The University of Washington devised a bold plan six years ago to protect students and faculty after a struggling medical resident shot to death his mentor, then killed himself. A new safety team would be alerted to all threats. It would move potential victims to a new dorm or office, assign them police protection or take steps such as changing their phone numbers.
About once every year, a campus murder is committed after administrators take insufficent action despite warnings about threats, flawed security or dangerous situations, a USA TODAY analysis of college homicides since 1991 shows. In at least 15 of the cases reviewed, the campus killer showed signs of being a danger, often with either a criminal or psychotic background, or by making violent threats.
Wisconsin’s Blue Book, the venerable chronicle of all things state government and so much more, becomes a fully searchable online database today — all 56,000 pages of 87 editions.
For the first time, every word of the biennial almanac, including the rare inaugural edition of 1853, will be available free on the Web.
A growing number of Americans crossing the Atlantic to get postgraduate business degrees, as the global economy continues to erase borders and as the demand for the degrees and graduates who earn them explodes.
Googleâ??s Library Project, which is in the process of digitizing millions of books at top university libraries around the world, announced a major expansion Wednesday: The 12 universities that make up the Committee on Institutional Cooperation have agreed to let Google digitize up to 10 million of their collective volumes â?? generally those from the most distinctive parts of their collections.
Google will greatly expand its Google Library Project through a deal it has made to digitize 10 million books in the libraries of 12 universities.
The 12 universities are members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of the 11 universities in the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago. The deal expands the number of agreements Google has made with universities from 15 to 25.
Will there be a truce in the battle over college-textbook prices?
Textbooks have become a flash point in the larger frustration over sharply rising college costs. In an attempt to get past finger-pointing, a new report highlights what publishers, policymakers, and faculty are doing, and can do, to give students some relief.
“Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable” is the culmination of a yearlong study by the federal Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, commissioned by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. (The full report is available at www.ed.gov/acsfa.)
….For a growing number of colleges and universities – and even a few high schools – long distances are no longer an obstacle for far-flung friends and relatives who can’t make it to campus. Schools are turning to Internet broadcasts to bridge the distance on graduation day.
The UW-Madison is hosting about 100 talented minority and low-income undergraduate students from around the nation this summer to do graduate-level research with faculty members — in the hope they will decide to continue their education in Madison.
The Summer Research Opportunity Program, partially funded by the National Science Foundation, includes programs in 10 fields, ranging from neurology and biology to engineering and education.
In the past year, Molinda Henry has filled out 57 scholarship applications looking for help in paying for her UW-Madison education.
“I’ve got a lot of rejections, a lot,” said the Madison undergraduate. “But I refuse to hang my head down because this is something I want. I want this more than anything I’ve wanted in my life.”
The University of Chicago has received an anonymous $100-million donation from an alumnus. In an announcement of the gift on Wednesday, the university said the money would be used for scholarships, jump-starting a $400-million fund-raising campaign for student aid.
The institution is following other leading public and private colleges, such as Princeton University and the University of Virginia, in replacing loans with grants for lower-income students.
The gift — the largest in the University of Chicago’s history — will help eliminate loans entirely for students from families with annual incomes of less than $60,000. It will also help cut in half the amount of loans taken out by students whose families earn between $60,000 and $75,000 annually.
MADISON (AP) â?? Gov. Jim Doyle called on lawmakers Wednesday to support his plan to increase funding for the University of Wisconsin System, warning the universities need “a major investment” to remain competitive.
Doyle used an appearance at UW-Madison to try to build support for his plan to spend an additional $225 million for the UW System and financial aid, a request the Legislature’s budget committee is expected to consider in the coming days.
The Governor is calling on lawmakers to increase funding for Wisconsin colleges and universities. Governor Jim Doyle says the state is at a critical point for higher education, and more investment is needed. He says the state and its students will suffer the legislature doesn’t approve the additional funding he’s requested in the state budget.
Governor Doyle is asking state legislators to invest $225 million into it’s UW system. the governor says the state’s 26 institutions are unable to take in all the students who want to join nursing, engineering and teaching professions and that problem could lead to a shortage in the near future.
