Albany Herald
Albany State University launches University College to help freshmen succeed
From staff reports
Albany State University is launching a new program that focuses on helping incoming students succeed. The program, University College, will serve as a national model for how to effectively prepare first-year students for university-level expectations, bridge the gap between first-year students’ natural interests and academic success, and promote on-time graduation in every major. “Providing a transformative first-year experience is key to supporting an effective transition to higher education for freshmen,” ASU President Marion Fedrick said in a news release. “This additional support will lead to an increase in retention rates, as students will learn to balance student life and prepare for the academic rigor of upper-level courses.”
Rome News-Tribune
GHC leadership creates ‘Ready to Start’ scholarship to help students pay for college
Alongside the Georgia Highlands College Foundation, the leadership team at GHC has created a new scholarship to help students pay for college. The new “Ready to Start” scholarship is for any student who falls a few hundred dollars short of paying after financial aid and other scholarships have been applied. President Mike Hobbs said a few hundred dollars shouldn’t keep a student from attending class and working toward their college goals, and that’s why he and the leadership team at GHC decided to create this new fund to immediately help students this fall — which could help hundreds of students right away. According to the GHC Foundation, on average $200 can make the difference for a student working to complete a college degree. Hobbs said the use of this new fund is a way of ensuring those students who are “ready to start” get the support they need at a moment in their college career where it can make the biggest impact. The “Ready to Start” scholarship will be applied to accounts for students who register for fall now or who have recently registered for fall classes and have a balance on their account that the new fund can cover.
The Tifton Gazette
New ABAC faculty ready for fall semester
Eight new faculty members will begin their first fall semester at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College when classes begin Aug. 15. The new faculty members include C. Adam Anderson, lecturer of mathematics; Dr. Andrew S. Peal, assistant professor of jazz and music theory; Marti B. Schert, lecturer of choral and applied voice; Dr. Jeb. E. Sharp, assistant professor of English; Madison M. Thornhill, lecturer of business; Dr. Wally H. Woods III, assistant professor of wildlife ecology and management; J. Ridge Harper, lecturer of education; and Michael C. Bowen, a part-time business instructor, college officials said in a statement. Three other ABAC faculty members began their ABAC careers earlier this year. They include Dr. John H. Cable, assistant professor of history; Dr. Amber C. Howard, assistant professor of biology; and Sarah Yawn, instructional service librarian. New ABAC President Tracy Brundage greeted the new faculty members in an orientation session Aug. 8. She joined the administration Aug. 1.
Athens Banner-Herald
UGA Students move into the dorms on move in day: Photos
19 PHOTOS
Savannah Morning News
Betty the Book Bus is promoting literacy with a mobile bookstore around Savannah
Josephine Johnson
Georgia Southern University junior and Savannah resident Kaitlynn Perry knows books. And she should. When the double history and archeology major isn’t researching artifacts from digs in and around Chatham County, or studying early 19th century pottery fragments, she’s curating and selling used and new novels, short stories and poetry. Earlier this year, Perry painstakingly converted a small school bus into a mobile bookstore, and this month “Betty the Book Bus” launches into regular business at pop-ups and celebrations around the city.
Savannah Morning News
Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute expands LEAP program
The Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute (GT-SCL) residing in and supported by the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), in coordination with Georgia Tech Professional Education (GTPE), is expanding its Logistics Education And Pathways (LEAP) program with the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) Reentry Program to implement services for eligible participants in Chatham, Bibb, and Muscogee Education Transition Centers (ETC). The goal of the ETCs is to reduce recidivisms and enable participants with the tools, training, and opportunities to move forward as a productive member of society with sustainable employment and a rewarding career. LEAP is a fast-paced certification program that prepares secondary education students to compete for successful high-growth jobs in the supply chain and logistics field, an outcome that is a natural component to the mission of the ETCs.
E Online News
Meet the 16 Universities Competing in Capital One College Bowl Season 2
E! News can exclusively reveal the 16 teams of university students ready to battle it out on NBC’s Capital One College Bowl season two. See if your alma mater made the list.
