College administrators say their quick actions stemmed from lessons learned after last April’s shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, where 32 people were killed by a suicidal gunman. While the number of violent campus incidents remains steady, there are more alerts since the Blacksburg tragedy, says Robin Hattersley-Gray, executive editor of Campus Safety Magazine.
To many college students, binge drinking and everything that goes with it â?? beer pong, keg stands and $1 shots â?? are a rite of passage, as integral a part of the college experience as midterms and all-nighters.
But to college administrators, drinking too much is a hazard to studentsâ?? health and safety. As a result, officials are addressing excessive drinking with tactics such as moving classes to Friday to prevent â??Thirsty Thursdays,â? convincing nearby communities to limit drink specials like ladiesâ?? night, and requiring incoming students to take online classes about alcohol use.
When a University of Memphis football player was found fatally shot on campus, resident assistants banged on doors warning students to stay in their dorm rooms.
When a man wearing a Fred Flintstone mask and toting a .50-caliber rifle was arrested at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., students were alerted by text message 10 minutes later.
And when a deranged man called the University of Wisconsin-Madison and said he was on campus with a gun, administrators sent e-mails and put the word out on the Facebook website.
American laboratories handling the world’s deadliest germs and toxins have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003, and the number is increasing steadily as more labs across the country are approved to do the work.
The near doubling in the cost of a college degree the past decade has produced an explosion in high-priced student loans that could haunt the U.S. economy for years.
While scholarship, grant money and government-backed student loans â?? whose interest rates are capped â?? have taken up some of the slack, many families and individual students have turned to private loans, which carry fees and interest rates that are often variable and up to 20%.
Many in the next generation of workers will be so debt-burdened they will have to delay home purchases, limit vacations, even eat out less to pay loans off on time
Delaware State University made all the headlines on September 21 when a freshman shot and wounded two students on campus, one seriously. An arrest and an apology later, the 18-year-old charged with the crime sits behind bars. But months after Virginia Tech, the incident sparked comparisons in both the nature of the shootings and the effectiveness of the response.
When a masked freshman came to campus at St. John’s University with what police said was a loaded rifle sticking out of a bag, the school alerted students via cell-phone text messages within 18 minutes.
And when a suicidal gunman was reported to be on the loose at the University of Wisconsin, the school sent out mass e-mails and took out an ad on Facebook to warn students.
As the school year starts, colleges around the country are applying the lessons of Virginia Tech and using high technology to get the word out fast in a crisis.
Mentions UW-Madison
NEW YORK â?? When a masked freshman came to campus at St. Johnâ??s University with what police said was a loaded rifle sticking out of a bag, the school alerted students via cell-phone text messages within 18 minutes.
And when a suicidal gunman was reported to be on the loose at the University of Wisconsin, the school sent out mass e-mails and took out an ad on Facebook to warn students.
As the school year starts, colleges around the country are applying the lessons of Virginia Tech and using high technology to get the word out fast in a crisis.
Five months ago, James Pellow, the chief operating officer of St. Johnâ??s University, numbly watched the panic at Virginia Tech. Students were dropping from upper-story windows, cowering under desks, scrambling for cover or freezing where they stood.
Two colleges hit by violence within the past two weeks used new emergency-alert plans — of different types — to keep their communities safe.
The shooting and wounding of two students at Delaware State University on September 21 sent resident advisers knocking on dormitory-room doors in the middle of the night. Three days earlier, thousands of people at the University of Maryland at College Park received an alert on their cellphones warning them of a violent crime near a freshman dormitory.
Columbia University took some hard hits for inviting Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at its School of International and Public Affairs.
Everyone from New York Sen. Hillary Clinton to the ranting hosts of Fox News criticized the invitation.
….It is always good for Americans to be reminded, as the great plaque on the University of Wisconsin campus teaches us: Great universities must ever “encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”
THE COLUMBIA University dean who shared a stage Monday with Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and who defended the university’s highly controversial invitation to Ahmadinejad to speak, was himself once denied the chance to give a controversial speech.
It happened in Madison, decades ago, but as William Faulkner once wrote, the past is never dead — it’s not even past.
John C. Coatsworth, who ignited even more controversy over the weekend when he said Columbia would have invited Adolf Hitler to speak, was barred from giving a speech on Cuba at Madison Central High School in the fall of 1963.
Coatsworth today is the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. He moderated Monday’s discussion with Ahmadinejad. In 1963, (he) was a graduate student at UW-Madison.
COLUMBIA, Mo. — Ah, college life. All-night study sessions in the library. Professors challenging the conventional wisdom. Snowball battles on the quad. Get real.
For students at the University of Missouri-Columbia, college is all about casual sex, meddling parents, foul-mouthed friendships and partying until you puke. At least that’s the portrayal in The Booze News, a new weekly newspaper that glorifies the wonders of excessive drinking.
