See you soon.

On to the guv. (rpeteg via Flickr)

Just as I was done with the Senate coverage, the House took up the bill and passed it 76-56.

Most of the opposition seemed to center on the idea that the state was giving $250 million more to two higher-ed systems that have never learned to reform themselves and cut costs.

State Rep. Gene Pelowski told the House that most of the money is going toward student financial aid and tuition relief.

And he said the bill has reporting requirements to make sure colleges and universities spend money wisely:

“We will hold them accountable — both the University of Minnesota and MnSCU. We will hold them accountable for the next year on how this money is spent.”

Having won approval from both the House and Senate, the bill must now move on to the governor for his signature.

Your turn, House. (trainman74 via Flickr)

This afternoon, the state Senate passed 44-22 the higher-education bill approved by the conference committee last night.

The main news for most of the public: It freezes tuition for two years for undergraduates at both the University of Minnesota and state-run colleges and universities.

The bill made the freeze possible by spending more than $120 million for tuition relief at the U and MnSCU.

Republican opponents of the bill said it doesn’t do enough to force higher-education institutions to cut costs, and so didn’t want to feed the system that much money.

Senate minority leader David Hann (R-Eden Prairie) told lawmakers:

“There hasn’t been, to my understanding, to my knowledge, any serious effort on the part of higher education institutions to figure out: How do we reform what we’re doing and make higher education affordable?”

But Senate higher-ed Chairwoman Terri Bonoff (DFL-Minnetonka) said the bill does include some cost-cutting measures, as well as reporting and accountability measures for the two systems that make it a good investment.

“Now is the time to take a strong stand to reverse the trend of high tuition costs.”

Opponents also expressed the concern that the omnibus bill contained the so-called Dream Act. That language would enable students living in Minnesota illegally to get access to state financial aid as well as pay instate tuition.

Bonoff asked them not to reject the whole higher-ed bill just because it contained that one item. She said education is transformative, and that the bill’s benefits should be accessible to all.

“Anything we can do as a state to make sure each and every young person has the opportunity to transform in a moment — we owe it to our kids.”

The bill also prohibits executive bonuses at the U and MnSCU. And it funds a pilot program to give MnSCU students a greater share of state aid.

The bill includes funding for MnSCU faculty raises, but it slashed money for its workforce initiative. It gave no funding for its request for more internships, though Bonoff said both the tax and jobs bills have funding for similar measures. It contains $7.2 million for a matching program to buy training equipment — a third of what MnSCU asked for.

All in all, the legislation provides $250 million more in spending. If it’s passed by the House, MnSCU would come out ahead, getting $102 million instead of the $97 million that it asked for. (The bulk of that increase, however, would be for the tuition freeze.) The U would receive $78.5 million, less than the $92 million it requested. Its MNDRIVE research funding, however, would get just under $36 million, about what it requested.

The bill now faces a floor vote in the House, which could come later today or tomorrow.

Update: The House is debating it right now.

You can read the full story here.

And you can get my first impressions the morning of my visit here.

This should contain any changes made last night, though I don’t believe they affect of the highlights I mentioned yesterday.

The floor vote could come today.

Despite recent study, some universities cater to gluten-free needs Universities have taken limited measures to accommodate their gluten-free and gluten-sensitive students. (USA Today)

University of California urged to graduate students in 4 years The California governor recently proposed giving UC and Cal State more money if they boost graduation rates 10% by 2017. (Los Angeles Times)

House advances student loan fix The days of fixed-rate student loans could be coming to a close, with House Republicans on Thursday advancing a proposal that would link rates to financial markets. (Associated Press via NAICU)

Let’s reimburse higher ed for remediation costs Taxpayers already have paid for elementary and secondary education once. Why should they have to pay for it again? (The Edmond Sun via University Business)

Liebling: Don’t let fear stop you from calling these folks. (tsaiproject via Flickr)

A while back I reported on college students’ efforts to get a “medical amnesty” law passed for the state. It would essentially protect underage drinkers from prosecution — under certain conditions — if they had to call authorities or 911 for help.

It passed the House today by a huge margin, and is now going on to the Senate.

Here’s an announcement by the chief author of the legislation in the House, Rep. Tina Liebling (DFL-Rochester):

Today, the Minnesota House of Representatives passed the Medical Amnesty Bill (HF 946) on a bipartisan vote of 124-8. The bill allows a person under the age of 21 who consumes or possesses an alcoholic beverage to contact a 911 operator to report a medical emergency without the risk of being ticketed for underage consumption.

“Every year we hear stories of underage drinkers in need of medical attention dying because their friends were afraid to call the 911. This bill tells young people we care more about their health than any punishment they might incur,” said Rep. Tina Liebling (DFL – Rochester), who sponsored the legislation.

