by Wendy Fischman My Current Soapbox Nearly all American students go to high school, and about two thirds of them eventually go to college. Optimally, the transition to college should be smooth—students should be equipped with appropriate cognitive skills and content knowledge for higher education. Students also need a certain degree of maturity in order […]
Author Archives | Wendy Fischman
Ethics at Work: The Importance of Academic Honesty in our Schools, Part II
by Wendy Fischman In the previous blog, I discussed the recent admissions scandal in higher education. I drew on our research conducted in the late 1990s: we described how easily young people justified cutting corners in order to get ahead and/or satisfy pressures to be “successful.” In this blog, I relate this work to our […]
Ethics at Work: The Importance of Academic Honesty in Our Schools, Part I
by Wendy Fischman Recently, an egregious scandal erupted in higher education. For perhaps the first time, several dozen parents have been exposed for blatant wrongdoings—paying others to change answers on standardized test scores; fabricating identities and resumes of their own children to disguise them as top tier athletes; paying coaches on the side to “recruit” […]
The Mental Health Enigma: One Size Does Not Fit All (Part I)
By Wendy Fischman The state of mental health on college campuses has become a major topic of conversation. In recent months, media outlets ranging from The Chronicle of Higher Education to Foreign Affairs have featured stories about how campuses have been inundated with reports of students’ personal problems. When we began our study of higher […]
Longing to Belong: An Important Issue for Higher Education
by Wendy Fischman In higher education, the context can shift quickly. When we began our national study in 2012, higher education seemed to be highly valued (funding for Pell grants nearly doubled), MOOCs were on the rise, and “liberal arts” as a form of education was admired and emulated in many parts of the world. […]
