(AP) STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Two top Penn State officials charged with covering up allegations of an explosive child-sex abuse scandal related to former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky stepped down late Sunday after an emergency meeting of the university?s Board of Trustees.
Wisconsin Lawmakers? Debate Over Race in Student-Aid Program Was NeedlessNovember 3, 2011, 9:46 pmA bitter controversy on Tuesday night in the Wisconsin State Assembly over the use of race in a state student-aid program turns out to have been moot. Lawmakers were surprised when a Democrat proposed removing race as a factor that could qualify students for the program, which offers grants of up to $1,800. After a long debate, the measure received preliminary approval early Wednesday. But according to the Associated Press, the state agency that awards the grants no longer considers race as a criterion. Apparently no member of the Assembly was aware of the agency?s shift.
It appears a late-night debate earlier this week in the Assembly about a proposal to remove race as a qualifying factor in the awarding of a state higher education grant wasn?t really necessary. According to the Associated Press, a letter circulated Thursday indicates race hasn?t been used as a factor in awarding Talent Incentive Program grant money for more than a year — with the switch being made by former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle?s administration.
Minneapolis ? If you?re a college student thinking about transferring to the University of Minnesota, pay attention: it?s about to get tougher to make the cut.
….The students, mostly from China?s rapidly expanding middle class, can afford to pay full tuition, a godsend for colleges that have faced sharp budget cuts in recent years. But what seems at first glance a boon for colleges and students alike is, on closer inspection, a tricky fit for both. Colleges, eager to bolster their diversity and expand their international appeal, have rushed to recruit in China, where fierce competition for seats at Chinese universities and an aggressive admissions-agent industry feed a frenzy to land spots on American campuses.
WASHINGTON — Officials from the National Collegiate Athletic Association last week had an unusually long opportunity to brag; with several changes to eligibility standards and scholarship rules making headlines all week long, words like “historic,” “unprecedented” and “profound” became standard rhetoric. Here?s hoping they enjoyed it, because they?re about to go back on the defensive.
Interim chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, David Ward, talks to Eliza Anyangwe about his long career in HE and how he developed a reputation as an ?inside reformer?
Leading critics of affirmative action say they are optimistic that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a lawsuit challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the University of Texas at Austin and hand down a ruling that curtails, or even ends, the use of such admissions preferences by colleges around the nation.
First impressions, second thoughts and the third degree: Giving student-athletes an extra $2,000 per scholarship is fine by me, but the NCAA is doing every one of its Division I members a disservice by making it an elective instead of a required course of action. It?s up to the conferences to decide, and those that can afford it will absolutely pony up. We?re talking most, if not all, of the six Bowl Championship Series affiliates.
More than four out of every five student-athletes who play sports at the NCAA?s highest level now graduate within six years, according to an annual report released this past week by the college sports oversight body. A formula used by the association indicates a record 82 percent of NCAA Division I student-athletes who entered school in 2004 earned a degree within six years. That figure is three percentage points higher than last year and eight points above the graduation success rates (GSR) first collected by the NCAA with the entering freshman class of 1995. Of the student-athletes who entered UW-Madison in 2004, the NCAA reports 81 percent graduated within six years. Not all the news at UW-Madison is so rosy, however….
Some students didn?t take well to Steven Maranville?s teaching style at Utah Valley University. They complained that in the professor?s ?capstone? business course, he asked them questions in class even when they didn?t raise their hands. They also didn?t like it when he made them work in teams. Those complaints against him led the university denying him tenure ? a decision amounting to firing, according to a lawsuit Maranville filed against the university this month.
Quoted: Michael Apple, UW-Madison professor of curriculum and instruction.
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is calling for an end to the federal student loan program, saying the program (or more specifically, government) is responsible for soaring tuition costs. I like Paul on many of his positions, but he is dead wrong on this one.
As a little girl growing up in Philadelphia, Dawn Crim never dreamed that she would play such an important part in higher education. And certainly, not far away in a mid-sized midwestern town.
?I had no idea I?d be living in Madison, Wisconsin, and I hadn?t thought about a career in higher education,? Crim remembers. ?But now, I?ve been in higher education for 20 years….and I have worked on three different campus and I am now a board of trustee member for Edgewood College. So, you never know. We say education opens doors. I had no idea that my door would actually be in the career of higher education.?
