Regarding State Journal columnist Chris Rickert?s Sunday piece, “Paying star profs a risky game,” Lorrie Moore was, indeed, forced to look for another position by the recent UW across-the-board cuts.Her loss to UW-Madison is as great as any football coach actually lured by an astronomical contract, if we still think of the university as an academic institution and not primarily an athletic one.
Wisconsin is shaping up to be an important front in the battle over for-profit higher education, with a likely crackdown in Milwaukee and a brewing debate over tighter regulations at the state level.
Out-of-state admissions and the developing proposal for a College for the Arts that would merge together departments from different colleges within the university were highlighted at a meeting of the Faculty Senate Monday night.
Here?s your chance to influence what an entire university community reads and discusses.The selection committee for University of Wisconsin-Madison?s common-reading program is seeking a book for the 2013-?14 academic year that fits the theme of global connections. Fiction titles are strongly encouraged.
group of University of Wisconsin-Madison professors will discuss the university?s international connections in China at a panel Wednesday.UW-Madison opened the UW-Madison Shanghai Innovation Office as part of the university?s commitment to international educational opportunities such as study abroad programs and research collaboration.
Here?s your chance to influence what an entire university community reads and discusses.The selection committee for University of Wisconsin-Madison?s common-reading program is seeking a book for the 2013-?14 academic year that fits the theme of global connections. Fiction titles are strongly encouraged.
Celebrated author Lorrie Moore departed her post at UW-Madison much the way she?s carried herself since first moving to town in 1984: quietly and without fanfare.
Last year was a rough year for students at public universities, as state legislatures throughout the country continued to cut funding to their universities. Nationwide, states underwent one of the largest divestments in higher education in American history, slashing funding by 7.6 percent. And in 2011, for the second consecutive year, state and local funding to public universities reached a quarter-century low despite the fact that enrollment and the cost of educating students reached near-record highs.
Last year was a rough year for students at public universities, as state legislatures throughout the country continued to cut funding to their universities. Nationwide, states underwent one of the largest divestments in higher education in American history, slashing funding by 7.6 percent. And in 2011, for the second consecutive year, state and local funding to public universities reached a quarter-century low despite the fact that enrollment and the cost of educating students reached near-record highs.
Milwaukee mutual fund manager and former University of Wisconsin basketball Hall of Famer Albert Nicholas announced Thursday he is establishing a $50 million scholarship fund for high school basketball players to attend UW System schools.
Lord knows there?s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education.
BALTIMORE ? He arrived on campus a middling high school student from Medford, Mass., who had settled for C?s and had confined his ambitions to the math club.
U.S. News & World Report ranked the University of Wisconsin-Madison 38th overall on a list of the top 400 universities in the world.UW-Madison moved up since last year, when the same organization ranked it 41st overall.
Sarah Gillmore grew up in rural Eau Claire, but now works to make things better for people in the city. Gillmore, 33, oversees Dane County?s new temporary warming house for homeless men and women on East Washington Avenue.
The voluntary moratorium on bird-flu studies is mostly over.
It?s common for new presidents on campus to announce how impressed they are with the institution and its people, their excitement about learning more from students, faculty and alumni. Substantive ideas? They might be proposed in an inaugural ? months after a president has actually taken over. But even then, many presidents don?t exactly break new ground with their addresses.
Roger L. Perkins directs the Veterans Support Center at the University of Utah. He?s had bedrooms that are bigger than his campus office, whose paper-thin walls make it easy for a sobbing student to be overheard next door.
MINNEAPOLIS ? The University of Minnesota is currently the cheapest school in the Big Ten for nonresident tuition, but possibly not for much longer.
The Wisconsin Technical College System has named its next president from within, promoting longtime administrator Morna Foy to the top job overseeing the state?s 16 technical college districts. Foy has been an administrator in the system since 1998. She?s been in her current job since 2005 as executive assistant and vice president of policy and government relations. She also worked in the Wisconsin legislative audit bureau from 1989 to 1998 as a program evaluation supervisor.
