HEC/News-Announcements

Announcements
Friday, January 15, 2010

The Higher Education Center is pleased to make the following announcements:

1) New Report: Interventions to Support Readiness, Recruitment, Access, Transition, and Retention for Postsecondary Education Success: An Equity of Opportunity Policy and Practice Analysis

Recognition is growing about the public health and civil rights imperative for reducing the high rate of school dropouts. However, too little policy attention is paid to enhancing equity of opportunity for those transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood by increasing enrollment and success in postsecondary education.

Previous policy and practice reports from the Center for Mental Health in School at UCLA have provided analyses indicating that reducing dropouts, increasing graduation rates, and closing the achievement gap require more than improving pre K-12 instruction and enhancing school management. In doing so, those analyses clarified fundamental flaws in prevailing school improvement policies and practices for addressing barriers to learning and teaching and recommended transformative changes.

This new report (http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/postsecondary.pdf) extends the earlier work by analyzing postsecondary education. Given concerns about diversity and the degree to which some subgroups are underrepresented in postsecondary education, the report stresses that it is essential to use the lenses of equity of opportunity and social justice in rethinking postsecondary education policies and practices. Using these lenses, the report focuses on interventions for improving K-12 in ways that reduce dropouts and improve readiness for postsecondary education, programs for bolstering recruitment and access, and efforts to facilitate transition and retention; recommendations for a shift in policy to enhance equity of opportunity are offered. The work is particularly timely given the increasing calls for enhancing enrollment in and completion of postsecondary education programs and for ensuring inclusion of more and more students from subgroups that have been underrepresented for too long.

The report can be viewed on the Web at http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/postsecondary.pdf

2) Job Opportunities

The following position was recently posted to the Job Opportunities section of the Center's Web site:

Associate Student Services Coordinator (Alcohol Education Program Coordinator) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Director of Health Promotion and Wellness Services
California State University, East Bay

Health Educator, Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention
Northwestern University

For more information on this and other recent job postings, please visit the Job Opportunities section of the Center's Web site at http://www.higheredcenter.org/jobs