USG Institutions:
www.businessinsavannah.com
BIS in brief: SSU to break ground for two buildings
http://businessinsavannah.com/bis/2016-06-11/bis-brief-ssu-break-ground-two-buildings
Savannah State University will break ground for two new science buildings during a June 24 ceremony. …The acreage on Livingston Avenue includes deep-water access, which will allow marine sciences faculty and students to depart and return at any time, with ship-based research and instruction not dictated by tidal schedules. The building will provide approximately 17,000 square feet of new space with state-of-the-art amenities. The new building is slated to include laboratories for dolphin survey, necropsy, fish ecology, environmental toxicology, ocean acidification, coastal biophysics, instrumentation and more. On the main campus, there will be a two-story, 30,000-square- foot building to house engineering technology and chemistry laboratories. The building will be comprised of labs and faculty space. Civil engineering technology will gain labs for surveying, construction materials, solids structures and fluids. Electrical engineering technology will have learning space for digital systems, electronics and power systems. The chemistry program will also be expanded and included in this new building.
www.wtvm.com
Georgia Southern’s Business Innovation Group receives grant to assist veterans in business
By Dal Cannady, Reporter
STATESBORO, GA (WTOC) – Veterans have a new partner in starting their own business. Georgia Southern University’s Business Innovation Group received a $250,000 grant to assist veterans who want to start a business. It’s one of a handful nationally, and the only group in Georgia to earn the one-year grant. They’ll have two people to work with veterans in person and online to get started. They say it’s great to be able to help those who’ve protected our country.
www.northbaybusinesskjournal.com
Santa Rosa’s Keysight Technologies cultivates software engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology
BY JAMES DUNN, BUSINESS JOURNAL TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
Keysight Technologies has launched a software development center at Georgia Institute of Technology in its perennial effort to train and recruit highly skilled engineers to push the company’s new-product development. The center is expected to grow to 200 engineers within five years. The project, part of Keysight’s University Alliance program, will include Keysight electronic-design-automation software called EEsof EDA, as well as support and training. The software is used for communications product design in radio-frequency circuits, microwave circuits, high-speed circuits, signal integrity, device modeling and power electronics. Member companies of Georgia Tech’s electrical and computer engineering school will gain access to Keysight’s software through a three-year licensing program … Georgia Tech in Atlanta has 23,000 undergraduate and graduate students. In 2014, Keysight started a three-year in-kind donation of software to Georgia Tech valued at $120 million.
www.ajc.com
Atlanta makes the latest list of tech hubs (number four?)
http://www.ajc.com/news/business/atlantamakes-the-latest-list-of-tech-hubs-number-f/nrdXg/
Michael Kanell, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We’re a tech hub! No, we’re just wannabes! We’re a tech hub, really! We are! We are!! I mean, aren’t we? It does seem as if there’s a continual question about metro Atlanta’s status as a hot hub of millennial-powered, Georgia Tech cultivated technology. And trotted out today, from InfoWorld, another in a series of sometimes encouraging but often-conflicting lists of the nation’s best spots for growth and technology. On one of those perennial Top Ten lists, Atlanta places fourth, says InfoWorld. The online magazine sums it up thusly: “With great salary potential, steady employment levels and a slow-growing, affordable housing market, Atlanta’s a great choice for tech professionals.” According to InfoWorld, Atlanta has 3.0 tech jobs for every 1,000 positions. Moreover, Atlanta’s average housing price is the very-affordable-to-well-paid-engineers amount of $276,650. And the average tech salary in Atlanta is $91,995. (That is, as it happens, slightly higher than Denver’s average tech salary, and InfoWorld placed Denver at number one. Go figure.)
www.businessinsider.com
Colleges are scrambling to ensure housing for transgender students meets federal standards
Scott Malone, Reuters
As lawmakers across the United States battle over whether to allow transgender Americans to use public restrooms that match their gender identities, universities are scrambling to ensure that dorms meet federal standards. At a time of year when the nation’s 2,100 residential colleges and universities are sorting out student housing assignments, they also are poring over a May letter from the Obama administration that thrusts them into the national debate on transgender rights. Known as the “dear colleague” letter, it makes clear that federal law protects transgender students’ right to live in housing that reflects their gender identity. Schools that fail to provide adequate housing to transgender students could face lawsuits or the loss of any federal funding they rely on … “Title IX and the ‘dear colleague’ letters make all of us, all institutions, more accountable for students who may be on the margins,” said Darryl Holloman, dean of students at Georgia State University, which offered gender-inclusive housing options for the first time in the 2015-2016 academic year … Few students are choosing gender-inclusive housing. At Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus, 42 out of some 4,100 students housed in dorms sought it last year. When Johns Hopkins University first offered it in the 2014-2015 academic year, 30 out of some 2,500 students enrolled, a number that doubled to 60 the following year.
