Enrollment of minorities in U.S. colleges has increased substantially in recent years, but not fast enough to keep up with demographic changes.
The findings are highlighted in a biennial report to be released Thursday by the American Council on Education, supported by the GE Foundation.
Perennial college football powerhouse Penn State University is promoting glossy trading cards similar to those collected by sports fans. Only, there’s no card for Hall of Fame football coach Joe Paterno or any of his Nittany Lions. The 10-card set showcases top faculty members. Glaciologist Richard Alley is a featured academic star, as is entomologist James Tumlinson.
On Tuesday night, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a university president, two MacArthur Foundation â??Geniusesâ? and a Japanese senator were presented with the award that bares Crossâ??s name for outstanding achievement in one of his many fields.
Honoree Laura L. Kiessling GRD â??89 is renowned for merging chemistry and biology by designing and synthesizing replicas of natural molecules central to life processes. She is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she has worked since 1991.
She was unable to attend Tuesdayâ??s ceremony because of a death in the family.
The University of Minnesota has concluded that falsified data were used in a 2001 article published by one of its pioneering researchers on adult stem cells.
The stunning admission followed an 18-month investigation into research published by Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, an internationally known stem-cell expert.
When it comes to building a top-notch faculty, racing to land prominent scholars is only half the battle for colleges. The other half: Fighting off poachers intent on swiping the college’s existing talented midcareer professors.
At Cornell University, a $35-million gift announced by officials in late September will give the institution an edge in an increasingly competitive market for faculty members. It will be used for endowed professorships to be awarded universitywide. One of these positions has already been used to hold onto a prominent chemist who was being wooed by another Ivy League university.
Graduate students and professors at the University of Illinois no longer need worry that a bumper sticker supporting John McCain â?? or Barack Obama or Ralph Nader or anyone else, for that matter â?? puts them in violation of the stateâ??s ethics law, the university systemâ??s president, B. Joseph White, said in an e-mail message to faculty and staff members this afternoon. The university will â??preserve, protect, and defendâ? the constitutional freedoms of speech and assembly of every employee, as well as academic freedom, he wrote.
When he was hired as director of the loud, rowdy Cal Aggie Marching Band at UC Davis, nobody told Tom Slabaugh about the tradition of “naked van.”
But on last year’s road trip to the football game with Portland State, a trumpet player yelled “naked van!” and everybody in the vehicle – men and women alike – stripped to their underwear.
Higher education is becoming essential for many careers, but is it out of reach for a lot of students?
State government and education officials want to convince high schoolers and their families that going to college or taking post-secondary coursework is realistic for practically everybody in Wisconsin during a one-day push touting the possibilities.
Higher Education Day in Wisconsin is slated for Tuesday, with more than 20 events planned statewide to make the public aware of the learning opportunities in the Badger State.
Students and professors at the University of Illinois decided to rally for Barack Obama on the Urbana-Champaign campus Thursday to make clear their stand on an increasingly controversial question as the November elections approach: Is it legal for employees and students at state colleges to express support for political candidates while on campus?
A short-term investment fund that holds $34 million from 10 private Wisconsin colleges restricted cash withdrawals this week amid the national credit crunch, leaving some schools to find other ways to pay operating costs.
JANESVILLE, Wis. — The cost of going to college keeps rising, and the current credit crunch isn’t helping students trying to further their education.
Some two-year schools are being abandoned by lenders.
Anyone applying for a loan, for anything, knows getting one isn’t as easy as it used to be.
The same goes for college students who are depending on student loans for their future.
Students like Ana Maria Perez simply have fewer options.
Those in education have long promoted the value of getting a college education.
But just how much is that higher education degree really worth?
In an effort to better quantify an answer, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has unveiled its Payback Calculator (http://payback.wisc.edu) — a tool that gives prospective and current students, along with their families and high school counselors, some answers related to the financial investment in a university education.
