As college tuitions continue to climb, a study released today fuels concerns about whether the investment in higher education by families and taxpayers translates into better results.
Students are a growing source of revenue for colleges, but little of that money is going into classroom instruction, says the report by the Delta Cost Project, a Washington-based non-profit.
The Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a bill aimed at bolstering student loans as access to credit is tightening.
With the economy sputtering and Congress pressuring colleges to be more affordable, many institutions feel a heightened need to provide more financial aid â?? and they are turning to alumni and other private donors for help.
While specifics vary from college to college, all types of institutions are feeling the pressure. Many smaller, private colleges find themselves in the tough position of having to dedicate increasing sums from their operating budgets to pay for such aid. They know they must become more affordable if they want to attract talented students of lesser means. And if they can’t offer the best students a good aid package, those students will go somewhere else.
Chris Jenkins was a popular student at the University of Minnesota who disappeared one night in 2003.
Four months later, he was found dead in the Mississippi River. At first police thought Jenkins was just a drunk college kid who accidentally fell into the river and drowned after a night on the town.
LOS ANGELES â?? When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:
If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe with the â??slavery systemâ? in Tibet before Chinaâ??s modernization efforts? What about the Dalai Lamaâ??s connection to Hitler?
As the frenzied admissions season winds to a close, many students finally know where they will be attending college in the fall.
But there remains a troubling question: how much damage was done along the way?
It’s nothing to LOL about: Despite best efforts to keep school writing assignments formal, two-thirds of teens admit in a survey that emoticons and other informal styles have crept in.
The controversial new writing portion of the SAT is actually a better predictor of grades for freshmen college students than the older, more-established, critical reading and mathematics portions, according to preliminary results of two new studies.
The Wisconsin online weapons dealer who sold one of the guns used in the Virginia Tech shootings visited the campus Thursday, a decision the school’s spokesman called “terribly offensive.”
“If we live in a culture of spin, there is a good deal of suspicion about claims of truthfulness, so this is also a culture of suspicion.”
The words are from Miroslav Volf, theologian from Yale University talking to a group of faculty and campus religious workers over lunch (last) Friday at Pres House just off the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
He was talking about the “obligation to truthfulness” for academics (if not the expectation for politicians), for people seeking justice in a world where truth too often seems expendable for whatever cause one is pursuing. Volf didn’t use the word, but satirist Stephen Colbert’s use of the term “truthiness” — let’s just pretend what I am saying is true — has come to be seen as a pragmatic substitute for the struggle to be truthful.
Getting medicines to people who need them in developing countries is a top goal of public health experts worldwide, many of whom note that people are dying all the time of diseases for which treatments exist. Universities, whose scientistsâ?? research is crucial to many of those drugs and which enjoy a share of royalties on some of those drugs, are finding themselves drawn into a debate that has as much to do with the economics of the pharmaceutical industry as anything that takes place in a laboratory.
On Oct. 2, 2003, board members at the University of Virginia filed into the Upper East Oval Room of the Rotunda, the centerpiece of Thomas Jeffersonâ??s campus design, for one of their regular meetings. As usual, they were joined by the universityâ??s top administrators. Just before the meeting began, a member of U.Va.â??s public affairs staff walked over to John T. Casteen III, the university president, to hand him a clipping from that morningâ??s newspaper.
After 9-11, Congress required Immigration and Customs Enforcement to better track international students. So in 2003, ICE implemented a database for the students called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).
Laurie Cox, UW Madison’s International Student Services Director, says SEVIS allows universities can collect the information about students. Additionally, students can get a print out of their information to bring to their respective consulate for the student visa process. Fees are going up in October to pay for a more efficient, paperless SEVIS that even students can update with things like address changes. (Audio.)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to roughly double the fees, to as much as $200, that visiting international students must pay in order to upgrade a federal surveillance program that monitors those students’ activities.
The increased fees for international visitors applying for student, exchange-visitor, or similar nonimmigrant visas (in categories known as F, J, or M visas) were outlined in Monday’s Federal Register and are scheduled to take effect on October 1. The revenue will support a growing database on international visitors called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or Sevis.
Incomes of graduates of Wisconsin technical colleges grew substantially over the past five years, according to a survey of those who graduated in the 2001-02 school year.
Annual median salaries of those responding to the survey grew by 48 percent over a five-year period, to nearly $40,000. The Consumer Price Index rose by 16 percent in the same period.
