Career » Carol J. Carter

Celebrating Emerging Scholars, NSCS, and the Power of a Crazy Idea

The following article was originally posted as part of my blog series on the Huffington Post where I am sharing experiences and insights I gained from my recent travel.Â

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a twenty-year anniversary celebration for theÂ National Society of Collegiate ScholarsÂ in Washington, D.C. It was a special honor to be there because I knew the founder, Steve Loflin, some twenty-five years ago before this concept had completely gelled in his mind. What started as a “crazy idea” to convene a college honor society on scholarship, leadership, and service was hatched with two of Steve’s friends over a lasagna dinner at his apartment. Twenty years later, this organization is a million strong with chapters at some 400 colleges. In Steve’s speech he spoke to the messiness of start-up ideas and the organic, sometimes random nature in which crazy ideas take root; an excellent perspective as the college culture can protect students from the uncertainties and ambiguities they will meet in the reality outside of school. With all of the news stories and data on how students struggle academically, emotionally, and socially, it is nice to see so many examples of students who are thriving and doing their best to make the world a better place.

Continue reading on the Huffington Post.

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Despite Optimism, New College Grads Are Increasingly Underemployed

If you know a college student or new college graduate, you’ve probably had a conversation with them that revolved around their anxiety in finding full-time employment in their field. And rightfully so. The correlation between a college degree and a high-salary job are a lot more uncertain than in the past. Unlike generations before them, a degree is no longer the final step before setting forth on a career path.
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The Psychology Behind Why We Choose Boring Jobs

Imagine you are offered a position to work as a museum attendant. Your only job is to stand around making sure that no one touches a painting. The job doesn’t sound too bad, right?

In reality, for many, standing around is a “boring” job that doesn’t offer much variety, interaction with people, or enjoyment. So why do people take these boring jobs?

The results of new research out of Duke University, shared in the NPR story “Why Do People Agree to Work in Boring Jobs?”, Â suggests people trick themselves into taking these boring jobs by thinking they will be more enjoyable than they actually know they will be. Â They also may suffer fromÂ effort aversion. When given multiple choices, people are more likely to choose the one that will require less effort.
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Final Session of the FREE NROC/LifeBound Summer Webinar Series

This summer, we partnered with the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) to present a summer series of FREE webinars on Academic Coaching. Â Over the past few weeks we’ve presented on the following topics, which are now available to view on archive.

SESSION 1: Coaching for College and Career Readiness: It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Know How To Do

Presented by Carol Carter, Maureen Breeze, and Lynn Troyka

This session shares hands-on ideas of how educators can coach students to master specific, practical connections for excelling in reading, writing and math. We discuss the development of professional skills as well as setting structures for accountability, challenge, and growth that can ensure success in college, career, and life.

WATCH NOW

SESSION 2: Academic Coaching for Advisors and Student Success Staff

Presented by Carol Carter and Maureen Breeze

In this informational webinar tailored to student success staff and advisors, participants will learn about various academic coaching strategies and professional development options for student services staff supporting redesign efforts in developmental education.

Through academic coaching, faculty and advisors ask powerful questions and promote deeper level thinking to help students make connections, set goals and action plans, create a vision for the future, and develop persistence, grit and accountability.

WATCH NOW

SESSION 3: Introduction to Academic Coaching for Reading and Writing Faculty

Presented by Carol CarterÂ

In this informational webinar tailored to reading and writing instructors, viewers learn about various academic coaching strategies to support reading, writing and critical thinking skills necessary for college success. Discover how academic coaching promotes academic, professional and life success.

WATCH NOW

Coming up this Thursday, August 22, is the final session of the NROC/LifeBound summer series. Space is limited.

SESSION 4: Introduction to Academic Coaching for Math Faculty

Thursday, August 22

2:00 pm ET

Presented by Maureen Breeze

In this informational webinar tailored to math instructors, participants will learn about various academic coaching strategies to support math understanding and quantitative reasoning skills for college success. Discover how academic coaching promotes academic, professional and life success.

REGISTER NOW

What are some webinar topics you would like to attend? I look forward to hearing from you in the comment section.

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How to Save Billions and Better Prepare Students to Make Billions

This article was originally posted on The Huffington Post on May 8, 2013.

Last February, The National Center for Education reported that 50 percent of theÂ 3 million studentsÂ who begin college annually require some level of remediation. This trend costs students, parents, institutions, and taxpayers nearlyÂ $7 billion a year, while remedial students fail to earn a single college credit.

The high volume and costs of remediation have policymakers and education leaders scrambling to stop this financial hemorrhage. While reform in remedial education is inevitable, the unintended consequences of swooping changes can be harmful to students, institutions, and the economy at a time when the U.S. is struggling to fill the 21st century workforce with high-skilled workers.

Who are remediated students?

