May 15, 2008
GAO Report Says Community Colleges Are Crucial in Training the Work Force
Community colleges continue to meet the needs of local industry through specific technical training, according to a report issued today by the Government Accountability Office.
In the report, the GAO surveyed 20 community colleges and found that they met the needs stipulated in the Workforce Investment Act through customized training of workers from specific employers, teaming up with small businesses, and specifically modeling their educational programs to suit their local populations. Money for the programs has come from both the Education and Labor Departments.
According to the report, community colleges operate 11 percent of one-stop centers for employment assistance started under the Workforce Investment Act, and will continue to be key players in training future employees. —Hurley Goodall
Posted on Thursday May 15, 2008 | Permalink | CommentMedical School for Physician-Scientists Will Offer Free Tuition
The Cleveland Clinic’s medical school will offer full-tuition scholarships to all of its students in an effort to encourage more people to pursue careers in academic medicine, the clinic announced today.
The free-tuition offer, which will begin with the class that enters in July, will initially be supported through endowment income and clinical revenues. The clinic hopes eventually to pay for it entirely through endowment income. Students will still pay about $22,000 a year for living expenses, fees, books, and equipment.
“The average debt for students graduating from private U.S. medical schools, such as the Lerner College of Medicine, is more than $150,000, making many graduates less likely to pursue careers in academic medicine,” said Delos M. (Toby) Cosgrove, president of the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western University. “By providing full-tuition support, we want to ensure that debt does not hinder the ability of our graduates to pursue academic careers as physician scientists.”
In 2002 the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Case Western Reserve University announced that they were opening a new medical school to train physicians and scientists for clinical-research careers. The school accepted its first students in 2004. —Katherine Mangan
Posted on Thursday May 15, 2008 | Permalink | CommentMay 14, 2008
Chronicle Reporter Honored for Coverage of Minority Issues
Peter Schmidt, a senior writer at The Chronicle, has received a national award for his coverage of minority issues. Lincoln University, a historically black college in Missouri, confers the Unity Awards in Media annually for coverage of issues affecting members of minority groups and people with disabilities. Mr. Schmidt won the Unity Award for education reporting for a series of articles on affirmative action in higher education in 2006:
- “The Bush White House Picks Its Civil-Rights Fights Carefully” (5/19/2006)
- “A Referendum on Race Preferences Divides Michigan” (10/27/2006)
- “U. of Michigan Is Accused of Continued Discrimination in Admissions” (10/27/2006)
- “ETS Accused of Squelching New Approach on Racial Bias” (11/10/2006)
- “Michigan Overwhelmingly Adopts Ban on Affirmative-Action Preferences” (11/17/2006)
New Ads Encourage High-School Students to Sign Up for Tough Courses
A series of public-service announcements aimed at encouraging low-income high-school students to sign up for challenging courses began airing today, courtesy of the Advertising Council, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the American Council on Education.
The advertisements, which target students who would be the first in their families to attend college, are part of a multimedia campaign designed to raise public awareness of the steps required to prepare for college. The ads feature warrior characters personifying algebra II, biology, and foreign languages. A companion Web site has “biographies” of the warriors as well as videos that take a humorous look at the subject areas. Both the ads and the videos will be featured on YouTube.
The campaign, dubbed KnowHow2Go, began in January 2007. In its first year, donated media support totaled $69.6-million, ranking KnowHow2Go among the Ad Council’s top-supported campaigns. —Kelly Field
Posted on Wednesday May 14, 2008 | Permalink | CommentCollege-Preparatory Programs Can Learn From Technical Education, Report Says
High schools could better prepare many students for college and careers by adopting the applied teaching strategies used by career- and technical-education programs, according to a new report from the Southern Regional Education Board.
The report says many students would have an easier time learning academic skills if their teachers applied two strategies commonly used by good career and technical programs: project-based learning and problem solving. Because a growing number of technical jobs require advanced academic skills, career- and technical-education programs would benefit from changes in teaching that kept students more engaged in their regular academic classes.
Among its recommendations, the report urges states to create panels composed of high-school and college educators and employers in high-demand fields. Their charge would be to design high-school courses that blended academic and technical content and to encourage students to pursue specialized career preparation after they graduate. —Peter Schmidt
Posted on Wednesday May 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]Mr. Mayor Is a Freshman
John Tyler Hammons could have spent his first year of college playing around on Facebook, like everybody else. Instead, he decided to run for office.
On Tuesday, Mr. Hammons, a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, was elected mayor of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in the northeastern part of the state. Mr. Hammons, 19, won 70 percent of the vote over his opponent, according to the Associated Press.
“The public placing their trust in me is the greatest, humbling, and most awesome experience I’ve ever had in my life,” said Mr. Hammons, a native of Muskogee.
A student’s winning election as mayor is not unprecedented in recent years. But alas, the University of Oklahoma, in Norman, may not get to brag about him for long: Mr. Hammons said he expected to transfer to a college closer to Muskogee. —Eric Hoover
Posted on Wednesday May 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [10]May 12, 2008
Roman Catholic College Disinvites Pro-Choice Speaker
A South Dakota state senator was supposed to deliver the commencement address at Presentation College on Saturday. But, at the last minute, the Roman Catholic college withdrew its invitation because of the senator’s pro-choice views on abortion.
