WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 – An Alabama heiress who says she is fed up with corrupt corporate culture is providing college scholarships to students with as low as a C average, as long as they have a record of service to family and community.
Venture capital is agony and ecstasy, bust and boom, the stress of gambling and the thrill of a front-row view on the latest technologies. And when real money is involved, it’s also one of the hottest classes on business school campuses.
Wisconsin’s congressional delegation should lead a campaign to undo the damage done by the federal Education Department when it cut the student aid program know as Pell Grants to more than a million college students.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association gave preliminary approval on Monday to a plan to take scholarships away from Division I sports teams when their players flunk their courses. That was the highlight of a flurry of meetings here in which delegates from all three divisions of the NCAA considered rules changes.
Wisconsin’s education leaders – from the K-12 system and all types of higher education – are banding together to protest changes in federal rules that will eliminate Pell grants for about 5,500 needy college students in the state this fall and reduce aid to many others.
Myles Brand, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, told people attending its convention here on Saturday that the following are myths: that college sports are more about sports than college, that college sports are only about the money and that athletes are pawns, that amateur sports are no more, and that Mr. Brand himself is the czar of college sport
When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in 2003 backing the use of race in college admissions, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Georgia took particular interest in the mechanics of the ruling.
At the time, both public universities were operating under federal-court orders prohibiting them from considering a student’s race in making admissions offers. With those decisions supplanted by the Supreme Court ruling, the institutions were free to return to race-conscious policies.
If you are employed full time by a selective college, there is a good chance that your institution is willing to bend its admissions standards to enroll your child.
Aetos Technologies Inc. pulled the wraps off a new high-tech microscope accessory last month at a scientific conference in Washington, D.C. But the unveiling of the company’s first product is probably far less significant than the existence of Aetos itself.
WASHINGTON – The American welcome mat is still out for international students, and for the first time since 9/11 the number of students taking advantage of it has gone up.
NCAA President Myles Brand is calling for sanity where he thinks it has often seemed lacking in big-time college athletics ââ?¬â? in spending. Warning that the days of escalating TV rights fees are near an end and profit margins are shrinking or disappearing.
The jobs market is uneven, and the U.S. education system needs a tune-up. What to do? The most intelligent answer may not be found within the nation’s most august learning institutions. The answer might be vocational education.
After the terrorist attacks of 2001, many believed the government’s more stringent visa policy would complicate life for international students….Numbers of international students at UW-Madison and at other U.S. universities have been declining recently. But, at least at UW, it isn’t because of bureacratic holdups. (1/5/05 Capital Times)
The Christmas Eve news that the Bush administration is going to cut back on Pell grants for low-income students this year underscored just how out of kilter this country has become.
We’re spending billions upon billions fighting a war that should never have been started and lavishing billions upon billions on giving the least needy people in America breaks on their income taxes. As is almost always the case, the people who can afford it least wind up bearing the burden.
The stereotypically cutthroat, competitive world of law school is largely fiction, a study suggests, with most first-year law students saying faculty members are helpful and sympathetic.
Neglect is defined in state law as the failure, refusal, or inability by one to provide necessary care for another. Wisconsin’s governor and Legislature are guilty of 160,000 counts of “neglect” in terms of UW System students and campuses.
CHICAGO ââ?¬â?? One education publication dubbed it the “December surprise”: Two days before Christmas, the Bush administration announced it was revising the formulas for its Pell Grants – the federal government’s primary aid vehicle for America’s neediest college students – in a way that may leave 1.3 million students receiving a smaller amount, and 90,000 off the rolls altogether.
NEW YORK – Brennan Taylor has a good job, but spending $200 on his daughter’s seventh birthday seems like “an awful lot.”
A 2002 survey of recent graduates by student loan company Nellie Mae found that the average student loan burden for a bachelor’s degree was $18,900, up 66 percent from five years earlier.
For UW-Madison students who took out student loans, the figure was $17,528 for the 2003-2004 school year.
Frustrated with the level of public support for his institution, the new dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school says he would like to partly privatize the school to allow it to raise more money and to control how that money is spent. (Subscription required.)
Reading and ‘rithmetic are still the superstars in education these days. Under federal law, just about every public school third- through eighth-grader in America will be tested in those two areas, starting next year. But writing also is on the front burner again in American education. Anyone who thought a few years ago that television and technology would be the death knell of the written word, especially among kids, was unduly alarmed.
Dear Editor: The AP story by Justin Pope, “Thunder from the campus right,” published in the Capital Times Dec. 28, cites the case of Columbia University, where our film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” documented the harassment and intimidation of students by professors hostile to Israel.
But this is not…a case of “liberal vs. conservative (writes Charles Jacobs, president of The David Project in Boston)…. It has to do with the dominance in many of our country’s Middle East studies departments by Arabists and radicals, and the indifference of university administrators.
A Chinese student studying at Harvard had to go back home last year to attend his father’s funeral. It took him five months to get permission from U.S. immigration authorities to return to his studies here.
