Category: Higher Education/System

The graph of the stock marketâ??s downward zigzag, a sinking mountain range in silhouette, is a textbook illustration (for those who can still afford their own textbooks) of how quickly the comfy insularity of college life can vanish.

Forget â??Gossip Girlâ? or â??Family Guy.â? Financial concerns are the new topic on campus. â??Sometimes people will make it a joke, but because there are so many jokes, you know itâ??s really serious,â? says Kyia Bish, a Spelman College freshman from Queens who is concerned about her momâ??s job security at JPMorgan Chase.

The military conflict thatâ??s likely to spark campus protests in the coming weeks doesnâ??t involve U.S. forces in Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, Israeli attacks on Hamas forces in Gaza have stirred sleeping campuses, and rallies and petition drives may gain momentum as more colleges resume full operations. The efforts, involving students and professors, supporters of Palestinians and Israelis, raise sensitive issues about whether academics are too quick or too slow to question Israel, what methods are appropriate for expressing opposition to another governmentâ??s actions, and why Israelâ??s actions are more likely to generate protests than outrages committed by other countries.

As college admission deadlines wind down and families submit financial aid applications for next fall, freshmen in 2009 will be the first to start college clearly in the throes of the recession.

Ripple effects of a dour economy are making this college application season as nerve-wracking for some admissions officers as it is for applicants. But for savvy families, there may be new opportunities.

The Princeton Reviews 100 “Best Value Colleges” list for 2009 is based on data compiled and analyzed by The Princeton Review, the education services and test-prep company known for its annual college listings.

As college admission deadlines wind down and families submit financial aid applications for next fall, freshmen in 2009 will be the first to start college clearly in the throes of the recession.

What this will mean for students and colleges is just beginning to be understood. But one thing is clear â?? now, more than ever, students and parents need to make every education dollar count.

Not listed are public schools including University of Wisconsin-Madison or University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; missing among private schools are New York University and George Washington University, the USA’s most expensive four-year campus.

Among all the uncertainty colleges face in this recession, they are sure of one thing: Families are feeling less than confident about their ability to pay for higher education. And many colleges are not sitting idly by.

Colleges are creating more student-aid programs or expanding existing ones. Others are offering students additional counseling or a grace period for paying their tuition bills. And even some that haven’t seen an increase in student need are preparing for one next year.

Because of the worst economic downturn since World War II, many state governments now expect revenues to fall in coming years â?? resulting in less public spending on higher education. Certain state-revenue reforms could moderate the effects of economic slumps on colleges. But higher-education institutions must also face reality and become more productive and cost-effective.

As state legislatures convene in the coming days and weeks, colleges will be battling to stave off large cuts, with governors in places like Arizona, Missouri, and Ohio asking public colleges to prepare for budget reductions of as much as 25 percent.

Most colleges have steered through the first jolts of the recession without resorting to layoffs, cutting employee benefits, or imposing across-the-board freezes on hiring. But the economic pain is afflicting campuses in many other ways, according to the findings from a new survey of chief business officers conducted last month by The Chronicle and Moody’s Investors Service.

Slightly more than one in 10 colleges had laid off employees, and another 26 percent were considering doing so, survey responses from more than 200 public and private four-year colleges showed.

Despite a massive federal effort to aid banks and boost the economy, lending has plunged in the last year. Home-mortgage volume and bank loans to big companies are down dramatically.

But the government’s response is expanding credit in at least one sector: higher education. Although the recession is weighing on colleges in many ways, the ability of students to get federal loans to pay tuition isn’t one of them.

As of Nov. 28, the federal government had guaranteed or made $65.2 billion in student loans for the 2008-09 school year, up 18.6% from the same time a year earlier. In contrast, lending for home mortgages was down nearly 38% through the end of November, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication. A recent Harvard Business School study found a similar decline in loans to big corporations.

An army of ironworkers, masons, carpenters and laborers are swarming the campus of the University of Michigan these days, as the university undertakes a construction campaign budgeted at $2.5 billion, ranking it among the largest university building programs in the United States.

The man’s smiling face overlooks Madison Area Technical College from a canary yellow billboard high above the Truax campus, next to the words, “The Smart Choice.”

For many new students, the first-year college experience is an academic and social buffet, a dizzying array of activities and opportunities to herald the passage into adulthood. Not so for transfer students, a growing but largely neglected group whose needs are as varied as the circumstances that bring them to campus in the first place.

That’s starting to change.

The cost of getting a beer at a Gophers football game increased by several thousand dollars Friday.

In a rare split vote, the University of Minnesota Board of Regents approved a policy that will allow alcohol sales in premium, restricted seating of TCF Bank Stadium, among other venues.

President Bush is leaving the White House with a mixed record on higher education.

His administration catapulted conversations about holding colleges more accountable for their performance into the national spotlight, and it pressed for some increases in federal spending on student aid and research.

Karen McDowell spent several days this fall dressed in a purple fish costume, holding a plastic spear.

Ms. McDowell, a network-security analyst at the University of Virginia, wanted to raise awareness about “phishing,” e-mail schemes in which con artists send messages to trick people into giving out passwords or other personal information. Ms. McDowell walked around high-traffic areas of the campus to get attention. “Sometimes I introduced myself as a fraudulent e-mail because many people don’t know what a phish is,” she said.

Some 170 lobbyists for public colleges and universities met here last week to prepare for upcoming state legislative sessions and to discuss how to protect their institutions from severe budget cuts in a nationwide economic crisis.

