Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a new study from the Joyce Foundation shows that public universities all too often focus their out-of-state recruitment on rich, private and largely white high schools in order to increase their academic reputation and their volume of full-pay students.

More Ivy League schools are going test-optional – this time for their Ph.D. program admissions.

Reported by Inside Higher Ed, both Cornell and Harvard have dropped the GRE requirement for their English Ph.D. programs. Joining the ranks of other institutions who have moved to test-optional admission requirements - not for any strategic enrollment growth benefit per se - but because these institutions are convinced that GRE scores are simply not good predictors of Ph.D. success.

Arizona State University’s move away from big lecture classes and toward active learning has increased their graduation rate by 18 points.

Reported by EAB, ASU’s new course design improvements incorporate active learning elements and adaptive learning software to help meet students where they are, and how they need help.

Higher ed has a completion problem, but we’re starting to make progress.

Reported by EAB, both 2- and 4-year colleges are seeing improvement in their student completion rates, rising from 56.8% to 58.3% across all institution types.

Dr. Goodman from Harvard University has a strategy for softening the emotional blow from some negative student evaluations.

Reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dr. Goodman’s assistant summarizes the constructive criticism, and removes the “emotional intensity” from any specific critique.

Cal State University, Dominguez Hills is trying to gamify student services.

Reported by Education Dive, students can earn prizes for both learning about and utilizing student support services. The goal is to improve first-year retention rates by incentivizing the acts of becoming informed about available campus support.

Reported by Education Dive, The University of Dayton School of Law is one institution moving to a mostly-online hybrid program, with on-campus intensive sessions one week each semester. This is an attempt to partially solve for the 13% slump in J.D. enrollment between 2013 and 2018.

Reported by Education Dive, University Innovation Alliance members are looking to improve that reality on their campuses in several ways, including making career exploration a key part of the first-year experience, better promoting career preparation resources, establishing career choice milestones as part of the degree program, and creating access to better hands-on career and internship opportunities.

How did a classroom mix-up force one professor to figure out how to mass scale personalized learning?

Reported by EdSurge, when a 400-seat movie theater at San Francisco State University was no longer available for his Principles of Marketing course, Dr. Bruce Robertson had to figure out how to use technology instead so these students could learn online.

What if work-study programs didn’t only provide financial assistance for students, but actually prepared them for their future career paths, too?

Reported by EdSurge, a new NASPA study shows that while work-study programs have high correlations with improved persistence and retention, there is still an opportunity for work-study programs to better improve more practical professional development skills for the participating students.