Category: Higher Education/System

The Milwaukee Area Technical College board voted 6-3 Thursday night to dismiss President Darnell Cole, less than two weeks after he was cited with operating while intoxicated.

Members of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) traded megaphone-delivered rally cries for a relatively quiet Thursday as they staged a sit-in at the office of Penn State President Graham Spanier.

More than 10 USAS members entered Spanier’s office one by one and asked if they could meet with the president to talk to him about cutting the university’s contract with Russell Athletic.

The nearly $54-billion that Congress is directing to state aid for education as part of the stimulus bill President Obama signed on Tuesday may stave off the worst budget cuts proposed for public colleges. But the money is unlikely to be able to plug all of the budget holes, and some university officials worry the measure could make it easier for states to spend less on higher education in the future.

The $100 billion in emergency aid for public schools and colleges in the economic stimulus bill could transform Arne Duncan into an exceptional figure in the history of federal education policy: a secretary of education loaded with money and the power to spend large chunks of it as he sees fit.

Historically black colleges and universities, which for decades have been educating students who cannot afford to go â?? or cannot imagine going â?? elsewhere, have been particularly challenged by the U.S. economic meltdown.

Enrollments at the schools have declined at the same time endowments have dropped and fundraising sources have dried up. The same is true at most universities, but often students at black college and universities need more aid to stay on course.

Mark O. Weiger was a star oboe professor who had traveled the globe as an artistic ambassador for the U.S. government. But he was also known as the king of raunchy puns. Even when he performed for schoolchildren, the music professor from the University of Iowa couldn’t resist slipping in some fart jokes.

“He liked pushing the envelope,” says his close friend, Alan Huckleberry, an assistant professor of piano at Iowa.

When Cornell University professors, trustees, and alumni got together last week to consider whether rising costs threaten the notion that higher education can help anyone in America succeed, the event’s location offered a taste of irony: It was held at the Cornell Club, an exclusive midtown haunt where you need a membership number just to buy a beer in the wood-paneled lounge near the front door.

The compromise, $789-billion economic-stimulus bill that Congress is planning to try to deliver to President Obama by Monday contains large sums of money for student aid and biomedical research, and would give states billions of dollars to ease budget cuts to colleges and schools.

College lobbyists didn’t get everything they wanted in the plan, which the House and Senate are expected to approve and could take up as soon as today. The measure, for instance, doesn’t include the separate pot of money for campus construction that the House had passed or money for the Perkins Loan program that the Senate had approved.

As the dust began to settle and details slowly emerged about the composition of the compromise economic stimulus bill crafted by Congress, the picture for higher education was generally positive â?? with students and colleges poised to receive somewhere between $50 billion and $75 billion, based on our rough estimate. But exactly how it looked very much depended on where you sat.

Provost Tom Sullivan has decided to dissolve the University of Minnesotaâ??s graduate school, placing more power in the hands of individual deans and his own office. Justified in part by budget shortfalls, the decision forecasts the kind of bold and arguably risky tactics college leaders may employ under increased demands to streamline â?? and it quickly began to stir controversy at the university.

A stimulus bill working its way through Congress would help thousands of students pay for college and could give colleges money to fix crumbling buildings. But would spending billions of dollars on education really kick-start the economy?

That’s the question many legislators and policy experts in Washington were asking last week as the U.S. Senate debated the roughly $900-billion measure.

As Congress continues to debate an economic-stimulus bill that includes billions of dollars for students and colleges, one U.S. senator warned higher-education leaders on Monday that they needed to rein in costs if they wanted to persuade his colleagues to back further increases in aid to academe.

Parents of Wisconsin college students have been receiving official-looking letters urging them to pay $49 to apply for financial aid, but the mailings are actually from a private business that charges money for information available online for free.

The poor economy is ratcheting up anxieties about college affordability at a time when more Americans than ever say a college degree is essential to success, a report says today. Those findings, based on a survey of 1,009 Americans in late December, are hardly mind-boggling, but they represent dramatic shifts in public attitude in a short period of time.

The time has come to mourn the short and trashy life of JuicyCampus.

For some, the now defunct Web site was a forum for exacting sweet, anonymous revenge â?? a sort of cyber boxing arena where jilted lovers could settle scores, and the Goth set could take the Greeks down a peg. There was also a downside. JuicyCampus was a nightmare for higher education officials and some students, who saw the site as a potentially dangerous provocateur, encouraging students to spread hurtful gossip, lies, threats and racial epithets.

The University of California took a major step on Wednesday toward adopting a sweeping change in its undergraduate admissions policy that would enlarge its applicant pool and drop the requirement that students take the SAT Subject Tests.