David Wilson, who left as chancellor of UW-Extension and UW Colleges in 2010 to become president at Morgan State University in Baltimore, is out of a job, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. Wilson, the son of Alabama sharecroppers who went on to graduate from Harvard University, left his job in Wisconsin despite efforts by top University of Wisconsin System officials to keep him.
How do you study philanthropy? Through philanthropy, apparently. UW-Madison and two other colleges are sharing a $5 million grant to explore the motives behind philanthropy and what strategies can be developed to get the most dollars. The Science of Philanthropy Initiative (SPI) is a collaboration among UW-Madison, the University of Chicago and Georgia State. The $5 million grant is from the John Templeton Foundation.
“In this era of tight federal and state resources, philanthropy is more important than ever in meeting societal needs, preserving community services and expanding public outreach and engagement,” said SPI co-investigator Anya Samak, assistant professor of consumer science at UW-Madison.
For the last quarter century, college students from Wisconsin have gotten on a plane, landed in Scotland and spent a semester or year together in the most splendid of dormitories: an 18th century castle in Dalkeith, a village six miles from Edinburgh. Starting soon, the castle will get more diverse. Wisconsin students in Scotland will be joined by students from Virginia State University, a historically black college in the shadow of Fort Lee, a key battleground in the Civil War.
Colleges and student advocacy groups across the state showed their support for a financial aid commission?s report that called for ensuring more students get aid.
A UW-Madison student magazine turns 10 this week. Curb Magazine, which in 2010 became the first college publication in the nation to include an iPad version, will launch its latest edition Wednesday. The launch is being preceded by a “10 Days of Curb” lead-up on Facebook, in which editors created a puzzle out of the magazine?s cover, filling in a new piece each day. More at facebook.com/curbmagazine.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent letters to several U.S. politicians Monday urging them to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health, an organization that funds animal research at many universities across the country, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the letters, PETA condemns UW-Madison among other universities ? including Columbia University and the University of California-San Francisco ? for conducting ?costly? research studies which ?do nothing to advance human health? when the money could be spent on ?safe? research.
ON THE face of it, American higher education is still in rude health. In worldwide rankings more than half of the top 100 universities, and eight of the top ten, are American. The scientific output of American institutions is unparalleled. They produce most of the world?s Nobel laureates and scientific papers. Moreover college graduates, on average, still earn far more and receive better benefits than those who do not have a degree.
College and university endowments have recovered most of the losses they sustained during the recession, now that the economy has begun to grow. Yet as this year?s high school seniors begin to fill out applications and aid forms, a number of prestigious smaller colleges are straining to meet students? financial needs. To bridge the gap, some colleges have begun revising their financial aid formulas, raising concerns about how campus diversity ? both economic and racial ? might be affected.
It may be a first in the nation: Come next fall, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the two-year UW Colleges will offer a 100% competency-based online degree program for working adults.
When Florida Governor Rick Scott announced earlier this week the creation of two four-year, $10,000 bachelor?s degree programs in Florida, he could have easily been mistaken for another Republican governor named Rick.
University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly proclaimed Wednesday a watershed day for Wisconsin residents, as the UW System became perhaps the first public university system in the nation to roll out a set of 100% competency-based online degree programs for working adults starting next fall through UW-Milwaukee and the two-year UW Colleges.
The University of Wisconsin System released Wednesday the first flexible option degrees in a new program aimed at helping non-traditional adult students earn degrees.
The University of Washington and Rutgers University announced plans Tuesday to cut ties with adidas following allegations of labor violations from a factory contracted by the apparel company, a move some members of the University of Wisconsin-Madison have encouraged Interim Chancellor David Ward to pursue. The issue began January 2011 when a factory contracted by adidas suddenly shut down without compensating over 2,700 workers. Since then, other colleges and universities, including Cornell and Oberlin, have cut ties with the company for violating contracts with the schools to ensure all workers are paid.
….The Wall Street Journal this past week called the SWIB purchase the most expensive college campus housing purchase on record. It also referenced the American Campus Communities Inc.?s $165 million purchase of an Austin, Texas, student housing property known as ?The Block.? The presence of UW-Madison has led to similar ? though not as large ? high-end complexes for millennial college students here, like Grand Central and Lucky Apartments. Vicki Hearing, spokeswoman for the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, says the pension fund purchased the dormitory in large part because of its value as a rental property.
