The bookshelves will soon be bursting with guides for the next group of high school students looking to make college choices.
U.S. News & World Report’s 2008 version of “America’s Best Colleges” will be online beginning today. The Princeton Review’s will be available next week. More will follow from there.
Richard J. Cook, the president of Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, will not say precisely how he used to rate his collegeâ??s competitors when the annual U.S. News & World Report peer review questionnaire showed up in his mailbox. What he will say is, â??I filled it out more honestly this year than I did in the past.â?
Princeton holds the top spot in the latest U.S. News & World Report college rankings, the eighth straight year the private, New Jersey school has either tied or held the top slot outright.
NEW YORK (AP) — A member of the Rutgers women’s basketball team has sued Don Imus and CBS, claiming the radio personality’s sexist and racist comments about the team damaged her reputation.
Kia Vaughn filed the lawsuit alleging slander and defamation of character in state Supreme Court in the Bronx Tuesday, the same day Imus settled with CBS Radio in a deal that pre-empts his threatened $120 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against CBS. The settlement allows him to make a comeback bid at a new station.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana University and the human-powered Internet search engine ChaCha are partnering to create a one-stop virtual reference desk that connects students with an array of experts and other help.
They will debut a Web-based search platform this semester allowing students, faculty and others to look for information using a machine-based search that marks the results recommended by IU experts. Visitors who need help finding information or refining their search can chat online with an expert in real time.
Madison public school students’ average scores on the ACT college admissions exam outpace those of their counterparts statewide, even as Wisconsin performs well compared to other states.
The average composite score of Madison public high school students on the national test was 24.6 over the 2006-07 school year, the best showing the district has had since it began keeping ACT records 22 years ago. Nearly 70 percent of high school students in Madison took the test last year.
Longtime reader Chris Wren is alarmed, and the rest of us should be, too. Wren caught the op-ed column by Stanley Fish in the New York Times on Aug. 1 about the sad state of affairs in the Florida state university system.
“The following comment caught my attention,” Wren wrote.
“Florida does not have a single campus that measures up to the best schools in the systems of Virginia, Wisconsin and Georgia, never mind first-tier states like California, Michigan and North Carolina. Climbing that hill will be an arduous task, and the key will be a persistence few states are up to.”
So, there we have it, Wren commented. “A new motto in the making: ‘UW: Setting the standard of excellence for the second tier,'” he complained.
As overseas study has become a prized credential of the undergraduate experience, a competitive, even cutthroat, industry has emerged, with an army of vendors vying for student money and universities moving to profit from the boom.
At many campuses, study abroad programs are run by multiple companies and nonprofit institutes that offer colleges generous perks to sign up students: free and subsidized travel overseas for officials, back-office services to defray operating expenses, stipends to market the programs to students, unpaid membership on advisory councils and boards, and even cash bonuses and commissions on student-paid fees. This money generally goes directly to colleges, not always to the students who take the trips.
University of Delaware student Michelle Rigney has stage-four malignant melanoma, and her biggest fear, next to dying, is losing her health insurance.
By federal law, students 19 to 24 are eligible to keep their parents’ health insurance only if they attend school full time, leaving a tough choice for those like Rigney.
If she stays in school, she may not be able to balance a full load of classes and the demands of treatment. If she’s too sick to go to school, she could lose her health insurance when she needs it most.
At colleges around the country this summer, one topic has vaulted to the top of the agenda at freshman orientation: campus safety.
The nation’s first incoming freshmen since last spring’s shootings at Virginia Tech are heading to class soon, and colleges have been fielding more questions from parents and students about security and mental health issues.
As housing officials at colleges around the country send out roommate assignments to freshmen this summer, a growing number of schools say they’re getting more requests for changes â?? from parents who don’t like the roommates’ Facebook profiles.
“They were getting an impression â?? false or accurate â?? of what the student would be like to live with,” says Magda Manetas of The College of New Jersey in Ewing.
Housing officials say parents who cite Facebook most frequently mention party-related content and photos as their primary concerns.
