Victoria’s Secret is showing a little school spirit along with all that skin.
The lingerie company’s new Collegiate Collection, which hit stores July 1, features licensed college logos on tank tops, sweats, and some fairly tame undies. The concept isn’t new, but it matches the company’s plan to appeal more to college-age women. So far 32 institutions have lined up, including Berkeley, Penn State, and Harvard.
A new, much-improved GI Bill, signed into law last week, will go a long way toward helping combat veterans pay for college. With billions in new federal dollars available â?? an estimated $62 billion over 10 years â?? college leaders are thinking about how to attract veterans, in part by matching more money with, well, more money.
MILWAUKEE – Wearing a pink skirt and sequined T-shirt, 12-year-old Stephanie Peralta adjusted the wheel base on her Lego car to make it roll faster and farther.
Zaira Guerrero, 16, tucked dyed-red locks behind her ear and hung a bucket from a bridge she’d built out of pasta, testing to see if it withstood the weight.
“Now, challenge your brothers to this,” instructor Jack Samuelson told them. “Women can do anything that men can do, and, my wife would say, some things they do better.”
The students at “Engineering for Young Women,” a five-day summer academy last week at Marquette University, aren’t the stereotypical geeks, plagued by pocket protectors and weak social skills.
When the Iowa River topped its banks and inundated the University of Iowa’s campus last month, the disaster caused damages worth at least $232-million, the university estimated Tuesday in a report to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
(UNDATED) Much of the health insurance debate is about Americans who have inadequate coverage or none at all. On college campuses across the U.S, the focus is increasingly on who pays the bill: students, through segregated fees……or mom and dad, through private insurance.
Currently, when U-W students need medical care, they can go to their campus health center. There’s usually no “bill” per se â?? the expense is folded into the segregated fees paid along with tuition. And there’s also comprehensive, campus-sponsored health insurance available.
However, at a small but growing number of schools, the private market has come into play. The University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, for instance, contracts with four area insurance providers. It’s a trend that Dr. Sarah Van Orman of University Health Services in Madison predicts will expand across the nation as colleges tighten their belts. (Third item.)
Some states are making it harder for illegal immigrants to attend college by denying in-state tuition benefits or banning undocumented students.
In the past two years, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Oklahoma have refused in-state tuition benefits to students who entered the USA illegally with their parents but grew up and went to school in the state. That represents a reversal from earlier this decade, when 10 states passed laws allowing in-state rates for such students.
An Associated Press analysis of federal records found that 157 college-age people, 18 to 23, drank themselves to death from 1999 through 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available. The number of alcohol-poisoning deaths per year nearly doubled over that span, from 18 in 1999 to a peak of 35 in 2005, though the total went up and down from year to year and dipped as low as 14 in 2001.
MADISON, Wis. â?? When Michael Olneck was standing, arms linked with other protesters, singing â??We Shall Not Be Movedâ? in front of Columbia Universityâ??s library in 1968, Sara Goldrick-Rab had not yet been born.
When he won tenure at the University of Wisconsin here in 1980, she was 3. And in January, when he retires at 62, Ms. Goldrick-Rab will be just across the hall, working to earn a permanent spot on the same faculty from which he is departing.
From the Halliburton Geoscience Visualization Center to the Kikkoman Lab of Microbial Fermentation, corporate names are sprinkled throughout the hallways and mailboxes of the UW-Madison campus.
Twelve provosts from the Big Ten universities and the Midwest region say they will work together on efforts to make the Midwest’s economy more competitive and are calling on governors to join them in this effort. The provosts from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a consortium of the Big Ten universities plus the University of Chicago, signed a resolution to that end on Friday.
It’s not much of a report card.
Half of Americans say U.S. schools are doing only a fair to poor job preparing kids for college and the work force. Even more feel that way about the skills kids need to survive as adults, an Associated Press poll released Friday finds.
The views of the general population echo concerns from business and college leaders, who say they have to spend a lot of time and money on remedial education for people who completed high school but don’t have the skills to succeed at work or in higher education.
