Differential costs of curricula in Illinois public junior colleges: Some implications for the future

The purpose of this study was to determine and analyze the annual cost of operation including depreciation of movable capital equipment for educating one student in each curriculum of selected community colleges and to show the relationship of costs of vocational-technical curricula to the cost for common baccalaureate oriented curricula.A stratified sample of eight community colleges was drawn from those that had been in operation for at least five years.These data indicate that a majority of the courses offered in highly specialized curricula in both the occupational and baccalaureate categories were more expansive than those courses that were common to a wide variety of curricula.This study supports differential program funding to assure continued development of high quality vocational-technical programs in community colleges.     

Lifelong learning and the reform of the teaching practicum in Australia

This paper reports the findings of a project—‘Lifelong learning and teacher education’—undertaken by the Centre for Lifelong Learning, Australian Catholic University, under the auspices of the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training. The study was designed to investigate the operationalization of lifelong learning in Australian teacher education. The study revealed that there is a range of existing, innovative practices regarding partnerships between schools and higher and further education that are in keeping with emerging ideas about lifelong learning. Moreover, some of these take the form of collaborative action research projects focused on improving the learning occurring in the partnership schools. This paper describes some current approaches in Australia to collaborative action research by teacher educators' and their partnership schools and shows how they contribute to lifelong learning. The approaches are then analyzed to suggest ways of advancing lifelong learning within Australian Education Faculties thus helping to make lifelong learning more of a reality for all.     

Incorporating the Narrative in Career Planning

The article makes a case for the construction of narratives as major focus for career planning. Narratives can be seen as an appropriate compliment to the analysis of objective test data that has dominated our practice in the past. Narrative is described as an approach for career counselors to understand clients' vocational experiences and future plans. Subjective and objective aspects of a career narrative are explored, and emphasis is placed on co-authoring a career story that is subjectively meaningful and objectively sound. The client's subjective understanding of the career story is given importance as being pivotal information that must be considered in career counseling. Five key interventions are described from a narrative perspective.     

Faculty orientations toward institutional goals: A broken front with implications for planned change

The formulation of institutional goals in higher education often involves input from various campus constituencies including faculty. The faculty's viewpoint is typically treated as though it were a uniform perception. The research reported here tested the uniform nature of the faculty's goal orientations. Statistical comparisons were conducted on mean ratings of five discipline groups of 207 faculty from a major public university on the scales of the Institutional Goals Inventory. Although discipline groups shared common viewpoints on the importance of academic instruction, intellectual pursuits, and research, major differences among groups were found for goals involving university service, off-campus instruction, accountability, intercollegiate athletics, and humanistic values. Institutional planners desiring a change in one of these latter areas should expect different levels of faculty support and resistance from different discipline groups.