www.tiftongazette.com
ABAC faculty, staff take health education to Enigma Packing Shed
Special to The Gazette
TIFTON—Huge drops of sweat began collecting on his face before he even started talking. But Troy Spicer didn’t mind. His audience of 200 local farmers, crew leaders and migrant workers were sweating right along with him in an outdoor packing shed on a recent steamy afternoon in Enigma. “It was hot but that’s South Georgia in the summer time,” Spicer, dean of the School of Nursing and Health Sciences at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, said. “We delivered some important information, and we made some good contacts.” ABAC Health Center Coordinator Carmen Counts and High School Equivalency Program Associate Director Olga Contreras Martinez accompanied Spicer on the visit to deliver six 20-minute mini-lectures on farm worker health. Ricardo Camara, consul-general of Mexico in Atlanta, expressed his thanks. “The training you provided on such relevant topics as basic first aid, heat stroke, treatment of wounds, and preventive health care was of the utmost importance to improve the conditions of Mexican and Latin-American farm workers in South Georgia,” Camara said in a personal letter to Spicer. New opportunities for ABAC nursing students have developed because of ABAC’s participation in the event.
Higher Education News:
www.insidehighered.com
White House Starts Higher Ed ‘Fair Chance’ Pledge
The White House on Friday announced a “Fair Chance” higher education pledge, in which colleges make pledges to help those who have been accused or convicted of crimes get a second chance at improving their lives and building their education and careers.
www.insidehighered.com
Logging Off, Dropping Out
Hard data on which students are failing to use learning management software can help colleges intervene to boost retention rates.
By Paul Fain
Knowing how often college students log onto learning management software is one of the best ways to predict whether they will stick with their studies or drop out.
That finding, which comes from a trove of data collected by Civitas, an education technology company that does predictive data analytics, might seem like common sense: students who don’t do their course work are less likely to graduate. But engagement data from learning management systems (LMS), said officials at colleges that are clients of Civitas, can be sliced and diced to much better predict which students are likely to struggle, and for colleges to act on that information.
www.diverseeducation.com
Number of Blacks Lagging in Computer Science Field
http://diverseeducation.com/article/84807/
by Jamal Eric Watson
The National Society of Blacks in Computing held its inaugural conference in Atlanta, with the goal of increasing the numbers of Blacks in the computer science field within the academy. The conference, which included three tracks focused on undergraduates, graduate students and future faculty/research scientists, attracted more than 90 participants from across the country. Although the number of Black Ph.D.s in computer science has steadily increased over the past few years, experts say that a lot more work still needs to be done. “I’m very much encouraged by the numbers and the trajectory that we are on,” says Dr. Juan E. Gilbert, the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and Chair of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida. Still, when he graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science in 2000, he was among nine other African-Americans who earned the doctoral degree that year. Last year, there were 15 Blacks who earned a Ph.D. in the field … According to Gilbert, the objective of IAAMCS is to increase the number of African-Americans receive Ph.D. degrees in computing science and to promote and engage students in teaching and training opportunities, while adding more diverse researchers into the advanced technology workforce.
www.insidehighered.com
Dubious Data
Ranking colleges based on reported number of rapes, as The Washington Post has done, may attract much publicity, but researchers and advocates say doing so is misguided.
By Jake New
Last week, The Washington Post published an article compiling U.S. Department of Education data on the number of rapes reported on college campuses. “These colleges have the most reports of rape,” read the headline of the article, which included a sortable chart of the data, with Brown University and the University of Connecticut topping the list. While The Washington Post noted that the high number of reports could be a positive development, indicating that students are feeling more comfortable coming forward about their assaults, other publications used the chart to create stories that ranked institutions by how many rapes they reported. Dartmouth College’s 42 rape reports in 2014, for example, inspired the headline “Dartmouth comes second in national study of reports of campus rapes.” While it makes for good headlines, researchers and advocates say using federal reporting data to assess the prevalence of campus sexual assault or to rank the relative safeness of individual colleges is ill advised and even irresponsible.
www.chronicle.com
New Law in South Carolina Aims to Shine More Light on Fraternity Misconduct
By Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz
Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, last week signed into law the Tucker Hipps Transparency Act, which will require the state’s public colleges and universities to publish reports on student-conduct violations by Greek organizations. The law is the first of its kind, said Suzanne Hultin, a higher-education-policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures. It is also unique, she said, because it focuses attention on a specific type of student organization that has long been associated with dangerous drinking, hazing, and other problems.