The study by the Wisconsin Technical College System also found that three-fourths of the graduates who responded were working in their fields of training.
Colleges already know how to close gaps in the graduation rates of black and white students, but too few have been willing to take the steps needed to do it, according to a report being released today by Education Sector, a Washington-based research group.
The reportâ??based heavily on the graduation-rate data that the Education Department collects from collegesâ??says that, nationally, the six-year graduation rate of black students at four-year colleges is about 20 percentage points lower than the graduation rate for white students. But the report identifies several institutions whose black students are at least as likely as their white peers to earn degrees in a timely manner and says that research on those colleges suggests that nothing is preventing other institutions from duplicating their success.
The causes of poor college graduation rates among low-income, first-generation and minority students have pervaded the pages of academic publication for years, while the instances in which African-American students have outperformed their White counterparts in the same area have gone largely undocumented.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison boosted its Black student graduation rate by 20 percent from 2002 to 2006, but Whites still graduate at a higher rate than Blacks, leaving the school with a 22 percentage point gap.
â??The most startling observation about this reports is that these top-rate universities produce stagnate or declining minority graduation rates year-after-year, and they do nothing about it,â? Carey says.
According to a new report released by Education Sector, an independent education policy think tank, there are currently 62 colleges and universities where the six-year graduation rates for Black undergraduate students outpace that of their White peers.
Trying to emulate the popularity of Web sites like Facebook and MySpace, hundreds of college alumni associations have begun to offer their own online social networks, seeking to stake a claim on the computer screens of current and former students, especially young alumni.
But many of the sites have struggled to attract alumni and to keep them interacting with the devotion they show to their online profiles on other networks. That makes the sites less useful to colleges, which want to foster closer ties with alumni and keep tabs on their whereabouts for fund raising and other purposes.
The Recording Industry Association of America this month fired off 569 “pre-litigation settlement letters” to college students whom it suspected of pirating music. The letters appear to be the largest batch sent since the RIAA began an expanded campaign in February 2007.
Most previous waves of letters went to about 400 students each, according to press releases on the RIAA’s Web site. Students who receive such letters are identified after RIAA investigators download music available on the students’ computers, said Jonathan Lamy, and RIAA spokesman.
Whether merely making a song “available,” without proof that another party has illegally copied and downloaded it, constitutes copyright infringement has been questioned in several recent court decisions.
MADISON, Wis. — After the shootings at Virginia Tech one year ago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison put plans in place to notify the campus community of an emergency.
The university also developed efforts to help prevent similar tragedies on campus. One of those efforts is a training session called “Avenger Violence Awareness” that UW-Madison police put on Wednesday.
During the training, police reviewed the events that happened at Virginia Tech and explained how communication can be key to preventing campus violence.
This year at Virginia Tech, April 16 was quiet and serene. Where mass shootings had claimed 32 lives and plunged the campus into chaos and grief a year ago, students, staff members, and neighbors marked the anniversary on Wednesday with calm resolve.
Under a clear morning sky, thousands of mourners clad in Hokie orange and maroon streamed onto the Drillfield, the heart of the vast campus here, for an official commemoration. As a student wind ensemble played, uniformed cadets stood watch over a memorial flame, lit at midnight for the 32 victims. The Virginia state flag, at half staff, hung still.
As the nation marks the one year anniversary of the Virginia Tech Massacre, one group is calling on Wisconsin lawmakers to help prevent future gun violence.
It was one year ago today that a lone gunman killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus, wounded 17 others, and then killed himself.
Jeri Bonavia with the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort (WAVE) says it highlights a tragedy occurring nationwide each day. She says over 30 people are murdered everyday with guns in the US, and at least another 50 die as the result of gun violence or suicide.
Since the mass shooting on the Virginia Tech campus one year ago, schools across the county ave reviewed their safety standards. Alert systems were put under the microscope and some problems came to light. University of Wisconsin Madison Police say in the past year, the focus has been on prevention.
UW Madison Police Chief Susan Riseling says the police, staff and students are now more aware of what she calls red flags. “It’s a much more broad approach to figure out ahead of time who’s in trouble.” After the unspeakable tragedy one year ago, we learned the gunman showed signs of a problem long before the massacre.
NEW YORK â?? In the year since a mentally disturbed student went on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, federal regulators, educators and legal experts have tried to reach a new understanding of the complex web of privacy laws that came under heavy criticism as one of the reasons no one acted in time to prevent the tragedy.