The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling overturning the city of Washington’s ban on the individual possession of handguns could have broad implications for colleges and universities that bar students from having guns on campus.
Incoming UW-Parkside chancellor Robert Felner has stepped down amidst a federal probe at old current college in which he’s accused of mishandling a half million dollars in federal grant money. Robert Felner was supposed to start at the Kenosha campus July first. But last Saturday, media reports surfaced about a probe at Louisville’s College of Education and Human Development, where Felner was the dean since 2003. He told the UW about it the next day.
The University of Wisconsin system proudly announced on June 5 that it had hired a new chancellor for its Parkside campus. But three weeks later, the system is back at the drawing board while its one-time appointee copes with a criminal investigation.
Robert Felner, dean of the College of Education & Human Development at the University of Louisville, was scheduled to become Parkside’s chancellor in August. He declined the appointment earlier this week as details emerged about his role in a federal probe.
With the presidential election officially down to two major party candidates, supporters of Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama are turning their attention to strategies for winning over key constituencies. When it comes to one target group â?? students on college campuses â?? both campaigns see significant opportunities, but challenging barriers, too.
There are many miles (and, more literally, possibly several months) to go before the federal budgeting process for the 2009 fiscal year is complete, and therefore much could change. But based on the initial signs, the latest of which came Tuesday when a Senate appropriations subcommittee drafted a spending bill for education, health and labor programs, the National Institutes of Health appears to be in line for the sort of hefty increase that biomedical research advocates have been begging for. Most student aid programs, however, would receive no new funds.
After touring the flooded and partially reopened University of Iowa campus on Monday, two leaders of the state’s Board of Regents said they were saddened by the devastation but thankful for the thousands of volunteers who had helped prevent an even worse catastrophe.
The board’s president, David W. Miles, called the experience of flying over and slogging through the sodden campus “humbling.” Speaking at a taped news conference on campus, he thanked the students, employees and community members who spent days piling sandbags and retrieving books, art, and equipment from the lower floors of buildings in the days leading up to the catastrophic flooding.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The man picked to lead the University of Wisconsin-Parkside faces an uncertain future amid a criminal investigation at the University of Louisville, where he was a dean.
Robert Felner is dean of the university’s College of Education and Human Development. He alerted UW System President Kevin Reilly on Sunday that his college was under investigation.
Outgoing UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley has been named interim director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the public half of the now-under-construction research center that will include private collaboration and interdisciplinary science.
….Wiley will also be a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and the LaFollette School of Public Affairs, according to a news release from the university. He also plans to continue research on policy-related matters, including the finance and economics of higher education.
As the floodwaters that inundated the University of Iowa slowly recede, summer-school classes are scheduled to resume this week and the daunting task of assessing the damage and preparing for clean-up and repairs will begin.
Twenty buildings were flooded, some with up to eight feet of water, when the Iowa River, which bends through the campus, spilled over its banks.
The economy in many states is weakening, and the overall state-budget outlook for the next several years is gloomy, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers.
Budget conditions vary among the states, according to the report, “The Fiscal Survey of the States.” But overall growth in state spending has slowed significantly, it says, and an increasing number of states face revenue shortfalls. Tighter state budgets often signal bad news for college officials and students, who face cuts in operating budgets and increases in tuition as legislatures struggle to make ends meet.
With Congress and the White House in agreement on a supplemental war spending package that would dramatically boost GI Bill benefits, thoughts are turning to the potential impact of the changes on colleges and student veterans. Many in higher education are excited about the probable passage of Virginia Sen. Jim Webbâ??s â??21st Century GI Billâ? â?? but so too are many curious about how billions in new benefit dollars could affect the calculus of veteransâ?? educational choices.
Worn-out high school seniors are getting fresh encouragement from a range of sources to take a break â?? a “gap year” â?? before plunging into college. But to be beneficial, it needs to involve more than rest and relaxation.
This spring, high schools in seven metropolitan areas hosted their first gap-year fairs to acquaint students with options for spending a year away from the academic treadmill. Earlier in the year, Princeton University announced plans to formalize a “bridge year” program for admitted students to do service work abroad before enrolling.