Commentators have increasingly been wondering if the end might finally be in sight for the many yearsâ?? worth of steady and often not-so-slow increases in college tuitions. How much longer, the thinking goes, will American students and parents be able to afford â?? and/or put up with â?? rapidly rising prices and expenditures on higher education?

Nancy Zimpher, the former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who left in 2003 for the University of Cincinnati, is expected to be named the new chancellor at the State University of New York.

Now that a multibillion-dollar stimulus bill is moving through Congress in the latest attempt to bail out a faltering economy, the lawmakers and pundits who seemed to be asleep at the wheel over the past decade are suddenly gripped by the virtue of fiscal responsibility. They are criticizing parts of the bill that they find wasteful. Higher-education administrators should beware: This newfound righteousness and ire could soon point their way.

A vision for Madison Area Technical College’s future that would include a new campus and a more welcoming “front door” at the Truax campus will be presented to the college’s board Wednesday.

The economic stimulus plan that Congress has scheduled for a vote on Wednesday would shower the nationâ??s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Educationâ??s current budget.

Average college endowment returns dropped about 3% over the 12 months ending in June, then plummeted an estimated 22.5% more on average over the next five months, three surveys show today.
And though the rich aren’t necessarily getting richer, the nation’s best-endowed schools are generally faring better than everyone else.

College endowments earned an average return of -3 percent for the 2008 fiscal year and an estimated -22.5 percent in the five months after that, two new reports out today show.

The declines are already having an impact. More than a quarter of all institutions said they planned to draw less money from their endowment this year than they had expected to spend.

Numbers suggest certainty, and when it comes to campus crime, everybody wants answers. That’s what the Clery Act set out to reveal: How many rapes, burglaries, assaults? When? Where? Enacted nearly two decades ago, the federal law requires colleges to send the government lengthy reports each year, detailing their policies and tallying their total crimes.

But do statistics keep students safe? As campus security has become a national fixation, some scholars of the Clery Act â?? and officials who must comply with it daily â?? challenge the wisdom of producing timeand labor-intensive reports of dubious value. And they puzzle over a paradox: The law requires them to publish the numbers, but students and their families don’t seem to read them.

In almost the same breath in his inauguration speech this week, President Obama touted green technology and his desire for higher education to make changes to meet America’s evolving needs.

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories,” he said. “And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.”

In a year of political change, college freshmen were more plugged into current events than they have been since 1968. A record proportionâ??35.6 percentâ??said they discussed politics frequently during the last year, according to the latest installment of a long-running survey of freshmen.

Across the nation, college admissions staffs are digging through applications and beginning to predict their enrollment numbers for the fall, just as they do at this time every year. Based on what he has heard from colleges, David A. Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, describes 2009 as “a typical admissions yearâ??with a big asterisk.”

As in previous admissions cycles, however, generalizations are difficult. So far, Indiana University at Bloomington has received about 10 percent more applications than it did last year, but the number at the University of Wisconsin at Madison was down slightly in its early count, as of last week.

That dip surprised Thomas D. Reason, Madison’s associate director of admissions, but he said that recent changes in the admissions processâ??raising the application fee and moving from rolling admissions to a system with two decision periodsâ??might explain the drop.

As colleges and students around the country struggle with the effects of the worldwide economic downturn, help appears to be on the way from the nationâ??s capital. And plenty of it, to judge from a draft of a massive, $825 billion stimulus package released by Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives Thursday.

Calculating exactly how much of the proposed money â?? $550 billion in new spending and $275 billion in tax breaks over two years â?? could (if enacted) flow to postsecondary institutions, and to students and potential students, is difficult because many of the proposals in the package lack detail. It would also be premature for anyone in higher education (or any other potential recipients of stimulus funds) to start spending it, since (1) budget hawks in Congress and elsewhere blanched at the size and scope of the package, (2) this is just the Houseâ??s version, with the Senate reportedly drafting its own, and (3) multiple steps remain in the process.

Most of the nation’s colleges are gradually paring back their investments in classroom teaching, an analysis of federal data shows. And all colleges have in recent years been spending a greater share of their revenue on expenses other than instruction, including computing centers, student services, administrative salaries and lawn care.

Most high school seniors and their families have not made final college plans for next fall. But they know this: It’s probably going to cost more than they had planned.

Even in good economic times, states and colleges have largely failed to hold tuition increases in line with inflation. Now as the slumping economy forces states to slash spending, students can expect the sharpest increases in years.

Families are calling on colleges to absorb as much of the burden as possible instead of passing the extra costs on to students.

Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s nominee to be secretary of education, pledged to work toward the president-electâ??s goals of increasing the maximum Pell Grant and simplifying the process of applying for student aid during his confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.

â??I donâ??t know if youâ??ve looked at the Fafsa lately,â? Mr. Duncan said, referring to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, â??but you basically need a Ph.D. to figure that thing out.”