USG Institutions:
www.tiftongazette.com
Over 1,300 students will live on campus at ABAC for fall term
TIFTON — An annual migration of students larger than the population of many small towns in Georgia is about to settle in on the campus of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. Dr. Chris Kinsey, Director of Residence Life, says a few spaces are still available in ABAC Place and ABAC Lakeside for students who need a place to live for the fall semester which begins on Aug. 10. “With only a handful of rooms remaining, students who need housing should contact the office as soon as possible,” said Kinsey. On-campus housing at ABAC provides a space for 1,324 students annually. ABAC Place is a “home away from home” to 835 upperclassmen, and ABAC Lakeside serves as an engaging living experience for 489 freshmen students. Both facilities filled up last fall.
www.chronicle.augusta.com
MCG gets full eight-year accreditation
By Tom Corwin
Staff Writer
After more than three years of preparation for its recent survey, Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University has received a full eight-year accreditation from its accrediting body, Dean Peter Buckley said today. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the accrediting agency for U.S. and Canadian medical schools, gave the school its full accreditation for meeting the 12 standards the agency has for medical education. Schools must be reviewed at least every eight years and since the last visit in 2008, MCG has added four regional campuses at Athens, Savannah, Albany and Rome, which adds “a degree of complexity” to meeting those standards, Buckley said. The quality of educational experience at those campuses must be equal to what is offered in Augusta and the administration and oversight have to be well-coordinated, he said. …“All of that just blew them away, that this is a medical school that has a solid foundation in its training but has upgraded its curriculum and its environment to be contemporary, what you would expect for training tomorrow’s doctors,” Buckley said.
www.onlineathens.com
Sharp rise in football support staff spending at UGA
http://onlineathens.com/breaking-news/2016-07-19/sharp-rise-football-support-staff-spending-uga
By MARC WEISZER
Georgia’s spending on its football support staff has jumped more than 33 percent in the past year as new coach Kirby Smart has added to what already was an increased off-the-field presence in the program. That’s something Smart grew accustomed to when he was on staff at Alabama. …Georgia is spending $2,893,550 on support staff positions, up from $2,171,393 a year ago, according to data received in an open records request by OnlineAthens.com. The numbers are also impacted by a three percent merit increase for athletics staff for the fiscal year that just started. …Georgia has 34 support staff members for football (not including Smart, his nine on-field assistant coaches and four graduate assistants), which is eight more than the previous year. Of those, 16 make at least $70,000 per year.
www.chronicle.com
Under the Gun
Faculty members in some states prepare for ‘campus carry’ to become reality
By Katherine Mangan
Ellen Spiro knows that, starting in August, there’s no way she’ll be able to legally prevent a student with a concealed-handgun permit from showing up armed to her classes here at the University of Texas. The prospect has her so unsettled that she’s told her colleagues she might move her first class, on August 24, across the street to a church, where guns are banned. Colleagues have talked about relocating their classes to the football stadium, another venue that has been designated gun-free under Texas’ controversial campus-carry law. …Across the country, faculty members, staff members, and administrators are reacting to new gun laws with a mix of apprehension and acceptance. …In Georgia, opponents of guns on campus won a narrow victory in May, when Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, vetoed legislation that would have allowed them. Among those relieved by the decision was Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech. In an essay in The Atlantic, he described how, shortly after he returned grades in a difficult class, some students anonymously posted threatening comments in an online discussion board.
Higher Education News:
www.myajc.com
Georgia Lottery raises a record $1 billion for education
By Kristina Torres – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Georgia Lottery raised more than $1 billion last year for the state’s pre-kindergarten program and HOPE scholarships for college students, the first time ever in the lottery’s 23-year history it has crossed the “B” mark in profits for a single year. Gov. Nathan Deal announced the milestone Wednesday, as the lottery closed the books on fiscal 2016, which ended June 30. In all, the lottery raised about $1.1 billion, with profits exceeding last year’s by more than $117 million. This is the fifth-consecutive year lottery profits have set a record, a positive trend that comes as the lottery has strained to meet the needs of popular education programs that continue to grow.
www.insidehighered.com
Free College Is a Damaging Myth
If we’re going to move the needle on college access in the United States, families have to get comfortable with personal investment in education, argues Shirley Ort.
By Shirley Ort
College is not free, and never will be. Someone is always paying — taxpayers, private donors, students or some mix of the three. That obvious truth is missing from much of our political debate and the growing panic over student loans, which casts education debt as a tragedy rather than an investment. The hardening rhetoric against student loans threatens to undermine national success in broadening access to higher education, discouraging the very students we need. This may sound strange coming from someone whose signature career achievement is a no-loans aid program. The whole idea behind the Carolina Covenant, which we launched at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003, was to assuage growing worry about student debt by eliminating loans for our lowest-income students. But if we’re going to put higher education within reach of the millions more who would benefit, loans are going to be a crucial part of the equation. And that means students from all backgrounds — especially low-income, first-generation and minority students — need to understand reasonable student debt as an opportunity, not a crushing burden.
www.washingtonpost.com
Did your college mislead you about job prospects? It might become far easier to have your loans forgiven
By Jeffrey J. Selingo
Nearly every college boasts about its job-placement rate for new graduates, and most of the time you won’t find a number less than 90 percent. To get to that number, colleges survey their graduates six months after college graduation, and nearly half of the schools never ask their graduates that question again. In many cases, just one-third of graduates even answer such surveys. Few colleges examine the percentage of students who found jobs but are underemployed in part-time work or gigs that don’t require a degree, and few find out what happens to those students five or 10 years after graduation. Either universities don’t know the answer or they don’t want anyone else to know it.
www.chronicle.com
Why a College Should Teach Its Own History
By Corey Ryan Earle
For the past six years, I’ve taught a course at Cornell University on the institution’s history and its role in the context of higher education in America. Topics include Cornell’s founders and founding, student life, diversity and inclusion, unrest and activism, and finances and administration. Having observed more than 2,000 students in my classroom, I am a firm believer that one of the best investments a college can make is in teaching its own history. Upon first glance, the course has little appeal — it’s only one credit, taught in the evening, and fulfills no requirements for most students. So why should other colleges take note? For starters, a large course with broad appeal across disciplines offers students a unifying experience, creating a sense of community that colleges strive to build. It brings together engineers and athletes, pre-meds and humanists, first-generation students and fourth-generation legacies — students across fields of study and backgrounds, many of whom have never taken a course together. Especially at a large, decentralized university like Cornell, shared experiences are rare and difficult to create. An institution’s own history is a topic that can, and should, resonate with everyone. Students draw parallels with those of the past and are surprised by ways the undergraduate experience and the campus have changed. Teaching a college’s history is also an opportunity to instill school pride.
www.insidehighered.com
Breaking With History
Should an HBCU founded by black Civil War veterans shutter its history department, against the recommendation of a faculty committee?
By Colleen Flaherty
It’s hard to separate Lincoln University in Missouri from its history: after the Civil War, veterans of the 62nd and 65th U.S. Colored Infantries headed back to the Midwest from Texas and Louisiana, where they had served, to establish a school for African-Americans. The Lincoln Institute, named to honor the veterans’ slain commander in chief, soon began offering college courses and became part of the black land-grant system. Decades later, in 1921, the Missouri Legislature passed a bill introduced by Walthall M. Moore, its first black member, renaming the institute as Lincoln University and establishing a Board of Curators. But now that board has separated Lincoln from its history — specifically its history program. The body this week voted 4 to 2 in a special meeting to deactivate the program for three years. Some on campus fear the vote was really about condemning the major to a slow death.