Bunker Hill Community College

BHCC in the News

2007-06-11 - BHCC Coordinator of Publications Awarded Community College Fellowship for Journalists

Boston, June11, 2007 – Wick Sloane, Coordinator of Publications and an adjunct professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College, who is also a columnist for Inside Higher Ed, has been chosen as one of six journalists nation-wide to receive a Hechinger Institute Fellowship from Columbia University. Each fellow will receive a $7,500 stipend to complete a major reporting project on community colleges; nine associates were also named. The fellows and associates were chosen from a competitive field of more than 50 applicants.

Those selected for the “Covering America, Covering Community Colleges” Fellowship will gather in New York City for two conferences. In October 2007, the journalists will meet with experts to discuss their projects.  They will return in February 2008 to present their projects.

Wick Sloane will focus on the weakness of community college funding.  “This is a unique opportunity to educate the public about the hardships that many community college students face and to examine the inequities in federal funding between public and private colleges,” stated Sloane.

“Inside Higher Ed is thrilled by the honor that Hechinger has bestowed on Wick, and pleased to bask in his glow,” said Doug Lederman, editor of Inside Higher Ed, a national daily publication about higher education. “Wick writes with intensity, authority and passion about many of the issues that matter to us and to our many readers. His coverage of financial aid equity concerns have been of particular value to us.”

“Community colleges enroll nearly half the college students in the United States but are rarely given substantive, analytical coverage by media outlets”, said Hechinger Institute Director Richard Lee Colvin. The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, named for former New York Times education editor Fred Hechinger, is part of Teachers College, Columbia University. Its mission is to promote fair, accurate and insightful coverage of education.

Support for the first year of the fellowship comes from Lumina Foundation for Education, an Indianapolis-based foundation that is also the leading funding organization for “Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count,” a national initiative to help more community college students, particularly low-income and minority students, succeed.

Bunker Hill Community College is the largest community college in Massachusetts. The College enrolls more than 8,500 students on two campuses and at five satellite locations each semester. Some 1,700 students take classes online. BHCC is one of the most diverse institutions of higher education in the Commonwealth. Six in ten students are people of color and more than half of BHCC’s students are women. The College also enrolls more than 600 international students who come from more than 95 countries and speak more than 75 different languages.

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