The bill is narrowly focused to deter underage drinkers from abusing the law. Under the bill, the person who initiates the contact must be the first person to report the emergency, provide their name and contact information, remain at the scene until assistance arrives, and cooperate with the authorities at the scene in order for this provision to apply.

The bill would not protect underage drinkers from other alcohol-related charges such as drunk driving.

Minnesota would be the 11th state to pass a Medical Amnesty Bill. California, New York, Colorado, North Dakota, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah all have similar laws.

Some agreement here. (MPR Photo / Hart Van Denburg)

Here’s a roundup of some of the main points in the legislation coming out of the state conference committee on higher education:

• Higher target. The legislation calls for $250 million more in spending — a bit more than the governor’s original proposal of $240 million, and much higher than the House’s target of $150 million. It is, however, less than the Senate’s proposal of $263 million.

• Tuition freezes. State lawmakers have agreed to fund a two-year tuition freeze for undergraduates at both the University of Minnesota and Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system campuses. Although lawmakers supported a tuition freeze for students at the U, the Senate had proposed allowing MnSCU a maximum increase of 3 percent. But they agreed to provide $78 million in funding to enable MnSCU to keep tuition flat. That should save MnSCU students several hundred dollars a year on average.

MnSCU student leaders have normally been wary of mandates for a tuition freeze, because they fear it would only force the administration to cut programs to make up for the lost revenue.

But because the freeze would be the result of a legislative investment, Minnesota State University Student Association Chairwoman Moriah Miles said she was excited:

“The tuition freeze, with the way they have funded that and pursued that, is great for our students. They’re reaching our goal of keeping our debt low while also not cutting our campuses in any way that would harm students. .. And with the amount of student debt that students are carrying, it’s important that we pay attention to every dollar that is put on their backs.”

• The Dream Act. Despite initial reluctance — or outright opposition — by House committee Chairman Gene Pelowski (DFL-Winona) to include the bill in the omnibus higher-ed legislation, Senate backers got it included. It would enable students living in Minnesota illegally to pay instate tuition at campuses such as the University of Minnesota, receive state financial aid as well as private scholarship money administered by public universities.

One of main people pushing for the act, Citizens League program assistant Juventino Meza, told me the hardest part should be behind him. Although such legislation has died in the legislature twice before, he says it has strong bipartisan backing and has the support of Gov. Mark Dayton.

He told me:

“I’m 100 percent confident.”

• Bonuses. Executives at both MnSCU and the U would essentially not be able to earn performance-based pay.
• Part-time students. I hear some details still needed to be worked out, but the bill is taking on the Senate’s proposal of a pilot project that would prorate the State Grant for part-time MnSCU students. That’s in answer to student claims that the State Grant formula discriminates against working part-time students.
• MOOCs. Though this isn’t a surprise, lawmakers adopted Senate language exempting providers of Massive Open Online Courses from registering with the state if students pay less than $100 for them.

The conference committee is expected to work some other details and then adopt the higher-ed bill tonight.
It would then go to the Senate and House chambers for a floor vote.

Not your usual location — UMR’s “campus” in the University Square mall downtown. (Photo by Alex Kolyer for MPR)

When the first graduates of the University of Minnesota-Rochester receive their diplomas Saturday, they’ll leave a campus that’s still figuring things out.

Instructors are still experimenting with the curriculum and how best to teach it.

Students are still trying to build a social life and an identity within the city.

And every once in a while, outsiders still wander onto the main floor, scratch their heads and ask:

Hey — where’s the  food court?

But that’s to be expected, considering that the school — an educational experiment that started up in a shopping mall, of all places — is only four years old.

“We’re in adolescence,” said biology professor Robert Dunbar, one of the original faculty members. “We’re not mature yet.”

For decades, the city of Rochester acted as a satellite location for various University of Minnesota programs. Its dreams for a higher education institution were realized in 2005 when Gov. Tim Pawlenty proposed a full-fledged campus to fill what he saw as a significant educational gap in southeastern Minnesota.

In the fall of 2009, 57 students began their first classes at  what became known as “UMR.” They were hailed as “trailblazers” and “risk takers” who gave up the traditional college experience at an established university for a chance to create their own.

Need to eat? Eat downtown — or bring your lunch. (Photo by Alex Kolyer for MPR)

They had no real campus — just a couple of floors in the old Galleria Mall where the movie theater and food court used to be.

“One of the classrooms used to smell like fish oil,” said biology professor Andrew Petzold. “Apparently it used to share a drain with what used to be a Long John Silver’s.”