A college degree is becoming incredibly more expensive. In some states, tuition has gone up 400% since the 1980s. So many are asking whether getting a college diploma is really worth the expense.
Every little bit helps. That is the attitude of Wisconsin college students and financial aid directors who are welcoming the new measures President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that aim to ease the burden of higher education loan debt.
It was just more than a week ago that I sat down with Cary Nelson, the outspoken president of the American Association of University Professors, for an hour long chat about the state of higher education.
….A little more than a week ago, many of Nelson’s comments seemed a bit much, a bit too sensational. Today? In Wisconsin? Maybe not so much.
When asked how higher education can fight back, Nelson said: “Get faculty to pull their heads out of the sand and take back the campus. Devote yourself not to complaining about the money that’s not arriving from the state. Devote yourself to spending the money you do have ethically and well. Find ways to limit administration salaries and the salaries of coaches. Don’t let your university take on gratuitous projects designed to be a president’s legacy. Devote yourself to figuring out how the campus is spending the money it has. Reach out and connect with your students and build coalitions around issues that matter. Just take back the campus.”
This year has seen a substantial increase in the number of colleges offering mobile apps for campus resources and services. But the use of Web-based services, known as ?the cloud,? for administrative services is growing slowly, according to a national survey of campus-technology leaders.Only 37.1 percent of the 496 colleges that responded to the survey reported that they did not have a mobile app and were neither planning for one for this academic year nor reviewing one for the future, the Campus Computing Project found.
Major-college athletes could receive up to $2,000 a year more in institutional aid and be granted multiyear scholarships under a wide-ranging set of proposals to be presented to the NCAA?s Division I Board of Directors next week.
Trying to address the perennially low college-attainment rate of central city youth, Milwaukee Public Schools opened the TeamUp College Access Center Monday at 2730 W. Fond du Lac Ave. It?s affiliated with MPS but open to all students and their families in the city.
* State leaders have named all but one of a 17-member committee charged with reviewing the University of Wisconsin System’s governance structure. Gov. Scott Walker on Monday announced his two appointments: Dave Olien, senior vice president emeritus of the UW System, and Darrell Bazzell, vice chancellor for administration at UW-Madison.
* UW-Madison is rising through the ranks of higher education social media influence, according to Klout.com.The website recently ranked UW-Madison as the second most influential behind Texas A&M. That?s up from fourth in January. Marquette University ranks 10th, making Wisconsin the only state with two universities in the top 10.
Kedric Kitchens is in the minority. Not for his race or gender or religious beliefs, but for his mode of transportation. Kitchens, an Oklahoma University freshman, uses a wheelchair to travel across campus.
Democratic legislators began circulating a bill Wednesday to increase the funding for technical colleges in Wisconsin through an income tax raise on millionaire Wisconsinites.
Three steps to starting college: Meet roommate. Unpack in dorm room. Then, sometime during orientation, hear music, see a student start dancing, watch as more dancers join in, and join the campus flash mob. (Or if you miss the actual event, watch it over and over on YouTube, to see how many people you recognize.)
Universities and anti-gun lobbyists have had many reasons to celebrate this year, with the death or delay of bills in more than a dozen states that would have allowed the concealed carry of weapons on campuses. But it seems the momentum may be shifting.
Talk show host Bill O?Reilly called him “a loon.” The head of a conservative think tank said he fed students propaganda and egged on a student “mob.” The comments were directed at UW-Madison?s Chief Diversity Officer, Damon Williams, who has been at the center of an admissions maelstrom ever since the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity alleged in a report this month that the university gives preferential treatment to black and Hispanic students.
The other day a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked me if I knew where the Center for Equal Opportunity gets its funding.It?s a good question. The Virginia-based center, which opposes affirmative action and bilingual education, recently released a pair of reports accusing the UW-Madison of rampant discrimination ? against white people and Asians. The beneficiaries of this alleged bias are African-Americans and Latinos. That an outside group would raise a fuss about reverse discrimination at UW-Madison, commonly seen as having too little diversity, struck some as peculiar.
The president of the Wisconsin Technical College System sent a letter Wednesday to the Government Accountability Board formally requesting that the body which oversees elections in the state reconsider its Sept. 12 decision to not allow technical college student ID cards to be used for voting purposes. Dan Clancy writes that the “plain language of the statute clearly includes technical college student IDs as an acceptable form of identification for voting purposes.”