Some 16 of Wisconsinâ??s private colleges have signed agreements with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Natural Resources allowing the schools to perform their own compliance audits for seven major environmental laws, officials announced Thursday.
SHREWSBURYâ?? It takes a few seconds to get a glimpse of the precious cargo loaded into the laboratory cooler that Dr. Gary Stein opens, mostly because of the frosty fog that billows out.
Then the air clears, and boxes of samples come into view: human embryonic stem cells.
Itâ??s the initial inventory for the new UMass Stem Cell Bank, a repository that organizers hope will come to hold more than 100 types of stem cells. Launched with a $7.7 million state grant, the bank is an early sign of Gov. Deval L. Patrickâ??s push to invest $1 billion in the life sciences in Massachusetts over 10 years to promote the stateâ??s economy. Starting Wednesday, the bank will begin accepting embryonic stem cell â??deposits,â? the first step in eventually making cells available to researchers.
SEATTLE â?? For the 5,500 college admissions officials and high school guidance counselors who gathered here over the weekend, there were discussions, debates and analyses of things like the ethics of tracking student applicants on Facebook and â??Why Good Students Write Bad College Essays â?? and How to Stop It.â?
When it comes to building a top-notch faculty, racing to land prominent scholars is only half the battle for colleges. The other half: Fighting off the poachers intent on swiping the college’s existing talented midcareer professors.
At Cornell University, a $35-million gift to be announced by officials today will give the institution an edge in an increasingly competitive market for faculty members. It will be used for endowed professorships to be awarded universitywide. One of these positions has already been used to hold onto a prominent chemist who was being wooed by another Ivy League university.
Dear Editor: Beware, college students! Someone may be trying to suppress your right to vote.
Last month, Barack Obama supporters were registering thousands of students at Virginia Tech University. The Montgomery County elections registrar then issued news releases incorrectly suggesting that students registered to vote at their college might lose their right to be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns or could lose scholarships or lose car and health insurance. All lies.
Perhaps more than any other top campus administrator, the chief diversity officer is a lightning rod for criticism. Of course, some people simply oppose efforts to increase access, equity, multiculturalism, and inclusion. But even people committed to diversity can object to the presence of these officers.
Some critics believe that hiring a chief diversity officer removes the responsibility for diversity and inclusion from the university’s president, other leaders, faculty members, and the campus as a whole. The institution now has a “diversity messiah,” who is singularly responsible for advancing campus-diversity efforts and is nothing more than a symbolic figurehead.
The author is the vice provost for diversity and climate at UW-Madison.
Blackhawk Technical College in Janesville is just about bursting at the seams.Technical Colleges
The parking lot’s so full, cars park on the lawn. Most teachers work overtime, and the school has added some part-time and limited-term faculty to teach extra sections. Classes that once held 12 or 15 students have swelled to 25 or 30.
Blackhawk is the most extreme example of a surge of midcareer adults and displaced workers returning to school for retraining during an economic downturn. Full-time enrollment at Blackhawk is up an estimated 20.7% this fall, in part because of downsizing at General Motors Corp. and in the auto industry.
Statewide, enrollment projections for the Wisconsin Technical College System are up 3.2% – even more than expected.
Wisconsin has lagged behind every other state but one in providing funding increases for higher education over the past five years, according to a report this week by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
The report, which looks at state tax funding for the University of Wisconsin System over the past 25 years, was sparked in part by tensions between the state and the university, said Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance President Todd Berry.
Two years ago, Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania joined what appears to be a growing college-life trend: pet-friendly dorm rooms offered to interested students. There are at least a dozen such colleges, and administrators and students alike declare the concept a hit.
The University of Iowa has fired two senior administrators who were singled out for criticism in an outside law firmâ??s investigation of the universityâ??s response to an alleged sexual assault. President Sally Mason had asked the two men â?? Phillip Jones, vice president for student services, and Marcus Mills, vice president for legal affairs and general counsel â?? to resign, and when they declined, she fired them, according to a statement on the universityâ??s Web site.
