Over the weekend, young MAGA operative Charlie Kirk and undercover conservative trickster James O’Keefe put out calls in widely circulated tweets for conservative college students to take advantage of new online classes by recording their professors… The threat of having recorded Zoom classes taken out of context online ups the ante, however, with the likelihood of those segments being turned into Fox News clips that are then weaponized against academic institutions… “For all the concern these days that conservatives are expressing for free expression in universities, activities such as these seem to indicate a different interest in the suppression of views,” Tiede said.

Read full article [here].
by Will Sommer, The Daily Beast.

Posted: March 25th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Declaring that it would be unseemly to raise tuition during the current national health emergency, leaders of the ten-campus University of California system on Wednesday withdrew their proposal to increase costs for the next five incoming freshmen classes. However, the tuition plan — which originally was scheduled for a vote Thursday — may be revived at a later date, they said. The regents’ next meeting is expected to be in May.

Read full article [here].
by Larry Gordon, Ed Source.

Posted: March 18th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Online education has been alternately hailed as the wave of the future, a way to deliver relevant curriculum to the masses at a lower cost, and disparaged as an inferior, Mickey Mouse version of “real” study that leaves some of the most vulnerable students behind. Now California is about to embark on an enormous, unplanned experiment in remote learning — and no one knows how long it will last.

Read full article [here].
by Vanessa Arredondo , Felicia Mello and Janelle Salanga, CalMatters.

Posted: March 17th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

It’s not fair that we should be charged full tuition. We pay money for going to classes, seeing professors and having one to one meetings during office hours,” said Oganesian, a biology major from Los Angeles. The online experience is a lesser one and should not cost as much as regular classes, she said, adding: “If I had wanted to go to an online school, I would have done that.”

Read full article [here].
by Larry Gordon, Ed Source.

Posted: March 17th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., chair of the House’s education committee, introduced a bill Monday that would give colleges $1.2 billion in emergency aid for students affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Colleges could also receive part of an additional $1.2 billion that would help K-12 and postsecondary institutions plan for closures and make sure buildings are safe for students’ return. The bill comes as colleges scramble to move their classes online to help stem the outbreak of COVID-19, the respiratory illness the virus causes.

Read full article [here].
by Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive.

Posted: March 17th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

All 23 California State University campuses and all nine University of California campuses with undergraduate courses have now made plans to move classes online in response to the spread of the coronavirus… CSU Chancellor Tim White said in a statement Tuesday that all face-to-face classes on all Cal State campuses will be discontinued and converted to virtual modes, including lab courses.

Read full article [here].
by Michael Burke, EdSource.

Posted: March 17th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The University of California’s faculty leaders, after a yearlong review, have recommended keeping the SAT and ACT in UC admissions. Yes, there have long been concerns that test scores are influenced by family income, parents’ education and race. But the faculty task force found that the UC system has been able to offset such bias by including other relevant factors in admissions. I believe that as a practical matter, eliminating the tests could make inequities worse. Doing so would mean relying more heavily on other measures that are equally biased or more so, like high school grades.

Read full article [here].
by Kim Wilcox, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: February 18th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The original intent of the SAT was to identify students who came from outside relatively privileged circles who might have the potential to succeed in university,” said the report. “This original intent is clearly being realized at UC.” Furthermore, authors said, analysis showed that test scores were better predictors of outcomes for underrepresented groups than for majority groups. Dropping the tests without any other changes, the authors concluded, would result in an average incoming student with a lower first-year GPA, lower probability of graduating within seven years and a lower GPA at graduation. Subsidies and waivers for California students would need to increase to account for the average student taking longer to graduate. Providing support for at-risk students would be more difficult, they said, because those students would be harder to identify.

Read full article [here].
by Lilah Burke, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: February 4th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Last month, Abigail Thompson, a professor of mathematics and department chair at the University of California, Davis, wrote a scathing opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal calling out the university’s ideological litmus test for job applicants. She suggested that the university’s requirement that aspiring faculty members submit “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” statements amounts to a political “loyalty oaths.” … In one recent search at UC Berkeley employing substantially similar evaluation techniques to those that UC Davis used, there were 893 qualified applicants who submitted complete applications that met the basic job requirements. Of those applicants, 679 were eliminated solely because their diversity statements were deemed inadequate.

Read full article [here].
by Daniel Ortner, The Hill.

Posted: February 3rd, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The move comes after a damning Government Accountability Office review, first reported by NPR. In that 2019 review, the federal watchdog found that during the expansion program’s first year, the department turned away 99% of applicants. The change — which the department posted to the Federal Register without a news release or other public announcement — will address one of the most alarming revelations in the GAO’s review: 71% of denials were essentially due to a paperwork technicality. According to the GAO, more than 38,000 applicants were denied relief under the expansion — known as Temporary Expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness (TEPSLF) — simply because they hadn’t first applied for and been denied PSLF. The department’s fix is to consolidate the two programs into one application form so that borrowers applying for TEPSLF will no longer have to first file a separate application for PSLF.

Posted: January 31st, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.