The funding will be distributed between all 26 schools in the UW system, with the largest chunk likely staying right here in Madison. It’s money that will be used to create more seats in programs that are seeing shortages in the real world, like nursing.
Bruin applicant No. 1 had an A-minus average at a good high school. His transcript showed numerous honors and accelerated classes, and his SAT score was 2040 of 2400. He was an athlete and clearly engaged at his high school and his church.
In his essays, he wrote movingly about his family and its influence on his life and choices.
But did he have what it took to become a UCLA freshman?
A group of admissions readers was asked to answer that question in December, when it met to be trained for a difficult task: choosing about 11,800 students for admission to the fall freshman class from the nearly 51,000 who applied.
Get ready for a new round in the race debate. A grass-roots movement wants more states to outlaw racial preferences in public education and hiring. But state universities that seek more minorities are fighting back, hoping to “deflect … defeat … and debunk” this drive for race neutrality.
A strategy paper issued in March by the College Board and more than 30 educational institutions calls for targeting “those who attempt to step into the fray and deprive higher education leaders of the tools … to achieve the benefits of diversity.”
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale has reached a settlement with a campus Christian group that had lost official recognition because it required members to abide by its Christian beliefs.
Under the terms of the settlement, the university will now officially recognize the Christian Legal Society as a student organization at its law school. Southern Illinois also agreed to pay for the group’s legal costs and will set up a $10,000 scholarship that will be controlled by the society.
Like most institutions that have received copyright-infringement notices from the entertainment industry, Stanford University has a fairly straightforward process for dealing with the complaints. Campus officials identify students accused of piracy, ask them to delete the offending material from their computers, and prepare to disconnect from the campus network anyone who does not quickly comply.
The process might sound simple enough, but in fact it can be time-consuming and surprisingly expensive. College technology officials say each complaint filed against a student under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can end up costing their institutions anywhere from $50 to upwards of $100.
DAVIDSON, North Carolina (AP) — With 1,700 students, Davidson College may be small. But you’d never know it when you see the stuff students leave behind at the end of the year.
In a large room at a fraternity house, stacks of clothing, furniture, lamps and electronics were already piling up days ahead of last Sunday’s graduation. Mixed in were odds and ends that could only wind up together in a college trash pile: a pair of giant Homer Simpson slippers; a collection of Pokemon cards; a batch of fashion disaster dresses you can only hope were costumes from a campus theme party called the Five Dollar Prom.
Rebecca Martin, a former provost and vice chancellor at universities in Wisconsin and Vermont, has been named senior vice president for academic affairs for the University of Wisconsin System.
Gov. Jim Doyle generated excitement last year when he proposed the Wisconsin Covenant, which guarantees a spot in a Wisconsin college — with a financial aid package if needed — to any state high school graduate who has fulfilled a pledge to maintain at least a B average and meet other standards of behavior.
However, as state lawmakers prepare to endorse the plan, the excitement has been superseded by questions.
Saturday’s UW-Madison commencement was part Broadway musical, part spiritual revival, as award-winning actor and alumnus Andre De Shields sent members of the Class of 2007 out into the world to meet the challenges of “unprecedented times” with uplifting song.
CHAMPAIGN — University of Illinois trustees voted Thursday to raise tuition and fees on the university’s three campuses by an average of 11.6 percent, taking the cost of tuition, fees and housing at the Champaign-Urbana campus to about $9,450 a semester.
Over the last decade, the state’s flagship university system has raised the cost of an education by more than 250 percent — five times the rate at which Americans’ incomes grew during that period and eight times the rate of inflation.
MADISON, Wis. — Madison Area Technical College students have become the first in the nation to get hands-on training with human embryonic stem cells.
MATC got the stem cells from WiCell, a nonprofit research institute, to advance stem cell science, through an agreement with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
“We’re doing what MATC does best, which is providing people for the workforce,” says Dr. Lisa Seidman, a MATC biotechnology instructor.
Seidman helped negotiate the deal that will allow biotechnology students to work with human embryonic stem cells and create a workforce for the Madison area’s growing biotechnology industry.
