USG e-clips for September 28, 2022

University System News:

Capitol Beat News Service (statewide)

State university system awards record number of degrees

by Dave Williams 

The University System of Georgia awarded an all-time high 74,446 degrees during the last fiscal year, up 2.1% over fiscal 2021.…The university system has undertaken many initiatives during the last decade to boost graduation rates, including the Momentum Year program, which gets first-year students off to a fast start by ensuring they pursue an aggressive course schedule. The system also has made a point of quickly alerting student advisors when their charges’ performance is lagging and provided “degree roadmaps” to prevent students wasting time and money on courses that don’t count toward their degree. Last month, the system launched the website Georgia Degrees Pay to show the value of a degree.

See also: Insider Advantage, USG’s efforts to increase degree completion paying off

Yahoo!

ABAC student first recipient of Wrigley Scholarship

Bridget Dixon, an agricultural communication major at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, recently received the first-ever Steve W. Wrigley Scholarship Award from the University System of Georgia Foundation. Wrigley is a former USG chancellor. A native of Kite, Dixon represented ABAC and students from all 26 of the USG’s colleges and universities when she gave a speech at the recent Board of Regents Scholarship Gala in Atlanta.

 

See also: The Albany Herald; The Longview News-Journal; KPVI-TV; Newsbreak

 

Americus Times-Recorder 

GSW raises nearly $95,000 on Day of Giving from 45 states 

By Ken Gustafson

In just 24 hours, Georgia Southwestern State University (GSW) raised a total of $94,563 during its fourth annual Day of Giving, which ran midnight to midnight on Thursday, September 22.

A total of 321 gifts from 291 donors rolled in from 45 states and three countries. This year, the Hurricanes focused on raising money for student scholarships – particularly the Southwestern Promise Scholarship, General Athletics, President Jimmy Carter Leadership Program, and the Southwestern Annual Fund.

WSBTV

UGA researchers working to return prehistoric fish to Georgia waters 

News Staff

Researchers with the University of Georgia are working to [return] a fish back to local rivers. The fish can live to more than 100 years and looks like something out of Jurassic Park. Lake Sturgeon can grow to several feet in length. Once native to our area, overfishing and environmental issues depleted them from Georgia waterway Severe Weather Team 2 Chief Meteorologist Glenn Burns has learned that a decades-long effort could be successfully bringing back these fascinating fish.

FOX 31 

Memorial to be held Monday following the death of an ASU student 

FOX 31 Staff

Albany State University is mourning the loss of a student. School officials say that 21-year-old Yasmine Durham was found dead in her dorm room over the weekend. Durham’s death is still under investigation and an autopsy will be performed. The university is holding a memorial service on Monday, September 26 at 6 p.m. at the C.W. Grant Student Union Amphitheater on East Campus.

The Hechinger Report 

Why aren’t flagship universities enrolling more of their own states’ Black students? 

By Meridith Kolodner

For at least a decade, the University of Georgia has failed to enroll Black students at a rate proportionate to the number of Black high school graduates in the state. In 2020, just 6 percent of freshmen who enrolled at the university were Black, compared with 36 percent of the state’s public high school graduates. Among state flagship universities, UGA has one of the country’s largest disparities between its proportion of Black students and that of Black high school graduates from the state — second only to the University of Mississippi.

WTOC

New COVID testing kiosk available in Liberty Co. on Georgia Southern’s campus 

By Hayley Boland

A new COVID testing kiosk through the Coastal Health District is now available in Liberty County. Georgia Southern’s Liberty Campus is the third and final campus within the university to receive one of the COVID testing kiosks. Campus leaders say they’re excited it will serve not only students, but also the community. The kiosks offer free, on-demand COVID tests right at your fingertips. It’s located right in front of the Liberty campus, along Memorial Drive. Anyone can come up and utilize the testing kiosk.

Other News

Augusta Chronicle

Hurricane Ian updates: State of emergency declared in Georgia 

By Abraham Kenmore

About 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Gov. Brian Kemp announced on Twitter he had issued a state of emergency ahead of Hurricane Ian. The order will take effect at 7 a.m. Thursday and lasts for 29 days.

Higher Education News

WGBH

Despite Biden’s loan forgiveness plan, colleges grapple with underlying problem: affordability  

By Kirk Carapezza

While President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan will help millions in the United States recover from the high cost of college, the estimated price tag of the relief plan soared to $400 billion this week. And that has some analysts urging a renewed focus on the bigger problem: college affordability. Tuition and fees at four-year public colleges in the last decade have soared 10 percent — and 19 percent at private schools — leaving students and families wondering how much higher prices can go. But colleges have little incentive to reduce that sticker price.

