The number of colleges and universities boasting endowments of $1 billion or more climbed by 14 last year to a record 76, nearly doubling the number of such schools five years ago. And as tuition increases continue to outpace inflation, that’s prompting some critics to step up their pressure on colleges to share more of their wealth.
Dena Sattler carries multiple credit cards, but when faced with the decision of which one to use at the checkout, more often than not she chooses the one emblazoned with the logo of the University of Iowa. As an alumna and football fan, she can earn points toward Hawkeye memorabilia to add to her collection.
So far, she has cashed in credit-card points for two football helmets used in games.
Colleges have been scrambling over the past year to respond to recommendations from a national commission that they be clearer to the public about what students have learned by the time they graduate.
Sometime in the next several weeks, for example, a national online initiative will be launched that allows families to compare colleges on measures such as whether they improve a student’s critical-thinking skills.
With the news that Chancellor John Wiley will step down next September it seems the future of UW-Madison is at a crossroads. In a presentation given to the UW System Board of Regents last Friday, Provost Patrick Farrell said, while UW-Madison has been an extremely successful university, that success is not guaranteed to continue. Farrell is right, but his solutionâ??to increase tuitionâ??is dead wrong.
Creighton officials can look to Wisconsin’s largest state school and a tiny college in eastern Kansas if they want insight into the do’s and don’ts of running an on-campus bar.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has served beer inside and outside its student union since the 1930s.
University officials there briefly debated ending beer sales a decade ago, when national studies found that Wisconsin students ranked among the worst binge drinkers in the country.
Instead, the university started a binge drinking research and outreach project now called PACE, headed by Aaron Brower, a professor in the department of social work.
Chancellor John D. Wiley’s annual earnings of $341,495 – including a state-provided car, free housing, retirement pay and club dues – may seem generous to the average Wisconsin taxpayer. But it may not be enough to attract a top leader to take the reins at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when Wiley steps down in September.
“That is one of the most underpaid great jobs in America,” said Stephen Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University and a consultant with executive search firm Korn/Ferry International.
Anyone entering one of the many restaurants in Providence, R.I., is likely to end up sitting next to out-of-town parents visiting their sons and daughters who attend nearby colleges. That’s because Rhode Island has one of the highest (the local chamber of commerce says the highest) concentration of colleges and universities in the United States.
Given that higher education commands a huge payroll in the city, you might assume that the local newspaper, The Providence Journal, fields a team of higher-education reporters. But the ProJo, as it’s dubbed in Providence, lacks even one full-time higher-education reporter. Staff cutbacks in the last two years have left the education reporter, Jennifer D. Jordan, covering statewide elementary- and secondary-school issues, adult education, preschool, and higher education.
IT IS a long way from Madison to Madison Square Garden, and once Willie Ney was there, sitting wide-eyed on the New York Knicks’ bench one night earlier this month, he thought it couldn’t get much better than that.
Ney, executive director of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives at UW-Madison, was in Manhattan as part of an extraordinary new program that will bring a New York City high school graduate to Madison next fall on a full college scholarship. The Knicks, New York’s storied National Basketball Association franchise, are involved, along with a New York City UW-Madison alumni group.
Best of all, a bunch of New York high school students with big talent and big dreams are involved. They are writing and performing poetry, proving there is more to hip-hop culture than a scowl and a snarl.
Molly Corbett Broad, who orchestrated sweeping changes to the tradition-bound University of North Carolina system during her recent nine-year tenure there, was named president of the American Council on Education on Tuesday.
Ms. Broad, who will succeed David Ward on May 1, will be the first woman to lead the nation’s top higher-education group since it was founded in 1918.
The next chancellor of UW-Madison will represent and deal with a broad spectrum of interests, and so should those who are involved in the selection process, says University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly.
Yale University Monday became the latest high-priced, highly selective private college to reduce tuition for families across a broad range of incomes.