Opinions vary on whether it’s good that college students today are much more connected to their parents.
But questions of independence and maturity aside, the trend toward what some call “helicopter parents” for their hovering tendency has been demonstrated by national studies. In fact, a survey by College Parents of America this year showed that 30 percent of college students communicate with their parents once a day and 73 percent do so two or three times per week, by phone or e-mail.
So University of Wisconsin-Madison officials decided to get into the act — with improved communication efforts and support services for parents.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. â?? Lehigh University has never been as sought after as Stanford, Yale or Harvard. But this year, awash in applications, it churned out rejection letters and may break more hearts when it comes to its waiting list.
Call them second-tier colleges (a phrase some administrators despise) or call them the new Ivies (this, they can live with). Twenty-five to 40 universities like Lehigh, traditionally perceived as being a notch below the most elite, have seen their cachet climb because of the astonishing competitive crush at the top.
BERKELEY, Calif. – A fit of spring-cleaning led Eric Brooks to a box of old newspaper clips from 1997. That’s when he was the lone black student enrolled in the incoming law school class at the University of California, Berkeley, following the end of affirmative action admissions.
He didn’t read them. That box doesn’t hold pleasant memories.
“I felt bad for myself at the time because of my situation, but worse for the people who were denied admission,” said Brooks.
The UW-Madison School of Business has been ranked 13th in the U.S. and 26th in the world in the Financial Times’ annual list of executive education providers, up from 14th in the U.S. and 28th in the world last year.
The University of Wisconsin System has responded appropriately to one of the ugliest scandals to break out in higher education: the revelation that private lenders have cultivated cozy relationships with campus financial aid officials in order to take advantage of students.
A tuition policy that has saved money for students on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus should be extended to undergraduates on outstate campuses as well, university President Robert Bruininks said Friday.
Rapidly increasing tuition is out of whack with school goals of access and on-time graduation, Bruininks said. He said he’ll propose that if students at the Duluth, Morris and Crookston campuses take more than 13 credits per semester, those extra classes should be free.
WASHINGTON, May 10 â?? With scandal rattling the $85 billion student loan industry, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings argued at a House hearing on Thursday that she lacked legal authority to clamp down on many abuses.
Ms. Spellings faced pointed questioning at the hearing from Congressional Democrats, who accused her department of mismanagement and complacency.
From a results standpoint, the hunger strike was a success. On the ninth day, as four frazzled, dehydrated and disoriented students continued their public protest of the wages paid to some Stanford University workers, the administration gave in: All contracted employees, even those who work less than 30 hours a week, would be covered by the universityâ??s â??living wageâ? policy, which was established for full-time employees in 2003.
Officials at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts say they will make college entrance exam scores optional in admission, making it the first nationally ranked science and engineering institute to do so. Beginning with the entering class of 2008, WPI applicants will have the option of submitting either ACT or SAT test scores or some other indicator of academic achievement, such as a research paper, science fair project, or similar effort that demonstrates a student’s organizational skills, knowledge of subject matter, motivation and initiative.
A fit of spring cleaning led Eric Brooks to a box of old newspaper clips from 1997. That’s when he was the lone black student enrolled in the incoming law school class at the University of California-Berkeley after the end of affirmative action admissions. He didn’t read them. That box doesn’t hold pleasant memories.
A dozen college presidents have pledged to boycott a key component of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings because they say the popular rankings mislead prospective students and encourage gamesmanship.
The presidents â?? from a range of mostly smaller institutions including Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and Earlham College in Indiana â?? outlined their complaints in a letter dated Saturday to colleagues at other schools.
In a case closely watched in higher education, the University of Wisconsin-Madison agreed Thursday to award more than $250,000 in student fees next year to a Catholic group to settle its religious discrimination lawsuit.
Both the university and the UW Roman Catholic Foundation praised the agreement, which settles a federal lawsuit filed after the university refused to recognize the group despite a campus presence dating to the 1880s.
Almost 60 years after graduating from Marquette University, a couple who made their fortune moving cargo up and down the Mississippi River will donate $51 million to the university, a gift that will launch construction of a new law school building.
