Richland Community College Case Study
August 29, 2022
Location: Decatur, Illinois Enrollment in 2019 (credit and non-credit): 5,435 Part-time students: 73% Continuing education students: 36% Number of EnRich training program participants since 2018: 1,500 OVERVIEW: In central Illinois’ Macon County, the unemployment rate for African Americans sticks stubbornly at around three times higher than the rate for white residents. Recognizing that the reasons for this extended beyond the sheer number of unemployed, Richland Community College in Decatur applied for workforce training funding…
Read more“Children’s Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools”
August 31, 2022
Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. Closing out this month’s Top of Mind, we turn to a paper published in 2011 focused on the importance of curiosity in schools. While we have focused on many of the contemporary issues of education this month, it is also important to reflect on the overarching trend of modern learning. In this paper, “[Susan] Engel argues that interactions between teachers and students can foster or inhibit…
Read more“Redefining the Goal of Education”
Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. As we see the start of the public school year throughout much of the US and other countries, let’s take a moment to reflect on the goal of education and how we might want to reframe it. For starters, many of us believed that the path toward the highest paying and most rewarding job was a college degree. And while it is true that, on average,…
Read more“More workers without degrees are landing jobs. Will it last?”
Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. Thinking about the tumultuous changes to education, one might naturally consider how this impacts the job market. As has been reported for several years, jobs increasingly care about skills, mindsets, and experience over holding a particular degree. In this recent article from the Washington Post, we see an examination of the recent trend of ditching the degree requirement in a variety of fields, namely IT. What’s…
Read more“Subpar pay, burnout, pandemic disruptions and a teacher exodus: The many factors imperiling Virginia schools”
Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. In Virginia, Ohio, and across the country, schools are experiencing massive disruptions. While regionally, there are differences, many of the causes are similar: continuing COVID-19 complications, lack of funding, teacher burnout, and in some states, a massive teacher shortage. This shortage isn’t because there aren’t enough trained teachers, but instead from qualified teachers who have had enough. In this article from Virginia Mercury, we see a…
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