New regulations, information campaigns and legislation are all part of the effort to make sure that college and university officials realize that in cases of imminent threats, the safety of students trumps legal barriers that otherwise would prevent officials from discussing a student’s mental state or revealing student records.
BLACKSBURG, Va. (AP) — A sea of people wearing orange and maroon flowed onto the main lawn at Virginia Tech on Wednesday, some clutching single roses, to remember the victims of worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
They gathered on the same field where a white candle lit at midnight began a day of mourning for the 32 people killed a year ago by a student gunman who killed himself as police closed in.
“We remain deeply and profoundly saddened by the events of that tragic day…,” Virginia Tech President Charles Steger told the crowd. “Indeed, all our lives were changed on that day.”
While this close-knit campus of 27,000 has worked hard to move on, the anniversary of the killings has left many struggling to cope. Some weren’t sure how best to honor the dead.
Colleges are trying to reduce the chances of violence by creating or beefing up risk assessment teams that typically include faculty, residence advisers, psychologists, administrators and police, college administrators say. The teams meet often to review reports on students who seem disturbed. The reports are submitted by professors, residence advisers, police and students.
University President Charles Steger released a list of new security measures and policy changes late Monday. Steger says Tech has spent more than $10 million responding to 400-plus recommendations from the panels charged with dissecting events that led to the massacre.
BLACKSBURG, Va. — A white candle, lit at the stroke of midnight, officially began a day of mourning to mark the first anniversary of the mass shootings at Virginia Tech.
More than 1,000 people gathered around the 32 memorial stones honoring the dead.
Gov. Tim Kaine has ordered state flags flown at half-staff Wednesday.
The campus of St. Xavier University was like a well-guarded ghost town Monday, its classrooms empty, its dormitories shuttered and its every entrance patrolled by school security officers and Chicago police.
That quiet watchfulness spread to neighboring campuses as well, after threatening graffiti was found last week in a university residence hall.
Following St. Xavier’s lead, four schools adjacent to the South Side universityâ??Mother McAuley and Brother Rice High Schools, and Queen of Martyrs and Southwest Elementary Schoolsâ??closed for the day Monday.
One year ago, Richard F. Celeste, president of Colorado College, did not keep a red card in his wallet that explained how to send messages to the entire campus during emergencies.
Charles D. Green, leader of the University of Iowa’s police department, did not arm his officers with .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistols â?? or any guns at all.
And William N. Flagler Jr. did not hand out business cards identifying him as the director of Northern Virginia Community College’s Office of Emergency Planning, because the job did not exist.
Gaps in faculty pay between private and public colleges and universities continue to widen, warned the American Association of University Professors in its annual report on the economic status of the profession. It is a divide, the group argues, that threatens the ability of public institutions to recruit and retain faculty members at all levels.
“When public universities cannot compete in terms of salary and other resources,” states the report, “private universities may be able to attract the best and most-productive scholars.”
At work, security checks and locked doors are becoming routine inconveniences for biomedical researchers who work with animals.
But as animal-rights extremists have escalated their attacks, some universities have extended these protections to scientists in their homes.
After members of the Animal Liberation Front vandalized cars and harassed researchers at home last year, the Oregon Health & Science University began increasing police patrols, installing cameras at some homes, and counseling scientists not to debate protesters.
The e-mail reply was polite but firm. “No. I will not be available for an interview,” wrote a researcher from the University of California at Los Angeles, when asked about the effects of recent animal-rights protests there.
That scientist was downright chatty compared with most of the other investigators around the country contacted by The Chronicle. Most simply refused to answer phone calls or e-mail messages, while a few recruited university public-relations officials to explain why scientists were clamming up.
In the past few months, animal-rights groups have stepped up their demonstrations against academic researchers who use animals, spawning a new wave of concern among scientists. In February, extremists caused a fire at the home of a researcher from the University of California at Los Angeles, and protesters struck the husband of a scientist from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
A classroom of UW-Madison administrators, advisers, and faculty members received training on spotting unstable students; barricading doors; even playing dead.
The purpose? To deal with what’s termed, “avenger violence.”
The on-going training session took place on the the anniversary of the week when a student gunman killed more than thirty people on the Virginia Tech campus.
College rejection letters are going out in record numbers. Wisconsin is part of this nationwide trend. Shamane Mills reports. (Audio.)
