For the first time in 15 years, the number of would-be freshmen applying to the University of California has dropped, the first sign that a national trend of declining college enrollment could be hitting the West Coast… At L.A.’s Downtown Magnets High School, college counselor Lynda McGee speculated that students were increasingly discouraged from applying to UC because of the system’s low acceptance rates. Students think they’re not good enough, she said.

Read full article [here].
by Teresa Watanabe and Suhauna Hussain, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 31st, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Historically, governor-appointed regents have consisted of lawyers, politicians and businessmen. “I think that this appointment is interesting because it does not significantly increase the diversity of the board,” Nuha Khalfay, the ASUC EAVP, said in an email. “By diversity I include ethnicity and gender but also geographic representation.” Khalfay also added that the board is disproportionate since it consists of residents from Southern California and the Bay Area, lacking Central Valley representation.

Read full article [here].
by Thao Nguyen, The Daily Californian.

Posted: January 31st, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In his annual State of the CSU address, White declared that 2018 was, in many ways, the best year ever for the nation’s largest and most diverse public university system — with 487,000 students on 23 campuses. Last year, he noted, Cal State had the largest number of graduates in its history. Four-year graduation rates also increased by six percentage points to 25.4%, and the achievement gap narrowed between low-income and underrepresented minorities and their peers. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “visionary” proposal for a $300 million increase in ongoing permanent funding for Cal State will help campuses keep the momentum going, White said.

Read full article [here].
by Teresa Watanabe and Suhauna Hussain, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 22nd, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

University of California regents this week will take their first collective look at the inaugural budget proposal of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has pledged to boost higher education spending after years of fiscal frugality under his predecessor, Jerry Brown. Regents also will discuss plans to increase enrollment, raise graduation rates and improve support for struggling students in their two-day meeting that begins Wednesday in San Francisco… the budget blueprint Newsom unveiled this month fell short of the regents’ hopes. They requested an increase of $477.6 million in permanent, ongoing funding for the 2019-20 budget that they approved last November. Newsom proposed an increase of only $240 million.

Read full article [here].
by Teresa Watanabe, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 15th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her Republican critics have both called her proposal to dramatically increase America’s highest tax rate “radical” but a new poll released Tuesday indicates that a majority of Americans agrees with the idea. In the latest The Hill-HarrisX survey — conducted Jan. 12 and 13 after the newly elected congresswoman called for the U.S. to raise its highest tax rate to 70 percent — a sizable majority of registered voters, 59 percent, supports the concept… Increasing the highest tax bracket to 70 percent garners a surprising amount of support among Republican voters. In the Hill-HarrisX poll, 45 percent of GOP voters say they favor it while 55 percent are opposed to it. Independent voters who were contacted backed the tax idea by a 60 to 40 percent margin while Democratic ones favored it, 71 percent to 29 percent.

Read full article [here].
by Matthew Sheffield, The Hill.

Posted: January 15th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

University of California employees continue to report missed or reduced direct deposit paychecks that they attribute to the university system’s troubled payroll system, UCPath. The complaints, often from student employees whose paycheck-to-paycheck income leaves them particularly vulnerable to payroll problems, prompted two California state lawmakers — Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, and Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego — to write letters voicing their concern to the University of California chancellors in their respective districts.

Read full article [here].
by Andrew Sheeler, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: January 14th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Without assurance of funding, lab directors may not be able to admit graduate students to their labs in the coming academic year. “It’s an impact that’s going to be felt after the shutdown,” says Benjamin Corb… There’s also a growing pileup of applications that have yet to be reviewed by NSF employees who are currently furloughed. Research teams usually obtain funding from a variety of agencies. Teams may have some staff members who have been awarded funding already, but other key staff members may not be able to work without a functioning government.

Read full article [here].
by Katherine Ellen Foley, Quartz.

Posted: January 11th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Alexander Grant’s unfortunate death is the result either of deferred maintenance or the result of excavation on a plaza and concession stand on the north side of the Greek Theater. Either way, UC is responsible… I looked at the downed tree that Killed Alexander Grant before it was removed. It should have been a crime scene. This tree had its entire east side root system sheered off in a vertical cut maybe two feet from the trunk, and the tree fell directly West, North. Someone had buried the tree’s trunk up six feet with excavated soil. I could find no evidence that the university reduced the size and weight of the tree to compensate. This goes beyond deferred maintenance to official neglect.

Read full article [here].
by Hank Chapot, The Berkeley Daily Planet.

Posted: January 11th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

“There is the ever-present tendency here in the State Capitol to adopt the corporate notion that if you want to do anything you have to measure it,” he said. As he has done throughout his governorship, he returned to what he thinks is the key to a good education: the relationship between the teacher and student. “I think the emphasis on the teacher and the living role that they encounter in the classroom is most important, as opposed to this obsession with more and more metrics, collected over more and more years, to attempt to shape policy but which in many cases do not.”

Read full article [here].
by Louis Freedberg, Ed Source.

Posted: January 6th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In the past, pursuing a PhD was a generally debt-free endeavor: Academics worked their way toward their degree while working as teaching assistants, which paid them cost of living and remitted the cost of tuition. That model began to shift in 1980s, particularly at public universities forced to compensate for state budget cuts. Teaching assistant labor was far cheaper than paying for a tenured professor, so the universities didn’t just keep PhD programs, but expanded them, even with dwindling funds to adequately pay those students. Still, thousands of PhD students clung to the idea of a tenure-track professorship. And the tighter the academic market became, the harder we worked. We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it.

Read full article [here].
by Anne Helen Petersen, Buzz Feed News.

Posted: January 5th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.