Category: Higher Education/System

The University of Wisconsin-Madison tied for 35th among 262 national doctoral universities in the 2009 edition of America’s Best Colleges, which is produced by U.S. News & World Report.

Among public institutions, UW-Madison ranked No. 7.

….”They have no meaning,” Wiley said prior to Friday’s University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents meeting in Van Hise Hall on the UW-Madison Campus.

No meaning?

“No, none at all,” said Wiley, who is stepping down from his post atop Bascom on Sept. 1, when Carolyn “Biddy” Martin will take over as UW-Madison chancellor.

The highly anticipated U.S. News & World Report magazineâ??s annual college rankings edition hits newsstands Monday.

Officials at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse are sure to be happy. The school jumped from 22 to 17 in the rankings of masterâ??s universities in the Midwest region. Marquette University alumni are likely pleased to see the school went from 82 to 77 this year in the national rankings.

Beloit College also got a nod as No. 37 among liberal arts schools in the â??Great Schools, Great Pricesâ? section, and Alverno College is a an up-and-coming school to watch. Alvernoâ??s internships, senior projects, learning communities and first-year programs were also recognized as top-notch. UW-Madison was recognized for its undergraduate research, and Marquette for its service learning.

Harvard University is the country’s oldest, wealthiest and most selective university. Now it’s back on top of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, claiming sole possession of the No. 1 spot for the first time in 12 years.

Princeton slips to No. 2, ending eight straight years of at least sharing the top ranking. The latest edition hits newsstands Monday, but was to be published Friday on the magazine’s website.

Yale follows at No. 3, and MIT and Stanford tie for fourth. The University of California, Berkeley is the highest-ranked public university, at No. 21 overall.

At Princeton, pride in being ranked No. 1 comes in a rolling wave of orange. There are blazers with orange stripes, orange stars and orange tigers as alumni march through campus at the annual Princeton reunion parade, or P-rade.

“Being the No. 1 school and having attended it and/or graduated from it, you naturally retain that for the rest of your life,” says Dixon Hills, a retired physician, Class of ’54, wearing orange-and-black striped socks. “They bring us back once a year to dress in orange and black and pretend we’re undergraduates again, and then we give lots more money at the annual giving.”

A college education is often hailed as the ticket to the good life. But in Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality (Crown Forum), Charles Murray says too many people go to college. In 1994, he co-wrote The Bell Curve, arguing that intelligence is a better predictor of success than socioeconomic status or parents’ education.

Better than Madison? Better than Marquette?

Even students who enthusiastically chose Carroll University found it hard to believe Tuesday that Waukeshaâ??s private, four-year college beat Wisconsinâ??s largest in a new national ranking.

â??Wow, that surprises me,â? said Megan Falk, a freshman psychology major from Lindenhurst, Ill.

In an effort to provide an alternative to the college-rankings giant U.S. News and World Report, Forbes.com for the first time released a list of top colleges based on â??the quality of the education they provide, and how much their students achieve.â?

Generally, large public schools didn’t fare as well as smaller liberal arts schools in the Forbes.com analysis. Wisconsin’s public flagship, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, ranks 335th, while some relative unknowns sit high on the list. The all-male Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., ranks 12th, and Centre College in Danville, Ky., ranks 13th.

Many students starting college this fall could have grown up playing with a Nintendo Game Boy in their crib. For them, “The Tonight Show” has always been hosted by Jay Leno.

These are some of the 60 items on Beloit College’s 11th annual Mindset List, which brings together 60 cultural landmarks in the lives of the incoming 2012 college class.

UW-Madison’s typical place in college rankings is near the top of lists (and not just when it comes to partying).
But in a recently released list of America’s Best Colleges by Forbes, it found itself at number 335.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has released an outline of his higher-education policy.

Students arriving on campus this month are seeing green â?? and not just from the money they’re spending on tuition. For example, students coming to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., will start their school year with the university’s first “Green Move-In.”

http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i49/49a00104.htm
Talk to the chief information officer at just about any American university, and he will probably say that his institution has bent over backward to help the Recording Industry Association of America curb illegal file sharing on his campus.

He will also tell you he’s angry.

State budget woes and a rocky economy have shaken public colleges and universities in recent years. One of the most noticeable shudders, however, has been a pervasive “brain drain” at some state institutions that face competition for their best faculty members from more prosperous institutions, both public and private.

Public colleges and universities are now girding themselves to win this war for tenured talent. Chief academic officers, deans, and department heads at those institutions are using specific incentives, careful nurturing, and, of course, cold hard cash as weapons. And they are also making hard decisions about whether some offers are worth matchingâ??and about the longer-term consequences of this faculty arms race.

A wide-ranging higher education bill designed to protect college students from aggressive lenders and rein in soaring tuitions won congressional approval Thursday.

The passage marks the first time in a decade that Congress has reauthorized the main federal law overseeing higher education and the third time in less than a year that it passed legislation to make college more affordable.

It took five years and 14 extensions, but Congress has finally cleared a bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, the major law governing federal student aid.

The bill, which would set federal higher-education policy for at least the next five years, easily passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday afternoon by a vote of 380 to 49. The Senate later approved it, 83 to 8. The bill now heads to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law, even though his administration has criticized the cost of some of the new programs it would create.

Congress wants to blow the whistle on colleges that raise tuition sharply, while helping students pay less for textbooks and making Pell grants available year-round â?? part of a wide-ranging bill designed to address concerns about rising college costs.

The University of Florida can raise a glass to another national title â?? best party school in the country. The Gators, known for wild celebrations following national championships in football and basketball, wrested the party title away from West Virginia University and beat out the University of Mississippi and Penn State University, in the Princeton Review survey of 120,000 students released Monday.

