As Lumina Foundation releases a new edition of the signature report, "A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education," the central message is the same one conveyed since the first of this series of reports in 2009. Lumina remains convinced that significantly increasing college attainment is the key to ensuring a brighter future for our nation and its citizens. By the year 2025 Lumina's goal is to see 60 per cent of Americans holding a college degree, certificate, or other high-quality postsecondary credential. This fifth edition of "Stronger Nation," much like earlier editions, is designed to track progress toward that vital goal from a national perspective in the nation's largest metro areas, in each of the 50 states, even down to the county level. This 2014 edition reports what appears to be modest progress in most areas. Beyond the numbers, Lumina sees even more encouraging signs-- unmistakable signals that the need and the hunger for higher education is stronger than ever.

A public policy leader addresses how artificial intelligence is transforming the future of labor—and what we can do to protect the role of workers. As computer technology advances with dizzying speed, human workers face an ever-increasing threat of obsolescence. In Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines, Jamie Merisotis argues that we can—and must—rise to this challenge by preparing to work alongside smart machines doing that which only humans can: thinking critically, reasoning ethically, interacting interpersonally, and serving others with empathy. The president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, Merisotis offers a roadmap for the large-scale, radical changes we must make in order to find abundant and meaningful work for ourselves in the 21st century. His vision centers on developing our unique capabilities as humans through learning opportunities that deliver fair results and offer a broad range of credentials. By challenging long-held assumptions and expanding our concept of work, Merisotis argues that we can harness the population’s potential, encourage a deeper sense of community, and erase a centuries-long system of inequality.

Building sustainable diversity in higher education isn't just the right thing to do—it is an imperative for institutional excellence and for a pluralistic society that works. In Diversity's Promise for Higher Education, author Daryl G. Smith proposes clear and realistic practices to help institutions identify diversity as a strategic imperative for excellence and pursue diversity efforts that are inclusive of the varied issues on campuses—without losing focus on the critical unfinished business of the past. To become more relevant while remaining true to their core missions, colleges and universities must continue to frame diversity as central to institutional excellence. Smith suggests that seeing diversity as an imperative for an institution's mission, and not just as a value, is the necessary lever for real institutional change. Furthermore, achieving excellence in a diverse society requires increasing institutional capacity for diversity—working to understand how diversity is tied to better leadership, positive change, research in virtually every field, student success, accountability, and more equitable hiring practices. In this edition, Smith emphasizes a transdisciplinary approach to the topic of diversity. Drawing on fifty years of diversity studies, this fourth edition engages with how the environment has transformed for diversity work since the third edition appeared in 2020. It • addresses the changed landscape in which DEI work has been politicized both on and off campus; • provides examples and language to suggest ways to articulate the centrality of diversity to mission and excellence; • emphasizes the link between healthy democracies and higher education's mission in light of the current global and domestic challenges to democracy; • highlights the need to focus on the conditions for developing healthy communities where dialogue, difference, and learning can take place; • examines the current climate of campus protests and the implications for free speech and academic freedom; and • reemphasizes the complexity of identity—and explains how to attend to the growing kinds of identities relevant to diversity, equity, and inclusion while not overshadowing the unfinished business of race, class, and gender.

Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular—and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. Now with a new afterword by Bryan Caplan, this explosive book argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As only to forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for average workers, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense—The Case against Education points the way.

A volume on Theory and Practice of Adult and Higher Education or Foundations of Adult and Higher Education will appeal to both our graduate students and faculty as so many of them have been taking courses in both program areas and have been concerned with their defined areas of expertise. Although theories and practices in Adult Education, and in Higher Education are being used interchangeably, there is a lack of scholarly work that connects existing theories and practices across the two fields. The proposed ground?breaking volume will cover topics/theories/practices in both fields of Adult Education and of Higher Education, and in doing so will bring to the fore the connections that make these two fields truly inseparable. The proposed volume will therefore generate new knowledge to share among faculty, graduate students and other researchers who practice not only in Adult Education, but also in Higher Education.

The topic of achieving and assuring quality in every higher education institution continues to be both relevant and urgent worldwide. This volume presents a considered discussion of a range of facets of the issue, drawing on the findings of a 3 year EU research programme involving seven countries: Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Latvia, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands. Topics include access, student assessment, governance, stakeholders, academic faculty, information and the interface between the secondary and tertiary sectors. The authors, all of whom are drawn from the research teams, explore particular aspects of the research objectives. These aim to identify the drivers and overcome the barriers to establishing high quality in both European higher education, in relation to the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance and, by implication, in worldwide higher education.

This thought-provoking volume brings together scholars and system leaders to analyze some of the most pressing and complex issues now facing higher education systems and society. Higher Education Systems 3.0 focuses on the remaking of higher education coordination in an era of increased accountability, greater calls for productivity, and intensifying fiscal austerity. System heads have been identifying ways to harness the collective contributions of their various institutions to benefit the students, communities, and other stakeholders that they serve. The contributors explore the recent dynamics of higher education systems, focusing particularly on how systems are now working to improve their effectiveness in educating students and improving our communities, while also identifying new means for operating more efficiently. This enhanced collaboration, or systemness, is the key aspect of version 3.0.