Category: Higher Education/System

The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities is kicking off a series of regional meetings today to discuss the future of the public research university. The meetings will include university presidents and other experts who will review trends in state and federal support, the growing gaps financially between public and private research universities, and ideas for preserving the quality of the institutions. Todayâ??s meeting is at the University of Texas at Austin. The rest of the meetings, also in April, will be at the Universities of Georgia, Washington, and Wisconsin at Madison, and at Rutgers University.

Last year, when Katja Favretto started telling friends in Los Angeles that she was considering a job offer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the young political scientist says she started feeling apprehensive about a potential move to the Midwest.

â??People outside of academia would say, â??Where is Madison?â??â??â? recalls the 33-year-old Favretto, who earned her doctorate at UCLA, spent her adult life living in Southern California and joined UW-Madisonâ??s political science department as an assistant professor this past fall.

â??After I told them, theyâ??d say, â??Wes-consin? Why would you want to go to Wes-consin?â??â? Not long ago, many within academia were starting to ask the same thing.

….Yet today, UW-Madison is on the offensive. And surprisingly, the school is winning more recruiting battles than itâ??s losing.

President Obama signed legislation on Tuesday to expand college access for millions of young Americans by revamping the federal student loan program in what he called â??one of the most significant investments in higher education since the G.I. Bill.â?

The law that President Barack Obama signed Tuesday could mean big changes for hard-pressed students and colleges as the government becomes the primary issuer of student loans. But just whom will that affect and how?

Big changes in the student loan program will help make college more affordable for students and their debt load more manageable after graduation, President Obama says. After a week when the loan program overhaul passed in the shadow of the health care law, the president cited expected benefits for young people: more student lending, caps on those repayments and more money for minority colleges and universities.

At UW-Madison: Undergraduate program in clinical laboratory science, and masterâ??s and doctoral programs in environmental monitoring

Catching up on a couple higher education-related items …

** Newspapers across the country are picking up this AP article, which notes UW-Green Bay changed the default font it uses for e-mails. Whatâ??s the big deal?

By any measure, the bill would make huge investments in higher education and college students, pouring upwards of $42 billion into Pell Grants, historically black and other minority-serving institutions, community colleges, repayment options for student loan borrowers, and college access grants.

BLACKSBURG, Va. â?? Nearly three years after a massacre that left more than 30 dead, Virginia Tech officials are urging calm as e-mails and Internet postings originating in Italy threaten another attack on campus.

Though police do not believe the threats are credible, University President Charles W. Steger said in an e-mail to faculty and students Wednesday that classes would be held Thursday with additional security across campus.

Given the public concern, Steger said an overabundance of caution is appropriate.

Debbie Crave once assumed that all of her children would go to college. Then she had kids. Son Patrick is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Debbieâ??s alma mater, and plans to one day help manage the familyâ??s 1,700-acre, 1,000-cow dairy farm here. Brian, 17, would rather sit atop a tractor than behind a desk. “Heâ??s been afraid we might push him” to go to college, his mother says. But her eyes have been opened: “Kids learn differently, and some just arenâ??t college material.”

Debbie Crave once assumed that all of her children would go to college. Then she had kids.Son Patrick is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Debbieâ??s alma mater, and plans to one day help manage the familyâ??s 1,700-acre, 1,000-cow dairy farm here.

The push for student-loan legislation, carrying the potential of billions of additional dollars for higher education, enters its showdown week with the expected release Monday of a new official cost estimate that may help determine its fate.

What was a year ago an emerging idea about how to reduce college costs and better serve students has begun to take hold at colleges across the United States, as more institutions introduce three-year bachelors degrees. On Wednesday, Stanley Ikenberry, interim president of the University of Illinois, said that the university had begun studying whether it would make sense to offer three-year bachelors degrees and would release a report in six months.

So UW-Madison is having trouble finding top students who want to attend, according to a March 1 article titled â??With less scholarship cash, UW is losing high achievers.â? I wonder where theyâ??re looking. They might consider looking in their own backyard. Madison West High School boasts 30 National Merit Finalists, roughly 5.5 percent of the senior class this year. Yet it seems that sharing a ZIP code with the university is a marked disadvantage when it comes to admission. This was driven home for us when our daughter, a National Merit Finalist who named UW-Madison her first choice school, was neither congratulated, recruited nor admitted to the university.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A new Ohio State University custodial employee who received a bad job evaluation shot two co-workers in a campus maintenance building, killing one of them, and then fatally shot himself, officials said Tuesday.

Nathaniel Brown, who had been hired in October, arrived for work at the nationâ??s largest university in dark clothing with two handguns in a backpack, campus Police Chief Paul Denton said. Denton described the shooting as work-related and said Brown recently received a poor performance evaluation, though he declined to say whether that was the motive.

No students were hurt and classes went on as scheduled.

Scott Hildrethâ??s training in physics and astronomy stopped short of teaching him how to read minds. For much of his career as a professor at Chabot College, in Hayward, Calif., this presented a problem. Hildreth recalls the daily routine of trying to figure out which concepts he should try to reinforce in his lecture. “Now, itâ??s totally different,” Hildreth says. “I literally spend my time now tuning my delivery for each class according to so much more information.”

UW-Madison has hired its first tenure-track professor to study the Hmong and other highland groups of mainland Southeast Asia.Ian Baird has a doctorate in geography and is an expert in Southeast Asia.

Edward S. Salsberg, director of the Association of American Medical Collegesâ?? Center for Workforce Studies, says he has seen some evidence of medical schools taking in fewer first-year students or slowing their planned growth rates. “Itâ??s up to the individual schools to make decisions that work for them,” he says. Public medical schools “have to go to their state legislatures to get support and we know state budgets arenâ??t in good condition in most states. “For the medical establishment, tight budgets and enrollment cuts couldnâ??t have come at a worse time. The Council on Graduate Medical Education estimated in 2005 that the United States would face a shortage of 85,000 to 96,000 physicians by 2020 unless medical schools were able to increase the number of new M.D.â??s they graduate each year by several thousand. Other groups, too, project a physician shortage or at least the need to draw physicians to underserved regions and toward practicing high-demand specialties such as internal medicine and geriatrics.

Every autumn, politicians, university administrators, funding offices and countless students wait impatiently for the World University Rankings produced by Britainâ??s Times Higher Education (THE) magazine. A position in the upper echelons of the THE ranking can influence policy-makersâ?? higher-education investments, determine which institutions attract the best researchers or students, and prompt universities to try to boost their ratings.

Anger over rising tuition and school budget cuts boiled over as students across the country staged rowdy demonstrations that led to clashes with police and the rush-hour shutdown of a major freeway in California.

Marquette University President Robert Wild plans to retire next year. The 69-year-old arrived at Marquette in 1996 and is one of the universityâ??s longest-serving presidents. He wants to retire June 30, 2011 or when a successor takes office, whichever comes later.

Students and faculty members in California staged dozens of protests on Thursday, marching in major cities and attempting to blockade freeways in the broadest demonstration yet of anger against state budget cuts to the nationâ??s largest public-university system.

In an unprecedented day of national protest across all sectors of education, the epicenter proved to be this college town where the seeds of student activism were sown more than 40 years ago.

University of Wisconsin Colleges and Extensions Chancellor David Wilson has been appointed to a board that will advise President Barack Obama on ways to enhance postsecondary education in black colleges and universities.