The publication’s founders, a pair of University of Illinois graduates, call The Booze News (motto: “Today’s News … Under the Influence”) an over-the-top satire modeled after The Onion, the popular parody newspaper started by college students in Madison that has since gone global.
On Wednesday, the non-profit National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities is to launch a website on which students can compare 600 of its 1,000 member schools using a standard format. Other groups plan to roll out similar efforts this fall.
It’s an open secret of the Ivory Tower. Even when they’re locked, the front doors of college dorms are almost always open. And once a stranger’s inside everyone’s vulnerable to theft, assault and to rape.It’s a fact. Students let strangers tailgate into the dorms all the time. The strangers then have access to all the floors and all the rooms.
Is a college campus a place for all views to be aired, or are some public figures too extreme to deserve the platform?
Itâ??s a question numerous colleges have wrestled with, but perhaps none more frequently of late than Columbia University in New York. The topic is front-and-center again over the invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak there Monday.
For parents hoping to keep tabs on their college-bound kids this fall, schools have this advice: Get it in writing — if you can.
Under federal law, colleges are barred from releasing information in a student’s record, including grades or disciplinary actions, without the student’s permission. There are certain exceptions to these rules, including when the school deems there is a health emergency. But parents are often dismayed to find that schools tend to err on the side of preserving a student’s privac
Quoted: Joanne Berg, registrar and vice provost for enrollment management of the University of Wisconsin.
Thinly stretched campus counseling centers routinely depend on overworked psychologists, off-campus therapists and waiting lists as long as three weeks to handle the crunch, says Rick Hanson, president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors.
Carnegie Mellon University has more than 7,000 students, but the downtown Pittsburgh campus offers only 2,700 parking spaces for students, faculty and staff.
This fall, the school is among more than 70 colleges and universities nationwide partnering with car-sharing services, which provide hourly rentals to members of the campus community.
Five months after the Virginia Tech massacre, some of the few remaining universities that do not permit campus police to carry guns are rethinking the firearms bans.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison did relatively well in a 50-college test of how much students learned about history and economics during four years of college, but students in Wisconsin and nationally knew little when they came in and not much more when they left.
No college did better than a D-plus on the Civic Literacy Test released Tuesday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonpartisan conservative educational organization that stresses the values of a free society.
The national average was F.
Students don’t know much about history, and colleges aren’t adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.
The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to grades.
First-year students whose roommates brought a video game player to college studied 40 minutes less each day on average, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Those 40 minutes of lost study time translated into first-semester grades that were 0.241 points lower on the 4.0 grade scale.
The University of Wisconsinâ??s Master of Business Administration program was ranked No. 32 in the regional category of the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive ranking of MBA programs Monday.
A piece of legislation that would decrease the cost of loan interest rates and increase grant eligibility among college students is expected to soon be signed into law by President Bush.
Colleges and universities are intensifying efforts to reduce the growing problem of textbook thefts by marking books with invisible ink, requiring used bookstores to keep logs of sellers and banning the resale of the expensive volumes by non-students.
Mentions University of Wisconsin.
Colleges are starting to wake up to how sleep deprivation cuts into the academic and athletic performance of their students. All-nighters have become a habit in higher education, but a handful of small new studies help document the consequences.
By Sonya Geis
Washington Post Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 13 — Scholars across the political spectrum protested what they called an assault on academic freedom after the University of California at Irvine withdrew a job offer from a liberal professor who wrote an op-ed criticizing the Bush administration.
With just days left before the Friday sign-up deadline, nearly 10,000 ninth-graders have committed to the proposed Wisconsin Covenant, which promises a route to college if they fulfill a pledge.
Colleges and universities are learning to work with a new breed of parent who stretch the first-year send-off into a multi-day affair. Dozens of schools offer two- or three-day parent-orientation sessions to get Mom and Dad comfortable with everything from housing to campus security. And according to University of Minnesota surveys, 74% of 193 responding institutions said that this year they were hosting parent receptions on move-in day, up from 7% in 2003.
Colleges and universities these days are seeing a surge in enrollment â?? and it’s increasingly driven by young women, according to U.S. Census data out today.
Concordia University Wisconsin hopes to open the state’s second pharmacy school in 2009. Its board of regents recently approved a plan to create the school in response to a demand in the state and nationwide for pharmacists. Officials estimate it will cost $10 million to build or renovate a building, develop a curriculum and hire faculty. The University of Wisconsin-Madison accepts 130 pharmacy students per year. Concordia plans to accept 50 to 75
Concordia University Wisconsin in Mequon plans to invest more than $14 million to start the second pharmacy school in the state.