The Pell Grant, a national scholarship widely awarded to low-income students, could experience a serious shortfall for the 2009-10 fiscal year, though officials remain hopeful Congress will act to correct the lapse.
COLORADO SPRINGS â?? Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.
They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas.
Broke young college graduates with ideas for awesome new Web sites are about as thick on the ground as pigeons in New York City, but Jordan Goldman has a talent for getting noticed. Born and raised in Staten Island, he graduated from Wesleyan in 2004, spent two post-grad years in England and, upon his return to his native city, lived in 16 different sublets in the next two years. His own parents referred to him as the Wandering Jew. â??I was ordering Chinese lunch specials and dividing them into three,â? he remembered recently, â??and that was my food for days. My mom thought I was nuts. She kept saying, â??Get a job,â?? and Iâ??d say, â??No, Ma, I have this idea.â?? â?
Ali Bramson has always been interested in science.
At age four, she decided she wanted be an astronaut to learn about the universe. When she was in elementary school, she thought girls were better at math and boys were better at art and music.
During a Q & A session following a presentation about the Wisconsin School of Business and its connections to local economic development, I made some remarks about the price of tuition at UW-Madison that were picked up by a Wisconsin State Journal reporter and then repeated more broadly in the media.
While the reporting was not inaccurate, the issues are sensitive and have a rich context, some of which is inevitably lost in a brief account.
A new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.
There is an elephant in the room, and I don’t mean the GOP. I’m referring to an issue that looms large in America’s future but is presently being overlooked by both presidential candidates: the significant decline in the percentage of Americans earning degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the proportion of students obtaining STEM degrees from American universities has dropped from 32 percent to 27 percent over the past decade. At the same time, the percentage of non-American students earning these degrees from American universities has increased dramatically.
(Bill Costello is training director of Making Minds Matter, Bowie, Md., and teaches parents and teachers the best strategies for educating boys.)
Millions of young Americans are off to college, and many will rely on those institutions for health care. But that reliance might be misplaced, because our college health systems are gravely ill. Unless colleges address widespread problems with insurance coverage, students risk being one disease or accident away from losing the potential for getting the education they are paying for.
(Bryan A. Liang is professor of law and executive director of the Institute of Health Law Studies at California Western School of Law in San Diego. This column first appeared in the Baltimore Sun.)
Two years after University of Illinois officials killed a proposal to enroll fewer in-state students at their flagship campus, the percentage of freshmen from Illinois in this fall’s class has dropped to less than 83 percent, the lowest in at least a decade, the Tribune has learned.
Intense public outcry forced administrators at the Urbana-Champaign campus to backtrack in 2006 from a plan to decrease in-state undergraduate enrollment from 90 percent to 85 percent. But this fall only about 87 percent of the campus’ 31,181 undergraduates are from Illinois.
There’s about to be a new entrant in the college-ranking business: the Boeing Company.
The Chicago-based aerospace giant has spent the past year matching internal data from employee evaluations with information about the colleges its engineers attended. It has used that analysis to create a ranking system, which it plans to unveil in the coming month, that will show which colleges have produced the workers it considers most valuable.
Squint hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good â?? healing, educating â?? and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.
It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of â??moral hazardsâ? â?? that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook donâ??t have to bear the cost and thus usually donâ??t think twice about it.
Northwestern may have gone Middle Eastern, but officials at the University of Wisconsin are not as eager to open â??brick and mortarâ? campuses overseas.
This semester, Northwestern University â?? based in Evanston, Ill. â?? opened a branch of its Medill School of Journalism and its School of Communications in Qatar. The university became one of more than a half-dozen U.S. colleges to open branches in the region.
Two dozen college presidents and policy experts defended the rising costs of tuition on Monday and argued against forcing colleges to spend more of their endowments.
But Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, who convened a round-table discussion on the subject, indicated that they would continue their effort to push universities to justify their tax exemptions by spending more of their endowment money.
It’s all doom and gloom in commercial newspapers these days: buyouts, layoffs, and fleeing advertisers. But most student newspapers seem to be doing just fine.
“We’re not experiencing a problem,” said Kevin Schwartz, general manager at The Daily Tar Heel, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “There’s no advertising downturn for us.”
For anyone who attended college before the era of e-mails and the Internet, the notion that bulky textbooks could someday become obsolete might seem ludicrous.
Yet with a wealth of information on virtually any topic now readily accessible online, more people are starting to ponder if these hefty staples of education will remain relevant.
Some 1,200 lucky freshmen enrolled at public universities and colleges in Wisconsin this fall will get a pleasant surprise in the mail next month.
Theyâ??ll be the first recipients of scholarships from the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars, a private, nonprofit foundation created by a donation of $175 million from philanthropists John and Tashia Morgridge last year.
As president of Vanderbilt University and four other prominent schools before that, Gordon Gee perceived an unhappy trend: Student-athletes were drifting away from the core of university life. They lived, ate and studied in a jock bubble.
Sure, most went to class. But they missed out on virtually every other important college experience, from studying abroad to Greek life.
Five years ago this week, Gee decided he’d had enough. At loggerheads with his athletic director, he summoned his top administrators and stunned them with the news: He planned to disband Vanderbilt’s athletic department, and fold it into the division of student life.
Of all the advice parents give to children heading off to college, warnings about alcohol â?? and especially about abusing alcohol â?? may be the most important. At most colleges, whether and how much students drink can make an enormous difference, not just in how well they do in school, but even whether they live or die.
Every state has a minimum drinking age of 21, and the vast majority of college students are younger than that. Yet drinking, and in particular drinking to get drunk, remains a major health and social problem on campuses. Car crashes and other accidental injuries, sexual assaults, fights, community violence, academic failure and deaths from an overdose of alcohol are among the consequences.
Where once there were stacks of books at UW-Madison’s College Library, now there are big tables, littered with laptops and pizza boxes.
In the place of journals, there is a coffeehouse and cafe. And windows that were blocked by bookshelves now reveal an expansive view of Lake Mendota’s blue water.
This is the changing face of College Library, housed within Helen C. White Hall.
The nation’s largest freshman class in history is moving into college dorms, hanging posters, meeting roommates and learning fight songs. In Indiana University’s Assembly Hall last Friday, a remarkably large chorus hailing from private high schools in the Northeast was singing the school’s ode to the “Cream and Crimson” in a pronounced New York accent.
If the separation anxiety isn’t enough, teens headed to university have to face a scary fact: They’ve got no choice in a first-year college roommate. But that doesn’t have to spell dorm doom, according to a study from University of Michigan researchers.
Colleges beware: One more tuition hike and your name might just end up on a new federal Wall of Shame.
The College Opportunity and Affordability Act, signed Aug. 14 by President Bush, will require the Department of Education to post online the colleges and universities with the highest percentage increases in tuition and fees in a three-year period. It also calls for the department to list the 5% of colleges with the highest overall sticker prices.
Several colleges and universities in Texas, Ohio, Maryland and New York are freezing 2008-2009 tuitions at last year’s levels in an effort to make college more affordable for the nation’s middle class.
Colleges experiencing larger-than-expected freshman enrollments are scrambling to relieve overcrowding in dorms, classrooms, cafeterias and elsewhere.
Marquette University has approved a new Center for Real Estate to be housed in the College of Business Administration, officials announced Wednesday.
Eight years ago, Texas Tech University started a financial-literacy program to help its students master the basics of budgeting, saving, and not buying what they can’t afford. Now, as colleges grapple with rising costs and an economic downturn, the university has found itself at the forefront of a growing effort to sharpen students’ financial know-how.