Eventually, as minority groups increase in numbers and race becomes harder to define, affirmative action should go away. But not yet. In the global economy, every student at UW-Madison benefits from a more diverse population on campus. Including race as one small factor among many is still justified.
The Chronicle of Higher Education released its annual Diversity in Academe special section over the weekend. I point this out to readers because the issue of diversity and “holistic admissions” practices are hot-button topics on the UW-Madison campus these days. Although much of what is posted online by The Chronicle in this special section is available only to those who subscribe, there are some interesting free articles/commentaries anyone can take a look at.
A Social Security check could accompany the generous compensation package of a number of college presidents these days.
When Tumal M. Karunaratne was trying to decide which college in the United States or Britain to attend, the University of Cincinnati stood out. The 20-year-old undergraduate from Colombo, Sri Lanka, was excited about its engineering and cooperative-education programs. And Cincinnati offered him $12,000 a year in scholarship money designated for international undergraduates.
Covering cultural trends has long been among the jobs of news sources. So it is my duty to report on a startling finding. Several professorial-type sources tell me that many of today?s students in higher education cannot read cursive writing. This one is likely to get the ?three R?s? crowd?s undies in a bundle, but it is apparently true. I can just hear some of the current presidential candidates screeching about the end of civilization.
Bucky, it seems, has found himself in the middle of an old controversy made anew. Last week, the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity released two studies showing that in 2007 and 2008 the University of Wisconsin-Madison engaged in “severe discrimination” based on race and ethnicity. African American and Latino students, the report alleges, received preferential treatment over whites and Asians in undergraduate and law school admissions processes.
On Tuesday, September 13, a mob of University of Wisconsin students overpowered the staff and swarmed into a room at the Madison Doubletree Hotel where Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, was giving a press conference on the release of two new reports from his organization.
The University of Michigan suspended its orphan works digitization project in response to the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it and four other universities, including Cornell.
Enrollment of new students at graduate schools in the United States dropped slightly from 2009 to 2010, despite an 8.4 percent increase in applications. It was the first decline in first-time graduate enrollment since 2003, according to the Council of Graduate Schools, and came after a 5.5 percent increase the previous year.
Five days after the Authors Guild filed suit against the University of Michigan for its plans to release hundreds of digitized ?orphaned? copyrighted books to faculty and students, the university halted the controversial project and admitted to committing a ?number of errors, some of them serious.?
The rate of student alcohol abuse has remained unchanged for 30 years: Nearly 40 percent of 2010 U.S. college students engage in high-risk alcohol consumption. That means, unfortunately, that binge drinking is as widespread among today?s freshmen as it was for their parents? generation and potentially just as lethal. Each year, almost 2,000 U.S. college students die from alcohol-related causes. An estimated 600,000 others are injured while under the influence.
(Jim Yong Kim is president of Dartmouth College.)
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (WKOW) — The University of Michigan has made serious mistakes in its legally challenged book digitizing project.
Less than a week after the University of Michigan brushed off a lawsuit by the Authors Guild over the university?s move to make copyrighted ?orphan? works in its digital collection freely available to students and faculty, the Michigan Library suspended the practice Friday, admitting ?serious? flaws in its process for identifying orphans.
What a group of management consultants found when they analyzed several research universities in 2008 and 2009 to identify potential savings probably didn?t come as a surprise to most people in higher education.
Move over, Bucky. Two mascots will be on the UW-Madison campus today to call for lower textbook prices. ?Mr. $200 Textbook? and ?Textbook Rebel? are on a six-week, 40-campus tour to gather petition signatures and distribute information about making textbooks affordable. They represent a national coalition called Textbook Rebellion.
The end of summer sends Wisconsin?s university, college and technical college students back to fall classes. So, it?s a timely question: How many of those institutions of higher learning does Wisconsin have? The answer: 62.
Black and Hispanic applicants were more likely to be accepted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison even though they had lower average test scores than white and Asian applicants, according to an analysis by a conservative group. The school?s admissions data from 2007 to 2008 was analyzed by the Center for Equal Opportunity, based in Falls Church, Va. It found that the university admitted roughly seven out of 10 black applicants and eight out of 10 Hispanic applicants, compared to about six out of 10 white and Asian applicants.
