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.

Any affiliations entered into by a publicly funded system that allow religious considerations to outweigh scientific and medical judgments are improper — and according to the state constitution and statutes, quite possibly illegal. Instead of reaching an agreement, the working group splintered. It ended up submitting two options for the UC administration and regents to choose from: Option 1, favored by those who think the university should find a way to collaborate with religious healthcare institutions, and Option 2, which explicitly places UC’s nondiscriminatory values above any and all religious restrictions.

Read full article [here].
by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 30th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The AFT, alongside Student Defense, a legal and advocacy organization for students, said DeVos had pushed through “a repeal riddled with errors and unfounded assertions” of the Gainful Employment Rule. The rule, enacted in 2014, required colleges and universities to maintain a certain student debt-to-earning ratio, according to NBC News. The rule also effectively blocked for-profit colleges from receiving aid under the Higher Education Act Title IV student programs, in addition to other regulations for colleges and universities. DeVos repealed the law in June, after previously delaying regulations that imposed requirements on for-profit colleges and universities.

Read full article [here].
by Marina Pitofsky, The Hill.

Posted: January 24th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In recent years, the number of students enrolled in higher education has declined and the cost of attending college has stabilized relative to people’s incomes, Moody’s analysts said. But borrowers have been slow to pay back their debt, meaning student loan balances will keep growing over the years… “The growth in student loans has slowed in recent years as states have invested more in public colleges, but millions of students continue to struggle with their debts,” Debbie Cochrane, executive vice president of the organization, said in a statement at the time. The student loan debt burden, Moody’s analysts said, is “weighing on household finances and the broader economy.”

Read full article [here].
by Harmeet Kaur, CNN.

Posted: January 19th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.