According to The Aberdeen News, a South Dakota newspaper, Sen. Nancy Turbak Berry was told the decision stemmed from her failure to share the Vatican’s stance that abortion should be illegal. Ms. Berry said she considers abortion a “very personal” decision.
The college replaced her with a much-safer choice: the bishop of the Sioux Falls Catholic Diocese. That move was in keeping with a trend, as reported today in The Boston Globe, of Catholic colleges’ steering clear of on-campus speakers with un-Catholic views, often under pressure from outside groups. —Thomas Bartlett
Posted on Monday May 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [47]May 10, 2008
N.C. Community Colleges May Admit Illegal Immigrants, Federal Agency Says
After two days of confusion over whether North Carolina’s 58 community colleges may admit illegal immigrants, federal officials cleared the air somewhat on Friday, stating that “it is left for the school to decide whether or not to enroll” those students, The News & Observer reported today.
In a statement released by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the officials said, “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not require any school to determine a student’s status.” The statement, issued at the request of the newspaper, noted that illegal immigrants were subject to being prosecuted and deported. But the statement said colleges were not required to report such students unless they had violated the terms of their student visas under the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.
Earlier this week, a lawyer in the North Carolina attorney general’s office issued a letter advising the colleges to drop their policy of admitting all illegal immigrants who meet the institutions’ other eligibility criteria. The lawyer said the policy appeared to conflict with federal law.
The letter, which said admission should be limited to students who meet standards outlined in federal law, contradicted a community-college policy based on a 1997 opinion by the state’s attorney general at the time — Michael F. Easley, a Democrat who is now governor. Governor Easley said this week that the colleges should continue enrolling illegal immigrants while any confusion over federal law was sorted out.
In a short statement on Friday, the state attorney general’s office said that its advisory letter earlier in the week had told colleges to “rely on the Department of Homeland Security for guidance,” The News & Observer reported.
Also on Friday, community-college officials released a new estimate of how many illegal immigrants were enrolled in the system: 112 out of 297,000 degree-seeking students. —Andrew Mytelka
Posted on Saturday May 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [24]May 8, 2008
New Study on College-Going Rates Gives Mom Something Else to Worry About
Here’s a novel line for a Mother’s Day card: “Thanks, Mom, for loving me so much I never earned a college degree.”
Implausible as it might seem, a new study suggests that there might be some truth to such a sentiment. Based on the survey responses of more than 13,800 young Texans polled during their senior year of high school and then again a year later, the study concludes that seniors who reported having good relationships with their mothers and fathers were actually less likely than others to enroll in a four-year college.
Yep, it’s true: Parents just can’t win.
One reason such findings are counterintuitive is that a large body of other research shows that children who have good relationships with their parents do better at school. The new study — by Ruth N. López Turley, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Matthew Desmond, a doctoral student in the department — reached the same conclusion, finding that students who reported getting along well with the folks generally reported having better grades and higher class rankings than their peers did.
How, then, does a strong parent-child relationship hurt college-going prospects? It makes a high-school senior substantially more likely to express a strong desire to live at home during college. And those seniors who said it was important to them to live at home after high school were more than 40 percent less likely to enroll in a four-year college than their peers were.
The study found that many other traits — including socioeconomic disadvantage, being foreign-born, or not having degree aspirations — increased the likelihood that a young person would not want to leave the nest right after high school. Above and beyond the effects of such factors, Hispanic students were more than twice as likely as white students to report that it was important for them to stay home, suggesting that culture also plays an important role.
But, after using regression analysis to separate out the other possible factors, the researchers found that the unwillingness to leave home that comes from having good relationships with the parents has a negative-enough influence on college-going to cancel out the positive influence derived from the higher academic performance associated with such family relations.
In a paper summarizing their findings and submitted to the American Sociological Review, Ms. Turley and Mr. Desmond say: “Through our research, a paradox has come to light: Strong family ties, considered vital to a child’s success in school, can serve as an impediment to a child’s educational attainment. Parents who strive to develop an encouraging and communicative relationship with their children might produce a high-school honors student but not a four-year college graduate.” —Peter Schmidt
Posted on Thursday May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [30]May 7, 2008
Bush Signs Student-Loan Bailout Bill Into Law
Washington — President Bush signed into law this morning legislation that aims to avert a shortfall in student loans.
The law, which the House and Senate passed swiftly and which Mr. Bush endorsed in a radio address, seeks to stem the departure of loan companies from the federally guaranteed student-loan program and to reassure families that student loans will be available in the fall. More than 50 lenders have left the federal program in recent weeks, amid a credit crunch that has spread from the housing market to the student-loan industry.
To encourage lenders to remain in the federal program, the law allows the secretary of education to buy loans that lenders have struggled to sell to investors. The law also clarifies that the Education Department has the authority to advance federal funds to guarantee agencies, so those agencies could make loans, if necessary, under a “lender of last resort” system.
The law will ease the process of applying for a student loan under such a system, allowing the secretary to designate emergency lenders of last resort on a collegewide basis, rather than student by student. —Kelly Field
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [5]
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