Category: Higher Education/System

DEARBORN, Mich. â?? Professors with tenure or who are on a tenure track are now a distinct minority on the countryâ??s campuses, as the ranks of part-time instructors and professors hired on a contract have swelled, according to federal figures analyzed by the American Association of University Professors.

Elaine Zendlovitz, a former retail store manager who began teaching college courses six years ago, is representative of the change. Technically, Ms. Zendlovitz is a part-time Spanish professor, although, in fact, she teaches nearly all the time.

The Chronicle of Higher Education released an annual survey Monday reporting the total compensations for U.S. university presidents, chancellors and rectors.

They are the invisible heroes in business, the men and women who make innovation possible.

The number of foreign students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities has increased for the first time in five years, a sign that efforts to recover from a post-9/11 dip are paying off, a report says.

The report also found that the number of U.S. students studying abroad is continuing its upward trend, increasing 8.5% in the 2005-06 academic year to a record 223,534

The number of international students enrolled in American colleges and universities rose by 3.2 percent last fall â?? the first significant increase since 2001. Thanks to two consecutive years of large gains in first-time students, foreign-enrollment figures have nearly returned to their peak level, seen in 2002.

Those results appear in the latest edition of “Open Doors,” an annual report on international academic mobility published by the Institute of International Education and supported by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs

A new way for students and their families to compare colleges â?? and for legislators and others to evaluate them â?? was unveiled Sunday with the start of a campaign to get institutions to sign up to use it.

â??College Portrait,â? as the effort is called, is a template for information that public, four-year institutions will provide online in an easily comparable way. Some of the information â?? statistics on the student body, figures on college costs â?? is fairly commonly found (if not always in comparable ways) on collegesâ?? Web sites today

The total number of international students enrolled in the United States climbed significantly in the last academic year for the first time since 2001-2. As for American students studying abroad, the number increased by 8.5 percent to 223,534 in 2005-6, with short-term programs and study in non-traditional destinations outside Europe particularly hot growth areas, according to the Institute of International Educationâ??s annual Open Doors report, released today.

Neighbors and students of Carroll College called for improved street lighting and other safety measures Thursday after a recent spate of criminal activity in the area.

The University of Wisconsin System will be part of a new national program in which universities provide standardized information in the same format so prospective students and their parents can compare institutions.

Though the UW System has been providing much of the information online for years, this new format will for the first time include test results that show how much students learn during their time at the universities.

The tests will compare randomly selected freshmen with randomly selected seniors to measure gains in critical thinking and written communication across all academic disciplines.

The total enrollment of foreign students at American graduate schools increased this fall for the second year in a row, according to the results of a survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools. The 7-percent increase is the largest gain since 2002, but it was unclear whether total enrollment would continue to rise, as the growth in first-time enrollments slowed considerably from 2006.

When he became dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business in 2002, Michael Knetter went looking for a big donor, someone who would give $50 million in exchange for putting their name on the school.

No one was interested.

So, Knetter decided to do something radical: find contributors willing to pay to keep the school’s name off the market.

In a coordinated stab at one of higher education’s most pressing problems, some of the country’s largest university systems pledged Wednesday to cut in half the achievement gaps for minority and low-income students on their campuses over the next eight years.

The announcement comes at a time of deep concern that, from everyday undergraduates to the ranks of elite faculty, America’s colleges and universities don’t look much like the country as a whole

Unhappy with the slow pace of commercializing its intellectual property, the University of Minnesota has signed an agreement with a private firm, aiming to more quickly convert the school’s technology and patents into viable businesses.

Marquette University’s College of Engineering has received a $15 million gift from Generac Power Systems Inc. founder Robert Kern and his wife, Patricia, to help pay for a new building, college officials announced Monday.

The cost of attending college continues to climb: in-state tuition and fees at public four-year schools averaged $6,185 this year, up 6.6% from last year, says the College Board, which tracks more than 5,000 colleges and universities. The increase was slightly more than the previous year’s 5.7% bump.

Illegal immigrants are hoping that the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act – commonly called the DREAM Act – introduced by U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and supported by Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) will pass.

To qualify, a person would have to be here at least five years and would have had to come to the U.S. by age 16. The person would have to graduate from high school, be of good moral character and not have committed any crimes. The age limit is 30.

The price of college in Wisconsin rose faster than the inflation rate this year but just about kept pace with the national tuition average, increasing about 6% at four-year public and private schools and about 4% at public two-year institutions.

Tuition and fees at public and private universities have risen this year at more than double the rate of inflation, with prices increasing faster at public institutions, the College Board said in reports released yesterday.

Not much remains of the Carroll College that was founded here in Abe Lincolns time.

On a campus that witnessed Wisconsins very emergence into statehood, little has survived the passage of time except the Carroll College name itself. Now, that could be about to change, too.

Andrew Shapransky, a freshman at Vassar, says that even if credit cards are as common as pizza among college students, â??I have no intention of getting one.â?

Mr. Shapransky, 18, an aspiring doctor from Webster, N.Y., is on a limited budget and knows he cannot pay the bills. But many find it hard to resist the barrage of credit-card offers on campus.

Colleges and universities raked in money by the billions last year. But their investing success now has a price â?? a movement in Congress to force the wealthiest schools to spend more of their money to keep down tuition.

Several cell phones rang simultaneously throughout a room at the College of St. Scholastica on Friday.

College staff members received an alert, sent seconds before, testing a new emergency notification system.

Engineers, needed to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and sewers, could be hard to find unless more students start going into the field.

Concerns about an engineer shortage exist, even though the American Society for Engineering Education’s annual survey of more than 300 colleges shows that the number of degrees awarded has risen slightly every year since 1999. More than 74,000 graduates earned bachelor’s degrees in engineering last year, the ASEE reported.

The prominent affirmative-action critic Ward Connerly appears well on his way to getting up to five states to vote in November 2008 on ballot measures banning the use of racial, ethnic, and gender preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.

And, according to political analysts who monitor the states that are the targets of Mr. Connerly’s planned “Super Tuesday” on affirmative actionâ??Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahomaâ??he stands a very good chance of getting measures passed in all of them.

Public colleges and universities rely to varying degrees on state appropriations for their fiscal futures, and depending on the institution, they tend to engage in a range of lobbying and outreach activities proving their value to their states and citizens. But in an analysis of factors that determine levels of state support for higher education, researchers find that statewide circumstances â?? as opposed to variables under a collegeâ??s control â?? are the primary determinants of state spending.

â??[D]espite their efforts, institutional lobbyists may have limited impact in states with poor state economies, intense budget competition, and history of poor support for higher education,â? David J. Weerts, an assistant professor of higher education at Florida Atlantic University, and Justin M. Ronca, a research associate for the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, write in their paper, a modified version of which will be presented at a forum on the University of Wisconsinâ??s Madison campus today.

â??Islamo-Fascism Awareness Weekâ? is still three weeks away, but the event and a similar campaign from Young Americaâ??s Foundation are already setting off campus controversies and debates about tolerance and free speech.

In the two years since the Federal Bureau of Investigation pulled together a panel of university presidents, the 20-person National Security Higher Education Advisory Board has discussed matters ranging from cyber threats to counterterrorism to the Virginia Tech shootings.