It’s stories like that that are causing a drastic drop in the number of foreign students studying at universities in the United States.
COLLEGES are taking their battle for high school seniors to the Web and beyond.
Most of us work harder at our jobs when we can see we are succeeding. So Wisconsin policy-makers and business executives should work harder on the job of economic development in the upcoming year than their counterparts in any surrounding state.
As many as 90,000 students could be disqualified from receiving Pell Grants and other forms of federal and state financial assistance under a change that the Bush administration has made in the formula the government uses to calculate a student’s need for aid.
Two days before Christmas, the U.S. Education Department announced in the Federal Register that it had, for the first time in a decade, updated the amount it allows families to deduct for state and local tax payments when applying for financial aid. (Subscription required.)
In the wildlife clinic at Tufts University’s veterinary school, Mark Pokras is slicing into the stomach of a North Atlantic seabird to see whether it might have succumbed to environmental or biological toxins. After getting past the snowy-white feathers of the emaciated gannet (similar to a pelican), he pokes around for signs of poisoning or accidental ingestion of foreign objects, like lead fishing sinkers or plastic fragments. (Subscription required.)
After resisting for 18 months, PeopleSoft Inc. agreed in December to merge with the Oracle Corporation. The news came as a disappointment to many college officials, who are wary of Oracle’s gaining control over PeopleSoft’s human-resource and business-finance software products, which are widely used in higher education and which compete with Oracle’s own offerings. (Subscription required.)
The village of Potosi has tourism potential. But like many rural communities, it doesn’t have much capital to invest in developing it.
UW-Platteville has always made itself available to help surrounding communities, said Duane Ford, dean of the College of Business, Industry, Life Science and Agriculture. Five years ago, however, the business of helping became official with the formation of the Community University Partnership.
Colleges were closed for the holidays; students, professors, and administrators were on vacation; and even The Chronicle took some time off. But news kept happening. Here’s a rundown of what you may have missed over the last two weeks. (Subcription required.)
Higher education has had a nasty headache, like the one that follows a night of partying. The headache stemmed from state budget problems, a depressed stock market, and anemic donations that followed the flush years of the late 1990s. But the pain is fading, and the New Year has a healthier glow. (Subscription required.)
With each failed click of his computer mouse, Glenn Paetow grew more concerned.
On Dec. 1, with a midnight deadline looming to submit online applications to the University of Maryland, Paetow kept getting blocked from the school’s admissions Web site. In his bedroom, he shot off instant messages to friends who were also applying at the last minute to the College Park campus, and they were having the same problem.
Jennifer de Silva of Racine has spoken with her husband by phone five times since he was swept up in the earthquake-driven waves of death that hit the coast of Sri Lanka on Sunday morning. …
On Tuesday, a day when the death toll soared above 58,000, the University of Wisconsin-Madison had not yet confirmed the whereabouts of 19 students who were studying in India.
At the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sue over a reading assignment they say offends their Christian beliefs. In Colorado and Indiana, a national conservative group publicizes student allegations of left-wing bias by professors. Faculty get hate mail and are pictured in mock “wanted” posters; at least one college says a teacher received a death threat. The episodes…all touch on an issue of growing prominence on college campuses.
The UW Foundation has received a $15,000 grant from the Helen Bader Foundation to develop and eight-week summer externship in dementia care for medical students.
SAN JOSE, CALIF. The Internet company that famously promised to “do no evil” is on a new mission to digitize the collections of some of the nation’s leading research institutions and establish a massive online reading room.
The recent Wisconsin State Journal story on county health rankings carried the headline “Go to college and you might live longer.” It displayed data that in Dane County, people with less than a high school education are three more times likely to die before age 65 than those with more than a high school education. How could a social factor like education be so important in producing longer and healthier lives?
Kindig is an emeritus professor of the UW-Madison Medical School’s Department of Population Health Sciences.
A legal confrontation is playing out here as a student organization seeks official recognition and money from a state-run university even though the students plan to exclude non-Christians and gays.
….Once, it was liberal campus activists who cited the importance of “diversity” in pressing their agendas for curriculum change. Now, conservatives have adopted much of the same language in calling for a greater openness to their viewpoints.
The Department of Education yesterday announced a new formula for calculating eligibility for college financial aid, a move that will eliminate federal Pell Grant scholarships for an estimated 80,000 to 90,000 low-income students and force a modest scaling back of other types of state and federal assistance to broader categories of undergraduates.
Federal changes in the financial aid formula for low-income college students will result in bigger cuts in Wisconsin than in 43 other states, an analysis by the U.S. Department of Education shows. Steve Van Ess, University of Wisconsin-Madison director of student financial services, estimated that about 2,000 low-income students at UW-Madison will lose an average of 13% of their Pell Grant, or about $250 to $300 a year, as a result of the new formula.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison administration and students are worried that government cutbacks in the Pell Grants program will further erode the ability of the average citizen to afford a college education.
