One side argued that the state needed a temporary infusion of cash to keep schools and vital state programs afloat until the economy fully recovered. The other side countered that new tax money would simply line the pockets of school bureaucrats and unionized teachers — and that thousands of overtaxed “job creators” would flee California and throw the state’s still-recovering economy into reverse… Kolko’s study of census data from 2005 through 2011 showed that although California’s richest residents face high taxes, lower-income people are more likely to leave. In fact, he said, the state saw a slight net in-migration of households making $200,000 or more during those years… Although the jury is still out on the effect of Proposition 30 on the California economy, initial indications are encouraging. The state’s unemployment rate fell eight-tenths of a percentage point — to 8.8 percent — from last November to August. During the same period, the national jobless rate fell a half of a percentage point to 7.3 percent.
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by Jessica Calefati and Josh Richman, The San Jose Mercury News.
Posted: November 2nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Proclaiming that the University of California teaches for California and researches for the world, UC President Janet Napolitano today (Oct. 30) announced three initiatives aimed at supporting undocumented students, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students across the 10-campus university. In her first major speech since becoming UC’s 20th president a month ago, Napolitano told members of San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club that she would immediately allocate $15 million in non-state funds — $5 million for each of the three groups — toward easing the unique challenges affecting these students and researchers at UC.
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by staff, UC Newsroom.
Posted: October 30th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Cal athletics was dealt a humiliating blow with last week’s report on graduation rates, in which Cal football ranked dead last among 72 major programs in the country and men’s basketball wasn’t much better. Barbour, who has been athletic director since the fall of 2004, has to own it. She can’t blame those numbers on departed coaches Jeff Tedford and Ben Braun. She was their boss. She extended their contracts during this dismal period. She is the one who has to be held accountable… The NCAA report showed that Cal football graduated just 44 percent of its athletes who entered school from 2003 through 2006 and men’s basketball graduated just 38 percent. Many would take the report as a clear sign of the difficulty and hypocrisy involved in attempting to balance big-time athletics and strong academics. Except for one thing: Stanford. Over the same period, Stanford football’s graduation rate was 93 percent and its men’s basketball’s graduation rate was 83 percent. And Stanford football paired its graduation success with a corresponding rise into the nation’s elite programs.
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by Ann Killion, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: October 26th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Cal State and UC officials said maintaining their respective roles is the best way to serve students. “Cal State, UC and community colleges work together on a regular basis and we’d like to continue that,” said Christine Mallon, assistant vice chancellor for academic programs and faculty development at Cal State and a member of the panel. “We should continue making use of the infrastructure, faculty and resources and continue finishing degrees started in community colleges.” … State Sen. Marty Block (D-San Diego) noted that Cal State lobbied and won legislative approval to offer doctoral degrees in education, physical therapy and nursing, despite arguments from UC and others against “mission creep.”
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by Carla Rivera, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: October 14th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
A group representing a multitude of business and education interests sent a letter to Congress and the White House Friday, warning that the nation’s “innovation deficit” will continue to grow if funding for university research and science education is not considered in negotiations over the government shutdown, sequester and debt limit… The federal shutdown has put a stop to some research, while delaying the approval and processing of future research grant requests. The federal government frequently sponsors research at universities through grants from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Both agencies are facing major furloughs — with three-fourths of NIH employees and almost all NSF employees considered “nonessential” in the shutdown. The letter warned that a lack of attention to the importance of science and research spending could have a long-term economic drag on the country.
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by Tyler Kingkade, The Huffington Post.
Posted: October 11th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
California’s attorney general filed a lawsuit Thursday accusing a for-profit college company of misrepresenting job placement rates, false advertising and other deceptive practices to lure low-income residents to take out student loans to attend its schools. The lawsuit against Corinthian Colleges Inc. was part of a larger investigation of the entire for-profit college industry, state Attorney General Kamala Harris said in San Francisco. Santa Ana-based Corinthian operates Everest, Heald and WyoTech colleges… Corinthian paid $6.5 million in 2007 to settle a similar lawsuit that Gov. Jerry Brown filed while serving as California attorney general. It made similar allegations. The New York attorney general and attorneys general in several other states have launched similar investigations in recent years involving a number of for-profit colleges amid complaints about misrepresentation…
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by Paul Elias
Posted: October 10th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
“The report…shines a light on how leaders in government and in our colleges and universities are being enticed by snappy slogans and slick sales pitches into making decisions that benefit investors and corporations instead of the students we’re supposed to serve,” said Lillian Taiz, a professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles and a participant in a teleconference about the report. “We’re talking here about a critical public need, higher education — one that affects individuals and societies in far reaching ways. The long-term costs and damage can be huge. And that’s what we set out to do in this work — look behind this rhetoric.” The report draws a link between the drop in business and value for for-profit schools following a damning 2012 government investigation of the sector and the current surge in partnerships between public institutions and private operators… The conundrum for public institutions is that the cost for participating in MOOCs is “relatively high,” according to Trinity College President Patricia McGuire, “and the net returns unclear at best.” Yet, to avoid the wrath of a Moody downgrade, she suggested, universities “will repress more thoughtful consideration of the value of adopting MOOCs for any given institution — and will encourage further avoidance of faculty participation in the decision — in favor of rushing to embrace this unproven method ―because Moody’s said so.” Her conclusion: “Moody’s should stay out of academic decisions.”
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by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology.
Posted: October 9th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The bare-knuckles contract brawl between the University of California and one of its larger unions has entered the next round, with an announcement Tuesday that AFSCME Local 3299 is planning to take a strike vote at the end of this month. The union represents some 22,000 employees who provide staff support and medical services at UC hospitals. Contract talks have been deadlocked for more than a year. AFSCME officials have said they are pressing for changes to policies that waste public money and put public health at risk. The university counters that AFSCME’s concerns are a smokescreen to hide its real agenda to curtail pension changes that other unions have already accepted. The union plans to take its unfair labor practice strike vote from Oct. 28 to Oct. 30. AFSCME’s move comes after the Public Employees Relations Board last month charged the UC system with intimidating employees who participated in another strike last summer.
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by Jon Ortiz, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: October 8th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Adjunct professors, as part of a growing army of working poor, are at the center of the academic labor movement, just as fast-food workers are now at the center of the larger labor movement. We are in the midst of deciding the extent to which we are an inclusive society that will live up to our nation’s promise that hard work pays off. The question is: How will we treat working people? Will we, the richest nation on earth, continue to structure employment in ways that reduce large segments of society to near Dickensian conditions of existence? Or can we muster the collective will to appropriately remunerate and honor the work of all working Americans?
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by Gary Rhoades, CNN.
Posted: September 24th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The boards of these two accrediting agencies are packed with executives from prominent for-profit college corporations. Ten of the 15 board members supervising the ACICS are drawn from the industry, including executives from Corinthian, Education Corporation of America and ITT Technical Institute. On the ACCSC board, industry executives fill eight of the 13 slots, representing publicly traded companies such as Universal Technical Institute and Kaplan Higher Education… A House higher education funding bill from the early 1990s proposed taking away the accreditors’ ties to federal aid funds… In the years after the congressional investigations, government auditors continued to raise questions about how accreditors were rating colleges, particularly for-profit programs. A 1996 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) found that accrediting agency staff “do not have the experience and expertise for reviewing and accrediting proprietary schools.”
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by Chris Kirkham and Kevin Short, The Huffington Post.
Posted: September 19th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