Its new undergraduate financial aid policy, which will go into effect for all new or returning students beginning this fall, will exempt more lower-income parents from having to contribute to their child’s education, and cut the average cost of attendance by thousands of dollars for families with incomes of up to $200,000.
If Plymouth High School freshman Marcus Gamoke can keep up a B average throughout high school, he’s likely to be assured a spot in whatever college, university or technical school he wants to attend. So why would the 15-year-old care whether he’s officially a Wisconsin Cove-nant scholar?
“I think it’s a good idea,” Gamoke said. “There’s a lot of extra stuff.”
Gamoke was one of 16 Plymouth High freshmen who visited with Wisconsin first lady Jessica Doyle Monday and talked about the merits of the brand-new Wisconsin Covenant program, which aims to make it easier for students to get into college.
Top administrators from 11 public research universities released a joint statement last week rebuking University President Drew G. Faust for her recent comments in BusinessWeek, where she was quoted as saying that public universities short on federal funds should leave expensive scientific research to their wealthier peers.
â??We emphatically reject that notion,â? wrote the administrators, who are provosts from schools such as the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. â??Collectively, our institutions educate more than 380,000 students, produce 1 in every 8 American PhDs, and conduct more than $4.5 billion worth of research every year.â?
George Mason University officials could not shout loud enough when economist Vernon L. Smith won the Nobel Prize in 2002. Smith’s recruitment a year earlier had shone a welcome light on the school, and the award was a crowning bonus.
Today, GMU is quiet, as Smith has slipped away for a job in California, lured by the same administrator who brought him to GMU.
Some universities play down faculty member moves, calling them part of the recruitment process in higher education. Others refer to many of the raids on star faculty members by competing universities as poaching or outright theft.
Dealmaking is constant, delicate and increasingly competitive as schools hunt for ways to attract top educators and keep their own stars from straying. The benefits to playing the faculty shuffle are many; academic prestige and grant money often come with new recruits, said David Ward, president of the nonprofit American Council on Education and a former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Women are still underrepresented in American boardrooms and they still earn less than men, but U.S. census figures released Thursday show they continue to outnumber men in college classrooms and on commencement day – a trend some call troubling.
About 33% of women ages 25 to 29 had a bachelor’s degree or more education in 2007, compared with 26% of their male counterparts.
The days when students had to trek across campus to get professors’ help during “office hours” may be slipping away.
Harvard University computer science professor David Malan has launched “virtual office hours,” allowing students to chat via text or microphone in live, online help sessions.
IOWA CITY, Iowa — What to do about college students who drink heavily on Thursday night? Put a price on their heads.
University of Iowa officials are so concerned about binge drinking among students, they’re offering departments extra funds to hold more classes on Fridays. The spur for that? A study that found early Friday classes reduced heavy drinking the night before.
Only around 1,400 classes are held on Fridays, compared with about 2,400 on Mondays through Thursdays. Because professors often schedule classes between Monday and Thursday, many students are free to make merry on Thursday night and recover Friday, thus allowing them to get drunk again that night.
It could just be the best public college you’ve never heard of, with prices so low that it’s a steal even for out-of-state students.
SUNY Geneseo, a small liberal arts college in western New York, boasts top students, a scenic campus, strong programs in both arts and sciences, and new dorms with — drumroll, please — washers and dryers on every floor. It adjoins a historic village with killer quaintness and puts students within 30 miles of Rochester, a major college town.
UW-Madison is ranked 19 for in-state and 23rd for out of state.
MADISON, Wis. — Pre-eminent ALS researcher and University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics doctor Benjamin Brooks is leaving the hospital after 25 years of work.
He told WISC-TV he is headed to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C., where he will be able to concentrate on researching ALS, which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
….Past and current patients and others in the ALS field rallied behind him in 2004 after UW Medical School officials closed Brooks’ ALS research lab in early 2003, alleging bookkeeping and training problems with testing procedures.