A sometimes tense but mostly uneventful press conference late Tuesday morning at the DoubleTree sprang to life after a diverse group of some 150 people stormed the downtown Madison hotel?s lobby, then forced their way into the adjacent banquet room where the press conference was wrapping up. The 11 a.m. press conference featured Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity. He was formally announcing two studies by the CEO that purport to show whites and Asians aren?t getting a fair crack at being admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison moved up a couple spots in this year?s U.S. News & World Report rankings of America?s Best Colleges. UW-Madison tied for 42nd in rankings of 268 national doctoral universities, a jump of three spots from a year ago.
When the recession hit in 2009 and colleges and universities saw many sources of funds contract, they did reasonably well making cuts to services that did not touch the academic core of the university, according to the latest annual report by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.
The copyright-infringement lawsuit brought on Monday by the Authors Guild and others against the HathiTrust digital repository, the University of Michigan, and four other universities could have a major impact on research libraries and the fate of millions of book scans created by recent mass-digitizing efforts. The plaintiffs seek to take control of those files out of the hands of libraries until Congress establishes guidelines for the use of digital libraries and orphan works?those that are subject to copyright but whose rights holders can?t be identified or located.
Whites and Asians aren?t getting a fair crack at being admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That?s what two studies released late Monday night by the Center for Equal Opportunity indicate. The organization states in a press release accompanying the studies that there is “severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity in undergraduate and law school admissions” at Wisconsin?s flagship institution of higher education.
Black and Hispanic applicants are more likely than their white and Asian counterparts to get admitted to UW-Madison despite having lower average test scores and class rank, a new analysis by a conservative think tank has found. The Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity, which opposes affirmative action, analyzed sensitive admissions information from the university after winning a lawsuit to obtain it. The center is scheduled to release the first results of its review Tuesday. UW-Madison officials have said in the past that they give preference to qualified students in targeted minority groups to foster campus diversity. They say academic achievement shouldn?t be the only factor in selecting who to enroll, arguing that it?s important students be surrounded by diverse perspectives.
UW-Madison ranked 42nd in the 2012 U.S. News & World Report ranking of best national universities, up from 45 in the 2011 edition. The rankings are scheduled to be released Tuesday. UW-Madison tied for the 42 spot with the University of Washington and UC-Santa Barbara. Nine public universities scored better than UW-Madison.
It’s move-in day here at the University of North Carolina, and Leila Ismail, stuffed animals in tow, is feeling some freshman angst.
Since California voters in 1996 passed an amendment to the state constitution to ban the consideration of race and ethnicity in public college admissions decisions and other state government functions, proponents of affirmative action have sought the help of federal courts to block such referendums.
Former UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin appears to have voted to remove the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from an elite group of universities, according to an article that ran in the Lincoln Journal Star over the weekend. That was after Martin advocated for Nebraska?s entrance into the Big Ten athletic conference in part because of its strong academic record, the newspaper reported.
After endorsing the University of Nebraska-Lincoln?s entrance into the Big Ten Conference — in part because of its academic strength — leaders at the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan apparently helped oust UNL from an elite academic group, according to documents reviewed by the Journal Star.
Most colleges and universities continue to expand the number of classes and programs they are making available online, but the public views such offerings with a skeptical eye.
Fewer than one-third (29 percent) of American adults believe a course taken online provides an equal educational value to one taken in a classroom, according to Pew Research Center polling released earlier this week.
To heck with academics and drinking honors. UW-Madison is beautiful. The popular website The Daily Beast ranks UW-Madison as the second most beautiful school in the land, right behind the University of Mississippi. It?s not just the campus, mind you. This poll takes into consideration the “hottiness” of the student body.
It was two years ago that the Cap Times asked a range of people associated with higher education in the Madison area if there was “something you wish every college student would know before the start of the school year?” We then posted these “words of wisdom” as the academic year got under way.
(CNN) — This summer, a group of University of Kentucky students and staff has been patrolling campus grounds — scouting out any student, employee or visitor lighting a cigarette. Unlike hall monitors who cite students for bad behavior, the Tobacco-free Take Action! volunteers approach smokers, respectfully ask them to dispose of the cigarette and provide information about quit-smoking resources available on campus.
It?s no secret that public colleges are struggling with huge fiscal problems. Nor that they are facing new political pressures as legislatures and governors in Florida, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere become more interested in issues like faculty productivity, assessment, accountability, and bottom-line budgeting. With the new academic year about to begin, The Chronicle asked several key people on campuses what they think will happen as these two trends collide. Are times different than in the past? Are there lessons from history?