But Robin Berkowitz-Smith of Syracuse University says race, religion and sexual orientation are the top three concerns from parents contacting officials there.
Christopher Wolfe, the demanding professor whose classes in constitutional law and civil liberties have challenged Marquette University students for almost 30 years – and helped many decide whether they have what it takes to pursue law school – will leave his academic home in May, and not for the usual reasons.
He’s not ending his academic career. Nor is he going to a rival university – not exactly.
Wolfe intends to work on establishing a university of his own, one inspired by the intellectual approach of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher.
With college enrollments mushrooming in many nations but public support generally unable to keep up, the world is seeing a historic swing from public to private financing of higher education, according to a report scheduled for release today by the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
That shift has become evident in a number of ways. First and foremost, more students and their families are paying their own way as countries impose tuition. And institutions themselves are looking for private cash in new ways, collaborating with businesses and starting up fund-raising departments.
Laptop theft, underage drinking and sexual assault are the typical crimes that are discussed at college orientations, but some institutions, hoping to answer questions before parents ask them, are adding detailed campus safety briefings â?? for both students and parents â?? to their introductory programs.
Since the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech, colleges have faced heightened concern about violence.
DEARBORN, Mich. â?? When pools of water began accumulating on the floor in some restrooms at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and the sinks pulling away from the walls, the problem was easy to pinpoint. On this campus, more than 10 percent of the students are Muslims, and as part of ritual ablutions required before their five-times-a-day prayers, some were washing their feet in the sinks.
UW-Madison junior Joe Xaypharath doesn’t want to think about how much debt he’s piling up as he works toward his pharmacy degree. He’s not even sure how much he owes right now, except that it’s a lot.
Sometimes you can tell that a politician is doing his job because he’s not in the headlines very often.
Such is the case with Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, whose low-key, by-the-book approach so far is a welcome change from the turbulent tenure of his predecessor, Peg Lautenschlager.
Van Hollen also ignored GOP wailing over the University of Wisconsin System’s admission policy. He advised campuses last week that they can consider race as one of many factors in freshmen admissions. Yet Van Hollen cautioned System leaders that comprehensive, individualized evaluations of applications are still required.
Marquette University, along with several dozen other universities across the country, is under investigation to determine if the school received illegal kickbacks from a student loan company.
The New York state attorney’s general office issued the subpoenas on Wednesday. Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo said he was investigating whether athletic departments at the schools agreed to promote loans to students in exchange for kickbacks.
Andrew M. Cuomo, New York State’s attorney general, announced on Wednesday that he planned to investigate more than three dozen college athletics departments, including some of the country’s most prominent programs, about whether they arranged loans for athletes in exchange for financial kickbacks.
DES MOINES â?? A college diploma could soon come with a corporate name.
The University of Iowa is considering whether to rename its College of Public Health after Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s foundation in exchange for a $15 million gift from the company’s philanthropic arm.
Terry Burton, a naming-rights consultant based in Vancouver, British Columbia, says he believes Iowa would be the first public university to name a college after a corporation.
The offer has ignited a debate over where universities should draw the line when accepting corporate gifts.
LEXINGTON, Ky. â?? A thick loose-leaf book jammed with charts and graphs details Lee T. Todd Jr.â??s ambitious plans for the University of Kentucky. But in a recent speech to a chamber of commerce, Dr. Todd, the universityâ??s president, summed them up in three brisk words: â??Research drives jobs.â?
His own life story encapsulates the idea. Dr. Todd grew up in a small coal-mining and farming town in western Kentucky, graduated from the university and earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at M.I.T. He returned to his Kentucky alma mater to teach before leaving to spend 18 years creating two successful high-tech companies here, in a state better known for thoroughbreds and bourbon than for digital innovations.
It’s the little things adding up that can bring even the toughest woman down.
That opinion came up again and again during a memorial symposium Monday organized by friends and colleagues of Denice Denton, a former UW-Madison researcher and teacher who became the chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz before jumping off a 43-story building to her death last summer.
