A very uncomfortable moment occurred when the ethnic breakdown of new admits was being discussed. On one of the charts, it showed that the percentages of new freshman who are Asian American, Latino/Chicano, African American, and American Indian have all gone up; however, next to Caucasian, there was no arrow. A regent asked why the percentage of white students didn’t also go up? I thought to myself, doesn’t he realize that you can’t have the percentage of all of the groups go up; after all, some group has to go down. Yet, in the delusional thinking of the regents, they should be able to increase every group, while they commit themselves to decreasing undergraduate enrollments.
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by Bob Samuels, Changing Universities.
Posted: July 16th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
A record number of out-of-state and international students are planning to enroll as University of California freshmen in the fall, the result of a controversial effort by the revenue-hungry university to garner the much higher tuition that nonresident students must pay. More than 8% of UC’s projected 37,151 freshmen will be from out of state or overseas, up from 6% for the school year just ended.
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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 15th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Despite earlier warnings from professors and instructors that taking UC online would destroy the university’s good name and quality, several regents said they were convinced of just the opposite: that UC has the brainpower – and the motives – to develop the nation’s first highly selective, Web-based degree program for undergraduates. They largely agreed with the plan’s leader, UC Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, that an online degree program could save UC money while expanding access to far-flung, tuition-paying students "from Kentucky to Kuala Lumpur."
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: July 15th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
UC, the jewel of the state’s higher-education system, has been one of the major casualties of the recession and the state’s financial crisis. In 2004, the governor signed an agreement with UC called the Higher Education Compact, which laid out the amount of funding the UC would receive for the next six years, providing for a 2.5 percent per year growth in total enrollments. But full funding as promised by the Compact has not come through since the 2007-08 state budget, despite rising costs and a growing student body.
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by Max Theiler, Capitol Weekly.
Posted: July 15th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The drop in Latinos, California’s fastest-growing group, was believed to be due in part to Berkeley’s shift toward nonresident students, who pay much higher tuition and are overwhelmingly white or Asian. About 23 percent of next year’s freshman class is expected to come from out of state, a sea change for a campus that enrolled only 11 percent of those students a year ago.
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by Josh Keller, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted: July 14th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Conflicts of interest almost always involve money, but sometimes they raise more questions about the subjects’ perspective than about their wallets. Consider the large investments University of California Regent Richard C. Blum has made in two for-profit higher education companies, Career Education Corp. and ITT Educational Services Inc… But what do these investments say about Blum’s vision for higher education? Should an important official of what is arguably the most prestigious system of public higher education in the world also be a leading financial backer of an industry that has been coming under intense regulatory scrutiny because of persistent allegations of fraud?
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by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 14th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Haven’t we heard this story before? It features a high-pressure sales force persuading consumers in search of the American dream to go deep into debt to purchase a product of often dubious value. Default rates are sky high. Taxpayer money is squandered. Top executives walk away with fortunes. This sounds like a description of the subprime mortgage industry, which came crashing down two years ago. But what I just described is the reality at many for-profit colleges.
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by Tom Harkin, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 13th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
At UC Berkeley, where academic departments are not allowed to run deficits, cost-cutting looks like this: 63 chronic roof leaks around campus, once-a-month garbage collection, some staff paychecks hovering near the poverty line and faculty phone lines yanked. Berkeley’s athletic department has no such deficit prohibition. Even as its $70 million budget soared by 61 percent during the recession, it still managed to spend more than it had.
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: July 13th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
California Community Colleges’ deal with for-profit Kaplan University has a few catches — among them Kaplan’s higher costs and the question of whether its credits would even be transferable… But there’s a better way to protect the students — by giving the community colleges adequate state funding, so they’re not forced to fill their course requirements at institutions that keep one eye on academics and the other on the main chance.
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by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 4th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
From BP to Goldman, boards have become hot seats for college presidents. As much as higher education and corporate America would like to be engaged, college presidents are struggling to reconcile the demands and values of academia with shareholder skepticism about their boardroom commitments… "Universities are feeling the pressure for fundraising, and they think creating these linkages will bring them more philanthropy, although there’s no evidence to suggest that actually happens."
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by Janet Lorin, Bloomberg News.
Posted: July 3rd, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