The growth in international graduate student applications at American colleges and universities has slowed considerably, according to new survey results released today by the Council of Graduate Schools. The council found that the number of international applicants grew only 3 percent in 2008, after gains of 9 and 12 percent in the preceding two years.
When Stanley J. Seeger gave Princeton $2 million for Hellenic studies nearly three decades ago, the giftâ??s income paid for two courses in modern Greek and trips to Greece for five.
Rare Greek coins paid for, in part, by a gift from Stanley J. Seeger include a silver grosso from the island of Chios, 1324-29, above, and a gold ducat, from Lesbos and Ainos, 1400-49, below.
But the Seeger money, which must be spent only on matters Greek, is now worth $33 million, multiplying through aggressive investing like the rest of Princetonâ??s endowment. So the university offers Greek, Greek and more Greek â?? 13 courses this semester, including â??The Image of Greece in European Cinemaâ? and â??Problems in Greek History: Greek Democracy,â? as well as trips to Greece and nearby areas for more than 90 students and faculty members last year. The history department recently hired its second Byzantine specialist. And the fund paid half the cost of a collection of 800 rare coins from medieval Greece.
ROCHESTER, Mich. (AP) â?? Threatening graffiti found in three menâ??s restrooms led Oakland University to cancel campus classes, sports and cultural activities for two days.
The school said it sent out a security alert Saturday after finding one threatening message, and officials said they found similar messages in menâ??s restrooms in two other buildings later that day.
Survivors of the shooting at Virginia Tech and families of those who were killed there have reached an $11-million settlement with the Commonwealth of Virginia that precludes lawsuits against the university and the state.
A majority of the victims’ families agreed to the settlement, which offers them financial compensation, health-care benefits, and other assistance.
A proposed requirement that colleges warn their campuses of emergencies within 30 minutesâ??a provision that is already in one bill pending in Congressâ??is the focus of another measure that was proposed on Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, introduced the new bill at a time when staff members from the House and Senate are preparing to hash out their differences over legislation to renew the Higher Education Act, the main federal law that governs colleges and universities that receive federal aid. The House version of the higher-education bill includes the 30-minute requirement, but the Senate’s version sets no time limit, saying instead that emergency notification should be “reasonable and timely.”
The smell of a curried butternut squash soup wafts through the air as you walk into the dining room. At long tables of dark wood, beneath windows soaring 20 feet overhead, customers dine on vegetable ragout over polenta, spicy orange beef, Dijon-crusted chicken, cheese quesadillas, vegetarian pho â??Vietnamese noodle soup â?? and spinach sautéed with garlic and olive oil.
If it werenâ??t for the trays, and the fact that most diners are under 25, youâ??d think it was a restaurant. But this is Thorne dining hall at Bowdoin College here.
Not only does it take a lot of money to run a university, but it also takes quite a bit to get someone to run it.
For UNC it most likely will take a lot more in the future.
As university leaders’ salaries have increased around the country, Chancellor James Moeser’s salary, recently raised to $390,835, is only slightly more than half of some of his peers’ at other public institutions.
For the first time in decades, the University of California has appointed an outsider as its chief. Mark G. Yudof, who has been chancellor of the University of Texas system for the past six years, was appointed last week to become the California system’s next president.
Colleges and universities, ever more mindful of campus safety, are installing outdoor sirens. The systems can blast spoken messages or tone alerts of danger â?? and one of the preset messages on many of the public-address systems warns: “There is a shooter on campus. Seek shelter immediately.”
Northwestern University tested its new outdoor emergency-alert system Tuesday morning, joining other schools nationwide that instituted safety measures in the wake of shootings at Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech.
The Evanston campus’ outdoor alert system includes messages telling people to seek shelter because severe weather is approaching or to go to a locked room immediately because there is a security threat on campus.
Beloved former Madison East High School Principal Milt McPike, hailed as a passionate, energetic and charismatic leader who “put kids first ” and transformed the school during his 23 years as principal there, died Saturday at age 68.
UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said in a statement that McPike ‘s “bedrock values of hard work, education and family made Madison a vastly richer place. We will miss his commitment to young people, his open-hearted service, and the way he inspired generations of students to achieve and succeed. ”
For the first time, new undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this fall will have to shell out more than $20,000 to attend the state’s flagship university.