They had no dorms, so students lived in a nearby apartment building. They had no athletic facility, so the university gave students memberships to the YMCA. And they had no cafeteria, leaving students to eat in downtown food joints or bring their lunch to school.

And with no intercollegiate sports, fraternities or clubs, it was up to students to make their own student life.

That rather spartan existence, combined with an specialized health-care curriculum that students call “intense,” has drawn a student body that’s focused on academics. Many have their sights on medical school or graduate work in the medical field.

“They just seem driven compared to students at some other campuses.” said sophomore Yusef Ouda of Rochester.

UMR has gained a bit of national attention for its unusual approach to education. The Chronicle of Higher Education noted how it was “scrapping the traditional university model,” and Washington Monthly called it the “Mayo Clinic of Higher Ed.”

Several things stand out about the university.

Time for finals. (Photo by Alex Kolyer for MPR)

A specialized education

UMR offers only two health-related bachelor’s degrees, as well a master’s and a doctoral degree in biomedical informatics and computational biology. It plays up its proximity to the world-famous Mayo Clinic, and students in one UMR degree program take classes from Mayo School of Health Sciences faculty and use Mayo facilities.

An encouragement of teaching

UMR eschews the “publish-or-perish” research-oriented culture of many universities. You won’t find large, anonymous lectures here. The campus does have one lecture hall — but it’s used only for community events. Students say they’ve enjoyed the relatively small class sizes. Most are between half a dozen students and about 30.

And students say they enjoy spending time at an innovation at UMR: the Just Ask Centers. These are open, common study areas where UMR faculty spend up to 22 hours a week helping students, answering questions and holding “extended office hours.”

Faculty member Yuko Taniguchi helps student Courtnee Heyduck with her work at a campus Just Ask Center. (Photo by Alex Kolyer for MPR)

“It’s one of the main reasons I came here.” said sophomore Kaylin Hibbing of Woodbury. “For five minutes or an hour, they’ll sit there and work with you. I was actually studying for pretty much my entire organic chemistry final at the center last year. I just got to sit with the professor (with a few other people) and worked through problems.”

Integrated classes

UMR has no academic departments. Instead, instructors from various subjects integrate their classes to provide an almost holistic approach to teaching.  Many classes and student papers attack a subject from multiple disciplines. For example, students might learn in biology about the science behind organ transplants and in ethics about the issue of organ trafficking.

Faculty also strive to make subjects relevant. Take math, for example. Pre-med junior Luke Bennett of Austin said a calculus lesson taught him how much time it takes medication to make its way through the human body.

“In a lot of calculus classes, you focus only on the math aspect,” he said. “Of course we do that, but then we move on to the (health field) application.”

But UMR has had some growing pains.

Students (from left) Kayla Saari, Leah Engelman, Dom Pandy and Abdullahi Jimale study before their final exam in the school’s main common area. (Photo by Alex Kolyer for MPR)

Integrating classes isn’t difficult in the first couple of years when students have to take the same courses. But professors say it has become more difficult to coordinate them as students take a wider array of subjects.

Course expectations have also been in flux. To encourage students to be creative, professors sometimes make assignments open-ended. But sometimes instructors are ambiguous because they’re still getting a feel for what to expect from students. Petzold says that’s all part of building a curriculum. Some students love the freedom in such classes, he says, but others can’t stand it.

Senior Laura Traut of Sartell is conflicted about it.

“I really like direction so I know what’s expected of me — what (faculty) want for an outcome in a group project or individual project,” she said. “They’ll say we want a paper on X topic. And you ask, ‘What aspect? How long?’ And they say it doesn’t matter. It’s a little bit frustrating, because you don’t know what to do.”

That said, she has come to appreciate the ability to handle ambiguity — a real-world skill.

The relationship with Mayo — which the school plays up, and which draws a lot of UMR’s students — is also a bit ambiguous to some on campus. Students love rubbing shoulders with Mayo personnel while getting lunch in the sandwich shop downstairs. And in their four years, they’ve heard from Mayo guest speakers, volunteered at the clinic or done job shadowing.

Student Paola Torres studies. (Photo by Alex Kolyer for MPR)

But some said they’re not sure what the real payoff will be. UMR has no formal feeder program with Mayo such as one might find with companies at established universities, students and faculty say.

Chancellor Stephen Lehmkuhle said UMR’s proximity to Mayo means the doors are “cracked open for them,” but students have to “walk in.”

For that matter, UMR doesn’t have a formal career center for jobs or internships. Instead, students consult faculty or UMR’s “student success coaches” when they’re looking for opportunities. UMR spokeswoman Sarah Oslund says that method allows the coaches to better understand students and their needs.