University of Iowa officials pledged on Wednesday that all summer-school classes would resume on Monday and were expected to be completed on time, even for students who had planned to study on the flooded arts campus.
The announcement, which was a relief to students who were counting on summer school to graduate, retain scholarships, or enter selective academic programs, came as new details emerged about millions of dollars of scientific research and equipment that may have been lost as a result of the flooding on both sides of the Iowa River, which bends through the campus.
The writing section added to the SAT has done very little to improve the exam’s overall ability to predict how students will do in college, according to research released Tuesday by the test’s owner, the College Board.
The United States last week became the world’s first nation of 200 accredited law schools, as the American Bar Association gave provisional approval to two North Carolina institutions.
In other countries, it’s much harder to become a lawyer. In the United States, the doors are open and getting wider.
The University of Iowa is scrambling to reopen next week for summer-school classes, but the long-term recovery of the university, which now has 20 buildings flooded and its entire arts campus under water, is likely to take months.
About 10,500 students are registered for summer classes, some of which will be moved to temporary locations. But readying the campus for the fall will be a much bigger challenge.
Far from the front lines of the nasty fight over laboratory-animal experiments at large research universities, activists are strategically drawing some teaching-oriented institutions into the same battle.
Milwaukee – More colleges in Wisconsin are getting rid of landlines as more students carry cell phones. This fall some schools within the University of Wisconsin system, including Madison, Green Bay and Whitewater, and Marquette University, are eliminating landlines in most or all student rooms.
It’s time to go. I spent the past four months dreading this moment. School had become comfortable, and I didn’t want to leave. I had class only two days a week, and my day started at 2:30 p.m. Life was easy, and I didn’t want to go back to the real world. Now I can say I’m happy the time has come. It is time to move on, time to be a grown-up again, time to step into the unknown, time to continue to grow
Thirty years ago, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent the nation’s selective colleges down a path where few had ventured before.
In the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, he wrote that colleges were legally justified in giving some modest consideration to their applicants’ race, so long as they were motivated by a desire to attain the educational benefits of diversity.
Thousands of volunteers who spent much of the weekend piling sandbags and salvaging books and paintings at the University of Iowa are anxiously eyeing the swollen river that cuts through their Iowa City campus, hoping the waters that have already flooded more than a dozen buildings won’t submerge any more now that the Iowa River appears to have crested.
On Sunday, campus officials said 16 buildings, including most of the arts campus, were flooded by up to four feet of water. At least seven more buildings were threatened, and many more were without power. Flooding forced officials to shut down the university’s electrical and steam plant early Saturday and switch to emergency backup power.
The financial credit crisis is squeezing student loan programs that offer breaks to borrowers who enter critical fields such as nursing and teaching.
In at least six states this year, state-affiliated lenders have dropped or scaled back programs. Some repay or forgive part of a federal student loan for borrowers who take jobs in specific fields. Some reduce interest rates if students pursue certain subjects.
Universities spend a significant amount of money each year carefully crafting a marketing message to enumerate the merits of the school.
But when it comes to the Internet, that nuance may be lost in favor of other messages, sometimes less flattering or just bizarre.
The Chronicle of Higher Education looked at what videos popped up when a user types in the name of a few sample universities on the user-driven video site, YouTube.
MILWAUKEE, Wis. (AP) — The Board of Regents gave a $73,000 raise to University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly on Thursday, rewarding him for what its president called an outstanding performance.
In a closed-door meeting at UW-Milwaukee, the regents agreed to increase Reilly’s pay to nearly $414,600 on July 1 from its current $342,000, a 21 percent increase. The board said his salary would increase to $421,500 on June 1, 2009.
The regents also approved Cornell University Provost Biddy Martin as the next UW-Madison chancellor and gave her an annual salary of $437,000. That’s about $110,000 more than outgoing Chancellor John Wiley earns and marks the first time in the 37-year history of the system that a chancellor will make more than its president.
The raises are sure to draw criticism at a time when the state is facing a budget shortfall and a slowing economy. UW System officials said the raises brought the salaries of Martin and Reilly to the average of their peers nationwide and were needed to attract and retain top leaders.