By Brett Malec
The ultimate battle of the brains is finally back. E! News can exclusively reveal the 16 university teams who will compete on season two of NBC’s quiz show Capital One College Bowl. Hosted by brothers Peyton Manning and Cooper Manning, the series features students from the country’s biggest and brightest colleges working together in groups to test their knowledge in a five-round trivia tournament in an attempt to ultimately win the Capital One College Bowl trophy and life-changing scholarship money. This season, which premieres Sept. 9, will include “bigger rivalries, impressive celebrity alumni shoutouts and new rounds of competition,” according to NBC. “More schools than ever before are competing, bringing more school spirit—from marching bands to mascots to a live audience cheering them on.” Plus, beloved NBC Data Analyst (and king of khakis) Steve Kornacki will join the sidelines to break down the numbers behind the match-ups. The 16 colleges and universities battling it out on season two are: …Albany State University; University of Georgia …Capital One will award a total of $1 million in scholarships, providing all student competitors with tuition assistance
The Times
Why a planned student housing project near UNG is shrinking in size
Jeff Gill
A planned student housing development near the University of North Georgia’s Gainesville campus could shrink in size because of falling enrollment at the college and lingering COVID-19 concerns. Developer bSide Partners of Johns Creek is proposing to reduce the number of bedrooms from 486 to 341 and the overall size from 269,468 square feet to 246,794. Also, the bedrooms would be spread out among 229 units instead of 152, making the units less crowded. “All of these changes create a better-designed community for students and young professionals in a post-Covid world,” bSide says in a document filed with Oakwood. The developer noted declining enrollment at the school as one reason for the changes. UNG has seen enrollment drop from 19,748 students in fall 2019 to 18,985 in fall 2021, or by 3.8%. It is due primarily to a smaller pool of students pursuing associate degrees, according to data provided by UNG.
Higher Education News:
The Chronicle of Higher Education
In the past, colleges grew their way out of enrollment crises. This time looks different.
By Karin Fischer
Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic, raising alarms that the enrollment emergency projected to arrive a few years from now is already here. High-school seniors uninterested in studying online chose to defer. Working parents strained by the demands of full-time pandemic child care put their studies on hold. International students couldn’t get visas. Those in majors with hands-on practicums or lab work found they couldn’t register for courses required for their degrees. Enrollment numbers continue to look bleak as the pandemic drags on, even though in-person classes have become the norm and consulates have reopened. College attendance among undergraduates has fallen almost 10 percent since Covid emerged in early 2020; this spring, enrollment dropped 4.7 percent from the year before, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a deeper-than-expected decline. The persistence of the enrollment contraction has sparked fears that many students are not simply missing but gone for good. Research shows that if students stop out, they may not continue with their studies, and that’s particularly true for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We have to act now,” said Courtney Brown, vice president for impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation. “This is a crisis moment.”
The Washington Post
The next inflation-driven worry: Rising college tuition
Families are concerned about affordability of higher education
By Nick Anderson and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel
At the University of Virginia, where prices were little changed last year, tuition and fees for state residents who pay in full are up nearly 6 percent for the coming school year, to about $20,350. Howard University’s sticker price, after a similar pause, has risen more than 7 percent, to about $31,050. These schools, one public and one private, underline the new inflation-fueled reality for many college students: The price freezes and other unusual bargains that coincided with the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic are over. Colleges and universities across the country, squeezed by sharply rising labor and supply costs, are taking steps to fortify their revenue and resume their pre-pandemic patterns of annual tuition increases. These price hikes, for the most part, do not appear to be as high as the overall annual inflation rate measured at 8.5 percent in July.
Higher Ed Dive
The Universities at Shady Grove’s executive director adapts the fluid fan idea reshaping the business of sports, shedding light on higher ed’s future.
By Anne Khademian
Anne Khademian is executive director of the Universities at Shady Grove, which is a regional higher education center of the University System of Maryland and a nontraditional campus that offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs from nine different state universities.
While many college leaders are especially worried about the fiscal challenge from lower enrollment, my takeaway is different: These numbers are further cause to rethink what higher education means in the first place, which presents a huge opportunity to build new models of higher ed for the majority of American high school graduates. The pandemic didn’t cause the “enrollment crisis,” it amplified it. Costs are rising and student debt has escalated. Obstacles to admission and transfers confront low-income, underserved and nontraditional students. Uncertainty looms over whether a college degree will result in a job with a sustainable family wage. Consider that 74% of students in higher education today are nontraditional — they work, they have family commitments, they are financing their own education, and many are the first in their families to go to college. While many of these students will persist in traditional four-year institutions, we must recognize that living on a four-year campus, or even studying for four consecutive years, is not in the cards for many students.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Many Professors Stopped the Tenure Clock During the Pandemic. Who Benefited?
By Megan Zahneis
Many colleges allowed faculty members to stop their tenure clocks during the pandemic, to account for the personal and professional disruptions that hampered progress toward promotion. It was a relatively simple response, administrators reasoned, to a seismic societal event — one designed to ease scholars’ anxiety about their career development as classes moved online, archives and labs closed their doors, and fieldwork and travel became impossible. Offering a tenure-clock stop was “something that the administration could do quickly, unilaterally,” said L. Lynn Vidler, dean of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs’ College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. “It was a morale boost. There was choice involved.” But as clock-stops — normally seen as one-time measures to ease individual faculty members’ circumstances — became an option for which wide swaths of early-career scholars were automatically eligible, questions emerged about whom the policy benefited, and to what degree. Those are questions Vidler and two colleagues explore in a new study about how faculty members’ decisions to stop their tenure clocks differed by gender, race, and institution type. Their findings, the authors write, expose inequities inherent in the clock-stop phenomenon.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
More Colleges Are Adding Diversity to Tenure Standards. But the Debate’s Not Settled.
