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• March 21, 2010 12:00 PM Berkeley Students Vote to Divest From Israel

  

  According to an article by Dina Omar in The Electronic Intifada, apparently Berkeley’s Student Senate voted on Thursday to:

  Divest from companies that provide military support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Debate began the night before at 9:00pm and ended and six hours later when the vote was held at 3:00am. The session was attended by more than 150 students, educators and concerned community supporters, forcing the meeting to be relocated to a larger room. Ultimately, the bill passed with 16 senators in favor and 4 against.

  This was in response to what one student described as “Israel’s siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip.” The bill requests that the University of California’s board of regents divest from two particular companies, General Electric and United Technologies, both of which build equipment used by the Israeli military.

  Rabbi Abraham Cooper of Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization in Los Angeles, condemned the resolution, saying that:

  In a world filled with human rights abuses across Africa, Asia and the Americas, the UC Berkeley students vote to single out Israel for censure is hypocritical…. This resolution will not help the quality of life for a single Palestinian, but is intended to render Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, helpless to defend its citizens from attack by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists.

  In February 2009 Hampshire College became the first American university to officially stop investing in companies doing business with Israel.

  by Daniel Luzer tags Cal, endowments

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• March 20, 2010 12:00 PM Cal State Moves Remediation to Summer

  

  California State University will now require anyone who is unprepared to take remedial classes before they start college. According to an article by Lisa Krieger in the San Jose Mercury News:

  The California State University approved a controversial policy on Wednesday that requires academically needy students to take remedial math and English coursework before they start their freshman year.

  The new “Early Start” policy, which will start in 2012, demands that students who fail proficiency tests take CSU-sponsored courses their senior year in high school online or in summer school, before the start of the college freshman year.

  At first glance this policy appears to make some degree of sense. Currently most students who take remedial courses in college have a very hard time passing regular courses and never end up graduating. So maybe if they take the remedial courses before they get to college, they’ll be prepared once they get there for four years of academic success.

  Except that it probably won’t work. According to the article, it doesn’t look like other efforts like Early Start have worked, anywhere:

  “Even with the best of intentions, Early Start has been denounced by almost everyone I know,” said San Jose State University professor Stefan Frazier, who coordinates the university’s remedial English programs. “It is ineffectual. And it will cost more for students — most Cal State students spend their summers working and making money, so they can attend school in the fall. It will put a huge dent in their paycheck.”

  In addition, Cal State isn’t an open-admission system. If the students aren’t prepared to do college-level work, why is Cal State letting them in at all?

  by Daniel Luzer tags Cal State, remedial education

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• March 19, 2010 01:56 PM The For-Profit Fight

  Career College Association President Harris Miller is angry again. Two days ago the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle posted something on the magazine’s blog about the New York Times’s critical article about for-profit colleges that ran last week. McArdle wrote that:

  These institutions are sharks, praying on the most vulnerable members of society as they try to improve their earning power and get a toehold in the middle class. You often hear people claim that generous financial aid and student loan programs are necessary to help lower income people—but it is lower income people who are likely to find themselves trapped by one of these schemes.

  Miller complains that McArdle’s piece is biased, anecdotal, and sort of elitist.

  Miller is apparently becoming quite the journalism critic lately.

  by Daniel Luzer tags journalism, proprietary schools

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• March 19, 2010 01:25 PM Get Ready

  No Child Left Behind is a complicated law and the Obama administraton’s plan to reorganize it will have many many components.

  One proposed change has to do with college, sort of. Currently public schools must make “adequate yearly progress” in various subject areas. Under the Obama plan, schools will be measured such that the final outcome is students who are college and career ready. Washington Post columnist George Will thinks this is a little silly:

  But how does one fulfill — or know when one has fulfilled — Obama’s goal of “college and career readiness” for every child by 2020? That gauzy goal resembles the 1994 goal that by 2000 (when, Congress dreamily decreed, every school “will be free of drugs and violence”) every child would start school “ready to learn.” Is “college and career readiness” one goal or two? Should everybody go to college? Is a college degree equivalent to career -any career? -readiness?

  Will has a point. The reason for public education is, at least in its most basic sense, to prepare Americans for life after public education ends. While in theory college-ready makes more sense than mere progress (however “adequate” it may be), at this point college and career ready look pretty hard for federal policy to appropriately define.