At least two major lenders have said they will stop providing loans to students at Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges and 13 two-year colleges, part of a national trend among some lenders that have found the two-year college market to be unprofitable because students borrow less for shorter terms.
The credit crunch has driven dozens of lenders out of the student loan market. But a number of new websites are trying to sidestep the traditional players, facilitating loans between students and anonymous investors or even friends and family members.
A number of admissions deans at elite private schools have accepted more students than usual from their wait lists this year. Harvard, for example, will take about 220 students from its wait list, compared with 50 last year.
Last month, many admissions experts predicted that the large number of students being accepted from the wait lists of highly selective schools would create a ripple effect at second and third choices. Some students might not know where they were going until as late as August, experts say.
Most people read their college alumni magazines for the class notes, immediately flipping to the back to see who was married, had a baby or was promoted to an envy-inducing job. The columns tend to be meatiest at this time of year â?? class reunion season.
The advent of social networking on the Internet has created a quandary for these magazines, which want to maintain a conversation with alumni but have been slow to embrace the Web. Most schools have set up password-protected sites where graduates can change their contact information, drop a class note or donate money.
But younger alumni, accustomed to second-by-second updates from friends and classmates, are exchanging information in real time on Facebook and MySpace. Why wait for your alma mater to churn out a quarterly journal when you can Twitter all day?
Wake Forest University will no longer require applicants to take the SAT and ACT exams, boosting a movement to lessen the importance of standardized tests in college admissions.
Indiana had nearly 31,000 applications, an 8-percent rise over 2007, and expects to admit very few students from its waiting list. Virginia Tech received 7 percent more deposits than last year, so it had no slots to offer any of its wait-listed applicants. As of this week, neither did the University of Virginia, which saw only a slight drop in yield despite ending its early-decision program.
Other public universities, however, were able to free many applicants from admissions limbo. The University of Wisconsin at Madison plans to admit nearly 800 students from its waiting list, one year after taking only a handful.
After overenrolling by 400 students last year, Madison needed to admit more conservatively this spring, says Robert Seltzer, director of admissions. And he perceived that more students were applying to multiple colleges. “Just because you’re up in applications,” Mr. Seltzer says, “doesn’t mean you’re going to be up in bodies.”
Here’s a bright spot in an otherwise brutal college-admissions season: More students are being accepted from wait lists at elite schools this year because colleges found it harder to predict how many graduating seniors would join the freshman class.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison expects to take 800 from the wait list this year, compared with six students last year.
When the State Journal this week published the list of the top 4 percent of this year ‘s graduating seniors from Dane County high schools, girls outnumbered boys by nearly two to one.
That academic gender gap highlights a national problem with costly consequences: Boys are falling behind in the American educational system.
TV celebrities and public officials are popular speakers at commencement ceremonies this year as colleges increasingly cater to student interests.
TV mogul and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey will speak at Stanford University, the University of Delaware has baseball star Cal Ripken Jr., and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland hosts Internet entrepreneur Craig Newmark (craigslist).
One of the biggest surprises this year was Harvard’s choice of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
A growing number of colleges are recasting the tradition of senior-class gifts by encouraging their graduating classes to focus more on giving â?? preferably money the college can spend as it sees fit.
For the first time, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has revealed the growing amount of financial support that colleges provide to their sports programs, using detailed accounting to separate institutional funds from money earned through ticket sales and private donations.
A March report from the NCAA concludes what many have long feared about the real costs of college sports: The vast majority of athletics departments operate in the red.
Congressional aides working on a compromise bill to renew, or reauthorize, the Higher Education Act have reached tentative agreements on several sections of the measure, but negotiations continue over some of the most contentious provisions.
Aides to members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate have been meeting informally over the past several weeks to negotiate their chambers’ differences, with the hope of producing a bill that lawmakers can vote on by Memorial Day. While it remains unclear if they will reach that goal, a draft of the agreements reached so far is being circulated in Washington this week.
