Category: Higher Education/System

States fund public colleges primarily based on how many students are enrolled. But a number of legislatures are considering policies that would link funding to whether students graduate. Lawmakers in Ohio appear likely to adopt a plan, introduced this year, that would base 100% of higher education spending on course and degree completion. Indiana is considering a similar but more modest proposal. And in Louisiana, the governor and Legislature have called for plans that tie 25% of higher education funding to student success.

Bad budgets are old news in the Sunshine State. While colleges across the nation are coping with the recession, public universities in Florida, a state with finances that resemble a Ponzi scheme, have spent years doing without.

Ask Paul Outka, an assistant professor in Florida State University’s highly regarded English department. But don’t call him on his office phone this fall. He won’t have one anymore â?? it’s among the latest victims of cost-cutting.

This year would break all the crystal balls in admissions. That much seemed certain months ago. After all, the statistical models that deans use to predict enrollment outcomes rely on historical data, but no moment in recent history had looked so hazy or so dire.

Amy B. Abrams pondered this last summer when she started her new job as the dean of admission and financial aid at Sarah Lawrence College. In her first year as a top enrollment official, she had to recruit students to one of the most expensive institutions during a recession. This task made sleep iffy, so Ms. Abrams kept a notepad by her bed. Often she woke at 3 a.m. and jotted down ideas â?? anything that might help her enroll enough qualified freshmen this fall.

The H1N1 influenza epidemic has had a devastating impact on Mexico’s fledgling internationalization efforts, with more than 30 percent of foreign students fleeing the country since news of the virus broke just four weeks ago, according to university administrators.

Some universities report an exodus of as much as 60 percent, said Thomas M. Buntru, president of the Mexican Association for International Education.

A 30-point boost in math and critical-reading scores on the SAT reasoning test is statistically meaningless yet could make or break a student’s chances of admission at “a substantial minority” of colleges, a research paper says.

In an opinion piece written for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Joseph Marr Cronin and Howard E. Horton ask if it’s “possible that higher education might be the next bubble to burst?” At the very least, the commentary notes a few eye-opening stats and raises several excellent questions.

Researchers have known for decades that rising education levels positively influence a host of social factors: income, health, voting rates and even the likelihood that a person will stay out of prison.
Education matters. A new website seeks to quantify just how much.

University of Florida president Bernie Machen didn’t grow up poor, but he remembers juggling multiple jobs while working his way through college. The dental surgeon says he’s inspired by students who have it even tougher than he did. So he donated his entire $285,000 bonus last year to a scholarship program he founded for low-income students at risk of being shut out of a college education.

Of the 700 or so commencement speeches Cristina Negrut estimates she has found on the Internet, only about one in 20 “is really inspiring,” she says. Those are the select few that make it onto a website she created three years ago called Graduationwisdom.com. Combing the web for “little treasures” is a hobby for Negrut, 39; by day, she works in product development for a medical equipment company in Madison, Wis.
2. Jerry Zucker, film director/producer, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003. “It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.”

A good commencement speech walks a fine line. It addresses graduates but will be heard by family, friends, faculty and the wider community. It should be memorable â?? but only for the right reasons. As college commencement season begins, USA TODAY asks students, faculty and others for advice on how to strike the right balance.

Stories appeal to our emotions and our ability to empathize. In 2003, film director and producer Jerry Zucker engaged University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates early on in his speech with a few simple words: ‘One day, when I was a kid, our house caught on fire â?¦’

President Obama’s budget for the Department of Education for the 2010 fiscal year would leave spending on most student-aid programs unchanged, but would largely spare higher education the program eliminations seen elsewhere in his budget.

The president’s plan, released Thursday, fleshes out a budget blueprint the White House unveiled in February. The budget would provide no increase for Federal Work-Study or the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, financing the programs at the current levels of $981-million and $758-million, respectively.

The N.C.A.A. released its academic reform data Wednesday, and for the first time issued postseason bans for poor academic performance. The association penalized the Centenary menâ??s basketball team and the Jacksonville State and Tennessee-Chattanooga football teams. Jacksonville State is appealing its ban.

A total of 85 Division I teams were punished in football and menâ??s basketball, but only 10 came from the six Bowl Championship Series conferences.

