A new report says nationwide, retention at two-year public colleges is improving, but declining at four-year private schools. Meanwhile, Wisconsin colleges and universities overall are bucking the trend.
A group of UW-Madison researchers received approximately $4.7 million from the United States Department of Agriculture to educate regional K-16 students in energy and ecosystem concepts as well as oversee the students in leading their own bio-energy research.
As issues of sustainability and alternative energy sources continually enter political discourse and influence local and national policymakers, a team of University of Wisconsin professors has received a $4.7 million grant to fund sustainability education programs in rural Wisconsin.
While the lasting positive effects of having a true mentor are hard to quantify, President Barack Obama?s decision to award a University of Wisconsin professor for his mentoring efforts provides recognition for years of a job done well.
In a 12-month period from 2003 to 2004, six New York University students committed suicide. These were very public suicides. ?They were all jumping from buildings, as opposed to quietly hurting themselves in their rooms,? said Zoe Ragouzeos, the university?s director of counseling and wellness.
For bargain-hunting families, state colleges and universities, supported by tax money, have long been a haven from the high cost of private education.
UW System Board of Regents President Charles Pruitt and UW-River Falls Chancellor Dean Van Galen outlined plans for the future of the UW System and how to help the state see an increase in the number of college graduates and more jobs.
Edgewood College plans to build a three-story Visual and Theatre Arts Center, finally providing a proper home for the arts on a campus where a hallway serves as the art gallery and the theater is hidden in a dorm basement.
Texas higher-education officials were reeling on Wednesday after lawmakers released a preliminary budget proposal that would slash financial aid, close four two-year colleges, and eliminate programs aimed at meeting the needs of the state?s growing Hispanic population.
The imagery couldn?t have been more powerful. On a day that headlines around Texas trumpeted the significant budget cuts that lay ahead for the state?s public colleges — threatening the possible closure of some more-vulnerable institutions — the state?s highest-profile campus announced that it would leverage one of its strongest assets for more visibility and much-needed revenue.
Wisconsin?s private colleges and universities are reporting strong enrollment figures, despite the sluggish economy. And many are seeing record numbers of first-year undergrads.
A 20-year-old economics major at the University of Colorado in Boulder came up with a unique stunt to illustrate just how much it costs to attend college these days. He paid his $14,310 tuition using $1 bills.
Nic Ramos jammed the 33 pounds of cash into a duffel bag and handed it over to the CU business office last Friday, according to a report by the ABC affiliate in Denver.
….A sober but determined focus on improving, strengthening and assuring the relevance of our educational system, from kindergarten through university or technical college, is crucial. If that means streamlining while strengthening and improving, then so be it.
UW-Madison likes to trumpet the fact it?s one of the top research institutions on the planet — and has been for the past two decades. This past fall, the university announced its annual research expenditures topped $1 billion for the first time.For a range of reasons, this is good news for the university, the city and state.
But is it possible places like UW-Madison are focusing too much attention on research — and not enough on educating students?
Nearly half of the nations undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges dont make academics a priority, a new report shows. Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives.
In the 1930s, ?40s and ?50s, the Wisconsin School of the Air brought the best instruction and instructors available anywhere in the world into the classrooms of rural schools. At its peak, the collaboration with the University of Wisconsin brought the Wisconsin School of the Air into high schools and even colleges. By the miracle of radio, parents and families at home listened along with their children at school to programs in science, art, math and music. The Wisconsin State Journal editorial board?s agenda should include this resurrection of the “Wisconsin Idea.”
The $1.4-billion in budget cuts proposed this week for California?s public colleges could prompt a new year of protests that decry higher tuition, stagnant employee salaries, and the growing inability of Californians to afford college.
Officials at Pima Community College, where Jared L. Loughner was a student, believed that he might be mentally ill or under the influence of drugs after a series of bizarre classroom disruptions in which he unnerved instructors and fellow students, including one occasion when he insisted that the number 6 was actually the number 18, according to internal reports from the college.
Many people had a glimpse of the deep delusions and festering anger of Jared L. Loughner, but none seemed in a better position to connect the dots than officials at Pima Community College.
The chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley is drawing rebukes from some commentators after he linked the shooting rampage in Tucson this past weekend to the failure of the Dream Act and the passage of Arizonas immigration law?an unusually political statement from a prominent university leader.
Listening to Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and some of the candidates for Dane County executive it might seem their opponents for the area?s top elected posts are new Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-led Legislature. With the possibility of cuts in local government aid, public employees facing job losses and pay cuts and the possible reversal of policies backed by liberal Madison and Dane County residents, the anti-Republican rhetoric already is a theme in local races. Cieslewicz called potential cuts to civil service workers, whose wages help fuel the city?s economy, ?particularly troubling.? He said restrictions on stem cell research would slow medical breakthroughs and undermine a critical piece of the region?s economy. And he said efforts to cut education funding, whether 4-year-old kindergarten or UW-Madison, a ?tremendous mistake.?
Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Charles Franklin.
It?s winter break. And that must mean it?s college rankings season. Here?s where UW-Madison ranked in three recent surveys. Best Value: UW-Madison was ranked the ninth best value among public universities, according to business magazine Kiplinger?s Personal Finance. CEO Production: UW-Madison ranked fourth among universities in producing chief executive officers of major corporations, according to a study from U.S. News & World Report. It awarded 17 degrees to Fortune 500 CEOs. Brand Equity: When it comes to Internet buzz, UW-Madison is tops.
One out of every four or five students who visits a university health center for a routine cold or sore throat turns out to be depressed, but most centers miss the opportunity to identify these students because they don?t screen for depression, according to new research from Northwestern University?s School of Medicine.
The Medical College of Wisconsin announced Sunday night that Jonathan Ravdin has stepped down as dean and that the school will begin a national search to replace him.
A new study of admissions at 30 highly selective colleges found that legacy applicants get a big advantage over those with no family connections to the institution ? but the benefit is far greater for those with a parent who earned an undergraduate degree at the college than for those with other family connections.
In the aftermath of a football academic scandal at Auburn in 2006 that caused two department heads to step down and the N.C.A.A. to investigate, university officials are no longer bragging ? or even talking ? about the team?s once-stellar scholastic record.
Former Sen. Russ Feingold will join the Marquette University Law School faculty as visiting professor of law beginning the spring semester 2011, according to a Marquette press release sent out Wednesday. According to the release, Feingold will teach an elective course, Current Legal Issues: The U.S. Senate.
For big-time college sports, late December is more than the season of holiday basketball tournaments and myriad football bowl games. It?s also the time for making tax-deductible gifts to the booster club of your favorite college team.
These gifts don?t get mentioned much when we hear talk of the excess costs of college sports, but they play a surprisingly large role in the college athletics business, and at considerable cost to the taxpayer.
(Charles Clotfelter, a professor of public policy at Duke University, is the author of the forthcoming book ?Big-Time Sports in American Universities.? This column first appeared in the Washington Post.)
UW-Madison was rated the ninth-best value among public universities in annual rankings produced by Kiplinger?s Personal Finance. That?s a jump of five spots from a year ago. No other Big Ten Conference institution cracked the top 20. The University of Michigan was UW-Madison?s closest rival, at No. 22.
Seventeen chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies hold degrees from University of Wisconsin-Madison, making the Badgers one of the largest producers of today?s corporate leaders, according to U.S. News & World Report. Only three schools awarded more degrees to Fortune 500 CEOs than UW-Madison: Harvard University (58), Columbia University (21) and University of Pennsylvania (20).
UW-Madison is closing out 2010 with a big victory. Wisconsin?s flagship institution jumped the likes of Harvard and Big Ten Conference rival Michigan to take over the top spot in the annual TrendTopper MediaBuzz Internet analysis of top universities released by the Global Language Monitor. These TrendTopper MediaBuzz rankings are designed to measure the “brand equity” of U.S. institutions in terms of their impact on the Internet.
Mississippi had a problem born of the age of soaring student testing and digital technology. High school students taking the state?s end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the answers.
