronicle. The list comprises degree-granting institutions with total enrollments of at least 500 in the fall of 2009, and which a recognized accreditor had accredited or given pre-accreditation status. Pew contacted a total of 3,324 college and university leaders who met those conditions. Survey Public. Survey Presidents.
Humanities Resource Center Online. Web Caspar - Data Resource System. Table Builder: Create a data table This section contains a selection of WebCASPAR data sources. You can select one or more to use as the basis for your table. Click on the checkboxes next to the data sources (e.g., NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates/Doctorate Records File) to select the data sources of interest, then click on Select Data Source(s) to continue to the Modify Analysis Variables screen. From there you will begin making the other selections for your data table. Saved Tables: View predefined tables and tables that you have saved Frequently Requested Tables: The Frequently Requested Tables pulldown box contains a selection of predefined data tables. Your Saved Tables: If you are logged in as a registered user, the Your Saved Tables pulldown box will display a list of the data tables previously saved under your user ID and password. This is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Federal Government computer system.
Your session will expire after 60 minutes of inactivity. Press Release on HRCO. The Humanities World Report Project.