The number of newly reported swine-flu cases appears to be ebbing, but the recent health scare, which led some institutions to pull students and faculty members out of Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak, and to cancel study-abroad programs there, can have some lasting lessons for colleges, says Gary Rhodes, director of the Center for Global Education at Loyola Marymount University.

Colleges across the country have seen a case or a few of probable or confirmed swine flu, and their responses have varied. Some have canceled certain events but otherwise are operating on normal schedules, while a few have shut down as have many K-12 schools.

Each afternoon this spring, Brennan Jackson, an A-student who ranks near the top of his high school class, has arrived at his guidance counselorâ??s office to intercept the latest scholarship applications, as if they were a newspaper landing on his front stoop.

If one must go deep into debt to earn an undergraduate degree, is it still worth it to go to college?

Consider: Of those who earned an undergraduate degree from UW-Madison during the 2007-08 academic year, 48.9 percent left school with debt (according to UW’s “Data Digest” publication). And of those who graduated with debt, the average amount was a whopping $20,747.

In addition, one doesn’t need a bachelor’s degree from a four-year college or university to succeed in today’s world. Right?

As state tax revenues plummet, some lawmakers and higher-education leaders are once again looking at loosening the bonds between state governments and public colleges to save money and give colleges the freedom to bolster their bottom lines in new ways.

Over the past two decades, college officials have often lamented the growing need to secure money outside of appropriations. But the continuing economic crisis has led to a new urgency on the part of some public colleges to shed more of their ties to states, despite the mixed results of previous such efforts.

Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California, says America needs to adopt new models of financing and operating its public research universities if they are to thrive into the future.

The federal government, he argues, might need to step in and provide direct aid to colleges. States have to decide to put more money into higher education. And institutions need to rethink how they do business, including by considering options like three-year undergraduate programs and doing more with technology to deliver instruction.

The latest rankings put the University of Wisconsin-Madison first in the nation in … printmaking?

While sports rankings usually grab most of the headlines on campus, the academic prowess of the graduate programs at UW-Madison also ranks among the best in the country, according to the 2010 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Graduate Schools.”

As the federal government prepares to pour billions of stimulus dollars into increased broadband Internet access, universities are trying to claim much of the money and shape the emerging national networking policy.

Their focus is $4.7-billion that will be doled out under a new grant program administered by a small Commerce Department agency called the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. In Congressional testimony this month, a senior official with the agency, which is known as the NTIA, described the project as “the first step in realizing President Obama’s vision of bringing the benefits of broadband technology to all Americans.”

Madison-area workers looking to retool in a harsh economy will have one new option this summer â?? and another one likely next year â?? as Minnesotaâ??s Globe University spends $12 million to open two branches of its for-profit, career college network here.

First up is Middleton, where campus director Brock Vander Velden said the 31,000-square-foot building under construction at 1345 Deming Way, east of the Marriott Madison West, is â??on trackâ? to open in mid-June. Degree programs in business, health care, criminal justice and other high-demand areas such as massage therapy and veterinary technology will start July 20, he said.

The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators announced a host of recommendations on Wednesday for improving the countryâ??s financial-aid system.

In a report, â??National Conversation Initiative Preliminary Recommendations,â? the group calls for dozens of changes, including a simpler federal-aid application, adjustments in the Pell Grant and federal loan programs, and a government college savings account for every child. The report draws on input from thousands of student-aid professionals, data from 40 research reports, and the suggestions of public-policy experts. The group gave it to the Obama administration the day before it was released to the public.

Budget-strapped public universities are predicting significant tuition increases at a time when private universities are doing everything to maintain or even lower tuition rates during the recession, experts say.
Though 2009-2010 tuition rates have not been set for most public universities, increases of at least 5% to 6% â?? and in many cases higher â?? are expected as university administrators struggle to maintain quality education amid state budget cuts.

If you’re one of those students afraid standardized test scores don’t paint the full picture of your potential, your options are growing. More and more colleges don’t require the SAT or ACT exams. Wake Forest and Smith just admitted their first class of applicants who could decline to submit SAT or ACT scores, while Sewanee and Fairfield will do the same next year.

But is the “test optional” movement gaining steam, or running out of it?

Over the last two decades, colleges and universities doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent, according to a new analysis of government data by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a nonprofit research center.

During the same period, the staff of full-time instructors, or equivalent personnel, rose about 50 percent, while the number of managers increased slightly more than 50 percent.