In The News

Civitas Learning today announced a significant growth investment from Francisco Partners, alongside current education and impact investors including Rethink Education, SJF Ventures, and Lumina Foundation. The Austin-based company pioneered the use of advanced data science, design thinking, and machine learning to inform initiatives and improve student outcomes.

High tuition fees for distance education courses are keeping some community colleges in Colorado afloat. But should rural students pay the price? When it comes to education, Colorado is a state of paradoxes. The state has one of the most educated adult populations in the country, yet young people who grow up there are less likely to go to college than those from many other states.

The Department of Education (ED) has taken many steps to better K-12 education standards, such as through the No Child Left Behind Act, which contributed to a national high school graduation rate of 84 percent for the 2015-16 academic year. A new report from the think tank Third Way explores the economic effects that would result if the college completion rate was equally high—which the author wrote is achievable if we dedicate the same “laser-like focus” to higher education and implement policy changes in the Higher Education Act (HEA) to increase retention rates.

What are higher education IT folks interested in? Judging by the reading habits of the Campus Technology audience, ed tech trends were far and away the most popular topic for 2018. Security and privacy issues also made a strong showing, followed by enrollment challenges, online learning, social media, classroom design and student advising.

Florida State University is helping to streamline its students’ academic experience by enabling them to more easily explore academic and degree pathways.

Colleges have the ability to gather more student data than ever before, and with that information comes the pressure to put it to good use. Nudges, when done right, are proving up to that task.

As technology bounds forward in ever-increasing leaps, Dodge City Community College, like many institutions across the country, is becoming more aware that on college campuses today, building a productive student experience requires embracing tomorrow.

Indianapolis-based education software firm ClearScholar Inc. was acquired in June by Civitas Learning Inc., an Austin, Texas-based education-tech company that supplies its data-gathering and packaging platform to more than 350 colleges and universities.

The higher ed system that we have today, if you can call it a system, is not built for the challenges we’re facing. The majority of college students we need to serve are non-traditional students, who don’t live on a residential campus with the classic, stereotypical college experience.

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities announced ASU, along with four other universities, as a finalist for the 2018 Degree Completion Award.