Thursday, February 9, 2012

Higher Ed news

Utah Lawmaker’s Bid to Limit Tenure is Defeated (Chronicle of Higher Education)

     … The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Christopher Herrod, a Republican, argued that tenure stifled competition and was unnecessary, because only 42 percent of Utah professors have it….

With long-term consequences, community college students struggle to pass college-level math courses (EdSource)

     Large numbers of community college students are struggling to pass the college-level math classes they need to complete a degree or transfer to a four-year institution, with long-term implications for their futures.
. . .
     According to an EdSource analysis, in the fall of 2010, 45 percent of students taking college-level math courses at California’s 112 community colleges received a failing grade below a “C” or dropped the class before the end of term.

Plans to slash and boost college aid (educatedguess)

     Gov. Jerry Brown and Assembly Speaker John Perez are heading in opposite directions on college financial aid. Brown proposes to pare back eligibility or amounts of aid for 72,000 of 244,000 low- or modest-income families receiving Cal Grants. Perez on Wednesday proposed a massive scholarship program for nearly 200,000 University of California and California State University students in the solid and upper ranks of the middle class. But then, Perez is counting on an extra $1 billion by eliminating a corporate tax break that Republican legislators say they won’t abide….

Born in the USSR (Inside Higher Ed)

     The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 meant the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of Lenin statues, and the near-disappearance of the schlocky Soviet stereotype in a certain kind of Hollywood movie. It also resulted in a migration of Soviet scholars, which greatly affected the field of mathematics in the United States, according to two professors who have co-authored a paper called “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians” to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics….

'We're Losing Our Minds' (Inside Higher Ed)

     …With most critics of higher education focused on rising prices or on whether American colleges and universities are producing enough degree and certificate holders with sufficient skills to keep the U.S. economy vibrant and competitive – the latter known in shorthand as the "completion agenda" – a few analysts are homing in on the quality and rigor of what students are learning (or not) en route to those credentials.
     Last year's Academically Adrift set the tone, providing data suggesting that many colleges are imposing relatively minimal academic demands on their students and that, perhaps as a result, many students do not appear to gain in some measures of cognitive abilities as they move through college….

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Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...