BIF Student Experience Lab Featured in New England Journal of Higher Education

BIF Executive Director Melissa Withers was recently tapped by the New England Journal of Higher Education to write an article about the BIF Student Experience Lab. See article below.

Why the Student Experience Matters

By Melissa Withers

If the conversation about innovation in education were a cocktail party, the room would be filled to capacity with advocates, scholars, administrators and college and university leadership who all care very deeply about the future of higher education in America. The talk would be lively, with fervent debate over issues like distance learning, student readiness, class size, tenure, course load, state funding and financial aid. There would be bursts of raucous solidarity and an equal measure of passionate dissent about where we are, how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.

What you would not hear is the voice that matters most: the voice of the student. To hear this voice you must tune into a different channel altogether and listen at a frequency that most institutions and policymaking bodies do not understand.

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