Page 6 - Campus Technology, May/June 2019

EARLY CAREER PLANNING. Complete College America has begun pushing a “Purpose First” philosophy for colleges and universities, a strategy intended to serve as the “missing link” among career choice, guided pathways and first-year momentum. The “Purpose First” initia- tive describes a redesigned institutional struc- ture that encourages students to identify their interests early on, learn about possible careers and get informed about labor market data and other relevant information to help them in their decision-making.
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sites that make them impossible to find or have links to calculators that use outdated expense data, misinform on the use of loan funding to cover costs, or don’t work consistently overall. The bottom line is that students make their col- lege admissions decisions based on faulty or incomplete information, frequently with nega- tive consequences.
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CBE FOR COLLEGE READINESS. West- ern Governors University (online) is launching WGU Academy, an independent entity serving students who need a little extra help before they’re ready for college. Academy courses will be delivered in the same online, competency- based format that the university follows. Stu- dents will enroll in programs of two or more college-level courses, which will most often consist of a writing course and at least one other course in math, general education or an introductory-level class focused on a specific degree area. WGU said it hopes to offer the ser- vices of the new academy to other institutions as a way to help them address the college read- iness gap as well.
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CUTTING COSTS. A new task force with pro- vosts, library directors, faculty and students at the University of Texas System will spend the next year sorting out ways to make college more affordable. According to reporting in the Daily Texan at the University of Texas at Austin, goals for the group include performing a “systemwide environmental scan” to uncover affordable learn- ing resources already in use and to produce rec- ommendations for increasing the adoption of open educational resources by faculty.
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Photos L-R: Sergey Nivens, WhiteMocca, LuckyStep/Shutterstock
BROKEN CALCULATORS. Net Price Calcu- lators, those little tools made available by col- leges and universities to help students under- stand the annual costs of their potential post-secondary education, aren’t doing the job they need to. In a brief published by the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Edu- cation, researchers found that schools often tuck the calculators into corners of their web-
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | May/June 2019