The Higher Education Government Relations Conference, “Making the Case,” featured several sessions on how to frame higher education’s economic-development mission favorably for the public as well as state lawmakers.

A group of college presidents and other top education officials says the USAs “economic, democratic and social health” could worsen over the next several decades if more Americans dont earn a college degree. The group is pushing to increase the percentage of young people who earn a degree from 40% to 55% by 2025.

More regulations may expand the thicket of student-privacy law, but the U.S. Department of Education hopes a new 289-page guide will help colleges and universities find their way.

The Education Department plans to release today its new rules on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects the disclosure of student records. After announcing initial regulations in March, the department received more than 120 comments from higher-education associations, university systems, and other groups, and postponed the final publication originally slated for September.

Even in the humble heartland, there is no escape from the academic arms race.

Twenty years ago, annual operating expenses for the University of Kansas campus here were $204-million. Today the institution spends more than triple that, even though its enrollment, 26,000, is almost exactly the same.

During the same period, tuition and fees for in-state students have increased fivefold.

When the economy tanks, graduate school applications go up. Thatâ??s one of the few bits of good news in which educators could have reasonably taken comfort this year. No more.

The number of students taking the Graduate Record Examination will decline in 2008, the first time ever that the GRE has seen a fall in test-taking during an economic downturn. Because the GRE is required for the vast majority of graduate school programs, its numbers closely correlate with trends in applications.

An independent report on American higher education flunks all but one state when it comes to affordability â?? an embarrassing verdict that is unlikely to improve as the economy contracts.

Universities have long rued the stark disparity between minority students’ share of the population and their share of Ph.D.’s, especially in engineering and the sciences. And three decades’ worth of efforts by private foundations and federal agencies seem to have had only sporadic positive effects.

Throughout this semester, graduate students and others on the academic job market have been eyeing the news with deep apprehension. It has been hard to imagine that this yearâ??s academic job market would be anything but tight, given the number of colleges cutting back on hiring due to the recession. But many searches did start, and it was possible to build an anecdotal case that everything would be OK, since there were some good positions out there.

The USA has made modest gains since the early 1990s in preparing students for college and providing access, a report says today. But other countries are advancing more quickly, and if trends continue, the picture is only going to get worse, the authors warn.

It’s no secret that colleges and universities are relying increasingly on part-time instructors or other faculty who are neither tenured nor on track for tenure. But a flurry of recent studies draw troubling conclusions about what kind of impact that is having on the quality of a student’s education.

Many states, and the United States as a whole, are doing a better job than they were two years ago of preparing students for college and expanding access to higher education, according to a national report card on higher education scheduled for release today.

But the country continues to slip behind other nations on measures of enrollment and degree completion, particularly among young adults, the report found, and on the subject of college affordability, it gave failing grades to all but one state: California, which got a C-.

The rising cost of college â?? even before the recession â?? threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the annual report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Ever since the killings at Virginia Tech last year, there has been widespread speculation about the relative incidence of mental health disorders among college students. A new study in The Archives of General Psychiatry finds that such disorders are common, and that far fewer students receive treatment than one might like. But the study â?? believed to be the largest national comparison of the mental health of college students and comparably aged non-students â?? finds that non-students are as likely to have mental health disorders and as unlikely to seek treatment as their peers in college.

In a more normal year, the alumni fund-raising plea that turns up in the mail right about now seems perfectly in tune as the day for thanks gives way to a month of giving.

But this year is different. Huge numbers of people have lost their homes to foreclosure. Unemployment is on the rise. And a good chunk of the United States automobile industry could wither away within months, taking hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs with it.

At a time when the nation’s economy is ailing and credit is drying up, Troy Carter thought he had found an affordable way to earn a four-year college degree: Stitch together an education at a community college and a state university.

But like millions of other students flocking to community colleges and public universities, he finds them struggling with financial problems of their own.

Midyear budget cuts are forcing many of the institutions to lay off faculty members, cut course sections, and freeze enrollment.

The nation’s economic crisis is bringing colleges higher borrowing costs, smaller endowments, tighter budgets, and fears over the availability of loans for their students.

Yet one of the most critical factors in colleges’ health â?? student enrollment â?? appears to be largely holding strong, at least for now.

Tuition and fees are the top source of revenue at private four-year colleges, with smaller institutions relying on those funds especially heavily. The loss of even a handful of students can bring some institutions to the brink of collapse.

IOWA CITY â?? Famous as a literary powerhouse, with its Writersâ?? Workshop and award-winning newspaper, the University of Iowa has been the gloomy setting of more trouble and tragedy lately than could fit in a single book.

Given the current economic downturn, admissions officers at Wesleyan University thought there might be a decline in early-decision applications this year. But when the deadline passed last weekend, they found that the number had risen 40 percent.

At a time when the nationâ??s economy is ailing and credit is drying up, Troy Carter thought he had found an affordable way to earn a four-year college degree: Stitch together an education at a community college and a state university.

But like millions of other students who are flocking to community colleges and public universities, he finds them struggling with financial problems of their own.

Hard hit by budget cuts, the California State University system is planning to cut its enrollment by 10,000 students for the 2009-10 academic year, unless state lawmakers provide more money.

â??We canâ??t continue to admit more and more students without receiving adequate funding,â? Chancellor Charles B. Reed said Monday.