My first reaction to last summer’s news that former UW-Madison scientist Denice Denton had committed suicide by jumping off San Francisco’s tallest apartment building was disbelief.
A prominent senator proposed legislation last week that would have required some colleges to buy tools to curtail illegal file sharing. But at the last minute, outrage by college officials forced the senator to back down.
The proposal was made by Sen. Harry M. Reid, a Nevada Democrat and Senate majority leader, as an amendment to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. (See related article, Page A21.) The amendment called for the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America to provide annual lists of the 25 institutions that received the most notices identifying cases of copyright infringement, usually by students passing around music and movies. Colleges would be ordered to plan a “a technology-based deterrent” and submit those plans for review by the secretary of education.
A major worry was that no software could stop illegal file sharing without interrupting legitimate file sharing as well. “We don’t know of any such software that’s reliable,” said Brian Rust, communications manager in the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s information-technology division. “We would not want to solve the illegal-file-sharing problem by creating a whole other problem that could hinder a student’s ability to learn.”
Should an undergraduate studying business pay more than one studying psychology? Should a journalism degree cost more than one in literature? More and more public universities, confronting rising costs and lagging state support, have decided that the answers may be yes and yes.
A Republican lawmaker is trying to use the power of the purse to eliminate academic programs he disagrees with philosophically and eliminate university administrators he feels are doing a poor job.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A problem with Duke University’s wireless network caused outages at the school, officials said Friday, exonerating the initial suspect, Apple Inc.’s new iPhone.
“A particular set of conditions made the Duke wireless network experience some minor and temporary disruptions in service,” Duke spokeswoman Tracy Futhey said in a written statement posted on the university’s Web site. “Those conditions involve our deployment of a very large Cisco-based wireless network that supports multiple network protocols.”
In presenting 17 high school students and a recent high school graduate with a rare, close-up look at one of the science world’s most cutting-edge fields, the WiCell Summer Science Camp also hopes to ignite their interest in pursuing a career in the sciences.
Every spring during his academic career at UW-Madison, Ying Chan makes sure he is sitting at a table at the Memorial Union terrace on the warm day when the ice on Lake Mendota disappears for the season.
To him, the moment has grown to symbolize the strong connection in Wisconsin between everyday life and the natural world. “Wisconsin has a love affair going on with the environment,” Ying said.
They helped give rise to the University of Wisconsin System. They shaped an important social theory. They challenged conventional thinking about retirement.
They confirmed that men and women have different views on sex, even later in life.
For 50 years, a third of the graduates from Wisconsin high schools in 1957 have answered questions on topics ranging from money to menopause. In doing so, they have served as a sociological Petri dish in one of the country ‘s longest-running studies.
The Senate passed a bill early Friday to increase aid to college students. The bill would give more money to Pell grant recipients, who are among the poorest. They get a maximum award of $4,310 annually now, but that would be bumped up to $5,400 by 2011. To pay for the proposal, lawmakers would cut roughly $18 billion in federal subsidies to banks that issue government-backed student loans.
Public universities would be disproportionately subject to sanctions proposed in Congress for institutions that raise their tuition by more than twice the rate of inflation over a three-year period, according to a report released this week by researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
That is the case even though the average tuition and fees charged at the four-year public institutions in the Wisconsin study was $5,383, nearly one-quarter of the average rate of $20,257 charged by the four-year private colleges that were analyzed.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Apple Inc.’s flashy new iPhones may be jamming parts of the wireless network at Duke University, where technology officials worked with the company Wednesday to fix problems before classes begin next month.
Bill Cannon, a Duke technology spokesman, said an analysis of traffic found that iPhones flooded parts of the campus’ wireless network with access requests, freezing parts of the system for 10 minutes at a time.
The Virginia Tech killings in April served as a grim reminder, not just to those in higher education but also to lawmakers, of what could happen on almost any college campus.
“You’re always thinking about how you can do things better,” said Jeffrey D. Duncan, a state representative in South Carolina. “So when I saw that, I wondered, ‘Could that happen here?'”