The costâ??the highest for any public school in the stateâ??includes nearly $12,000 in base tuition and fees and more than $8,000 in room and board. The university’s Board of Trustees approved the increase Wednesday. Tuition for the typical new freshman will increase 9.5 percent to $9,242, an amount guaranteed for four years.
University of Illinois trustees approved a nearly 10 percent increase in tuition Wednesday, sending total costs to attend the school to more than $20,000 a year.
School officials also announced a plan to start a $100 million endowment for undergraduate scholarships, saying the school’s fund-raising had gone better than expected.
Illini prospects could see 10 percent tuition hike $20,034 a year to be an Illini?
New undergraduate students at the Urbana-Champaign campus would pay $9,240 in tuition next year, a 9.5 percent increase over last year. But under state law, that rate would be frozen for those students through four years of study.
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — Attention parents: The video games that drive your kids to distraction could soon become a staple of higher education.
For a growing number of college professors, computer games are no mere child’s play. Instead, such games are seen as a 21st-century tool to promote critical thinking, social collaboration and even civic participation to students raised clutching joysticks since they learned to walk.
“The experience kids can have in a game world are more authentic than those they can have in a classroom,” said David Shaffer, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
NEW HAVEN â?? Modular construction may have an image associated with prisons and barracks, but it is also increasingly being used in a more refined setting, to create quick and convenient dormitories and classrooms for colleges and universities.
While fewer total high school students will be graduating over the next few years nationwide, a greater percentage of the graduates than ever before will be minority students, according to a study released this month.
The Federal Education Department proposed on Monday new regulations to clarify when universities may release confidential student information and, after the Virginia Tech shootings last year, reassure college officials that they will not face penalties for reporting fears about mentally ill students.
Families of those killed in the Virginia Tech massacre would receive $100,000 each under a settlement the state is proposing to prevent lawsuits, according to a victim’s relative who received a copy of the proposal.
Medical and counseling expenses would be provided to the families of the 32 killed and dozens of surviving victims, said the person, who asked Monday to remain anonymous because those involved were told not to discuss the settlement.
If Green Bay gun dealer Eric Thompson had his way, college students would carry more than just books.
In his vision, the next college shooter is thwarted by a student armed with one of Thompson’s guns – averting a massacre, saving lives.
Thompson’s Internet-based business TGSCOM Inc. sold weapons to the shooters at both Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech universities. First, he said, he felt grief for the victims. Then, a sense of resolve. Not to stop selling guns, but to advocate for guns on campus.
Lawrence University is among a growing list of more than 750 colleges and universities that have some kind of test-optional admissions, according to FairTest, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that opposes heavy reliance on the tests. The trend comes as standardized tests have faced increased scrutiny for possible bias against students who are the first in their family to go to college, minorities or non-native English speakers.
The majority of selective colleges and universities – including all University of Wisconsin campuses – still use standardized tests as one piece of the complex admissions puzzle.
“It’s certainly not the end-all, be-all factor,” said Tom Reason, associate director of admissions for UW-Madison. But it helps when high school grades and class rankings have become less reliable, he said. And public universities have an added layer of responsibility to ensure fairness and equity.
The recording industry is pressuring Congress to clamp down on illegal file sharing at college campuses. Embedded in the Higher Education Act are provisions that would require universities to develop plans to provide music and movie services online. The colleges would also have to explore computer programs that stop illegal downloading. (Audio.)
The federal law designed to protect the privacy of studentsâ?? educational records has been under scrutiny and stress from a variety of angles in recent years, most recently from those concerned (in the wake of last yearâ??s shootings at Virginia Tech) about whether the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act gives college officials sufficient latitude to report their fears about mentally ill students.
For the first time in more than 20 years, the University of California is poised to pick a president from an institution outside its system and the state. The university’s search committee recommended on Thursday that Mark G. Yudof, chancellor of the University of Texas system, be named its new president.
Colleges and universities know that the composition of the nation’s student body is headed for a major change. They’ve been seeing the evidence for years. And an analysis of population data released on Wednesday confirms that major shifts are under way.
“The reality is that the change has hit,” said Nancy Davis Griffin, dean of admissions at Saint Anselm College, in Manchester, N.H.
Security and privacy are the No. 1 technology concern for schools, according to an annual survey of 535 colleges and universities by Educause, which will publish the results in May. The Washington, D.C., organization works with universities on a range of information technology issues, including securing its systems.