  Vagaries and grand goals are not the ingredients that make for successful policies. As Will says, “Doubling down on dubious bets is characteristic of compulsive gamblers and federal education policy.” Let’s see if the Department of Education can find a way to give “college ready” and “career ready” real meaning.

  by Daniel Luzer tags high school, jobs training

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• March 19, 2010 12:40 PM $2 Billion Tokenism?

  It looks like America might be coming to the end of the health care fight. Now that the student loans and all sorts of college funding have been folded in by Congress, higher ed is watching the progress of the bill enthusiastically. While the American Graduation Initiative, and its roughly $12 billion for American community colleges, is gone, all is not lost.

  From an article in Community College Times comes news that:

  There is some good news for community colleges: The bill does include $2 billion specifically for public two-year colleges for training and education.

  “The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) strongly supports the reconciliation legislation and urges its member colleges to communicate this support to their members of Congress,” AACC said in an alert to member colleges. “By providing substantial funds to needy students and to our colleges, we believe this support is merited.”

  The proposed reconciliation bill would provide $500 million annually over fiscal years 2011-14 for the program for dislocated workers and those who may be laid off, according to AACC.

  This money has potential to be very helpful to the legions of laid-off workers now straining the budgets and facilities of American community colleges. Still, $2 billion won’t go very far in meeting Obama’s original goal of generating 5 million new community college graduates by 2020.

  by Daniel Luzer tags community colleges, healthcare, political

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• March 19, 2010 11:00 AM Wonder How You Manage to Make Ends Meet

  Madonna Constantine, the woman fired from a tenured position at Columbia University’s Teachers College two years ago after the school found that Constantine had plagiarized material written by her colleagues and students, has lost a lawsuit she brought against Columbia following her dismissal. The Associated Press reports that Constantine:

  …has lost one of her three lawsuits surrounding plagiarism accusations that got her fired.

  A Manhattan judge’s ruling says Teachers College officials acted within their authority in dismissing Madonna Constantine. The Columbia University-affiliated college says she copied work from colleagues and students.

  The judge’s ruling on the dismissed case was filed Tuesday.

  Teachers College says all of Constantine’s suits are baseless.

  Constantine actually has two more lawsuits pending. One is a $200 million New York State court definition case, the other is apparently a federal discrimination lawsuit.

  In 2007 a noose was found (passive voice used deliberately) on the door of Constantine’s Teachers College office. The university enthusiastically supported Constantine and made efforts to address apparent racial problems on campus.

  Constantine spoke to ABC News immediately after the noose incident, calling the incident “personal and degrading:”

  But then it turned out that Columbia had actually been investigating Constantine for plagiarism since 2005. She was sanctioned by the university in February 2008, and dismissed in June, 2008. She does not appear to have found a new position yet.

  “I would like the perpetrator to know I will not be silenced,” Constantine said after the noose incident. “I will not be silenced.” This was despite the fact that it didn’t really appear anyone would have any desire to silence Constantine, as her research was pretty uncontroversial.

  Columbia never discovered who put the noose on Constantine’s door.

  by Daniel Luzer tags Columbia, race, scholarship

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• March 19, 2010 10:00 AM The NCAA and the 40 Percent Solution

  

  On January 15th, Education Secretary (and former Harvard basketball player) Arne Duncan proposed that schools that graduated less than 40 percent of basketball players shouldn’t be eligible to participate National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. Duncan said:

  I propose … that if you don’t graduate X percent of your players - call it 40 percent as a starting point - that you’ll be ineligible for postseason competition. … Some folks might think that’s tough, but think about that. If you can’t graduate two out of five of your players, what are they doing at your university?

  Inside Higher Ed reports that by Duncan’s standard, 12 schools would be ineligible for this year’s tournament: Baylor, Clemson, Georgia Tech, New Mexico State, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Cal (apparently the graduation rate of Berkeley basketball players is a mere 20 percent), Kentucky, University of Louisville, UMaryland, Mizzou, University of Tennessee, and University of Washington.

