University System News:
www.tiftonceo.com
ABAC Named Tree Campus USA for Fifth Consecutive Year
Staff Report From Tifton CEO
The Arbor Day Foundation recently named Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College a Tree Campus USA for the fifth year in a row. Grounds Manager Brad Barbee said that caring for Georgia’s natural resources is a top priority at ABAC, and it is an honor to receive the recognition. To obtain this distinction, ABAC met the five core standards, which included sustaining a tree advisory committee, a campus tree-care plan, dedicated annual expenditures for its campus tree program, an Arbor Day observance, and the sponsorship of student service-learning projects.
www.ajc.com
It will soon be illegal to hold your phone while driving in Georgia
By Aaron Diamant, Local | WSBTV
ATLANTA — Georgia’s governor is expected to sign a new distracted driving bill Wednesday. The law will make it illegal to hold your phone while you’re driving. Gov. Nathan Deal won’t be signing that bill at the Capitol. Deal will do it in Statesboro, home of Georgia Southern University. That’s where five nursing students killed in a highway crash went to school. “Don’t view this as a hostile act by the state government,” Deal said. “It is an act to protect the safety of anyone.”
www.wtxl.com
Georgia governor to sign state’s budget in Tifton
TIFTON, Ga. (WTXL) – Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal will make a stop in Tifton on Wednesday to make this year’s state budget official. Deal will sign the 2019 state budget at the Henry Tift Myers Airport in Tifton. He will also sign House Bill 769, which outlines rural health care regulations, and House Bill 951, which promotes rural economic development and innovation by creating a Center for Rural Prosperity and Innovation. The center will be located at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton.
www.mdjonline.com
Local VSU student learns about real-world politics as Georgia House Intern
Staff reports
Valdosta State University’s Theodore Johnson of Marietta spent the Georgia 2018 legislative session — Jan. 8 to March 31 — at the State Capitol in Atlanta as a Georgia House of Representatives intern. Johnson worked in the office of Majority Leader Jon Burns, R-Newington, where he briefed and advised the representative on current legislation, coordinated meetings, interacted with lobbyists and attended special Capitol events. He said a highlight of the internship was witnessing Crossover Day at the Capitol.
www.athensceo.com
UGA Engineering Students Make Their Mark on Georgia
Staff Report From Athens CEO
From a virtual reality system allowing pediatricians at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to practice delicate medical procedures to the construction of a new pedestrian bridge for the Wormsloe Historic Site near Savannah, students in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering are using their senior design projects to give back to the state. The yearlong projects are part of a capstone course that tests seniors on all the engineering concepts and skills they’ve learned and practiced during their undergraduate studies. They will present their projects on April 30 in the Tate Student Center’s Grand Hall.
www.athensceo.com
University of Georgia Announces New Hospitality and Food Industry Management Degree
- Faith Peppers
The Board of Regents has approved the University of Georgia to offer a new degree program that will fuel the workforce of the state’s growing hospitality industry. The new major in hospitality and food industry management will prepare students for jobs in the hospitality and food industry across a broad spectrum of opportunities available in Georgia and beyond.
www.onlineathens.com
Human waste contaminating UGA streams, students find
http://www.onlineathens.com/news/20180501/human-waste-contaminating-uga-streams-students-find
By Lee Shearer
Two steams that flow through the University of Georgia campus register high levels of E. coli bacteria, an indication of animal waste. Now a team of student environmental detectives has gotten closer to finding out where the waste originated. Their research has ruled out dog and deer feces as the source. It’s human waste, they determined. The student investigators in professor Anna Karls’ “Water Quality and Human Health” freshman course took a series of water samples at three on-campus sites to find that out. The course is a service-learning course for the “Biomedical Research and Global Health Learning Community,” a group of first-year students who live near each other in Creswell Hall, one of UGA’s three high-rise Baxter Street residence halls.
www.bizjournals.com
DOD awards Georgia Tech researchers $12.8M cybersecurity contract
By Jessica Saunders – Managing Editor, Atlanta Business Chronicle
The Department of Defense has awarded Georgia Tech researchers a $12.8 million contract for a cybersecurity research project. The DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency issued the $12,860,789 cost-reimbursement type contract to Georgia Tech Applied Research Corp. under the Harnessing Autonomy for Countering Cyberadversary Systems (HACCS) program. “The HACCS program aims to develop technologies for accurately identifying malicious cyber-adversary infiltrated networks, generating reliable software exploits for large numbers of known (n-day) vulnerabilities, and creating effective autonomous software agents that can be inserted in the compromised networks via the n-day exploits to safely and reliably neutralize cyber-adversary software agents,” the DOD said in a statement.
Higher Education News:
www.myajc.com
Get Schooled with Maureen Downey
New survey: Loneliest Americans are college-age
In a survey of more than 20,000 Americans released today, global health service company Cigna found troubling levels of loneliness and isolation. The most surprising finding is where the survey yielded the highest loneliness scores: College-age respondents. Among the findings that may take you aback:
- Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) and Millennials (adults ages 23-37) are lonelier and claim to be in worse health than older generations.
- Social media use alone is not a predictor of loneliness. Respondents defined as very heavy users of social media have a loneliness score similar to those who never use social media
- Students have higher loneliness scores than retirees. …
www.chronicle.com
Why Are States Spending Less on Higher-Ed? Medicaid and Lazy Rivers Could Be to Blame
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-States-Spending-Less/243281/#.WuhI1Q3QKv8
By Julian Wyllie
Three decades of spending cuts by states have left public colleges with nearly 25 percent declines in state funding per student. What happened to the money that could have been invested in higher education during that time? Most of it went to Medicaid, according to a new study. The study, “Higher Ed, Lower Spending: As States Cut Back, Where Has the Money Gone?” found that state spending has increased for public-school education, prisons, police, and fire protection, but the largest spending increases have gone to public welfare. Public higher ed is the only category in spending decline. Doug Webber, author of the study and an associate professor of economics at Temple University, said Medicaid is the single biggest cause of the decline in higher-education funding at the state and local levels. He also found that a $1 increase in per capita public-welfare spending was associated with a $2.44 decrease in per-student higher-education funding.
www.cbsnews.com
Why Bill and Melinda Gates put 20,000 students through college
Now universities around the country are forming a new, color-blind, Affirmative Action, aiming to close the gap between rich and poor
CORRESPONDENT
Scott Pelley
America, built on the dream of upward mobility, has become a country of deepening divide between rich and poor. The surest way to narrow the wealth gap is to earn a college degree. Now major universities like Princeton are working to lower the price of admission through a new kind of affirmative action, not based on race, but on low-income status. It began with two of America’s wealthiest parents, Bill and Melinda Gates. They spent more than a billion dollars putting low-income minority students through college. Before they tell you what they learned, come meet some of the Gates Millennium Scholars.