Spanish remains a large and constant fixture in the foreign language learning landscape in the United States. As Spanish language study has grown, so too has the diversity of students and contexts of use, placing the field in the midst of a curricular identity crisis. Spanish has become a second, rather than a foreign, language in the US, which leads to unique opportunities and challenges for curriculum and syllabus design, materials development, individual and program assessment, and classroom pedagogy. In their book, Brown and Thompson address these challenges and provide a vision of Spanish language education for the twenty-first century. 

Using data from the College Board, ETS, and the authors’ own institutions, as well as responses to their national survey of almost seven hundred Spanish language educators, the authors argue that the field needs to evolve to reflect changes in the sociocultural, socioeducational, and sociopolitical landscape of the US. The authors provide coherent and compelling discussion of the most pressing issues facing Spanish post-secondary education and strategies for converting these challenges into opportunities. Topics that are addressed in the book include: Heritage learners, service learning in Spanish-speaking communities, Spanish for specific purposes, assessment, unique needs for Spanish teacher training, online and hybrid teaching, and the relevance of ACTFL’s national standards for Spanish post-secondary education.  An essential read for Spanish language scholars, especially those interested in curriculum design and pedagogy, that includes supporting reflection questions and pedagogical activities for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses.

SATs, ACTs, GPAs. Everyone knows that these scores can’t tell a college everything that’s important about an applicant. But what else should admissions officers look for, and how can they know it when they see it? In College Admissions for the 21st Century a leading researcher on intelligence and creativity offers a bold and practical approach to college admissions testing.

Standardized tests are measures of memory and analytical skills. But the ever-changing global society beyond a college campus needs more than just those qualities, argues Robert Sternberg. Tomorrow’s leaders and citizens also need creativity, practicality, and wisdom.

How can the potential for those complex qualities be measured? One answer is “Kaleidoscope,” a new initiative in undergraduate admissions, first used at Tufts University. Its open-ended questions for applicants, and the means used to score the answers, gives applicants and admissions officers the chance to go beyond standardized tests.

Does it work? As Sternberg describes in detail, Kaleidoscope measures predicted first-year academic success, over and above SATs and high school GPAs, and predicted first-year extracurricular activities, leadership, and active citizenship as well. And every year that Kaleidoscope measures were used, the entering class’s average SATs and high school GPAs went up too.

What worked at Tufts can work elsewhere. New kinds of assessments, like Kaleidoscope, can liberate many colleges and students from the narrowness of standardized tests and inspire new approaches to teaching for new kinds of talented, motivated citizens of the world.

The most crucial choice a high school graduate makes is whether to attend college or to go to work. Here is the most sophisticated study of the complexities behind that decision.

Based on a unique data set of nearly 23,000 seniors from more than 1,300 high schools who were tracked over several years, the book treats the following questions in detail: Who goes to college? Does low family income prevent some young people from enrolling, or does scholarship aid offset financial need? How important are scholastic aptitude scores, high school class rank, race, and socioeconomic background in determining college applications and admissions? Do test scores predict success in higher education?

Using the data from the National Longitudinal Study of the Class of 1972, the authors present a set of interrelated analyses of student and institutional behavior, each focused on a particular aspect of the process of choosing and being chosen by a college. Among their interesting findings: most high school graduates would be admitted to some four-year college of average quality, were they to apply; applicants do not necessarily prefer the highest-quality school; high school class rank and SAT scores are equally important in college admissions; federal scholarship aid has had only a small effect on enrollments at four-year colleges but a much stronger effect on attendance at two-year colleges; the attention paid to SAT scores in admissions is commensurate with the power of the scores in predicting persistence to a degree. This clearly written book is an important source of information on a perpetually interesting topic.

A collection of essays that provides advice and strategies for BIPOC scholars on how to survive, thrive, and resist in academic institutions.

Conditionally Accepted builds upon an eponymous blog on InsideHigherEd.com, which is now a decade-old national platform for BIPOC academics in the United States. Bringing together perspectives from academics of color on navigating intersecting forms of injustice in the academy, each chapter offers situated knowledge about experiencing—and resisting—marginalization in academia. Contextualized within existing scholarship, these personal narratives speak to institutional betrayals while highlighting agency and sharing stories of surviving on treacherous terrain. Covering topics from professional development to the emptiness of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and redefining what it means to be an academic in our contemporary moment, this edited collection directly confronts issues of systemic exclusion, discrimination, harassment, microaggressions, tokenism, and surveillance. Letting marginalized scholars know they are not alone, Conditionally Accepted offers concrete wisdom for readers seeking to navigate and transform oppressive academic institutions.

In real life, Mitchell Stevens is a professor in bustling New York. But for a year and a half, he worked in the admissions office of a bucolic New England college that is known for its high academic standards, beautiful campus, and social conscience. Ambitious high schoolers and savvy guidance counselors know that admission here is highly competitive. But creating classes, Stevens finds, is a lot more complicated than most people imagine.

Admissions officers love students but they work for the good of the school. They must bring each class in "on budget," burnish the statistics so crucial to institutional prestige, and take care of their colleagues in the athletic department and the development office. Stevens shows that the job cannot be done without "systematic preferencing," and racial affirmative action is the least of it. Kids have an edge if their parents can pay full tuition, if they attend high schools with exotic zip codes, if they are athletes--especially football players--and even if they are popular.

With novelistic flair, sensitivity to history, and a keen eye for telling detail, Stevens explains how elite colleges and universities have assumed their central role in the production of the nation's most privileged classes. Creating a Class makes clear that, for better or worse, these schools now define the standards of youthful accomplishment in American culture more generally.

How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher and classicist, argues that contemporary curricular reform is already producing such “citizens of the world” in its advocacy of diverse forms of cross-cultural studies. Her vigorous defense of “the new education” is rooted in Seneca’s ideal of the citizen who scrutinizes tradition critically and who respects the ability to reason wherever it is found—in rich or poor, native or foreigner, female or male.

Drawing on Socrates and the Stoics, Nussbaum establishes three core values of liberal education: critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. Then, taking us into classrooms and campuses across the nation, including prominent research universities, small independent colleges, and religious institutions, she shows how these values are (and in some instances are not) being embodied in particular courses. She defends such burgeoning subject areas as gender, minority, and gay studies against charges of moral relativism and low standards, and underscores their dynamic and fundamental contribution to critical reasoning and world citizenship.

For Nussbaum, liberal education is alive and well on American campuses in the late twentieth century. It is not only viable, promising, and constructive, but it is essential to a democratic society. Taking up the challenge of conservative critics of academe, she argues persuasively that sustained reform in the aim and content of liberal education is the most vital and invigorating force in higher education today.