University System News:
Albany Herald
New ABAC dean emphasizes student engagement
From Staff Reports
Matthew Anderson says he believes people and flamingos share many common characteristics. “When one flamingo gets excited, they all get excited,” Anderson, the new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, said. …Anderson said the ABAC tradition of establishing close connections with its students was the biggest draw for continuing his academic and administrative career at ABAC. “I love the student engagement programs here,” he said. “Student contact is where I shine. Most of my publications have had student co-authors. …Anxious to get started in his leadership position, Anderson talks excitedly about compiling data on “what students are doing and where they are going after graduation.” “We serve students across the state and the region,” he said. “What can we do to better serve these students? Engaged student learning is the key. “I also hope to engage our partners in the community and the region. I want to bring in ABAC alumni who have done well for themselves. We need to connect our students with these alumni.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta among top 10 cities in North America for tech talent, CBRE report says
By Fiza Pirani
Since 2013, Atlanta’s tech talent pool has grown at the seventh fastest pace of the 50 largest markets across the United States and Canada, according to CBRE’s new scorecard. The scorecard, part of its sixth annual Scoring Tech Talent Report, is based on 13 metrics used to “measure each market’s depth, vitality and attractiveness to companies seeking tech talent and to tech workers seeking employment.” These metrics include tech talent supply, growth, concentration, completed tech degrees, cost of living, industry outlook, market outlook and average rent cost growth. The top three markets on CBRE’s report are the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Toronto. Atlanta ranked ninth overall and seventh for top markets for tech degree completions, with Georgia Tech as its top regional university pipeline.
Savannah CEO
Georgia Southern Professor Provides STEM Opportunities to Disadvantaged Youth in Her Home Country
Staff Report From Savannah CEO
When Georgia Southern University College of Education (COE) faculty member Beverly King Miller, Ph.D., left Pueblo Nuevo, a community in Panama, to live in the United States at the age of six, her grandmother had only one wish for her — that she become the first woman in their family to attend college. Miller exceeded her grandmother’s expectations, earning a doctoral degree in education from the University of New Mexico. Her dissertation focused on the experiences of Panamanian, Afro-Caribbean women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It was, in fact, one of her own experiences there that left an indelible mark on her. …This summer, 85 students ages five and up participated in the program. COE student Aleshia Hill, a senior elementary education major, and 12 volunteer assistants, including two Georgia Southern alumni, joined Miller. “The alumni and Aleshia were trained so well as teachers at Georgia Southern that I knew I could trust them to handle their own classrooms and instruction,” Miller said. “They were also a huge help in drafting curriculum.”
The LaGrange Daily News
20 Under 40: Sewell is giving back to her hometown by educating tomorrow’s leaders
By Daniel Evans
It’s been quite a year for Long Cane Middle School teacher Traviera Sewell. Sewell, a sixth grade social studies teacher, was named the Troup County School System’s Teacher of the Year in March. This is only Sewell’s fourth year teaching. “I was in tears,” Sewell said when her name was called. “I was surrounded by my family, my co-workers, my friends and faculty, so I felt really blessed and humbled but super excited also.” The LaGrange native went to the Troup County School System for kindergarten through twelfth grade and graduated from LaGrange High School in 2010. She said it meant a lot to come back to Troup County and teach the next generation. …Sewell earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia, her master’s from Columbus State University and her specialist degree from Liberty University. She’s currently working to earn a doctorate degree.
WSAV
School officials back program to help local students empower each other
By: Jon Dowding
Eric Wooten knew he always wanted to help people in life, but was not quite sure how to do it. When his aunt told him about a Peer Mediation Program at his high school, he decided to see what he could take away from it. “Through Peer Mediation I found that there’s actually a different way that normal people can help normal people out with different situations,” said Wooten. Now, after having graduated from Armstrong State University, he’s working as a Volunteer Coordinator at the Mediation Center of the Coastal Empire, the same organization that taught him lasting lessons in high school.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia’s Savannah port sets shipping record amid global trade tension
By J. Scott Trubey
Georgia’s Savannah port posted another record fiscal year for container traffic for the 12 months ending in June, a signal of economic resiliency despite continued global trade tensions. The Georgia Ports Authority said on Tuesday that container traffic hit a record 4.5 million, 20-foot equivalent units from July 2018 through June, up 7.3 percent from the prior fiscal year. Automotive and machinery units shipped through the state’s Brunswick port were up 4 percent during that time. Georgia’s inland and coastal ports are vital cogs in the state’s economy, and serve as canaries in the global economic coal mine. The volume of cargo that flows in and out of the Savannah and Brunswick harbors are bellwethers of U.S. demand for imports and of the appetite abroad for Georgia-grown or manufactured products.
…The Atlanta region boasts a rail network and freeway system that provide ready access to the coast. A recent study by the University of Georgia found maritime trade accounts for $44 billion of the state’s gross domestic product and the ports directly or indirectly touch more than 439,000 jobs.
Fox News
Hackers could gridlock entire cities using connected cars, researchers say
By Christopher Carbone
Imagine a future in which you’re riding along in a self-driving vehicle and, suddenly, it shuts down in the middle of a major New York City intersection. When you open the window to see what’s happening, it seems that every other self-driving vehicle nearby has also shut down — grinding traffic to a halt citywide. Although that scenario sounds far-fetched now, in a new study physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have simulated what it would take for hackers to wreak this kind of havoc in a future, even more connected world.