By Isha Trivedi
The California Community Colleges system approved a new policy in May that added diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria to tenure and promotion reviews. Then, a couple of weeks later, the University of Washington’s faculty rejected a proposal to have professors submit a diversity statement as part of the tenure process. The contrast highlights a fierce debate happening across higher education — and across the political spectrum — over whether professors should have to demonstrate support for their institutions’ diversity goals to move up the academic ladder. Since the racial-justice protests and national reckoning that began in 2020, more institutions have added diversity criteria, often abbreviated as DEI, to tenure and promotion standards. While diversity statements started to become more common in faculty hiring about five years ago, revisions of tenure policies are a newer phenomenon. About one-fifth of institutions surveyed this year by the American Association of University Professors had made DEI a factor in tenure and promotion. Among colleges that hadn’t, half of them said they were considering adding DEI in the future.
Inside Higher Ed
OPINION – Developing Strategic Thinking Skills in Grad School
Recognizing and capitalizing on opportunities to hone those skills will allow students to elevate their value as they enter the workforce, writes Dinuka Gunaratne.
By Dinuka Gunaratne
As a graduate student, you develop distinct skills, knowledge and connections throughout your research program that set you apart as a highly skilled professional. As you develop those skills, you become more marketable and valuable to employers and the workforce. However, many graduate students have told me that, even with such practical skills, they still struggle to find employment. As we move into the post-pandemic world, organizations are going to look for candidates with complex sets of both technical and transferable skills. One such skill that is universally valued is strategic thinking. Strategic thinking is often defined as the ability to see the big picture, plan ahead and be action-oriented in achieving one’s own or an organization’s goals. It is showcased through curiosity and connecting the dots across different domains while, at the same time anticipating and mitigating challenges to crafting a path forward in achieving goals. This highly sought-after skill is valued across many sectors and employers.
Inside Higher Ed
OPINION – Make Title IX Policies More Student-Friendly
New research finds students aren’t able to comprehend typical Title IX policies. Here’s why that’s a problem, Laura Beth Nielsen and Kat Albrecht write.
By Laura Beth Nielsen and Kat Albrecht
Imagine it is 1 a.m. on any college campus about six weeks into the fall semester. A first-year student believes they have been sexually assaulted. Just a few weeks in, they are still getting to know their roommate, the campus and the university bureaucracies. Alone, ashamed and hurting, they want to know what to do and how to get help. They turn to the campus website and search for “sexual assault on campus” or “rape resources.” A number of things come up: campus police, local police, anonymous reporting options, LGBTQ+ resource centers, campus mental health services. And, of course, they find the Title IX policy itself. But will this Title IX policy—the object of so much research and debate—help the student handle this traumatic event? Probably not, our research suggests.
Higher Ed Dive
75% of master’s programs with high debt and low earnings are at private nonprofits
Urban Institute report undermines narrative that programs with poor student outcomes are all at for-profit colleges and in the humanities.
By Lilah Burke
Dive Brief:
Private nonprofit institutions offer a disproportionately high number of the master’s degree programs whose graduates have high debt and low earnings, according to a recent analysis from the Urban Institute. Although private nonprofit institutions accounted for 44% of all master’s programs in the data, they made up 75% of programs with high debt and low earnings. Nearly half of master’s programs with high debt and low earnings are in the fields of social work, clinical counseling and applied psychology, and mental and social health services. Public institutions offer programs in those fields that graduate students with significantly less debt than their private and for-profit counterparts, raising questions about degree pricing, according to Urban Institute researchers.
Inside Higher Ed
Conservative Students Sue Clovis Community College
By Sara Weissman
Students from a campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student organization, sued campus officials at Clovis Community College in California last week for allegedly requiring them to take down fliers expressing conservative viewpoints. The students are being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an organization that promotes academic freedom, free speech and due process rights. According to the lawsuit, in November 2021, three students hung fliers on bulletin boards in academic buildings, including one that listed the death tolls of Communist regimes and warned against the dangers of “leftist ideas.” Clovis Community College president Lori Bennett ordered the fliers be taken down after administrators received complaints. The suit alleges she cited a rule that wasn’t previously in place that campus fliers are intended for club announcements.