For many liberal arts college students home for Thanksgiving, the dreaded question likely was dropped sometime between the first bite of turkey and the final forkful of pumpkin pie. “What kind of job do you hope to find with a major in history?” Or anthropology? Or, fill in the blank . . .
The new University of Wisconsin Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, designed to benefit K-12 science teachers in the classroom, will help teachers live up to new federal standards.
The Associated Students of Madison?s final Shared Governance Week of Action forum Thursday sparked discussion about how to handle the costs of University of Wisconsin System schools in the face of decreasing state funding and increasing tuition and fees.University of Wisconsin-Madison Student Services Finance Committee Chair Ellie Bruecker and UW System Regent Katherine Pointer, the student appointee on the Board of Regents, each voiced their own ideas on how best to raise and manage universities? funds.
It began with a first-person account of an elite college?s callous treatment of a rape victim, written by a woman from the rural South who said she never felt fully accepted on campus. The resulting storm has engulfed Amherst College, leading to debates about not only rape, but also group identity, tradition and how directly or publicly a school should confront its problems.
A recent report from the President?s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology projects a shortfall of one million college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) over the next decade. Approximately five to six of every 10 students that begin in a STEM major will switch majors to a non-STEM field before graduation. A team of researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) and University of Colorado-Boulder are undertaking a study to examine the reasons why students are switching out of STEM majors at such a high rate.
(CNN) – Former Penn State President Graham Spanier has been charged with several counts in the Jerry Sandusky child rape scandal at the university, including obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy, endangering the welfare of children and failure to report allegations of child abuse. Additional charges also were filed Thursday against two other former university officials -? former Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and ex-Vice President Gary Schultz. The three men now face the same five charges.
It turns out that midterm you didn?t study for, or the tuition bill you paid for your son, aren?t the only scary things on the UW-Madison campus. According to author Matthew L. Swayne, the campus is home to all sorts of mysterious supernatural forces. In his new book, ?America?s Haunted Universities,? Swayne collects ghost stories and unexplained phenomena from colleges all over the country, including a bunch from right here in Madison.
University of Wisconsin-Madison sophomore Amber Cypcar works four days each week at Gordon Commons and nearly 40 hours a week at Buffalo Wild Wings in her hometown during semester breaks. But instead of spending her money on State Street shopping sprees or eating at expensive restaurants, she saves money to pay for her entire college education.
A walk across campuses locally and across the nation will show more faces like (Arwa) Alsughayyer, a graduate student at Edgewood College, and her husband, Suliman Alghnam, a graduate student at UW-Madison. They?re here thanks to a massive scholarship program funded by the Saudi king that pays for promising young Saudis to earn undergraduate and advanced degrees in the U.S. and other countries.
Online education still tends to get a bad rap in some circles — especially among those of us who grew up listening to professors talk at the front of a lecture hall. But it?s becoming increasingly apparent that a good mix of online and face-to-face teaching and learning can trump the more traditional (old-fashioned?) ways.
Quoted: Aaron Brower, who is serving as a special assistant to UW System President Kevin Reilly for new educational strategies, a role that allows him to provide leadership for the system?s new flexible degree initiative. Also mentioned, John Booske, chair of UW-Madison’s electrical and computer engineering department, the director of the Wisconsin Collaboratory for Enhanced Learning (WisCEL), and a believer in the value of the flipped classroom and blended learning.
Imagine boiling American history down to 138 pages in a small book. The result is ?American History: A Very Short Introduction,? one of the newest entries in Oxford University Press? VSI series. This offering ? one of almost 350 ? is of particular interest because it was written by Paul S. Boyer, a UW-Madison history professor emeritus who died in March.
A nationwide study, conducted in part by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, has begun work analyzing the nation?s decrease in science, technology, engineering and math undergraduate degrees, despite a relatively opposite trend seen at the University of Wisconsin.