The Princeton Review’s annual guide, The Best 368 Colleges, out Monday, comes with the traditional rankings of best party schools (University of Florida is tops this year), most beautiful campus (Princeton) and best professors (Middlebury College in Vermont). But this year’s edition adds a new wrinkle: how “green” a school is.

Higher education canâ??t resist a ranking: best college, best cafeteria, biggest endowment, biggest party school. It says something about whatâ??s important on campus, then, that when the Princeton Review releases its annual guide to colleges this week, it will include a new metric: a â??green rating,â? giving points for things like â??environmentally preferable food,â? power from renewable sources and energy-efficient buildings.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose “last lecture” about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.

Pausch died at his home in Chesapeake, Va., said Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal writer who co-wrote Pausch’s book. Pausch and his family had moved there last fall to be closer to his wife’s relatives.

Pausch was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in September 2006. His popular last lecture at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 garnered international attention and was viewed by millions on the Internet.

When Elisha McKinney graduated this spring from Bevill State Community College, she became the first in her family to earn a college degree. Now, as she takes online summer classes toward a bachelor’s degree, she marks another first that she hopes also will be her last: She took out a student loan.

“I did everything I had to” to avoid borrowing money, says McKinney, 34, a married mother of three who worked full time while also a full-time student. “I’m nervous.”

But as the costs associated with going to college have increased, loans have gotten harder to avoid.

While the stagnant economy has hit some universities hard, others â?? including Ohio State â?? have managed to avoid major budget cuts. Thatâ??s created an opportunity for the â??havesâ? to poach faculty from the â??have nots,â? and some universities stand to lose a lot in this latest skirmish.

In response to raiding efforts, some universities have built up war chests to retain faculty. Last year, the University of California at Berkeley used a $113 million grant to help retain faculty. Wisconsinâ??s Legislature also put money toward keeping faculty in the state, appropriating $10 million last year to help retain faculty across the University of Wisconsin System.

The infusion of funds in Wisconsin came after more than 115 faculty members reported receiving outside offers in 2006, which was the highest number of offers reported in 20 years, the Associated Press reported.

Like 60% of community college students nationwide and about 75% of his classmates, Chris Doing attends part time. Yet when his community college, the College of Southern Nevada, reports graduation data to the Department of Education, Doing won’t be part of the count. The Education Department asks colleges to track graduation rates each fall only for full-time students entering college for the first time.

Tthe more elite an institution is, the more public money it gets. Higher education traditionally has favored the best and brightest. But that status quo increasingly is being challenged, buttressed by growing consensus that the nation’s best and brightest alone can’t keep the U.S. workforce afloat in an increasingly global economy.

Today, the more urgent need is to ensure that more people complete at least some higher education, says a paper distributed this spring to presidential candidates. And “the fastest, most effective way” to achieve that is to focus on helping students who are most at risk of failing, says the paper by the non-profit State Higher Education Executive Officers.

By Betty Young’s count, it’s been nearly three years since Jay Leno has made any cracks at the expense of community colleges. She should know: In the fall of 2005, after he had taken what she thought was a string of cheap shots, Young rode her Harley-Davidson more than halfway across the country to his Tonight Show studios and asked him to lay off.

He made no promises, but Young, a graduate and longtime president of community colleges, considers Leno’s silence on the subject these days a victory. Perhaps more important, her public relations trek served as a sort of rallying cry for community college leaders nationwide. Tired of their image as the Rodney Dangerfields of higher education, they have become increasingly vocal in their demand for respect. Nothing less than the nation’s economic future is at stake, they argue.

Note: Story includes a highlights of a student transfer to UW-Madison.

Two undergraduates on Pennsylvania State University’s main campus have filed four complaints against instructors under new procedures designed to help students who believe that their professors have presented biased lessons in the classroom. Two more complaints have been filed at Temple University.

Penn State and Temple put their student-complaint procedures in place in 2006, after Pennsylvania’s legislature held much-publicized hearings to investigate allegations that professors had indoctrinated students in left-wing ideology and discriminated against conservatives.

The Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute and the South Asia Summer Language Institute are eight-week intensive language training programs for undergraduates, graduate students and professionals. The eight-week courses, both of which are currently hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, count as one full year of language.

The Southeast Asian institute offers instruction at the first-, second- and third-year levels in Burmese, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Javanese, Khmer, Lao, Thai and Vietnamese.

The number of foreign students coming to the United States this fall may increase over last year, according to colleges contacted by The Chronicle and visa-issuance figures from India and China, the two countries that send the most students to American shores.

As president of the American Association of University Professors, Cary Nelson, the 62-year-old gadfly and erudite literary theorist, is trying to breathe new life into a group with a complicated dual role: speaking out on behalf of academic freedom, while also representing faculty at some colleges in contract talks.

The association’s core issues are front and center these days. Colleges are increasingly relying on part-time faculty, who have less job security and protection if they speak out on controversial subjects. But at such a critical time, the association has been hobbled by declining membership, staff turmoil and financial dysfunction.

A high-profile push by American business groups to double the number of U.S. bachelor’s degrees awarded in science, math and engineering by 2015 is falling way behind target, a new report says.

In 2005, 15 prominent business groups warned that a lack of expert workers and teachers posed a threat to U.S. competitiveness, and said the country would need 400,000 new graduates in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields by 2015.

As textbook prices skyrocket, college students and faculty seeking more affordable options increasingly are turning to “open textbooks” as an alternative. Open textbooks are free textbooks available online that are licensed to allow users to download, customize and print any part of the text. Professors can change content to fit their teaching styles. Some authors offer a print-on-demand service that produces professionally bound copies for $10 to $20.