Dear Editor: I love it when someone tries to explain why college faculty lean left on the basis of their being “smarter than the average American, better educated, have more time to think about what’s going on” and then concludes, “It is that simple.” Oh my, talk about leaving one’s self open for rebuttal with that conclusion!
The reality is the author of those statements puts forward an explanation that is, in fact, simplistic.
First of all, not all college faculty lean left, as there are a significant number who are conservative but keep their political leanings from those who are responsible for advancement in academia because of the bias shown against those who are not liberal lemmings.
The record industry got a surprise when it subpoenaed the University of Oregon in September, asking it to identify 17 students who had made available songs from Journey, the Cars, Dire Straits, Sting and Madonna on a file-sharing network.
The surprise was not that 20-year-olds listen to Sting. It was that the university fought back.
ITHACA, N.Y. — For 19 years as a custodian at Cornell University, Sue Welch has been taking out the garbage and mopping the floors of residence halls. Recently, she added a new responsibility: trying to prevent student suicide.
In the mid-1960s, when William R. Fitzsimmons was a student at Harvard, the college took in a freshman class of roughly 1,550, including students at Radcliffe, which it would eventually absorb. In the four decades since, the population of the United States has ballooned by two-thirds, applications to Harvard have tripled and Mr. Fitzsimmons has ascended to the job of dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, but this yearâ??s freshman class is only about 125 students larger than when he was a student.
On college campuses, many women have a false sense of security. They’re either not paying attention to their surroundings — talking on cell phones, listening to iPods, etc. — or posting their schedules and personal information on MySpace, Facebook and similar Web sites.
All of that makes them especially vulnerable to a danger many don’t even know exists — stalkers.
More than one-in-eight female college students are victimized by stalkers, according to one recent survey. But, while 93 percent of those victims tell their friends about it, only 17 percent notify campus authorities or the police, advocacy groups say.
In giving $175 million for college grants, John and Tashia Morgridge have recognized what some higher education experts have been worrying about for years: The nation’s poorest students are in danger of being priced out of college.
John and Tashia Morgridge last week donated $175 million of their personal wealth to fund college scholarships for thousands of Wisconsin high school graduates.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center this month committed $100 million to help all future graduates of Pittsburgh Public Schools go to college.
And in Kalamazoo, Mich., which triggered a nationwide movement two years ago with a privately funded guarantee to pick up the four-year tuition tab for any graduate of that city’s school system, officials are almost awestruck by the results — a dramatic increase in student enrollment, lower dropout rates and small but encouraging signs of economic development in a struggling city.
Robert Maranto’s column “PC University: Data show ivory towers lean left” provides a deeply misleading assessment of sources and consequences of the political affiliations of faculty members.
Maranto cites a number of studies he commissioned to make a case that academia is biased against conservatives. He fails to note that in selecting the authors of the studies, he exclusively chose academics whose views were already identifiable as supportive of claims of ideological bias, and he failed to include any academics who have written critically of such views.
(Steven N. Durlauf is a professor of economics at UW-Madison.
Before this week, Jordan Trentin had never heard of John or Tashia Morgridge.
He knows who they are now.
Trentin, a freshman at Madison Area Technical College in the nursing program, hopes he may be one of the beneficiaries of the Morgridges ‘ $175 million gift to set up the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars.
The largest gift to low-income students in Wisconsin history will provide $175 million for grants to graduates of public schools to attend the state ‘s public colleges and universities and will boost the state ‘s Wisconsin Covenant program, officials revealed Monday night.
The donation from John Morgridge, former chairman of Cisco Systems, and his wife, Tashia, a retired elementary special education teacher, will give about 2,000 grants of $1,000 to $5,000 for the 2008-09 school year, and more than 3,000 grants annually after that.
Making what they called “a strong statement in support of the young people of the state of Wisconsin,” John P. and Tashia F. Morgridge are donating $175 million to create a permanent endowment to fund scholarships for Wisconsin high school graduates to attend colleges, universities and technical schools in the state.