Higher Education News:
GPB
Kemp To Speak At Ribbon Cutting For South Georgia’s First 4-Year Medical School
By Ellen Eldridge
South Georgia’s Colquitt County has its first four-year medical school in Moultrie and Gov. Brian Kemp will speak during the Aug. 6 ribbon cutting. The Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine is designed to help meet physician workforce needs in rural Georgia, President Jay Feldstein said in a release. Joanne Jones, who works with the college’s business office, said the goal is to enroll students from the South Georgia region, “Have them go to medical school here, train in their residency programs in this region so that they will stay and practice after all of their training is completed.” Classes begin Aug. 12 with 55 students who will study to become Doctors of Osteopathic medicine. Graduates are fully licensed physicians who differ from medical doctors (or MDs) in their approach to care and training, which focuses on the “whole person.”
EdSurge
Don’t Call Them Test Companies: How the College Board and ACT Have Shifted Focus
By Jeffrey R. Young
These days the leaders of the College Board, which runs the SAT, have been making a surprising argument—that colleges and parents should stop taking the scores of its signature test so seriously. Or, at least, that SAT scores should be considered as just one factor among many in judging whether a student is ready for college, or a fit for a highly-selective campus. “The era of trying to measure aptitude is finally over,” wrote the College Board’s president, David Coleman, in an essay in The Atlantic earlier this summer, referring to the version of the test that has been in place since 2014, when the SAT was last revised. “The new SAT does not tell students or anyone else how smart students are, or how capable they are of learning new things. It only says something about whether students have yet attained the reading, writing, and math skills they will use to gain knowledge in college or career training; it makes no statement about what they are capable of learning.”
Inside Higher Ed
A Welcome Message, or a Warning?
A State Department official says Chinese students are welcome. She also speaks of Chinese propaganda and influence activities on U.S. campuses, and of academic espionage.
By Elizabeth Redden
A senior State Department official said Tuesday that the U.S. welcomes students from China. But Marie Royce, the assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, also said that colleges need to do a better job integrating their Chinese students and that many live in a “bubble” of Chinese Communist Party propaganda and misinformation that skews their perceptions of the U.S. And she said that the U.S. takes the threat of academic espionage seriously and will not tolerate intellectual property theft, even as she noted that only 0.0001 percent of Chinese students’ visa applications are refused for this reason. “Contrary to what you might have heard from the government of China, the number of Chinese student visa applications refused has declined each of the last four years,” Royce said. It was not immediately clear whether Royce referred to a decline in the visa refusal rate or in a decline in the raw number of refusals. According to publicly available data, the raw number of student visas issued to Chinese citizens has fallen substantially over the last several years, a decline largely attributable to change in policy under the Obama administration that increased the duration of visas for Chinese students from one year to five.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Nell Gluckman
Reports in ProPublica Illinois and The Wall Street Journal describe what admissions professionals say is a new loophole: Parents transfer their child’s guardianship to a friend or relative so the child doesn’t have to declare the family’s income when applying for financial aid.
Inside Higher Ed
Compilation: Removing Barriers to Student Success
By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed is pleased to release today our latest print-on-demand compilation, “Removing Barriers to Student Success,” an exploration of what our authors would do if they could revise requirements. You may download a copy here, free.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Katherine Mangan
The University of Alaska Board of Regents, here at an emergency meeting in Anchorage on July 22, met July 30 to authorize the system president to draw up a plan to consolidate the system’s universities and community campuses into one university.
Each day that goes by without a cost-slashing plan deepens the financial crisis facing the University of Alaska. But deciding where to cut, and when, has become an agonizing ordeal for university regents who met on Tuesday to hash out dueling options. Whatever they do, they’ll have to do it fast, the system’s president, James R. Johnsen, told regents. With a sweep of his budget pen, the state’s governor, Michael J. Dunleavy, cut $130 million from the university’s state budget for the fiscal year that began July 1. Combined with legislative cuts, the university lost $136 million, or 41 percent of its state budget and 17 percent of its budget over all. “The board has to decide whether its house is on fire or whether it’s just toast burning,” Johnsen told regents. “In my view,” he added, “our house is on fire.”
Inside Higher Ed
Divisions Within Alaska’s ‘House on Fire’
University of Alaska board’s debate over how to respond to $136 million cut in state funds reveals rift among the university’s senior leaders. Regents ultimately back move toward “one university.”
By Doug Lederman
The nearly monthlong drama surrounding the Alaska governor’s decision to slash 41 percent from the state’s allocation to the University of Alaska system has been widely portrayed as a battle between Governor Mike Dunleavy and those who support the university. But seven hours of discussion and debate by the university’s Board of Regents revealed a significant chasm between the university’s supporters, too. Although the divided governing board ultimately voted 8 to 3 to support President Jim Johnsen’s recommendation to move toward a singly accredited university, it did so over the objections of chancellors of the university’s three main campuses and many faculty and student leaders who argued instead for maintaining three separately accredited institutions. To a person, the members of the board and all those who spoke before it unequivocally believe the planned $136 million cut in state funds will damage the university. Johnsen called the reduction “truly existential,” precipitating an “unprecedented fiscal crisis in magnitude and speed.”