Mr. Duncan, a Republican, responded by drafting legislation designed to prevent a similar event. In doing so, he joined dozens of officials around the nation.
Federal privacy laws do not bar college administrators and staff members from sharing crucial information about troubled students, campus mental-health experts told an independent panel that is investigating this spring’s fatal shootings at Virginia Tech on Wednesday.
The daylong hearing, held at the University of Virginia, revealed the legal and ethical complexities of campus mental-health issues in the aftermath of an incident that one panelist called “the 9/11 for colleges and universities.”
Eastern Michigan University, still reeling from the apparent cover-up of a student’s murder in December, announced on Monday that it had fired its president, its vice president for student affairs, and its campus-police director. But the chairman of the university’s Board of Regents said, without elaborating, that the president’s dismissal was not related to the murder case.
The president, John A. Fallon III, was fired on Sunday afternoon by a unanimous vote of the regents, who informed him of the dismissal in a letter delivered by courier to his home that evening. The board re-enacted the vote before a crowd of 200 in the university’s main administrative building on Monday.
We’ve all seen the bitingly clever bumper stickers that proclaim “My child and my money go to X University.” I’m a college professor, and when my students gripe about $50,000 annual costs and associated debt, I tell them they don’t want to know what I paid a quarter-century ago (60 times less in current dollars).
(Written for the Baltimore Sun; reprinted in 7/16 Capital Times)
YPSILANTI, Mich. (AP) – The president of Eastern Michigan University has been fired, months after top university officials were accused of covering up the rape and slaying of a student by publicly ruling out foul play despite evidence to the contrary.
The president, John Fallon, confirmed that he was fired Sunday evening by a unanimous vote of the Board of Regents, The Ann Arbor News reported in its Monday editions.
Who doesn’t like a good lawyer joke?
On the other hand, who doesn’t like a good lawyer when you’re in a legal scrape?
A conservative Wisconsin think tank is charging that the stateâ??s university system has an â??outdated, inefficient management structure.â?
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute report recommends that UW-Madison be broken off from the University of Wisconsin System.
Last May delegates to the inaugural annual conference of the University and College Union, which represents 120,000 British academics, stoked international controversy by voting to consider a boycott of Israeli institutions and academics. The move was the latest attempt by British faculty unions in recent years to penalize Israeli universities. And, like previous efforts, it has angered and puzzled many academics in the United States.
A growing number of states are cutting college tuition for recent veterans in a show of gratitude, but also in some cases to fill gaps in the federal GI Bill.
Included: “In Wisconsin, where a 100% waiver kicked in this month, some lawmakers want to pare back eligibility.”
University of Wisconsin System students will have to wait until next month to find out how much their tuition for the coming academic year will cost.
A conservative Milwaukee-based “free market” think tank recommended today that the UW-Madison should be broken off from the University of Wisconsin System, which should also be reorganized to create clearer lines of management authority.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute says that in the 35 years since the former University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin State University systems were merged, the result has become “an outdated, inefficient management structure.”
Our economy has become increasingly knowledge-based. Employers in a wide range of industries need more highly skilled workers than they once did in order to remain competitive. Workers, likewise, need new skills and higher educational credentials in order to earn a decent wage.
U.S. senators pleaded this month with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to let them decide how to revise college-accreditation procedures. They may soon wish they had let her keep the job.
One week after Ms. Spellings granted the senators’ request that she suspend her review of accreditation rules, a top Senate aide came before a group of college and accrediting officials on Thursday to explain how the lawmakers will proceed.
Despite striking down two voluntary school-integration plans in a 5-to-4 ruling on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court left solidly intact its precedents dealing with affirmative action in higher education.