The donors are Raymond and Kathryn Eckstein, who live now in Boca Raton, Fla., but spend several months a year in Cassville, the small town in Grant County on the Mississippi River where he grew up and worked for many years.
Fifty-three “John Doe” subpoenas issued Tuesday against the UW System will force the System to give up the names of students the Recording Industry Association of America says have illegally downloaded music, a UW-Madison official said.
Brian Rust, communications manager for Madison’s Division of Information Technology, said Wednesday that 16 of the students are from Madison, but he could not confirm any numbers from any other UW schools.
If campus technology officers have been feeling left out as their colleagues in the financial aid office get all the fan mail from Congress, never fear. Now itâ??s their turn.
MILWAUKEE — In the wake of the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history, Gov. Jim Doyle announced today that he is creating a task force to develop practices to ensure safety and preparedness on Wisconsin campuses.
The task force of students, parents, law enforcement agents and university officials will look at all options — including whether campus security officers should carry guns, Doyle said.
“I don’t want anything off the table with the task force,” he said.
The University of Wisconsin is the ninth most affordable public university in America, according to annual rankings released by the Princeton Review last month.
The list is based on institutional data collected from colleges and universities from fall 2005 through summer 2006 and surveys of students attending the schools.
South Korean student groups at UW-Madison have canceled an upcoming cultural event in
response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech.
Two key lawmakers are asking Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration to explain his sweeping, and so far largely undisclosed, plan to help more students achieve a higher education.
Wisconsin is rolling out the nation’s most expansive guarantee of higher education to students in hopes of raising aspirations and improving preparedness. The state’s 75,000 eighth-graders can sign the Wisconsin Covenant starting May 10. They promise to earn a B average, take courses to prepare for college and be good citizens.
Your college experience isnâ??t complete until you take over at least one campus building. At least, that might have made sense back in the 1960s, when the student movement spilled over into the public consciousness and it seemed, if only for a moment, that everything was worth protesting.
If times have changed, so have the tactics for both modern-day campus protesters and those who find themselves on the receiving end of student activism: college administrators. â??Many of the people who now are leaders of universities were students in the â??60s when demonstrations seemed to be â?¦ extremely energetic,â? said Kent Hubbell, dean of students at Cornell University. â??Hopefully, we will have learned from that experience in our current roles.â?
Fewer of Americaâ??s top colleges and universities across the country require English majors to study William Shakespeare, according to a new study released this month by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
MADISON (AP) – Wisconsin is rolling out the nation’s most expansive guarantee of higher education to students in hopes of raising aspirations for low-income families and improving college preparedness.
The state’s 75,000 eighth-graders — of all incomes, in public schools and private — will be able to sign the Wisconsin Covenant agreement starting May 10. They’ll promise to earn a B average in high school, take courses to prepare for college, stay out of trouble and perform community service work.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When the top U.S. nuclear regulator addressed industry leaders in March, he spoke about a problem often neglected in public debates about nuclear energy: the threat of a labor shortage.
As many as 53 UW-Madison students could be slapped with lawsuits by the music recording industry after a federal judge on Wednesday ordered the university to surrender their names and other information for sharing digital music files over the Internet.
Charles W. Steger, president of Virginia Tech, has spent more than a week responding to the April 16 shootings on his campus in which a student gunman killed 32 students and faculty members before taking his own life. No other college leader has had to confront a massacre of that scale.
In an interview with The Chronicle on Wednesday, Mr. Steger talked about the role of a president in a crisis of such magnitude, how he wants Virginia Tech and other institutions to learn from the external and internal reviews being conducted, and how he is trying to move the university forward.
If federal rule making negotiations were reported like baseball games, in the sports pages of the local newspaper â?? and letâ??s thank our lucky stars that theyâ??re not â?? the outcome of Wednesdayâ??s vote on transfer of credit policies during an Education Department negotiating session on accreditation would look, technically, like a loss for for-profit colleges and the national agencies that accredit them.
