University System News
Capitol Beat
Longtime state agency manager named acting University System of Georgia chancellor
By Dave Williams
The University System of Georgia Board of Regents Wednesday named state government veteran Teresa MacCartney acting chancellor of the system while the board continues its search for a permanent successor to the retiring Steve Wrigley. MacCartney, who will take over the role July 1, has served as the university system’s executive vice chancellor for administration since 2019, where she oversees departments including cybersecurity, human resources, legal affairs, economic development and real estate and facilities. Before that, MacCartney was the state’s chief financial officer and headed the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget. She also has held several other leadership roles throughout state government, including with the Georgia Student Finance Commission and state Department of Education.
This story also appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Associated Press.
Atlanta Magazine
Clayton State University and Mailchimp team up to build a new pipeline of tech talent
By Jewel Wicker
Mailchimp, the Atlanta-based email marketing behemoth, teamed up with Clayton State to start the [Launchpad Academy] in 2018. The company, which now has about 1,200 employees, committed to a three-year partnership and invested $300,000 to give students access to the city’s fast-growing tech industry. According to a 2019 survey by CBRE, Atlanta created nearly 32,000 jobs in the sector from 2013 to 2018—the second-most in the country, trumped only by San Francisco.
The Albany Herald
UGA grad named winner of Nesbitt-Flatt Outstanding Senior award
By Courtney Cameron
William Flatt served as the dean of the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences from 1981 to 1994. Coming in as dean, Flatt recognized that college enrollment was low and tackled the challenge of recruitment using his problem-solving skills and charisma. This year’s Nesbitt-Flatt Outstanding Senior Award recognized a student with the same charisma and determination as Dean Flatt. Arjun Bhatt was recognized as this year’s recipient during the 2021 Student Awards and Leadership Celebration held on YouTube. Bhatt recently graduated with bachelor’s degrees in both applied biotechnology and psychology. Bhatt originally entered UGA as a biochemistry major in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, but he wanted to study something more tailored toward his interests of translational science, synthetic biology and genetics. After skimming through the UGA Bulletin, he found exactly what he was looking for — applied biotechnology. Bhatt also decided to add a psychology major because of his interest in understanding the human experience.
Atlanta Inno
Educational investment firm University Growth Fund expands to Atlanta for diverse student population
By Erin Schilling
A new fund focused on teaching students how to invest has chosen Atlanta for its latest expansion.
The University Growth Fund allows university students to manage an investment portfolio to create a pathway into private equity and venture capital. Sponsored by financial technology company Ally Financial Inc. (NYSE: ALLY), it is gearing up to close its second, $50 million fund, which will be managed by the students and supervised by a management team. The first fund was $32 million. The inaugural Atlanta class includes two AUC students, one Georgia Tech, one Georgia State University and one from Georgia Gwinnett College. The office is located downtown near Georgia State’s campus.
This story also appeared in The Business Journals.
Statesboro Herald
Study finds 3/5 of Statesboro renter households ‘cost burdened’ by rent
By Al Hackle
Three-fifths of Statesboro renter households are “cost burdened,” spending more than 30% of their income on rent, according to a consulting group’s housing study and needs analysis commissioned by the city government… Delivering the study report June 15 to the mayor and council, Seidenberg and KB Advisory Group Vice President Jonathan Gelber observed that the predominance of university-student renters, especially from metro-Atlanta counties where average incomes are much higher, pulls Statesboro average rents upward, to the disadvantage of local families who rent. Paradoxically, Georgia Southern University students also skew Statesboro’s household income statistics lower, since their incomes from lower-paying or part-time local jobs are counted here, but not their parents’ greater resources when those parents live elsewhere, Seidenberg observed.
Other News
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Map: Coronavirus deaths and cases in Georgia (updated June 22)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is keeping track of reported coronavirus deaths and cases across Georgia according to the Department of Public Health. See details in the map below. See the DPH’s guide to their data for more information about definitions.
CONFIRMED DEATHS: 18,407 | Deaths have been confirmed in every county. This figure does not include additional cases that the DPH reports as suspected COVID-19-related deaths. County is determined by the patient’s residence, when known, not by where they were treated.
CONFIRMED CASES: 901,472 | Cases have been confirmed in every county.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia governor to end public health state of emergency on July 1
By Greg Bluestein
Gov. Brian Kemp is set to lift the public health state of emergency roughly 15 months after lawmakers granted him broad new authorities to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. The governor signed an executive order on Tuesday that ends his emergency powers on July 1, saying they are no longer needed as “more Georgians are getting vaccinated, our economic momentum is strong and people are getting back to normal.” The emergency orders, ratified by lawmakers in an overwhelming vote in a special session in March 2020, gave his administration the ability to suspend state laws, take “direct” control of civil staffers, close schools, restrict travel and limit public gatherings.