  That’s 18 percent of schools. Wow.

  by Daniel Luzer tags Arne Duncan, college athletics

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• March 18, 2010 01:45 PM Bad News for Career Services

  College graduates are going to have a hard time finding jobs this spring. In an article for Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Reginald Stuart reports that:

  Gone are the days when even the best candidates at the best schools can be picky. College job fairs and career days, popular recruiting tools since the 1980s, are having a hard time drawing recruiters as their ranks thin. Signing bonuses and relocation allowances are now few and far between, if offered at all. Generous vacations and attractive employer-paid health and savings plans are a thing of the past.

  Indeed, the new world of work in America - which is expected to sustain a national unemployment rate of roughly 10 percent most of this year - is characterized by fewer recruiters and smaller recruitment events for colleges, fewer offers of full-time jobs, and more modest pay than before the nation’s economic slump began two years ago, career counselors say.

  In fact, with one job opening for every 5.4 job seekers, colleges are having a hard time even getting employers to show up for recruiting events.

  Meanwhile, Justin Lahart at the Wall Street Journal writes that even people who achieved new skills after being laid off last year are having trouble finding jobs.

  The hiring, if one can call it that, that does happen appears to be mostly in internships.

  by Daniel Luzer tags career services, economy, jobs training

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• March 18, 2010 01:22 PM Why Don’t Hispanics Graduate?

  Hispanic students still aren’t doing a terribly good job completing college. According to a New York Times article by Jacques Steinberg:

  The percentage of Hispanic students who graduate from college in six years or less continues to lag behind that of white students, according to a new study of graduation figures at more than 600 colleges.

  In the study, the American Enterprise Institute… found that 51 percent of those identified as Hispanic earned bachelor’s degrees in six years or less, compared with 59 percent of white students.

  This was apparently true no matter how selective the school the school. Only 83 percent of Hispanic students attending America’s most competitive colleges graduated in six years. Almost 90 percent of white students in similar institutions graduated in the same time frame.

  It remains a little unclear why graduation rates are still lower, despite much effort in this area. There apparently remain many, many barriers to educational success for Hispanics.

  The AEI study recommends, somewhat vaguely, that colleges implement “institution-wide commitment[s] to insuring that all their students graduate,” and that guidance counselors provide “information about schools that have a successful track record with Hispanic students.” AEI also has a more specific suggestion: disseminate federal financial aid based on a formula that has more to do with “how well schools serve their students, not simply how many students they enroll.”

  by Daniel Luzer tags college graduation, Hispanic, race

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• March 18, 2010 01:02 PM Student Lender Not Actually Sure if Direct Lending Will Cut Jobs

  Student lender Sallie Mae is very worried about the switch to direct lending that will result from passage of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA). One of Sallie Mae’s major lobbying points is that the change to direct lending will cut American jobs. Well it turns out Sallie Mae isn’t just lobbying congress; it also appears to have been lobbying its own employees. According to an article by Pedro de la Torre III and Erin Rosa at Campus Progress:

  While managing loan collections, two employees at the Muncie, Ind., office of Student Assistance Corporation (SAC), a Sallie Mae subsidiary, learned that they were in the middle of a political battle that pitted Sallie Mae against proponents of SAFRA….

  One former worker at SAC, who requested to remain anonymous… recalls the lending giant would send out e-mails to pressure employees into collecting signatures for an anti-SAFRA campaign. “It was quite pressure-filled. They had e-mails every day on how many teams [at the company] had how many signatures, who was doing well and who wasn’t,” he says.

  It’s probably worth pointing out that SAFRA might still be a good idea in the long run even if Sallie Mae has to cut jobs. The bill will certainly save money and generate more funds for actual financial aid. Still, the accuracy of the jobs loss scare is questionable. Direct lending might actually be creating more jobs.

  In fact, even Sallie Mae doesn’t appear to be sure if direct lending will hurt jobs. A year ago, according to the Campus Progress article, Sallie Mae told an Indiana paper it wasn’t planning to eliminate any jobs:

  Despite President Barack Obama’s intention to end government subsidies for student loan companies, a spokesman for Sallie Mae said she doesn’t expect the lender’s local office to be affected.

  “Sallie Mae proudly employs more than 725 Hoosiers in Muncie,” spokesman Martha Holler told the Star Press. “Our plans there remain unchanged.

  What’s really going on here?

  by Daniel Luzer tags Sallie Mae, student lending, student loan industry

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