Responding to reduced funding from the state, University of Minnesota officials Wednesday approved a budget for next year that makes $95 million in cuts, including the elimination of more than 1,200 staff positions. "There are severe cuts in this budget," Regent Steven Hunter said. Quality will be affected, he said, "whether we want to accept that fact or not." Most of the 1,240 job cuts will be through attrition or positions left vacant, but about 370 employees are expected to be laid off. The U employs about 18,500 people systemwide. Undergraduates are shielded from much of the pain because of federal stimulus money that will cap tuition increases at 3.1 percent and even result in lower tuition for many. But graduate and professional students — who make up about 40 percent of the U's student population — will see tuition rise an average of 7.5 percent, which caused concern among some Board of Regents members at their meeting Wednesday...
...The plan, which Education Secretary Arne Duncan described at his first White House press briefing, would expand the use of “skip logic” in the online Fafsa, allowing applicants to bypass more questions than they can now. It would also ask Congress to strike from the form dozens of questions about family income and assets and allow some applicants to retrieve tax data to answer many of the remaining questions...
With the proliferation of Internet sites for personal expression, colleges have become entangled in numerous high-profile scandals in recent years after students or faculty members have posted mean-spirited rumors or salacious photos online. But the way to curb that trend is not to enforce more-restrictive speech codes or chase down the source of every anonymous rumor, several higher-education legal experts said on Wednesday during a panel session at the annual conference here of the National Association of College and University Attorneys...
About 700 colleges signed up for the new Post-9/11 GI Bill's Yellow Ribbon Program, which allows colleges to enter into dollar-for-dollar matching agreements with the federal government to pay veterans' educational costs above those covered by the base GI Bill benefit (which varies by state and is tied to undergraduate, resident public university tuition rates). While the Department of Veterans Affairs has not yet released its final list of participating colleges, Keith Wilson, director of the VA’s education service, expects the 700 figure to stay pretty stable...