A report released today by theÂ National Center on Education and the EconomyÂ states that many community college career programs demand little or no use of math, and high school students are taking math courses they will likely never use. In reading and writing, the group noted incoming college freshmen had simplistic and academically unchallenging skills. Finally, NCEE discovered that very little writing is required of community college freshmen, and when it is, there are low expectations for making a cogent argument and employing basic rules for writing, punctuation, and grammar. The report calls for the bar to be raised if students are to succeed in college, career, and life. Some of these same patterns exist for freshmen admitted to open admission four-year colleges.

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Google’s CEO Shares the Best Advice He Ever Received

Professionals and athletes aren’t the only people who can benefit from a coach, students who participated in an academic coaching program found increased retention and graduation rates.Â Â Through the process of coaching, students deepen their learning, take responsibility for their actions, improve their effectiveness, and consciously create their outcomes in life.

How can you use coaching to improve student outcomes? LifeBound’s Academic Coaching Training is a great professional development option for professors, teachers, administrators, counselors, and other education professionals who want to learn to be a coach for their student by listening, asking powerful questions, and encouraging problem solving. Our next 3-day coaching session is June 24-26. Let me know if you would like to learn more about our Academic Coaching Training in the comments or by sending an email to contact@lifebound.com.

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My New Blogs on the Huffington Post

Last week I had my first blog published on Huffington Post. The open forum in the Huffington Post comment sections has already been a great writing and learning experience, and I look forward to engaging with more opinionated readers.

My latest article explores why low-income students are often less likely to receive a quality K-12 education, graduate from high school, and enter college with college-level skills. Over the next few weeks I’m going to continue the conversation by sharing how low-income students can find learning opportunities outside of school to improve their personal, academic, and professional achievement as well as share some stories of Â people I know personally who have overcome poverty.

You can read and comment on my blog “Why Aren’t Low-Income Students Succeeding in School?”Â Â at the Huffington Post.

“We cannot rest until each of us would be satisfied with randomly assigning our own children to any public school in the nation.”Â

- Â Jason Kamras

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Will MOOCs Equalize or Divide Accessibility to Higher Education?

MOOCs are on the minds of many educatorsÂ and studentsÂ today as the new open source trend opens many discussions on what learning will look like in the 21st century. Technology can bring a free college course taught by the best of the best professors from universities like Stanford and Harvard right to your living room. The popularity of MOOCs has people asking, why pay for a college education when you can get one for free online?

In his latest op-ed Thomas Friedman shares what he learned about the future of MOOCs at the recent conference â€œOnline Learning and the Future of Residential Education.” The following are a few points I found most compelling:

Friedman quotes historianÂ Walter Russell Mead, writingÂ higher education will move from a model of Â “time served” to “stuff learned.”Â
Blended learning will optimize learning in and out of the classroom.Â Today’s college students spend classroom-time getting lectured at and their time at home studying for a test. In the near future, at-home studying will be reserved for students to master basic skills at their own pace and time in the classroom will be spent applying their basic knowledge in labs and discussions.

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Accelerating the Developmental Path to a College Degree

As more students flock to colleges to earn a degree and better their chances at employment, more students are landing in developmental education courses before they can enroll in a degree-earning program. Though the demand for workers with a college degree only continues to increase in the 21st century workforce, college retention and graduation rates have failed to make significant gains.

Some states that are determined to greatly increase the number of college graduates are redesigning their developmental education programs in hopes of finding more potential graduates in the population of remedial students; a population which is significantly less likely than their non-remediated peers to graduate from college. In 2009, 29% of Coloradoâ€™s college students required remediation in reading, writing or mathematics, and over half (53%) of students attending two-year institutions needed remediation. Of 100 students enrolled in the lowest level of developmental math, only four will graduate.¹

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How a Workplace Mindset Can Lead to Classroom Success

A new study by the Milken Institute found a strong relationship between a well-educated population and a region’s economic performance.¹ Though it’s common knowledge that well-educated workers often make more money and have better jobs than less-educated workers, this study stands out in that it also found that just by their geographic location, less-educated people can make more money if they live in the same area as more-educated people.

Other key findings from the report include:

Education increases regional prosperity. Adding one year to the average years of schooling among the employed in a metropolitan area is associated with an increase of real GDP per capita of more than ten percent, and an increase in real wages per worker of more than eight percent.
Better educated = bigger benefits. The better educated the worker, the greater the benefit of additional schooling, to both the worker and the region. Add one year of college to a region’s workforce, for instance, and GDP per capita jumps 17.4 percent.
Clusters count. In metros with clusters of high-skilled occupations, the share of workers holding at least a master’s degree is much higher than in metros without significant clusters, perhaps because of the intense competition for employment.

A Matter of Degrees: The Effect of Educational Attainment on Regional Economic Prosperity²

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