At first glance, the following is surprising. Roman Catholic colleges are enrolling a higher percentage of Muslim students than the typical four-year institution, the Washington Post recently reported.
The newspaper uses figures from UCLA?s Higher Education Research Institute and notes some of these Catholic colleges have been “astonished and sometimes befuddled” by the spike in Muslim students in recent years.
The Senate vote to repeal the 17-year old ?don?t ask, don?t tell? policy against gay men and lesbians serving openly in the armed forces removes a reason that many elite colleges have cited for barring the Reserve Officers Training Corps from recruiting on their campuses.
Presidents of some of the nation?s highest profile colleges and universities, where the Reserve Officers? Training Corps program has been barred for decades, said that the U.S. Senate?s vote Saturday to repeal “don?t ask, don?t tell” will usher the return of the program to their campuses — though the exact procedure remained unclear.
A national survey of tenured law faculty members and interviews with a smaller group of them formed the basis of the paper, by two legal scholars, Katherine Barnes of the University of Arizona and Elizabeth Mertz of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. They note that tenure is viewed as crucial by most law faculty members, but for widely varying reasons.
The U.S. Senate on Saturday failed to get the necessary super-majority of 60 to force a final vote on legislation that would have provided a path to citizenship for some college students and veterans who do not have legal documentation to reside in the United States.
Rushing a student to a psychiatric emergency room is never routine, but when Stony Brook University logged three trips in three days, it did not surprise Jenny Hwang, the director of counseling.
Catching up on a couple higher education-related items …
….The race is on for faculty across the UW System to join unions. With final exams and the end of the fall semester upon us, it appears it’ll be February before elections will be held.
Of course, with the new Republican leadership coming into power in just weeks, who knows what the future holds. Gov. Jim Doyle gave university faculty and academic staff the right to form unions in the summer of 2009, when he signed his 2009-11 state budget. How quickly this right can be wiped away remains to be seen.
Collective bargaining issues also remain an important topic to academic staff working across the UW System. However, there remains no indication most faculty or academic staff on the UW-Madison campus are interested in forming unions.
UW alumni overwhelming have positive memories of their alma mater, according to the findings of new survey.
College officials praised the results of a survey released Monday saying that college graduates? apparent satisfaction reaffirms the value and resilience of American higher education. But the survey methods — along with a lack of information regarding majors and institution types — has others struggling to find meaning in the data.
Terry Hartle, a senior vice president with the American Council on Education, was in town Friday to take part in a University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents meeting at the Memorial Union on the UW-Madison campus.
Hartle?s job entails working with all sectors of higher education — from community colleges and for-profit schools, to public universities and private not-for-profits — to try and fashion a unified voice in dealing with the federal government in Washington, D.C.Hartle spoke to the regents about the future of higher education and also briefed them on the upcoming release of an American Council on Education survey of young alumni.
Before catching a plane back to Washington, he sat down with Campus Connection to offer a national perspective on the state of higher education in Wisconsin and across the United States.
Virginia Tech could face federal fines and a loss of student aid for failing to quickly warn the campus about a gunman on the loose in the hours before the shooting rampage that killed 30 people April 16, 2007, the Department of Education said Thursday.
Rather than throwing up their hands about dwindling resources, college leaders could steer cash away from some beloved feel-good programs and into strategies that have proven to be more cost-effective in helping students graduate, a new research analysis suggests.
In a working paper, entitled ?The (Un)Productivity of American Higher Education: From ?Cost Disease? to Cost-Effectiveness,? two University of Wisconsin at Madison professors test the relative costs and benefits of popular student success measures, such as reducing student-faculty ratios. What the researchers found, among other things, is that a college may well get more bang for its buck by replacing adjuncts with full-time faculty than by reducing class sizes ? a strategy smiled upon in the influential U.S. News & World Report rankings.
