Higher Ed Site Is Gateway to College Stories

By: Charles Bowen As we gear up for another school year, your education reporters can never have too many online resources. And they'll probably tell you that, while there are many Web tools for covering public and private K-12 institutions, there are significantly fewer devoted to higher education.

But a new site operated by James Forest intends to rectify that situation. His Higher Education Resource Hub is a major gateway for information on colleges and universities and related topics from the United States and internationally. Topics covered by this far-ranging site including assessment in higher education, news, and recent publications that feature research on colleges.

A particularly useful feature is a growing collection of links to the syllabi for courses at the college and graduate level that address the topic of higher education. And for that back-to-school feature, you might want to check out the details in the site's history of higher education, which contains links to a number of primary documents including the text of the GI Bill and the Morrill Land Grant Acts. Forest even has commentaries from John Henry Newman, and Thorstein Veblen's critique of American higher education published in 1918. The site also has a section devoted to job resources in higher education, including information about the reference work Higher Education in the United States: An Encyclopedia, which is co-edited by Forest and Kevin Kinser of SUNY-Albany.

To use the hub, visit http://www.higher-ed.org, where the navigation bar is divided into two sets of options:

* "Higher Education as a Field of Study" includes archival resources, assessment in higher education, Carnegie classification, Encyclopedia of Higher Education, higher education course syllabi, higher education degree programs, job resources, news and journals, professional associations, recent publications, and research centers.

* "Other Resources for Higher Education" include admissions and financial aid, college and university Web sites, funding resources, graduate education, higher education consulting, international higher education, policy organizations, reference resources, state government Web sites, strategic plans, and study-abroad resources.

The center panel of the home page provides links to recent additions. For instance, at this writing, the site offered links to data on colleges and universities that have closed, merged, or changed their names as well as "Earn a career-track online degree from home or while you travel."

Other considerations for using the Higher Education Resource Hub in your writing and editing:

1. For even more education-related links, click the "Other Resources" option at the bottom of the navigation bar. The resulting screen has a page of links to everything from directories of college and university Web sites and international links to student resources such as college catalogs, financial aid information, and graduate school data.

2. To prowl the site by keyword, scroll the introductory page and watch the center panel for a data-entry box labeled "Search the Higher-Ed Web site."

3. If you write about the resource in your news columns or Internet features, you might want to direct your readers to the site's "Higher Education Bookstore" through its link at the bottom of the introductory story. Here, through a cooperative venture with Amazon.com, Forest singles out books of interest to educators. (A portion of the sale price on the books goes to the operating funds of the Forest site.)
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