City College students and faculty were told in July that the school’s accreditation would be revoked next year by the accrediting commission, sending college administrators and community college leaders scrambling to fix financial mismanagement and governance issues. Newly hired City College Chancellor Arthur Tyler said he is confident the school will provide the evidence needed to keep its accreditation. The loss of accreditation would probably force the school to close, because City College would be unable to accept public funds and students would be unable to access financial aid. Should City College close its doors, 21 Bay Area colleges have agreed to enroll the school’s 85,000 students. City College is already seeing steep declines in students, which could result in $20 million in lost revenue next year if the current trend continues, Agrella said.

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by Melody Gutierrez, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: November 12th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Federal budget cuts known as sequestration have carved a chunk out of their respective budgets and threaten the fabric of publicly funded scientific research, the university presidents and chancellors explained at a news conference. After less than a year under this reality, the impacts have begun to show… UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said the estimated hit to his university’s research funding is $50 million — the majority brought about by uncertainty or cuts in multi-year grants. UCLA is a massive institution, with a research budget of more than $900 million. But $50 million still counts. Block said he’s worried about the possibility of brain drain. The fleeing of top researchers and the exodus of students isn’t happening yet. But the rumblings are noticeable. “We are beginning to see China advertising,” Block said. “We are hearing stories from investigators over there bragging about the facilities they are building.”

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by Sam Stein, The Huffington Post.

Posted: November 11th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Sy Stokes, a junior at the University of California at Los Angeles, remembers that he nearly dropped out his first year. He has come to see that what he had been told about UCLA — that it was diverse and welcoming of all kinds of people — was hype. As a black male, he said in an interview Saturday, he felt “isolated” and he was very aware that the diversity at the university hasn’t led to increases in the share of black students (about 4 percent). While UCLA regularly has debates about race, he said that he felt that the perspective of black male students was missing… Of men at UCLA, black males make up 3.3 percent; of the 2,418 entering male students this year, 48 were black, and their expected graduation rate is 74 percent, so their numbers will shrink. He talks about students who leave because they can’t get enough financial aid while the business school dean at UCLA flies around the world first-class.

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by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: November 11th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

About 11% of Latinos age 25 or older have earned bachelor’s degrees, compared with 30% of all Californians, 39% of whites in the state, 23% of African Americans and 48% of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the report said. The study used census reports, state and federal education data and statistics from California’s three systems of higher education — the University of California, California State University and the community colleges. Educational achievement among Latinos shows some promise: Between 1990 and 2011, the number of those ages 25 to 34 who earned high school diplomas increased 23%. But the number earning bachelor’s degrees increased only 5%.

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by Carla Rivera, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: November 11th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

For decades, the for-profits — which range from beauty colleges and truck driving schools to industry behemoths like the University of Phoenix — enjoyed booming enrollment and annual profits that climbed into the billions. But after years of criticism over purportedly fraudulent claims, high costs, and shady recruiting practices, for-profits have seen deep declines in student numbers and have been forced to slash tuition… “We’re in an age where the privatization of education is in a struggle with the public sector,” Levin said, noting that for-profit colleges and their lobbyists have repeatedly thwarted federal regulators’ efforts to more tightly regulate them. Even in the midst of all of these setbacks, “I think privatization has the upper hand,” he said.

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by Matt Krupnick, CNN.

Posted: November 11th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The fees to attend California’s community colleges are by far the lowest in the United States — less than half the national average — yet at least 40 percent of the 2.4 million students in the largest U.S. system of higher education do not pay them. The reasons? An unusual financial aid program and a half-century-old vision that made affordability and open access the chief purpose of the two-year schools… As state funding declined by $1.5 billion over four years, lawmakers raised fees three times, to the current price of $46 per unit. But nearly all the anticipated revenue was eaten up by the waivers and colleges ended up cutting courses and enrollment anyway, said Boilard, who thinks the state needs to look hard at further restricting waivers and substantially raising the admission price.

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by Lisa Leff, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: November 9th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

[C]lasses at the University of California are only becoming more crowded and teaching assistants harder to find – even though students pay double the tuition of just five years ago, say graduate-student teaching assistants who released a report on Tuesday they call “Towards Mediocrity: Administrative Mismanagement and the Decline of UC Education” … Class size isn’t the only problem identified by the students. More than half of graduate students offered a spot at UC choose to go elsewhere. The reason, say students, is clear from UC’s own survey, conducted in 2010, showing that UC offers comparatively cheap financial packages to prospective doctoral students. The deals for teaching stipends and tuition waivers are $2,697 a year lower than those of competing institutions. Combined with California’s higher cost of living, the survey shows the gap is closer to $4,978 a year.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: November 6th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In 1997, the year after California voters approved Proposition 209, which prohibited the consideration of race or ethnicity in the operation of state institutions, black students made up 8 percent of UC Berkeley’s freshmen enrollment — roughly the same percentage of African Americans living in the state. The following year, the percentage of black freshmen at Cal plummeted by more than half, and has hovered at or below 4 percent ever since… Some UC administrators and many students say that Berkeley will continue to feel inhospitable to African Americans until Cal can boost admissions to reach a so-called “critical mass” of black students on campus… The problem of low black-student enrollment also is not confined to the Berkeley campus; it’s considered by UC officials to be a statewide issue.

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by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, The East Bay Express.

Posted: November 6th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The 2014-2015 proposal seeks an increase of $237.6 million in state funding. Included in that total is about $80 million to increase student enrollment by about 20,000; $13 million to hire more than 500 new, full-time faculty members; $15 million to finance critical maintenance repairs and upgrades and more than $91 million to increase faculty salaries… The request is somewhat of a gamble, relying on an improving state economy and faith that, after years of cuts, lawmakers again are willing to invest in higher education. And it comes in the face of a consistent drumbeat from Gov. Jerry Brown that California’s public colleges and universities have to run leaner and acknowledge competing monetary demands on the state — such as funding healthcare, prisons and pensions. The governor reiterated those concerns Tuesday: “Each item has to fit with each other in terms of available money down the road,” Brown said. He left the meeting before the budget vote.

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by Carla Rivera, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: November 5th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Californians will get the first chance to comment on President Obama’s proposals to make college more affordable during a public forum this week at Cal State Dominguez Hills, officials said. The Wednesday event is the first in a series of four public sessions held around the country — and the only one in California — to gather input on the president’s recently announced agenda to develop a college ratings system to help students select schools with the best bang for their buck… The ratings system has elicited concern among some higher education experts who question the reliability of graduation rates and other data that would be used.

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by Carla Rivera, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: November 3rd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.