Because opposition by any single negotiator effectively means that a rule making panel has not endorsed a particular proposal, Judith S. Eatonâ??s â??noâ? vote on proposed regulatory language that would have required accreditors to ensure that the institutions they oversee do not discriminate in their transfer policies against academic credits of students from nationally (rather than regionally) accredited institutions meant that the committee did not formally endorse it.
When Loretta Medeiros’ financial aid letter from New York University arrived last summer, she remembers seeing just one lender mentioned: Citibank.
Assuming it was the only lender NYU worked with, Medeiros borrowed nearly $29,000 in a private loan for graduate school. But this year, when she needed $3,000 more, she decided to ask NYU if other lenders were available. The university directed her to a school website, where she says she found a lower-cost option that will save her money.
“I was kind of going in blind” in seeking loans, says Medeiros, 23. “I wish I’d known there were other options, instead of (the school) throwing a main bank in my face.”
Concerns that such students are paying too much for loans because of questionable ties between lenders and universities are reaching a boiling point. With New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo set to testify before a House panel today about his probe of the student-loan business, the industry could be on the verge of transformational change.
WASHINGTON — One week after a lone gunman killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech, a former chancellor of UW-Madison called for the creation of a national center for campus public safety.
David Ward, who headed the Madison campus from 1993 to 2000, joined other university advocates Monday at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on improving campus safety. Ward is now president of the American Council on Education, an advocacy group for higher education.
Colleges need better ways of spreading information in a crisis and improved means of dealing with students who are mentally ill, even as the schools balance the principles of academic openness with campus safety, witnesses told the Senate Homeland Security Committee yesterday.
The hearing, held a week after a rampage at Virginia Tech that left 33 dead, was intended to find ways to prevent further campus violence, said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the committee’s chairman.
Connecticut College senior Paul Dryden has known for years that he’d have lots of competition for an entry-level promotions job in New York’s music industry. So in a bid to get an edge last summer, he invented a job for himself. The job, as an intern in Universal Music’s Buenos Aires office, had never existed before Dryden proposed it. Yet because he was willing to work without pay, he got his foot in the door and was soon translating interviews with American rock stars for his boss, who didn’t speak English.
It’s too soon to know whether colleges and universities will re-examine admissions practices in light of the Virginia Tech killings. But last week’s tragedy in Blacksburg served as a stark reminder to Louis Hirsch, admissions director of the University of Delaware, that when it comes to spotting potential problems, “it’s very, very tough to create a foolproof net.”
Though colleges by law can’t reject students based on a disability, the massacre exposed a frustrating gap between what high schools may know and what colleges learn about an applicant.
Allegations of stalking, like those against Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui Cho, are common on college campuses, according to psychologists and police. The most widely cited national survey, published in 2000, found that 13% of college women said they had been stalked in the previous seven months, says the study’s primary author, Bonnie Fisher, a criminal justice professor at the University of Cincinnati. Stalking is generally defined as a repeated pattern of behavior or conduct that causes a reasonable person to feel fear, she says.
After last week’s Virginia Tech massacre, hundreds of colleges are considering a text-message emergency-alert system, and thousands of students have signed up for the cellphone service on campuses where it’s already in use. “The standard changes after Virginia Tech,” said Mark Rosenberg, chancellor of Florida’s state university system. He is asking the state Legislature for $1.5 million for new emergency-alert systems that include text-message notices for the 11 state-run campuses. Virginia Tech school officials did not alert students until more than two hours after the first 911 call reported a shooting at West Ambler Johnston Hall. Most schools including Virginia Tech warn students with e-mail, but that may not be read for hours.
Foreign applications to American graduate schools increased last year, but still fell short of reaching numbers before Sept. 11, 2001, according to a study released last week by the Council of Graduate Schools.
Women make only 80% of the salaries their male peers do one year after college; after 10 years in the workforce, the gap between men’s and women’s pay widens, according to a study released Monday. The study, by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, found that 10 years after college, women earn only 69% of what men earn.
Even after controlling for hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors known to affect earnings, the study found that one-quarter of the pay gap remains unexplained. The group said part of the gap is “likely due to sex discrimination.”