“We have a responsibility as a university to help students in this area,” says Dorothy Bagwell Durband, who directs the program. Financial literacy affects more than students’ wallets, she says. It also has an impact on retention, productivity, even wellness.
Textbook sales are headed downward at many university presses, and the negative trend has accelerated in the last couple of months. That’s the word from press directors anxious about the decline but unsure what’s causing it or what to do to stop it.
“I am hearing more and more complaints from people about their textbook sales, which for university presses means sales of specialized books that come in for upper-division courses,” says Peter J. Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses. “I’m hearing it from big presses and small presses.”
Critics of Title IX in Madison know the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination at any school that receives federal funding as the one that helped doom the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s baseball team.
Yet the next major Title IX debate on college campuses, and potentially the UW, likely will have nothing to do with sports.
Over the past couple years, government agencies such as the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and NASA have started undertaking Title IX compliance reviews in university science and engineering programs at a handful of schools across the nation. In fact, auditors from the Department of Energy visited UW-Madison April 1-2 to review its graduate physics program, and a final report is due out by the end of the year.
Liberal arts colleges make a passionate case that the skills they offer â?? analysis, writing, argument â?? are the best preparation for a career in the ever-changing business world.
But at a time of surging college costs and rising career anxieties, they’re feeling some heat from parents and students to do more to give students a well-rounded resume.
High school graduates in Wisconsin taking the SAT continue to score higher than the national average, according to the College Board, which owns the test.
An estimated 4,000 low-income Wisconsin Technical College System students applying this fall for a widely used state grant program wonâ??t get the money, because the state has run out of grant funding for technical schools.
Wauwatosa West High School graduate Cameron Collier wasnâ??t sure whether to bring a car with him for his freshman year at Ripon College, but a brochure from the school sealed the deal with an offer he couldnâ??t refuse.
To save parking spots and go green, the 1,000-student college offered incoming freshmen a brand-new Trek 820 mountain bike, a Trek Vapor helmet and a Master Lock U-Lock – all to keep – if they pledged to leave their cars at home. Collier signed up.
Prominently mentions UW-Madison’s efforts to help students get around in an environmentally responsible way.
Average national SAT scores for the high school class of 2008 were the same as last year, even as a larger, more diverse group took the test, a College Board report released Tuesday says.
China is hoping that American college students watching the Summer Olympics will want to travel there, providing a bump similar to what Australia and Greece enjoyed in 2000 and 2004. But even before the 2008 Games, China was already on its way as the hot new destination for study abroad.
Crammed on middle linebacker Derek Walker’s plate are beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, spinach and a roll. In the other hand, he balances a salad and a bottle of hot sauce. He lumbers through the small, tabled-filled cafeteria and plunks down without spilling a drop.
All without a tray.
College enrollments have been on the rise for decades, but the proportion of students who earn a bachelor’s degree within five years has stagnated at about 52%, down from 55% in 1988, says a report due this fall by the College Board, owner of the SAT. Some of those left behind eventually graduate, while others drop out.
MADISON, Wis. — Some of the nation’s most educated academic professionals believe the legal drinking age should be lowered from 21 to 18.
The movement, called The Amethyst Initiative, was undertaken by college leaders who believe that lowering the drinking age could cut the abuse of alcohol.
“The important thing from the university perspective is the decision-making,” said UW Associate Dean of Students Kevin Helmkamp. “We want our students to make good decisions.”
Though 128 college and university chancellors and presidents have weighed in, the UW has not. Outgoing UW Chancellor John Wiley did not sign the initiative, though there is a possibility that incoming chancellor Biddy Martin could.
Beginning this fall, individuals taking the rigorous Graduate Management Admission Test will have to submit themselves to a palm-vein scan to ensure that they are who they say they are and not a hired brain paid to bring in a higher score.
More accurate than fingerprints, the PalmSecure scan is the next level of security for the exam that is essential to admissions at more than 1,800 graduate schools. In July, 140,638 people took the exam.
