In this state, we’ve come to expect ballot initiatives sponsored by business interests to be, essentially, frauds. But it’s hard to conceive how one could be more fraudulent than Proposition 32. If there was any doubt left that the initiative process has been totally corrupted by big business and the wealthy, this should put it to rest for all time… “It looks temptingly like reform,” says Trudy Schafer, program director for the League of Women Voters of California. “But it’s not.” … “When corporations can just write a check from their general treasury, the idea that this is a meaningful restriction is ridiculous,” says Richard L. Hasen, an election and campaign law expert at UC Irvine. The share of corporate political spending coming from employee payroll deductions “has got to be a drop in the bucket, and putting it in there is just a fig leaf.”

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by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: August 19th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

“The problems colleges have run into with accreditation are abnormally acute at this point in time in California,” said David Baime, a senior vice president with the American Association of Community Colleges. “The colleges in California have been subject to such savage budget reductions that it has placed institutions under a great deal of financial and administrative strain. I think that’s a big part of the issue for the colleges.” … Colleges need accreditation to accept federal financial aid, offer courses with transferable credit, participate in league sports and award diplomas. Without accreditation, many schools would shut down…

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by The Associated Press, The Oakland Tribune.

Posted: August 16th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Students taking free online courses offered by the startup company Coursera have reported dozens of incidents of plagiarism, even though the courses bear no academic credit. This week a professor leading one of the so-called Massive Open Online Courses posted a plea to his 39,000 students to stop plagiarizing, and Coursera’s leaders say they will review the issue and consider adding plagiarism-detection software in the future. In recent weeks, students in at least three Coursera humanities courses have complained of plagiarized assignments by other students. The courses use peer grading, so each student is asked to grade and offer comments on the work of fellow students.

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by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: August 16th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

…the student debt bubble differs from all the others you’ve seen: It is legally impossible to pop. By law it can only grow very fast. The profits in this racket are downright hallucinogenic: A military veteran sharing his story with Occupy Student Debt has paid $18,000 on a $2,500 loan, and Sallie Mae claims he still owes $5,000; the husband of a social worker bankrupt and bedridden after a botched surgery tells Student Loan Justice of a $13,000 college loan balance from the 1980s that ballooned to $70,000. A grandmother subsisting on Social Security has her payments garnished to pay off a $20,000 loan balance resulting from a $3,500 loan she took out 10 years ago, before she underwent brain surgery.

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by Maureen Tkacik, Reuters.

Posted: August 15th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Middle-class students at California’s public universities are one big step closer to receiving a major tuition break, after the Assembly narrowly approved a measure Monday that would fund college scholarships by eliminating a corporate tax break. Democratic Assembly Speaker John Pérez, who has made the measure his top priority this year, needed the support of two-thirds of the Assembly because the legislation is a tax measure. He squeaked out the bare minimum number of votes by persuading two lawmakers from outside his party – Republican Assemblyman Brian Nestande of Palm Desert (Riverside County), and GOP-turned-independent lawmaker Nathan Fletcher from San Diego – to vote for the tax increase. The measure fell one vote short at first Monday, when Assemblyman Tony Mendoza, D-Artesia (Los Angeles County), refused to join other Democrats in supporting it. Mendoza argued that the money raised by the tax should go directly to struggling universities, but ultimately said he would vote for the measure in the hope that it will be amended in the Senate.

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by Marisa Lagos, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: August 14th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Mr. Ryan’s plan would slash federal spending for nearly all non-defense-related programs, including many of concern to higher education. It would cut spending on programs that support academic research, such as the National Institutes of Health, and would make several changes to the federal student-aid programs. It also calls for a complete spending cut for the National Endowment for the Humanities… Among the largest higher-education items targeted for cuts in Mr. Ryan’s budget proposals are the federal student-aid programs… Mr. Ryan, like Mr. Romney, has been a strong supporter of for-profit education… A Republican administration would allow for-profit institutions to operate in a more friendly regulatory environment, but the types of spending cuts on federal aid that the Ryan budget proposes could also adversely impact those institutions. In many cases, for-profit colleges rely on federal student-aid programs for close to 90 percent of their revenue…

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by Michael Stratford, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: August 13th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The documents reveal that FBI agents amassed dossiers on hundreds of students and professors and on members of the Board of Regents; established informers within student groups, the faculty, and the highest levels of the university’s administration; and gathered intelligence from wiretaps, mail openings, and searches of Berkeley homes and offices in the dead of night… the records “strongly support the suspicion that the FBI was investigating Kerr to have him removed from the UC administration, because FBI officials disagreed with his politics… FBI documents also show that in the 1950s Hoover ran a secret operation called the “Responsibilities Program” to get professors whose political views were deemed unacceptable fired by surreptitiously giving anonymous and unproven charges of disloyalty to Gov. Earl Warren, who then ordered investigations of the faculty.

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by Seth Rosenfeld, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: August 13th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In California, where public higher education has experienced cut after cut, the choices are particularly difficult. For the spring semester of 2013, the California State University has told campus leaders they may not admit any Californian students to graduate programs. Given that tuition covers only a fraction of the costs of these students’ education, the university said it couldn’t afford them. But the system said its campuses could admit out-of-state students, since they didn’t cost the state money… Bill Nance, vice president for student affairs at San Jose State University, said, “It’s right at the head of campus priorities to pick up additional revenues…. We agree it’s not fair to Californians.”

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by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Education.

Posted: August 13th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Katherine Orr had just started her freshman year at UC Berkeley last August when she was stunned to see five students in military fatigues carrying what looked like rifles and stopping students at Sather Gate. “They were asking people, ‘Are you Jewish?’ They were trying to be like soldiers interrogating Palestinians along the border,” Orr said. “They were re-enacting what was happening on the West Bank.” To students who regard Israel as an essential Jewish homeland, this event and others like it that are staged each year on University of California campuses seem hostile, like poorly concealed anti-Semitism – especially when the Israeli flag with its Star of David is paired with a Nazi swastika, says a new report by a UC fact-finding team seeking to understand Jewish students’ experiences. But to students who oppose Israeli policies and support such sensational protest methods, some recommendations by the team – that UC adopt a definition of anti-Semitism, prohibit hate speech and consider banning campus sponsorship of offensive activities – have become a new subject for protest.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: August 10th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

It’s no secret that falling behind on student loan payments can squash a borrower’s hopes of building savings, buying a home or even finding work. Now, thousands of retirees are learning that defaulting on student-debt can threaten something that used to be untouchable: their Social Security benefits… From January through August 6, the government reduced the size of roughly 115,000 retirees’ Social Security checks on those grounds. That’s nearly double the pace of the department’s enforcement in 2011; it’s up from around 60,000 cases in all of 2007 and just 6 cases in 2000.

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by Annamaria Andriotis, SmartMoney.

Posted: August 7th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.