Is there some great meaning in the fact Scott Van Pelt, a moderately obscure cable TV anchorman, has been asked to deliver the UW-Madison commencement address Sunday?
After all, Van Pelt didn’t attend UW-Madison and has no real ties to the state.
Ka Bao Lee has been waiting to take Hmong language classes pretty much her whole life.7
Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, Lee and her family came to the United States and Sheboygan when she was 3. Hmong is spoken at home, the UW-Madison senior said, but she didn ‘t have a clue how to read or write the language — and that bothered her.
Under-age drinkers will do almost anything to stay out of trouble. Sometimes they won’t even call 911 in an emergency, says Meghan Hanrahan, a junior at Ohio University. That’s why she believes administrators should waive judicial punishments when intoxicated students seek medical help for themselves or their friends.
Ms. Hanrahan, a student at the university’s main campus, in Athens, and a member of Ohio’s Student Senate, helped establish a committee to study the feasibility of “medical amnesty.” “Punishments put fear into students,” she says. “But if you’re sick or in trouble, safety should be the No. 1 priority
Pay me now, and pay me later.
Thatâ??s the new mind-set at some leading research universities in dealing with business â?? and the essence of an emerging model for how corporations can tap big brains on campus without having to pay their salaries.
Corporations have long been able to license intellectual property from universities, but these deals are cumbersome to negotiate and tend to work best when corporate researchers know exactly what they need to create.
University of Wisconsin-Madison is the No. 1 public school for research spending, top-rated in many academic fields and often a winner in athletics.
But its next leader’s compensation will not be near the top of any chart.
The search for a chancellor to lead Wisconsin’s flagship university could be hindered by a relatively low salary at a time when compensation for higher education leaders is rising, experts say.
The effect college students will have on the Iowa caucuses is more of a wild card than in years past because they will occur during winter break. Campaigns are not taking any chances and are heavily courting the student vote.
“Bear in mind, we have presidential candidates walking around the campus more often than we see custodians,” says William F. Woodman, a professor of sociology at Iowa State University. “I’ve seen an awful lot more student involvement and attendance at these things, anecdotally, than I’ve seen in the past.”
Thirteen nano-level university laboratories across the country are hiring themselves out to businesses eager to make their mark in the millennium of the minuscule. The intimidatingly named National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network, begun in 2004, is funded in part with $14 million a year from the National Science Foundation.
Participating business owners say the network allows them to do much more research than they would have without access to its resources. That research, to which the businesses retain all rights, will foster better products and industrial processes that will bolster the national economy, they say.
Responding to criticism that college costs are spiraling out of control and students are graduating with increasing mountains of debt, some of the nation’s most elite â?? and expensive â?? colleges are developing initiatives aimed at relieving the financial burden for typical American families.
The far-reaching search to replace outgoing University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley will begin immediately, and whoever will be the next chief Badger has a significant void to fill.
“John Wiley is leaving the UW at the top of its game. He has left the university in excellent shape,” said Tom Loftus, a member of the Board of Regents and former Democratic speaker of the Assembly and candidate for governor in 1990. “His timing is perfect: The chancellor’s home will be ready for a new occupant, a new biennium will be starting in the Legislature, and the university’s reputation is at its zenith.”
Loftus said the search is “wide open, and we’ll undoubtedly look internationally. I’m sure pay will be an issue as the choices are narrowed.”
It’s exhausting work, the pay is low, the fruits of the labor are sometimes hard to see. But those facts haven’t discouraged thousands of America’s brightest college students from applying to work for the fast-growing non-profit Teach for America.
MADISON – Chancellor John D. Wiley, who has earned a reputation as a campus builder and a farsighted leader since becoming the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s chief executive in 2001, announced today that he will step down in September 2008.
An Indiana native who has spent more than 30 years on the Madison campus, Wiley will relinquish the helm of a university whose international status as a leading research and teaching institution grew under his watch.