College students in virtually every state will be required to shoulder more of the cost of their education under new federal rules that govern most of the nation’s financial aid.
Because of the changes, which take effect next fall and are expected to save the government $300 million in the 2005-6 academic year, at least 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell Grants, the nation’s primary scholarship for those of low income, according to two analyses of the new rules.
UW-Madison students studying abroad this year in Thailand and India appear to be safe, although the scope of Sunday’s earthquake and tidal waves in southern Asia made for some tense moments for friends and faculty advisers in Madison.
College students in virtually every state will be required to shoulder more of the cost of their education under new federal rules that govern most of the nation’s financial aid.
Because of the changes, which take effect next fall and are expected to save the government $300 million in the 2005-6 academic year, at least 1.3 million students will receive smaller Pell Grants, the nation’s primary scholarship for those of low income, according to two analyses of the new rules.
UW Medical School Dean Dr. Phillip Farrell said Tuesday he will step down next December. There will be a national search for his replacement. (Wisconsin State Journal)
In a major shakeup of top leadership in the University of Wisconsin System, Linda Weimer announced Tuesday she is leaving her job as vice president for university relations effective Feb. 1…. System president Kevin Reilly said he would not replace Weimer. (Wisconsin State Journal)
University of Wisconsin Medical School Dean Dr. Philip Farrell is expected to relinquish his post in December 2005. That’s when Farrell’s second five-year term will end. He said in an interview he would stay until June 2006 if a successor is not in place. He is the fourth longest-serving Medical School dean in the nation.
The University of Wisconsin System’s university relations chief will continue drawing her pay for a year after she steps down in February.
Vice President of University Relations Linda Weimer announced Tuesday she will leave the job Feb. 1. She plans to take a position to help launch a collaborative initiative by a number of national education groups, including the American Council on Education and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Starting next month, UW- Madison will be the only Big Ten university that does not offer health insurance for the partners of its gay and lesbian staff. It’s a distinction school officials say will hurt the university’s ability to recruit and retain employees.
Penn State University, the only other holdout, will add it as an official benefit, likely in January. Penn State now offers such coverage using private donations.
Health insurance for domestic partners is not allowed for state employees, including at the university, under Wisconsin law. Coupled with the state’s long-standing, lower- than-average salaries, it hurts the university’s competitive edge, school officials said.
American universities, which for half a century have attracted the world’s best and brightest students with little effort, are suddenly facing intense competition as higher education undergoes rapid globalization.
On a palm tree at the University of South Florida’s St. Petersburg campus, a squirrel munches on an acorn. A few feet below, three students quietly assemble their equipment.
IRVINE, Calif. – So far, not a single person has been helped by human embryonic stem cells.
But in cramped university labs, a young neurobiologist with movie-star good looks, a Carl Sagan-like fondness for the popular media and an entrepreneur’s nose for profits is getting tantalizingly close.
SACRAMENTO — A new gold rush is poised to begin in California, where scientists and an eager biotech industry are preparing to stake their claim to a share of $3 billion in voter-approved funding for stem cell research that many hope will lead to a trove of scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs. (Login required.)
Fearful that California’s investment in stem cell science will sap Maryland’s biotech industry, two lawmakers are proposing legislation to dedicate $25 million a year to helping the state’s scientists pursue the promising but controversial research.
Quoted: Terry Devitt, a spokesman for the University of Wisconsin. (Login required.)
Of the many complaining questions that faculty members ask, the one I used to hear most often was, “Why do you administrators make so much more money than we do?” The answer is simple: Administrators work harder, they have more work to do, and they actually do it. (Subscription required.)
…The pack of about 40 caroling University of Wisconsin students had a message for the governor: Give the UW more state funding, and decrease or freeze tuition. In Doyle’s last budget, the university took a $250 million cut, and raised tuition by 37.5 percent over two years to help cover that cut.
Last May, the University of Michigan pulled out all the stops when it announced its drive, dubbed The Michigan Difference, to raise $2.5 billion. More than 1,000 wealthy alums and friends packed the glittering kickoff, while former President Gerald Ford — a Michigan grad — and his wife Betty were introduced as honorary chairs of the campaign. But for all the hoopla, the real drive had been under way for almost four years and had already netted $1.3 billion.
End race-based scholarships Race and ethnicity-based admissions practices are permitted under certain conditions by last year’s Supreme Court decision in the University of Michigan case. By contrast, race and ethnicity-based scholarship programs are in clear violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin.
W. Lee Hansen, Madison
State, Union, refuse to budge over health care premium issue.
The University of Wisconsin’s teaching assistants say they’re frustrated that talks with the state over a new contract haven’t resumed in seven months
Two Midwestern universities announced on Thursday that they had received gifts of about $50-million. An anonymous graduate of Creighton University, in Omaha, Neb., pledged $50-million for “emerging national leadership among faith-based universities,” while the Lilly Endowment gave Indiana University at Bloomington a $53-million grant for life-sciences research.