The public pins most of the blame for poor college graduation rates on students and their parents and gives a pass to colleges, government officials and others, a new Associated Press-Stanford University poll shows. All sectors of American higher education received high marks for quality. That extends to for-profit colleges, despite recent criticism of dubious recruiting tactics, high student loan default rates and other problems at some schools. Quoted: Sara Goldrick-Rab, assistant professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Colleges must play a greater, and more deliberate, role in helping regions innovate and thrive in an increasingly competitive and globalized economy, speakers urged this week at a conference on higher education and economic development.
With help from its own thriving television network, the Big Ten Conference pulled in $905.2-million last year, up more than 50 percent from six years ago. The league received help from Ohio State ($123-million), Michigan and Penn State (both with $107-million), and Wisconsin ($94-million). (See the full Top 10 here.)
Madison is one of “America?s Brainiest Bastions” according to a report in Portfolio.com. The website used American Community Survey data to “identify markets that have the highest levels of collective brainpower, as indicated by their residents? educational attainment.” Not surprisingly, the report was top heavy with college towns….Madison checked in at No. 8 — one spot behind Boston and one ahead of San Francisco/Oakland.
American Sign Language is close to surpassing German as the third-most-studied foreign language at America?s colleges and universities. Only 4,500 more students study German than study ASL, and enrollment in classes for the gesture-based language used by the deaf increased 16% since the last survey three years ago.
United States students are continuing to trail behind their peers in a pack of higher performing nations, according to results from a key international assessment. Scores from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment to be released Tuesday show 15-year-old students in the U.S. performing about average in reading and science, and below average in math. Out of 34 countries, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.
The recession has sent tuition-discount rates at private colleges soaring to record highs, reaching 41.8 percent in 2008. But some small colleges have managed to buck that trend, lowering their discount rates while raising enrollment. They?ve done so by figuring out smarter ways to distribute aid dollars and effectively market themselves to prospective students.
The Motion Picture Association of America endorses creativity, in general. But when it comes to laws forbidding students from pirating movies, it would prefer that colleges adhere to the MPAA?s interpretation rather than coming up with their own.
A naturalized U.S. citizen has been sentenced to two years in prison after defrauding a Madison firm and the government to get student loans. Ernest Kwasi Bankas, 56, originally from Ghana but living in Texas, was sentenced this week by U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb in federal court in Madison.
The landscape of post secondary education in the United States has always been a diverse mix of private and public institutions, however recent controversy over for-profit institutions has revealed problems ranging from fraudulent recruiting tactics to criminal organizations operating across the globe.
David Carel was never a rabble-rouser. But amid the clutter of his dorm room at Yale University, Mr. Carel, baby-faced and slight-shouldered at 19, keeps evidence of his new life as an AIDS activist: posters, banners and the flier demanding ?$50 bn for Global AIDS? that he concealed in his fleece jacket one Saturday in late October when, heart pounding, he sneaked past security into a Democratic campaign rally in Bridgeport.
In her new book, “America by Heart,” Sarah Palin says most members of the mainstream media and those who teach at universities don?t believe in God.
A blog post by The Chronicle of Higher Education?s Tom Bartlett notes that on page 215 of her new book, Palin writes: “Most of those who write for the mainstream media and teach at universities and law schools don?t share the religious faith of their fellow Americans. They seem to regard people who believe in God and regularly attend their church or synagogue as alien beings, people who are ?largely poor, uneducated and easy to command,? as the Washington Post once famously put it.
“Not true, writes The Chronicle?s Bartlett — at least when in comes to those who work in higher education.
Cyberbullying is back in the news, and some legislators are trying to get it into the books.
New legislation introduced in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on Thursday would require institutions of higher learning to have anti-harassment policies in order to receive federal funding if passed.
A college degree is a big purchase. It is also a mysterious one. In many cases, families don?t know the bottom-line price they will pay at a particular college until the financial-aid award letter arrives, often mere weeks before their son or daughter must make a decision about where to enroll. Even then, deciphering the letter to determine out-of-pocket costs can be tricky.
Big gifts make big campaigns. The eight- or nine-figure donations, known in campaignspeak as lead gifts, attract publicity, inspire others to give, and, most important, help colleges make significant progress toward their fund-raising goals.