Student life is also less structured. UMR now sports 30 clubs, but students say they have to work a bit to find the usual college fun. Although downtown is beginning to cater to students, it still doesn’t boast the kind of atmosphere found around many traditional campuses.

“We’d like a coffee shop that’s open past 5 p.m.,” said senior Tanner VanLith. “You go down to the subway level, and everything is closed up.”

That’s beginning to change, he said.

Students Luke Schulte, right, and Gavin Mark get some schoolwork done in the school’s main common area. (Photo by Alex Kolyer for MPR)

But then again, no one is really groaning about social life. Bennett said a lot of his classmates are too focused on their education and volunteering to be bothered. Those who couldn’t take the lack of social life have gone elsewhere.

One peeve of students is that a lot of Rochester residents still don’t really know what UMR is — or think it’s Rochester Community and Technical College.

Students say they’d like to be able to tell locals, “I go to the U,” and be understood that it’s UMR.

So if Rochester’s own residents don’t fully recognize their own college yet, what awaits graduates when they apply for jobs and graduate school? How will recruiters view a program and campus that have no real track record?

“To be honest,” Lehmkuhle said, “I think some of our students will be handicapped. We just don’t have (an established) reputation. But I really think that’s short-lived. Our students — if they can get an interview, just get their foot in the door, they will impress people.”

Professors at two U.S. universities agreed.

They said the reputation of a school and its faculty does indeed count. And a school with a small faculty has a smaller network of contacts — and may offer fewer academic experiences than a large, established program does.

But smaller programs also enable faculty to really know their students.

Professors Robert Dunbar (standing, left) and Andrew Petzold (standing, right) tag team in class. (MPR Photo / Alex Friedrich)

“It very much matters what (faculty) say about the individual student, and how they characterize their experience and their relationship with the student — what they tell us about the potential of that student,” said Professor Amy Schulz, who has chaired the doctoral admissions committee for the University of Michigan’s department of health behavior.

John Hoffman, who helped start a doctorate of education program at California State University – Fullerton, says students should stress to recruiters that they learned about having “an entrepreneurial eye, an innovative mindset, being able to make adjustments as needed on the job as things are or aren’t working.”

“Those,” he said, “are certainly be things that I would find compelling.”

All that is now on the radar of 31 students — the share of the original 57 who are either graduating this month or are close to doing so. The vast majority of the rest have left the health-care path, Oslund said.

The school has not formally tracked graduates’ plans or job placement. Oslund said some have secured jobs in healthcare, while others are applying to medical school, chiropractic school or graduate school in areas such as healthcare administration. Several have already been accepted, she said.

Meanwhile, UMR continues to expand.

It’s now almost three times the size it was when it opened. UMR’s original student body of 57 has ballooned to 407 undergraduates and 37 graduate students, and officials hope that number grows to 5,000 students in the next two decades.

Although UMR still leases all its space, it plans to build a five-square-block campus several blocks from its current location. Oslund said it could take three decades before the campus is fully developed, but has no plan to move out of its current location.

All that growth may challenge professors such as Dunbar, who relishes the creativity and freedom that a new program allows.

“In some ways, I look forward to our becoming mature,” he said. “But in other ways I dread it. I don’t think that we should become mature. I think perpetual adolescence might be good for UMR. It might be good for other institutions as well.”

Please let us see what we’ve written. (MPR Photo / Alex Friedrich)

Some University of Minnesota students are asking the U to give them access to their fellow students’ evaluations of courses and professors.
The U administers the evaluations at the end of every semester. Students fill them out, but the information is kept by the university.
Graduate student Cody Mikl, who chairs the group of student reps to the Board of Regents, says looking at the formal assessments would help students choose their classes more wisely.

He told me:

“The primary concern of students is the quality of the instructor at the front of the classroom. A part of it is workload, but more of it is: How well do they do at teaching the content of the course? And do you actually learn what the coursebook says that you’re going to accomplish?”

He says word-of-mouth recommendations are limited, and websites such as Ratemyprofessors.com don’t provide accurate information.

“Students who are motivated to put a post on those websites have had a bad experience with a professor. And that might not be the same experience that the rest of the students had in the class, could be unique, and bottom line: It’s skewed data, and something that’s not very reliable.”

University officials say much of that information is considered part of an employee’s personnel file, and so is confidential. That’s because it’s the U’s evaluation system. General Counsel Mark Rotenberg said if students had their own system, data practices restrictions would likely not apply.

But students argue that some of the information in the U’s evaluations — such as course workload, difficulty and whether the student would recommend a class — is not personal.

President Eric Kaler said he understood their desire to make informed decisions, and that U officials will try to find a way to give students access to nonconfidential information.