The decision, which the university’s board of regents approved Friday, is designed to meet the growing demand for pharmacists in Wisconsin and throughout the country. That demand is expected to increase in coming years as more pharmacists retire.
The state’s only pharmacy school is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For many college students, back to school also means back to downloading music over the university’s high-speed Internet connection. But not so fast: The music industry’s crackdown on piracy on campus didn’t stop with the end of the spring semester.
Some schools, like the University of Wisconsin, have declined to assist the RIAA, explaining that “to identify the IP users and forward the letters to them would put the university in an uncomfortable and inappropriate alliance with the RIAA,” says Meg McCall, a spokesperson for the university. “While we agree that violation of copyright law is serious and should be addressed, the only way to be certain of infractions is to pursue action through the courts.”
This fall’s freshmen may be the smartest group to enter the University of Minnesota, but they still might find it a challenge to leave in four years with a degree.
First-year undergrads arrived on the U’s Twin Cities campus this week boasting a higher average college entrance score than any previous class, with many coming from the top tier of their high school classes.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – Clerical, technical and health workers went on strike Wednesday at the University of Minnesota after contract talks with their union broke down.
The union represents about 3,500 workers — about 17 percent of the employees in the University of Minnesota system statewide — but university officials said the second day of fall classes will go ahead as planned.
A shortage of Arabic-language teachers across the country is shedding light on a classic economics question: What happens when there is plenty of demand and not enough supply?
Since 9/11, the number of students interested in the Middle Eastern language has been skyrocketing. More than 20,000 people in the USA enrolled in an Arabic-language higher-education program in 2006, double the number who signed up from 1998 to 2002, according to projections from a study the Modern Language Association expects to release this fall.
Colleges around the country are closely watching for a key ruling in a bitter legal battle between Princeton University and a disgruntled alumnus who claims the school misspent the millions his family left the school in 1961.
Regardless of the outcome, the case has already cost Princeton $22 million in legal fees and left a mark across higher education. Many colleges are grateful they haven’t been targeted by such a suit â?? and newly determined to make sure they never are. It’s accelerated a trend among both schools and donors of negotiating upfront just how gift money is to be spent.
When Emily McLain decided to enroll at the University of Oregon, a significant part of the appeal was low tuition. She had not counted on all the fees that unexpectedly appeared on her bill.
â??I had my dad calling me asking, â??Whatâ??s this for?â?? â? said Ms. McLain, 22, a political science and international studies major now entering her last year at the university.
When the bands, cheerleaders and mascots drum up excitement for their schools’ sports teams this fall, their wide smiles and precision stunts may be masking something: Fanfare doesn’t come cheap.
While sports teams may travel in style, Division I-A athletic departments at public schools spent anywhere from zero â?? at schools such as UCLA and Idaho â?? to $1.2 million at Tennessee and Texas on “spirit,” according to their 2005 and 2006 NCAA financial reports.
In some cases, universities have redirected spirit costs, especially when it’s an integral part of the school’s image. Wisconsin, for example, moved funding for the marching band to an endowment â?? now worth $4 million â?? when the athletic department was having financial difficulties in the 1990s, according to director of bands Mike Leckrone.
A hard-hitting report by a state panel on last spring’s massacre at Virginia Tech could have an effect beyond the Blacksburg, Va., campus and the state border as colleges nationwide consider whether to adopt new policies dealing with security, emergency preparedness, and mental-health issues prompted by the country’s worst campus shooting, higher-education experts say.
A report reviewing the Virginia Tech massacre found that university officials missed dozens of opportunities to intervene as Seung Hui Cho’s mental health deteriorated in the year before the rampage.
College campuses are discovering the possibilities that open up when students, faculty and staff make a point to read the same book. In the process, such “common readings” serve a range of purposes, especially for incoming students who are navigating a big transition.
“When students have more active involvement in school, when they have closer relationships with faculty, they’re more likely to persist and more likely to graduate,” says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “The common readings are a signal to students that this is going to be a very intentional, very engaging first year of college.”
The statewide panel charged with investigating the mass shooting at Virginia Tech sharply criticized the university for not quickly and clearly notifying students and staff after police responded to a double homicide in a campus dorm and for failing to respond when shooter Seung Hui Cho showed signs of mental illness his junior year.
RICHMOND, Va., Aug. 29 â?? A state panel has sharply criticized decisions made by Virginia Tech before and after last Aprilâ??s shooting massacre, saying university officials could have saved lives by notifying students and faculty members earlier about the killings on campus.
Because university officials misunderstood federal privacy laws as forbidding any exchange of a studentâ??s mental health information, the panelâ??s long-awaited report concludes, they missed numerous indications of the gunmanâ??s mental health problems.
For the state and nation, scores were down slightly compared with the prior year, the College Board announced, but the long-term trends and such things as the increasing number of minority students taking the SAT could be looked at more positively.