For those of you who can?t read enough about the Jerry Sandusky serial-child-rape scandal that rocked Penn State, I highly suggest checking out this lengthy piece by a PSU professor who explains his decision to resign his post as the Paterno chair in literature at the university.
UW-Madison has been ranked in the top 25 of universities worldwide when it comes to the quantity and quality of research studies published. The 2012 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities puts UW-Madison at No. 22 out of 500 research universities included in the study produced by National Taiwan University.
The University of Wisconsin is attempting to balance in-state and out-of-state enrollment, as this years out-of-state admissions exceeded the UW System?s alloted amount.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard opening arguments in a case that could change whether a place like UW-Madison can continue to use race as one of many factors in a so-called ?holistic? admissions process. The case, Fisher v. the University of Texas-Austin, centers on a white student, Abigail Fisher, who says she was discriminated against in the admissions process after the university failed to offer her a spot at the institution in 2008.
Affirmative action has been an issue for decades, but this week a controversial case comes before the U.S. Supreme Court that could change college admissions processes.
University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Labor Licensing Policy Committee expressed concern Wednesday after adidas announced its plan to host a summit abroad to address the issue of companies? failure to pay severance in the global garment industry. Over the past year, LLPC has urged Chancellor Ward to cut licensing and sponsorship ties with adidas, the university?s primary licensing partner, after the company failed to pay more than 2,700 Indonesian workers due severance pay after a PT Kizone factory contracted by adidas abruptly shut down in January 2011.
(CNN) – Heman Marion Sweatt and Abigail Noel Fisher both wanted to attend the University of Texas at Austin. Both claimed their race was a primary reason for their rejection. Both filed civil rights lawsuits, and the Supreme Court ultimately agreed to hear their separate appeals — filed more than half a century apart. Their cases share much in common — vexing questions of competition, fairness, and demographics — and what role government should play when promoting political and social diversity.
Three days a week, UW-Madison senior Billy Burnside attends anatomy class in an auditorium at Agriculture Hall. Thursday nights, he?s often back in the same room praying and singing alongside dozens of classmates as a student leader with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The national evangelical organization, based in Madison, has a significant presence at UW-Madison and at 575 other campuses across the country.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents discussed Friday preliminary reports on system-wide enrollment numbers for 2012, which showed a trend of decreasing enrollment in Wisconsin universities. UW System Senior Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs Mark Nook presented the data to the board, which included a 0.6 percent decline in total UW System enrollment. However, UW-Madison?s enrollment increased by 440 this year compared to the past three years? average. Nook said the numbers could be a result of the current unfavorable higher education climate, such as increasing tuition costs and difficulties in finding financial aid resources.
Why would President Barack Obama head to Madison for a rally the day after his first debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney? A better question may be this: Why wouldn?t he? “You want a friendly crowd, you want an overwhelmingly enthusiastic crowd, and Madison nearly guarantees it,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
The American Institute for Economic Research declared Madison the second-best small city in the United States for college students on Monday, moving up four spots from last year.
The cover story of this week?s Chronicle of Higher Education print edition highlights the significant budget cuts most states have delivered to major public research universities between 2002-10. The article is based on a report by the National Science Board, which found that only seven states increased their per-student financial support to these institutions during that period. Perhaps surprisingly, Wisconsin was not among those 10 states making the deepest cuts. According to an online, sortable table put together by the Chronicle using the board?s figures, Wisconsin?s cut in state support to UW-Madison ?- the state?s only major public research university -? was 9 percent between 2002-10.
The cover story of this week?s Chronicle of Higher Education print edition highlights the significant budget cuts most states have delivered to major public research universities between 2002-10. The article is based on a report by the National Science Board, which found that only seven states increased their per-student financial support to these institutions during that period.
Madison is the second-best small city in America for the “college experience,” according to an annual index released Monday by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). The No. 2 ranking is four spots better than Madison?s ranking last year.
EVANSTON, IL (WKOW)– The body of a Northwestern University student from New York who was last seen leaving a weekend party has been found in a harbor near the school?s suburban Chicago campus. Authorities say the body of 18-year-old sophomore Harsha Maddula was pulled late Thursday from a harbor in Wilmette.
