Only about a quarter of the 2009 high school graduates taking the ACT admissions test have the skills to succeed in college, according to a report on the exam that shows little improvement over results from the 2008 graduating class. The Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT said 23% of this year's high school graduates had scores that indicated they were ready for college in all four ACT subject areas, or had at least a 75% chance of earning a grade of C or better in entry-level courses. Last year, a similar ACT analysis found that 22% of the class of 2008 was college-ready...
Even as high school graduates in recent years have grown increasingly better prepared for college, too many members of the class of 2009 cannot adequately perform all of the academic skills they will need to succeed, a report says. Just 23% of students, up from 22% last year, earned test scores suggesting they can earn at least a C in first-year college courses in English, math, reading and science, says the report, released today by the non-profit Iowa-based testing company ACT. It's based on scores of 1.48 million 2009 high school graduates who took the ACT's college entrance exam...
The average score on the ACT, the standardized test that colleges use (along with its main competitor, the SAT) to help make college admissions decisions, was unchanged in 2009, when compared with the previous year's scores, the test maker said in a report scheduled for release Wednesday...
The form submitted by the provost at the University of Wisconsin at Madison deemed 260 of its 262 peer institutions to be of "adequate" quality. A survey from the University of Vermont's president listed "don’t know" for about half of the universities...Long a sore spot for many critics, the peer assessment survey for U.S. News & World Report's annual college rankings has been subjected to especially tough scrutiny since June, when an official at Clemson revealed that her bosses, as part of a larger strategy to propel the university up the rankings, had regularly given low scores on the "reputational" survey to other universities to make Clemson look better...
Some veterans planning to pay for college this fall with Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits could be out of luck, says a report from Nextgov, which is published by the National Journal. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has been overwhelmed by claims for educational benefits, creating a large backlog, says the report, which is based on an interview with an anonymous Congressional source. The department might not be able to process some veterans' applications for tuition and fees payments by the time the veterans' classes start this month, according to the report...
H1N1flumay have two surprising symptoms: innovation and empathy. At least that's the hope of University of Michigan officials, who are encouraging faculty to make broader use of technology to help sick students keep up with class work. As faculty create syllabuses for the coming semester, Michigan officials want them to consider the possibility of an outbreak infecting large numbers of students in the coming months. That means finding ways to work with students who may be absent for days by putting greater emphasis on distance learning tools like listservs, e-mail and Web-based teaching platforms...
If an outbreak of swine flu or some other crisis closes its campus, Northern Virginia Community College plans to still be open. The college is training classroom-based professors in the basics of online teaching as part of its emergency plan to shift large numbers of courses to the Web...
A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies -- articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products. Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account. Those universities may not have much longer to get their houses in order before they find themselves in trouble with Washington...
For as long as high school seniors have been visiting colleges, it seems, there have been tour guides walking backward in front of them, breathlessly reciting statistics from a script while, hopefully, avoiding tree roots and other hazards. Not so at Hendrix College, a liberal arts institution outside Little Rock, Ark. It is one of several dozen colleges and universities that are increasingly directing their tour guides to turn around and walk forward, and to purge their memories of all those dates from the college’s history in favor of personal anecdotes and frequent breaks for give-and-take...
For 13 years, University of California officials have wrestled with a seemingly insoluble problem: how to sustain a student body that reflects the state's vast diversity without violating Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot measure banning race-based affirmative action. The latest attempt to formulate a policy that is both legal and capable of increasing diversity is a controversial new admissions mandate that will take effect in fall 2012...
It may be small comfort to parents and students who are sweating tuition bills this year, with their college savings plans in shambles and financial aid and loan sources drying up, but colleges and universities finally are feeling their pain. After years of huge tuition increases, public and private colleges and universities in Illinois have held the line this year, in most cases passing more modest increases on to students. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, tuition for incoming freshmen went up 2.6 percent, to $9,242 -- a small jump compared with the 9.5 percent tuition hikes trustees approved for incoming freshmen in the three previous years...
Four University of Illinois trustees offered their resignations Tuesday, bowing to the wishes of a governor who has vowed to overhaul the board following an admissions scandal that has jolted the state's most prestigious public campus...Seven of nine trustees now have volunteered to step down, setting up a showdown between the governor and the two remaining trustees: Frances Carroll and James Montgomery. Both have expressed reluctance to step down, with Montgomery going as far as to say he would challenge the decision in court...
University of Illinois chancellor Richard Herman is seeking the advice of national higher education leaders as his campus decides how to implement admissions changes. In an e-mail to faculty and staff on the Urbana-Champaign campus this afternoon, Herman said the outside leaders will advise an internal task force of a dozen administrators, faculty and a student to decide how best to handle outside admissions inquiries...
...In fact, the trend of colleges and universities going green is growing at an incredible pace. In the second annual Princeton Review's Green College ratings, there was a 30 percent increase in participating schools...Of course, there is no lack of colleges working on green technologies of their own. It is hard to walk around the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus without seeing a slew of students on mopeds zooming by...