National average scores for the SAT college entrance exam declined for the second year in a row, a report shows. But this year’s drops were less dramatic than last year’s, the first time that national average scores were based primarily on a recently revised version of the test.
And, unlike last year’s dip in the number of recent high school graduates taking the test, the number of 2007 graduates taking the test was up slightly. Nearly 1.5 million students took the test, up 1.9% from last year, representing the largest and most diverse group of SAT test takers ever, says the report, released Tuesday by the College Board, the non-profit group that owns the SAT.
As students return to campuses across the nation, college administrators face the first test of their efforts to inoculate campuses against the sort of horrific violence that hit Virginia Tech last April, when a student killed 32 other students and faculty members, then committed suicide.
Average reading and math scores on the SAT test declined slightly this year, as the number of high school students taking the standardized exam grew larger and more diverse than ever, according to a report released yesterday by the College Board on the high school class of 2007.
Outside Hollywood, the work of a crime lab technician is known for two things: tedium and less-than-lucrative pay. Yet, thanks in part to an abundance of crime lab TV dramas, the field of forensic science is one of the hottest new majors on college campuses.
At West Virginia University, with one of the largest programs, forensic science ranks second in popularity to Spanish.
TRENTON, Aug. 27, (AP) â?? The Mercer County prosecutor has asked a judge to drop charges of aggravated hazing against two Rider University officials in a case involving the drinking death of a fraternity pledge.
As students head to the nation’s college campuses, relishing their new independence, criminal prosecutions in the deaths of two young men are a sober reminder of how quickly alcohol-fueled “fun” can spin out of control.
Charges were filed this month against students and administrators linked to the recent fire death of a 19-year-old sophomore at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., and the alcohol poisoning of a 18-year-old freshman at Rider University in Trenton, N.J
WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 â?? Officials at Virginia Tech University issued a set of mild recommendations for campus security Wednesday, suggesting the university provide more counseling for mentally troubled students, erect Internet-based message boards across campus to alert students of emergencies and install more surveillance cameras and better internal door locks.
University of Wisconsin-Madison administrators will be pleased, but students may be disappointed by the fact that the university was not the No. 1 “party school” in the Princeton Review’s annual rankings.
In fact, the UW didn’t even make the top 20 list, which is developed from a survey of 120,000 students at 366 top colleges in the nation.
….UW-Madison also came in 16th for Best College Newspaper and 18th for Students Pack the Stadiums. The Princeton Review also summarized what UW-Madison students say about the university….
Federal officials on Tuesday warned students moving to college to take steps to protect themselves from the rising number of fires on and near campuses.
At a media briefing on the University of Maryland campus, officials released a new National Fire Protection Association report that cites an increase in college housing fires: 3,300 in 2005, up from 1,800 in 1998. From 2002 through 2005, there were 39 deaths and about 400 injuries in dormitories, fraternities, sororities and barracks as a result of fires.
But the report, which was based on estimates from two national databases, did not include off-campus fires. USA TODAY reported last year that off-campus fires were the most deadly.
Authorities at Virginia Tech will not escape scrutiny for their actions in the hours between two shooting sprees that left 33 people dead, the chairman of a governor-appointed review panel said Tuesday.
The report will be unflinching in assigning fault for failures and misjudgments, Massengill said. He would not discuss any specific points in the working draft of the report, a copy of which was delivered to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine last weekend.
Making one of the largest charitable commitments in Milwaukee history, real estate developer Joseph Zilber on Tuesday gave Marquette University a huge boost and set the stage for announcements in coming days of other large gifts.
For most students starting college this fall, bottled water is taken for granted, stadiums and rock tours have always had corporate names, Nelson Mandela has always been free and phone calls have never been private.
For the class of 2011, instantly updating autobiographies on “Facebook ” or “MySpace ” is as common as being a latchkey kid or having nutritional information on food labels. “Off the hook ” has nothing to do with phones and being “lame ” has more to do with being dumb or inarticulate than being disabled.
U.S. News & World Report releases its annual college rankings Friday in the face of the loudest and best-organized criticism from educators the magazine has ever encountered.
But for all the complaints that the rankings warp college admissions and distract colleges from educating students, U.S. News still has the upper hand. Colleges are having a hard time quitting the magazine’s annual beauty contest.
More proof has arrived that Wisconsin boasts some of the best schools in America. In half the states, at least half the students in the high school graduating class of 2007 took the ACT, one of the nation’s two major college-entrance exams. Among those states, Wisconsin tied Iowa for second place in average score. Only Minnesota bested them, and just by a sliver.
But Wisconsin’s high ranking does mask trouble spots, including worrisome results for non-white students. What’s more, not enough of such students take the exam.