Rather than signaling any clear desire to revisit its past decisions on race-conscious admissions policies — as some conservative groups had urged it to do — the court’s majority cited those precedents repeatedly as justification for holding that the school-integration policies before it violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
The first reaction to Thursdayâ??s U.S. Supreme Court ruling for many officials at colleges that practice affirmative action was relief. The ruling, as expected, rejected programs under which schoolchildren in Louisville and Seattle have been assigned to schools based on race. While the case didnâ??t involve college affirmative action, many of the legal briefs in the case cited Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Courtâ??s landmark 2003 ruling involving the University of Michiganâ??s law school, which upheld the right of colleges in some circumstances to consider race in admissions.
Gowtham Karri looks young for a city planner. He wears tennis shoes and shorts on the job and can’t be much more than four and a half feet tall.
But he brings a professional intensity to the task of redesigning Madison’s neighborhoods.
If all goes according to plan, high school students embarking on the college search process can expect to get more help beginning this fall. A number of higher education associations are developing tools through which participating colleges will make more information available to families in user-friendly formats that are easier to compare.
At least three voluntary initiatives are in the works.
College students kick their weekends off early by drinking more alcohol on Thursday nights when they don’t have Friday classes before 10 a.m., a study shows.
The study, published in the July issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, found that the later their classes started on Friday, the more college students drank on Thursday nights. Students with a 9 a.m. Friday class drank an average of 1.39 drinks on Thursday night, while students who did not have class on Friday drank an average of 2.41 drinks.
For more than a decade, there have been faculty members at UW-Madison who have incorporated Hmong language, culture and history into their teachings.
Some now believe it’s time to take that interest to the next level.
ST. PAUL (AP) – The governors of Minnesota and Wisconsin said Friday that they settled a long-simmering tuition reciprocity dispute without making students pay more to attend universities in either state.
Their pact means that starting in the fall of 2008, Wisconsin students attending higher-priced University of Minnesota schools will see a bigger number on their bills — but the state will kick in the difference in the form of a “tuition reciprocity supplement.”
Members of the U.S. Senate are making another attempt at persuading President Bush to allow greater flexibility on the use of embryonic stem cells in federally supported research.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have expanded federal financing for research on stem cells derived from human embryos. The president said the provision would encourage the destruction of embryos, which he called human lives.
The Senate Appropriations Committee overwhelmingly approved a 2008 spending bill Thursday that, as expected, would increase funds for the National Institutes of Health by $1 billion but keep most higher education at their 2007 levels. But the committeeâ??s action Thursday may be most noteworthy because of two tactical policy proposals made by committee members.
The University of Iowa will end a lengthy and contentious presidential search with the hiring of Sally Mason, provost of Purdue University, according to news reports. Ms. Mason’s selection, which is to be voted on by Iowa’s Board of Regents today, comes after a previous search was scuttled last November, provoking widespread outrage and faculty, staff, and student votes of no confidence in the board (The Chronicle, January 5).
Board officials were not immediately available to comment on the news, but the presidential search is on the board’s agenda for today.
Don’t look now but Wisconsin’s once beleaguered College Savings Program is suddenly a hot commodity.
The state’s “529” savings plans — EdVest and Tomorrow’s Scholar — now boast nearly 228,000 accounts. That’s up about 7 percent from a year ago and 45 percent over the past four years.
The growth is even more impressive when you consider the history of the Wisconsin 529 program, named after its section number in the IRS code that allows earnings to grow tax-free.
They didn’t call for an all-out boycott, but presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges signaled their intent Tuesday to stop cooperating with U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings. What that means exactly is not spelled out. Because most college presidents must answer to trustees, faculty and other constituents, “the decision to participate or withdraw from the U.S. News rankings rests with the individual institutions,” says a statement released Tuesday by the Annapolis Group, whose members include 121 liberal arts colleges.
Gifts and payoffs to universities and their officials by student lenders were far more pervasive than had been disclosed and in some cases were demanded by university officials themselves in exchange for promoting lenders to students, according to a Senate report on the student loan industry issued yesterday.
Michiganâ??s public colleges and universities were barred by a state appeals court in February from offering health and other benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of employees. So Michigan State University is trying another tack: extending benefits to people it labels â??other eligible individuals.â?