National Bureau of Economic Research

International College Students’ Impact on the US Skilled Labor Supply 

By Michel Beine, Giovanni Peri & Morgan Raux

US universities have attracted hundreds of thousands of international students each year for the last decade. In this paper, we identify and estimate by how much one more international master’s (or bachelor’s) student increases the skilled labor supply of the US in the short-run. We find that attracting an additional international student to a US university increases the local labor supply by about 0.23 employees for master’s students and about 0.11 for bachelor’s students. These averages conceal an important difference. While non-STEM bachelor’s and master’s students had negligible transition rates into US employment, STEM Master students have had significant transition rates around 0.2, especially after the 2008 reform of Optional Practical Training for STEM graduates.

Higher Ed Dive

Here’s what happened when 3 colleges, including the University of Pennsylvania, went test optional 

By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf

Supporters of test-optional admissions often say withdrawing requirements that students provide SAT and ACT scores will help demolish barriers that prevent historically marginalized groups from applying to college. Enrollment leaders backed that argument at a session Friday of the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual meeting.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Public-University Curricula Are ‘Government Speech,’ Florida Says 

By Sarah Brown

The State of Florida asserted on Thursday that faculty members’ curricula and in-class instruction at public universities are “government speech” and “not the speech of the educators themselves.” Therefore, such expression is fair game to be regulated by state lawmakers. The state was responding to a lawsuit that several professors and a student filed this year, alleging that Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act violates the First Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague and racially discriminatory.

The New York Times 

The Discount Data That Some Colleges Won’t Publish 

By Ron Lieber

Want to know how few students pay full price, or the odds of getting merit aid? The C.D.S. is a collection of information about admissions, demographics, financial aid, academics and campus life. Schools assemble it each year and send it along to U.S. News & World Report, Peterson’s and other entities that sort or rank colleges and universities. Most institutions post their C.D.S. somewhere on their websites. But at least a dozen did not at the start of this week.

Indiana Public Media 

Jury finds Purdue retaliated against student who alleged assault 

By Benjamin Thorp

A jury found Friday that Purdue University violated due process and treated a student differently because she was a woman after she came forward with assault allegations against a fraternity member. The initial complaint argued that Purdue had a policy “written or unwritten” that if women could not prove their claims to the satisfaction of university decision-makers, they faced “discipline or expulsion.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Higher Ed’s Hiring Crunch Was Already Bad. It Got Worse Over the Summer. 

By Megan Zahneis

A trying year for hiring in higher ed only worsened over the summer, according to a survey of college leaders this month, fielded by the Chronicle with support from the Huron Consulting Group. Of 446 respondents, 64 percent reported that hiring in July, August, and September had been more difficult compared with the rest of the year, and 32 percent said it was about the same.

Weatherford Democrat 

Lawsuit prompts protestors to WC presidential luncheon 

By Sally Sexton

Outside the Alkek Fine Arts Center on the Weatherford College campus Thursday stood a line of residents, students and former staff, holding protest signs as ceremonial festivities inside were readied for the annual WC Presidential Luncheon. The incident came weeks after a former WC employee filed a lawsuit against the college. Shelley Gipson claims she was the victim of sexual harassment and discrimination by President Tod Allen Farmer, according to the lawsuit filed Aug. 22 in the Northern District Court of Texas.

Inside Higher Ed

After the China Initiative: Seeking Accountability 

By Colleen Flaherty

The Department of Justice discontinued its controversial China Initiative in February, amid accusations that the program was criminalizing China-linked workers’ paperwork errors and spreading anti-Asian sentiments instead of uncovering actual state-sanctioned economic espionage. The initiative, launched in 2018, did lead to multiple pleas and convictions: a hospital researcher and her husband pleaded guilty in 2020 to conspiring to steal trade secrets to sell them to the Chinese government, for instance. Yet numerous academics who were charged under the China Initiative but never tried or convicted say the DOJ knowingly pursued flimsy cases against them, upending their lives, with nary an apology.

See also: The New York Times, Former Espionage Suspect Sues, Accusing F.B.I. of Falsifying Evidence

 

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

In Diversity Efforts, An Invisible Labor Falls on Faculty of Color 

By Lois Elfman

In the ongoing, often fraught march toward diversifying both the student body and the faculty of colleges and universities, professors of color have reported being saddled with added responsibilities that are less of a concern for most white faculty. The COVID-19 pandemic made the weight of those added duties even more glaring, some observers say, and clarified just how much more difficult it can be for faculty of color to successfully proceed toward earning tenure — under the longstanding rules about what constitutes scholarship that merits tenure.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Not All College Presidents Are Straight White Men 

By Richard J. Helldobler

In 2019, Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University, told a group of students he was trying to recruit a “leading African American scholar,” a person he inappropriately described as “one of the rarest creatures in America.” With all the talk about diversity and inclusion, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other sexually-identifying college presidents still go largely unrecognized by national organizations. And so, many LGBTQIA+ presidents like myself feel as if we are similarly seen as rare creatures — highly conspicuous and yet still invisible entities on campus.