“It has been both a challenge and a privilege to lead this university during an important time in its history,” says Wiley. “The university has never been better poised to improve the lives of Wisconsin residents and take a leading role in reshaping the state’s economy.”
MADISON, Wis. — University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley announced on Friday that he would step down next year
Wiley, 65, said that he will go back to being a faculty member in September 2008. He spoke during a news conference on Friday afternoon.
Wiley said that he was stepping down now so a new chancellor can be in place in time for preparation of the university’s next two-year budget and reaccreditation.
“The timing is right,” Wiley said.
Citing his age and timing that would benefit a successor, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said today that he will leave his post in September 2008.
Wiley, 65, is the chief executive officer of the campus and is responsible for programs and laying out a direction for the school. He has been at the helm of the Madison campus for six years, and plans to return to the faculty after he steps down, though he is not sure which field he would enter.
As campus administrators worry about how to prevent violence like last spring’s Virginia Tech shootings, students applying to college increasingly face queries about their past behavior: Were they ever severely disciplined in high school? Have they been convicted of a crime?
Although such questions were added to a widely used college application form months before the massacre at Virginia Tech, admissions officers say that the murders made them more vigilant about students’ personal troubles. They say that they won’t reject otherwise strong applicants because of one schoolyard fight or a beer arrest, but they may be wary of troubling patterns.
(John Lucas of University Communications is quoted in this article)
When a student defaults on a loan guaranteed or serviced by Great Lakes Higher Education Corp., there’s no car or home to repossess.
“You can’t take back the education,” said Richard George, the company’s president and chief executive.
When Mindy and Tom Gunn sent their son away to college this fall, they expected the school to send them a bill. They didn’t expect a letter saying he’d been caught drinking.
But two weeks after their son John enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the school notified them that the 18-year-old had violated the campus drinking policy. The letter encouraged his parents to talk to him about it. And it invited them to call a school official if they had questions.
Schools agree that for the policies to work, the key is to engage parents. “It’s not just about notification, it’s about involvement,” says Lori Berquam, dean of students at the University of Wisconsin. In 2005, the university began calling parents of students who have alcohol or drug violations in certain circumstances, such as when a student is transferred to a detoxification center or a student gets three violations (a fourth results in suspension).
MISSION VIEJO â?? It was a Monday morning, and officials at Saddleback College had just tested their new emergency notification system, purchased in the wake of the April 16 campus massacre at Virginia Tech.
“We were joking that we hoped we would never have to use it,” said Saddleback President Rich McCullough about the new system, which instantly turns every phone on campus into a warning loudspeaker.
MONTCLAIR, N.J. (AP) — It was after 1 a.m. on a Sunday when college freshman Amanda Phillips arrived at the train station. She was nervous about walking alone in the dark to her dorm at Montclair State University.
So Phillips activated a GPS tracking device on her school-issued cell phone that would instantly alert campus police to her whereabouts if she didn’t turn it off in 20 minutes. After a five-minute walk, she safely reached her dorm room, locked the door behind her and turned off the timer.
….Montclair is one of the first schools in the U.S. to use GPS tracking devices, which along with other security technology are increasingly being adopted on campuses in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre last spring.
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Another option the school could consider is to collect a donation and keep the name as is. That’s exactly what the Wisconsin School of Business in Madison did earlier this year.
After unsuccessfully trying to find a donor to attach its name to his school, Dean Michael Knetter instead offered a group of donors the right to put money toward keeping the name unchanged.
It seemed reasonable enough. Students who vomit, fall down or otherwise draw attention to themselves inside Camp Randall Stadium as a result of excessive alcohol consumption forfeit the privilege of attending future University of Wisconsin football games.
