UC claims to generate nearly 10% of all published research in the United States. The university also has been a significant partner of Elsevier, which has published about 18% of all UC output and collected more than 25% of the university’s $40-million overall subscription budget. But the open access issue is the reason their battle has drawn the attention of academics all over the world. UC’s goal is a direct challenge to the business model of academic publishing that earns Elsevier more than $1 billion in operating profit per year.
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by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: March 1st, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
California would add financial protections for students at for-profit colleges under measures that Democratic legislators introduced Wednesday in response to the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era regulations. The seven bills would place restrictions on college programs if graduates cannot find good-paying jobs, limit aggressive recruiting measures that target veterans and allow students to recoup more of their costs if their schools shut down. “We are here today to say students come first, not shareholders,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco.
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by Alexei Koseff, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: February 27th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
[T]he field seems to have converged on a consensus: A free-college proposal—or an answer about why they don’t have one—is something of a prerequisite for Democratic candidates hoping to challenge Donald Trump in the 2020 election. The consensus is long in the making… In recent years, in the absence of ambitious federal efforts to deal with college costs, states, both red and blue, have been introducing their own college-affordability plans. “Anybody who wanted to do anything big or bold on college affordability had to do it at the state level,” Huelsman told me. More than 20 states have adopted free-college models since 2005. New Jersey, West Virginia, and Virginia look to be the next three states to implement free-college plans…
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by Adam Harris, The Atlantic.
Posted: February 26th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Each year, thousands more qualified students apply to Cal State L.A. than the campus has the funding or space to accommodate. Now campus officials want to raise admissions standards and shrink the fall 2020 class. If officials decide to do so and the Cal State chancellor’s office approves, Cal State L.A. will join six other Cal State campuses — Fresno, Fullerton, Long Beach, San Diego, San Jose and San Luis Obispo — that declared themselves fully “impacted,” meaning they have too many qualified applicants for all levels and programs, and made similar changes… Campus enrollment has increased by 25% since 2012 while funding for expanding enrollment has gone up only about 2%.
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by Suhauna Hussain, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: February 25th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
According to a new survey from CollegeVine, a Cambridge, Mass.-based consultant group that helps college-bound high-school students, San Jose State is ranked the most underrated school in America… CollegeVine, who says it has worked with more than 6,000 students so far, found “about 10 schools that are consistently underrated, but which students and parents shouldn’t discount.” The survey’s authors say that while “the traditional college rankings do a decent job of ranking the best universities … because of how these formulas are constructed, there are some serious factors that get left out. When we look to advise families on colleges that are underrated, our primary focus is on outcomes — more specifically financial outcomes like starting salary and ROI (return on investment), as well as qualitative outcomes like job placements.”
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by Patrick May, The San Jose Mercury News.
Posted: February 22nd, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
With this large new investment in higher education, Newsom’s budget proposal said that that he was trying “to increase access to higher education, improve student success and timely degree completion, and to better ensure that college remains affordable by freezing tuition at current levels.” And yet, despite the commitment of over a billion dollars of new revenue to the U.S.’s largest community college and public university system, little of that money is likely to go where it is most needed: to reducing class sizes for introductory college courses, and to replacing poorly-paid temp job for college instructors with professional positions at living wages. The reason is simple, and ideological: today’s higher education administrators— in California and around the U.S.— are committed to a version of what they call “student success” that marginalizes questions of class size, teaching load, and the working conditions of faculty from their definition of success.
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by Trevor Griffey, PhD, Remaking the University.
Posted: February 22nd, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
In a report released Feb. 12, California State Auditor, or CSA, Elaine Howle said that although the UC Office of the President, or UCOP, has made strides in implementing financial transparency reforms, its current state still allows the UCOP to maintain “virtually an unlimited amount” of money. Howle’s most recent report was released after the results of her 2017 audit on the UCOP in which she discovered an accumulation of unaccounted funds, including $175 million that was hidden from the UC Board of Regents. In response to the 2017 findings, Howle requested that the UCOP implement transparency reforms by 2018.
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by Sasha Langholz, The Daily Californian.
Posted: February 18th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Nearly a year after a deadline for the University of California to overhaul business practices at its headquarters, UC President Janet Napolitano has made improvements but is still doing business in a way that lets her office amass “virtually an unlimited amount” of money… The state audit two years ago was the first to look solely at UC’s $813.5 million headquarters, which oversees the public university’s 10 campuses, five hospitals and three national laboratories. Howle’s discovery of the president’s reserves — much of it used for university projects but never disclosed to the regents in Napolitano’s annual budget presentation — prompted her to prescribe the overhaul.
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle .
Posted: February 6th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
A statement by the Cal State Student Association — students representing the Student Senate of the California Community Colleges (SSCCC), the University of California Student Association (UCSA), and Cal State Student Association (CSSA) — expressed concern that the budget proposal is still not enough to address particular issues that low-income students face. The statement describes the financial aid system as “broken” and unable to meet a standard in which a student can live without stressing over money. This is because of high California housing costs and everyday living expenses incurred by college students. The CSSA, SSCCC, and UCSA student representatives appreciate the budget increase but do not believe it will effectively tackle systemic issues that low-income students face.
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by Alex Ortiz, The Bottom Line.
Posted: February 6th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The federal government promised to cancel the student loans of approximately 41,000 public employees and certain non-profit workers after ten years of payments as long as they worked in public service. A decade later, authorities approved just 206 people for loan cancellation, according to the U.S. Department of Education… “For years, Navient solutions, LLC has told its customers that they were eligible to have their loans forgiven after 120 payments, despite knowing that those individuals did not have eligible loans,” court documents in the case state, According to federal rules, borrowers must consolidate into a so-called Direct Loan to be eligible for the Student Loan Forgiveness Program. The plaintiffs in the case say Navient never told them that.
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by Jackie Callaway , ABC Action News.
Posted: January 31st, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
