With a few shovelfuls of dirt today, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside will begin the start of another construction project aimed once again at improving and enhancing the academic setting to help its students get a first-class education. This time it's the Communication Arts building that will benefit from a $34 million addition and renovation. It seems hard to believe that our young campus needs renovation, but the fact is that UW-Parkside is more than four decades old and that means some reworking is needed - along with the expansion plans that the university continues to embrace...

The towering coal piles near University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Great Lakes WATER Institute cannot be moved. So the institute, and the future home of UWM's new School of Freshwater Sciences, might be leaving the neighborhood. UWM officials said Monday they are reconsidering plans to build the water school next to the institute, which overlooks the harbor at 600 E. Greenfield Ave. The university is instead studying the option of moving the institute, and building the school, at a business park planned for the Reed Street Yards, on the Menomonee River Canal south of the Harley-Davidson Museum...

The Dane County Board has gotten involved in presidential politics and war in the past. Now, a majority of board members are weighing in on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's primate research. Twenty county board supervisors have sent a letter to UW-Madison's Chancellor Biddy Martin, asking her to get directly involved in the ethics of monkey experimentation...

As the final college applications trickle in for the 2010-11 year, University of Wisconsin officials reported an approximate 26 percent increase in international student applications. Interim Director of Admissions Tom Reason said applications from international students increased from about 2,660 last year to 3,360 this year — a jump of approximately 700 applicants. In contrast, the total applicant pool is only up 82. He added the area that has seen the largest rise in applications is eastern Asia, particularly China...

The UW-Extension has opened up a brand new student union which is online, instead of on-campus. David Schejbal is the U-W Extension's Dean of the Division of Continuing Education, Outreach and E-Learning. He says the virtual student union is a web-based resource designed to be a social gathering place for students. Schejbal says students can share information about financial aid, child care, job searches, or making time to study online...

When a piece of scrap metal falls to the factory floor at Wagner Companies, employee James Woggon may be close behind, snapping it up as material for his artwork. So when thousands of small metal rings were going to be scrapped, Woggon used them - and a chair from the company cafeteria - to create a funky piece of patio furniture...Previously, he was an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he graduated in 2002 with a bachelor's degree in industrial design...

If metro Milwaukee could increase the share of its population with at least a four-year college degree by a single percentage point, income in the seven-county area would rise by $1.5 billion annually. Those numbers, tabulated by the CEOs for Cities urban policy group, are helping fuel the latest economic development initiative around Milwaukee: increasing the ranks of knowledge workers and the creative class who are believed to drive innovation and enhance the arts...

The Wisconsin Senate's higher education committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on a plan that would make it illegal to manufacture and use false academic credentials. The goal of the bill is to crack down on so-called diploma mills, which issue bogus degrees to students who pay them money and do little work...

U.S. industry needs more engineers and technical workers and is turning to schools to generate interest. A growing number of schools across the country, including Stevens Point Area Senior High, are implementing Project Lead The Way, a national nonprofit organization designed to teach students on how to succeed in high-tech fields and compete in a global market. This program offers pre-engineering coursework, software and teacher training programs to create a new generation of engineers...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security conducted a threat assessment of local pro- and anti-abortion rights activists before an expected rally last year, even though they did not pose a threat to national security...The report was compiled prior to a February 2009 meeting in Middleton by the University of Wisconsin Hospital board to decide whether to open a clinic that would offer late-term abortions...

As colleges nationwide review freshman applications over the next several weeks, many will face lopsided numbers of male and female candidates. Some colleges maintain a gender balance, but national data in recent years show a 57%-43% split favoring women, both in enrollments and graduation rates. Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail and a former USA TODAY editorial writer, talks to reporter Mary Beth Marklein about how we got there, why we should care, and what should be done about it...

...Although the UC President Mark Yudof and the Board of Regents would like the students and the faculty to blame the state for all of the university's problems, the coalition has directed its anger in multiple directions and has effectively criticized both the state and the UC administration. For instance, when students protested the most recent move to raise students fees, they not only called for the legislature to restore the system's funding, but they also protested the regents decision to support compensation increases for top administrators. The broader message of the UC coalition is that they do not think a public university should be run like a private corporation, and they also do not think that the most diverse and prestigious public university system in the world should be transformed into a boarding school for the super wealthy...

For some Hispanic students, navigating the college application process can be a double-whammy: Balancing high school coursework with essays and interviews, and then translating the whole system for their parents, who don't speak English. Some venerable East Coast universities are trying to ease that burden — and tap the booming pool of Hispanic students — by offering Spanish translations of their admissions and financial aid material...

Why not abolish student fees at the University of California? And in exchange, how about requiring graduates to pay the university a percentage of their income for a while after college? That may sound outlandish at a time when UC is substantially hiking student fees and the state budget crisis has left the 10-campus system strapped for cash. But that's precisely why UC Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich raised the idea to a commission trying to chart the university's course into the future...

The "no loans" era of elite private higher education might be short-lived. Dartmouth College announced Monday that it is restoring loans to the aid packages of students from families whose incomes exceed $75,000 -- ending a no-loans policy that was announced with much fanfare two years ago. Dartmouth will continue to exclude loans from the aid packages of those with smaller family incomes and will continue to be "need blind" in admissions, meaning that financial need will not be taken into consideration in admissions decisions...

As part of a broad-reaching plan to close a projected budget gap of $100-million, Dartmouth College announced on Monday the layoffs of 76 people and a return to including loans as part of the financial-aid mix for some students. No faculty members will lose their jobs, officials said, and all of the layoffs will come from the ranks of managers and hourly workers...