That was nearly the policy that the UW Dean of Students Office put in place years ago to help curb the binge drinking and rowdy behavior that have become synonymous with Badger Saturdays in Madison. “A game ticket is a license that can be revoked, and our initial idea was to just revoke the season tickets of those students who get kicked out,” says assistant dean of students Ervin Cox. “Then we thought, ‘Let’s not do that. Let’s give them the chance to still come, but they have to come sober.’ ”
Although the number of law school applicants has declined across the country, a study conducted this summer revealed admissions have nonetheless become more competitive.
MADISON, Wis. — Gov. Jim Doyle signed a bill Wednesday making Wisconsin the seventh state to enact “Michelle’s Law.”
Michelle Morse, of New Hampshire, lost a battle with colon cancer in 2005. She couldn’t reduce her course load while she battled the disease because she would lose her health care coverage.
Zach Grun, a University of Wisconsin-Marinette student, inspired the law in Wisconsin after losing health insurance coverage while he dealt with a serious illness, WISC-TV reported.
Taking time off because of an illness can be a difficult choice for some college students, since many providers won’t continue insurance coverage. Legislation signed by Governor Jim Doyle will keep them from facing that problem in the future though. The law allows students to take a leave of absence from their studies because of illness for up to one year, while retaining their health insurance.
Dozens of colleges, universities and trade schools have been ordered to turn over documents to government officials explaining why a single lender at each school handles the majority of federally backed student loans.
The request, sent to 55 schools, comes amid concerns that some colleges might be steering students improperly to lenders who reward schools for the extra business.
The Japanese already use cellphones to shop, read novels, exchange e-mail, search for restaurants and take video clips. Now, they can take a university course.
Cyber University, the nation’s only university to offer all classes only on the Internet, began offering a class on mobile phones Wednesday on the mysteries of the pyramids.
Online education â?? also known as “distance learning” â?? has become an increasingly convenient way to get a college education, especially for students with jobs and families to support. Nearly 3.5 million students enrolled in online classes during the fall of 2006-07, according to the 2007 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, which surveyed more than 2,500 schools and released results last month. Over the past five years, the survey found, online enrollments have grown by an annual average of 21.5%.
At the University of Chicago, the third Monday in November began with an hour of violence. Around 12:30 a.m., an assailant fired a shot at a staff member who was walking on the campus. At 1:15, a group of men robbed two female students on a nearby street. Several blocks away, just before 1:30, Amadou Cisse, a doctoral student, was shot and killed while walking to his home, a half block from the campus.
Minutes later, administrators discussed the situation by telephone. Like many colleges, Chicago has a brand-new emergency-notification system, installed after the massacre at Virginia Tech last April. The system can quickly send short text and e-mail messages, yet officials did not discuss using it in the middle of the night, said Henry S. Webber, the university’s vice president for community and government affairs.
There are 33 courses at Colorado with 400 students or more. Three have more than 1,200. Most are broken into sections, but even those may have hundreds of students. One chemistry course is so big that the only place on campus where everyone can take the final exam at once is the Coors Event Center, Colorado’s basketball arena.
Such arrangements are here to stay on U.S. campuses.
There already are 18 million American college students, and that number is expected to increase by 2 million over the next eight years, as the value of a college degree continues to climb.
To get everyone through their coursework, monstrous class sizes are unavoidable. That does not have to be a bad thing. At their best, giant classes can be effective and inspiring â?? a way to get the best teachers in front of the most students.
Critics have complained for years about the galloping cost of college. But now, Democrats and Republicans are pushing measures that would go further than ever before to control college costs. Some proposals would reward schools that control their costs and cast an unflattering spotlight on those that don’t. Others would require schools with multibillion endowments to use more of that money to lower tuition.
A Pennsylvania college that was the scene of a protest against Vice President Cheney is trying to start a movement to ban politicians from holding closed meetings restricted to supporters on all campuses in the nation.
The Soapbox Alliance started by professors at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., says it is opposed to allowing politicians of any party to use colleges as a backdrop for their rallies. The alliance has sent letters to 600 other colleges and universities in the hope that they too will refuse to let their facilities be used for such events.