USA Today
By John Bacon, Elinor Aspegren, Steven Vargas
The Biden administration won’t reach its “aspirational” goal of getting 70% of adult Americans at least partially vaccinated for COVID-19 by the Fourth of July, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said Tuesday. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have reached the goal already – but some states are at less than 50% of all adults, Zients said at a White House briefing. Still, the goal of at least partially vaccinating 70% of Americans ages 30 and older has been reached, he said, adding that the administration also is on track to hit the 70% target for ages 27 and older by the Fourth of July weekend. Zients said it will take a few more weeks to reach 70% of all adults but called the current numbers “amazing progress.”
Higher Education News
Atlanta Business Chronicle
Campus leaders take sides as Biden mounts push for free community college
By Hilary Burns
Opposition is mounting from lobbyists and advocacy groups representing four-year private colleges and universities already struggling to maintain enrollment before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Inside Higher Ed
High School Students Are Changing College Plans
By Scott Jaschik
Two surveys of high school students are being released today — and both suggest that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic will be with colleges for some time. A significant portion of students report that their college plans have changed and that they want to study close to home and inexpensively.
DiversityInc
HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge says student loan debt is a major hurdle for black homeownership
By Brian Good
Black Americans are saddled with an overwhelming majority of the nation’s $1.7 trillion student debt — and according to Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Marcia Fudge, that debt is one of the key factors preventing Black Americans from buying and owning their own home. Business Insider’s Ayelet Sheffey reported on the Federal Housing Administration’s press release on Friday, June 18, where they announced it would be “updating its student loan monthly payment calculations in an effort to ‘remove barriers and provide more access to affordable single-family FHA-insured mortgage financing for creditworthy individuals with student loan debt, which has a disproportionate impact on people of color.’”
Inside Higher Ed
Negotiated Rule Making Kicks Off
By Alexis Gravely
The Department of Education began its negotiated rule-making process Monday by holding the first of three days of public hearings, with commenters discussing topics for federal student aid regulations the department is planning to consider. The department solicited comments on 14 topics for possible regulation, including borrower defense to repayment; Public Service Loan Forgiveness; gainful employment; and discharges for closed institutions, borrowers with a total and permanent disability and false certification of student eligibility. Commenters were not limited to discussing only those topics and could comment on any regulatory issue that may improve outcomes for students. The department is also accepting written comments until July 1.
Inside Higher Ed
By Melissa Ezarik
Although higher ed leaders feel immense pride about how their teams pivoted to virtual everything practically overnight when the pandemic hit, students are in much less agreement on that point. “This last year in my opinion was a lot of money for almost no actual learning,” wrote one respondent to the latest Student Voice survey of 2,000 college students, while others shared similar sentiments. Conducted by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse from May 23 to 27, and presented by Kaplan, the survey explored how students believe the pandemic affected their academic progress and overall success in college.
Chronicle of Higher Education
Enrolling More Students at Prestigious Colleges Is a Losing Strategy
By Robert J. Massa and Bill Conley
Applications to the nation’s prestigious colleges soared this year, largely because many more of them went test-optional in 2020 due to the pandemic. Students who normally wouldn’t bother applying to an exclusive institution figured this year they would take a shot. Predictably, as applications shot up, acceptance rates plummeted. Several selective colleges dropped their rates, already in the single digits, even lower, leading to a clarion call by higher-education observers for those institutions to expand their enrollments, particularly to students from low-income families. David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, called for that in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Why Stanford Should Clone Itself.” And Jeffrey J. Selingo, a former Chronicle editor, echoed a similar plea in The Washington Post. Both essays cite a 2017 study showing that the most selective colleges in the United States enroll more students from the top 1 percent of incomes than from the bottom 60 percent — a sobering statistic.
Bloomberg
OPINION: Giving Colleges Unrestricted Donations Is Noble. It’s Also Risky.
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
The president of the University of Central Florida was effusive last week in accepting an unrestricted $40 million windfall from MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and former wife of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “Every new dollar allows us to make new discoveries on distant planets and to solve problems here on earth,” said Alexander Cartwright. This kind of lofty and vague language illustrates the pitfalls of making unrestricted gifts to colleges and universities. Higher education can be a black hole for philanthropy, and there’s a risk that Scott’s gifts to a number of colleges could be sucked in.
Chronicle of Higher Education
The UNC Scandal No One Talks About
By Andy Thomason
In the summer of 2012, the biggest scandal in half a century was splintering the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A series of phantom courses — supposedly lecture classes, but they never met in person — had been used for years by athletes trying to stay eligible to play. At a university that had long bragged about winning “the right way,” the revelation was evidence of an irresistible hypocrisy. Journalists and faculty members agitated for answers.