Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed
All the resources that the podcast has produced which explain college to the confused
Higher education can feel bewildering: admissions, affordability, student life, and everything that goes on—or doesn’t—in the classroom.
What can make it worse is that a lot of people have opinions about it, but those are often a decade or so old—accumulated when they were residential college students. Close examination would show they didn’t actually know all that much about how their own college worked at the time, let alone ten years later. And they certainly didn’t know how other four-year residential colleges worked, and as for two-year colleges…they don’t even think of them as college.
This ongoing series of conversations brings together historians, educators, and practitioners to help make sense of it all.
Getting In
“The Truth About College Admissions”— Rich Clark and Brennan Barnard know a lot about college admissions, far more than a high school student, the parents of a high school student, or your average high school counselor. They’ve written a guide to getting into college while keeping the family together.
Doing the Work
“The First Three Weeks”—Mark Salisbury, now of TuitionFit, explains the research that indicates how important the first three weeks is for a new undergraduate. We discuss how this should influence what new students do, and what professors do.
“The Secret Syllabus”—Jay Phelan and Terry Burnham, unlike most people, have really good advice to give to new undergraduates. In fact, they wrote probably the best book to give new students.
After Graduation
“What’s the Use of Your Humanities Degree in an AI World?”—Brent Orrell, a policy expert on labor and jobs issues at the American Enterprise Institute, explains that a humanities degree has a lot of utility in a world that is hurtling towards artificial intelligence and increasing automation.