Among the issues that appear to be resolved: college-cost watch lists, accreditation, and campus piracy. Among the unresolved: state higher-education spending, textbooks, and a controversial 30-minute emergency-notification rule.
Teach for America, the program that recruits top college graduates to teach for two years in public schools that are difficult to staff, has experienced a year of prodigious growth and will place 3,700 new teachers this fall, up from 2,900 last year, a 28 percent increase.
Wisconsin, Berkeley and the University of Texas are each sending 50 recruits.
Not long ago, forecasts for state appropriations to higher education were gloomy as the credit crisis, a slumping housing market, rising energy costs and unemployment, and sagging consumer confidence took their toll on state finances.
But the budget news emerging from many statehouses for colleges and universities has been better than expected. In many states, higher education has been spared the deep cuts being required of other state agencies. In some states, lawmakers are even providing increases.
After months of discussion and debate, Carroll College trustees have voted to change the school’s name to Carroll University, effective July 1.
In what may be a happy surprise for thousands of high school seniors, Harvard plans to offer admission to 150 to 175 students on its waiting list, and Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania each expect to take 90, creating ripples that will send other highly selective colleges deeper into their waiting lists as well.
A Wisconsin college is closed for the day after they received a gun threat.
According the Southwest Technical College President, a student reported receiving a threatening voicemail early Wednesday morning.
Carroll College students participating in a new survey have shown little enthusiasm for changing the school’s name to Carroll University.
FORT COLLINS â?? For the second time in four years, Colorado State University faculty council members overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution to give benefits to domestic partners, saying Tuesday that they hope this go-around will get the nod from the school’s board of governors in a new state political climate.
CSU professors have been agitating for domestic-partner benefits since 1994. When the University of Colorado agreed to do it for its exempt employees in 2002, faculty here said it put the Fort Collins institution at a competitive disadvantage.
A recent spike in online-piracy notifications from the Recording Industry Association of America has mystified college officials. Some say they wonder whether the increase is part of a strategy to persuade Congress to make colleges crack down on students who download music illegally.
But Cary Sherman, president of the industry group, said in an interview on Tuesday that even the association has been surprised by the timing of the sharp increase in notifications, which he said was caused by an upgrade in the software used by a company the association hired to detect piracy.
Itâ??d be hard to argue that Indiana University doesnâ??t take illegal downloading seriously. As noted on its â??Are You Legalâ? Web site, the university imposes a $50 fine for the first notice university officials receive from entertainment companies about a studentâ??s alleged improper sharing of copyrighted music or video, and cuts off the studentâ??s access to the Indiana network if he or she fails a 10-question quiz within 24 hours. The penalties ramp up from there.
But Indiana officials are now discussing whether they should continue to respond to complaints from the recording industry with the same aggressiveness. Itâ??s not that university leaders have suddenly decided that illegal behavior isnâ??t wrong; instead, they are beginning to question the legitimacy of the notices the Recording Industry Association of America sends accusing network users of illegally sharing music.
In the prim 1950s, college dorms were off-limits to members of the opposite sex. Then came the 1970s, when male and female students started crossing paths in coed dormitories. Now, to the astonishment of some Baby Boomer parents, a growing number of colleges are going even further: coed rooms.
The weak dollar, a sluggish economy and a tougher time getting some types of student loans is making it harder for some U.S. college students to study or travel abroad this summer.
Study abroad programs have set records in recent years, with more than 223,000 U.S. students participating during the 2005-06 academic year, according to the latest annual survey by the New York-based Institute of International Education. Most universities expect overall participation to keep rising, but that growth could be limited within some programs by the struggling dollar and other economic factors.
Congress gave final approval Thursday to legislation aimed at ensuring the problems in the credit markets don’t prevent students from getting college loans.
The House passed the legislation in a 388-21 vote, one day after the Senate approved it. President Bush is expected to sign the measure.
FedEx Corp. pledged a donation of $1 million over a four-year period Wednesday to support Teach For Americaâ??s growth, recruiting efforts and diversity goals.
Their growth plan aspires to place 7,500 corps members in 33 regions across the country by 2010. Thirty-three percent of those teachers would have diverse backgrounds.
