THE ATLANTIC – Education | This, That and The Other

Even in the best of times, searching for a first job after college is an exercise in patience, resilience, and coping with rejection. And these are not the best of times. Companies have no idea whom to hire, applicants have no idea how to stand out, and everyone is miserable.Historically, new college graduates were more likely to have a job than the average worker. Now, however, the recent-grad unemployment rate is slightly higher than that of the overall workforce. That’s in part because there are fewer positions to go around. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for college students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year, and companies are warning that this year’s entry-level job market could be even worse. (To be clear, the unemployment rate for recent graduates is still far lower than the rate for young people who didn’t go… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. No one should be kept from taking a class, for… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.