Alex FriedrichIn a follow-up to former University of Minnesota President Mark Yudof’s $700,000 housing min-scandal at the University of California, the UC system has gone so far as to appoint an official to manage Yudof’s new private residence. “Here you literally have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have gone into student scholarships, reduction Read more →
MPR News Intelligence on higher education
Archives for August 2010
And you thought that semester in Spain was a big adventure. Four Minnesota freshmen will soon be taking off for four years at New York University’s new, high-profile campus in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The four — Nolan Funk of St. Cloud, Charlotte Wang of Plymouth, Amelia Kahn of Minneapolis and Eric Johnson Read more →
Profs get smartphones, so students can call them As a professor, how do you get dropout-prone college students to stay in school? Give them your cellphone number. How do you get professors to promptly field text messages, calls and e-mails from students? A Georgia college says buy them smartphones and pay for the service plan. Read more →
Following news of how budget problems may force St. Cloud State to cut football — and possibly athletics administrators — the St. Cloud Times has dug up information on what it pays its chiefs in sports administration. Here it lays out a comparison of the salaries of the university’s six athletic directors with the salaries of coaches at other Minnesota State College Read more →
AlexiusHoratius via Wikimedia Commons It’s not the outside that’s the problem If you didn’t catch Tim Post’s MPR piece on the planned renovation of Northrop, here’s a link to the Web story and the audio. It’s a huge undertaking — $80 million — especially considering the U’s budget problems. The planned change is dramatic, the way Post Read more →
rpongsaj via Flickr It’s safe with us If you’ve read the news about the Oakdale firm that’s now handling California student loan accounts, the name of the company — Educational Credit Management Corporation — might sound familiar. That’s because it made the news in March after someone stole personal data — including Social Security numbers Read more →
Paying to snag an internship: Students find they’re having to pay companies thousands of dollars to get hooked up with an internship and housing for the summer. Biz school offers free e-books: Virginia State University is giving free e-textbooks to students in its business school for eight core courses. Credit card firms cautious: The recent federal reform bans Read more →
MPR/Alex Friedrich Come and get it at St. Thomas At the State Fair they’ll line up for anything. Make any ol’ doohickey, slap a college logo on it and they’ll stand around for half an hour till the line stretches out the door. Because it’s Minnesota edu-swag: bandannas, tote bags (“tohht baygs”) and lanyards. MPR/Alex Read more →
bjosefowicz via Flickr Yeah, I bet that’ll build your critical thinking Check out the Midmorning page and listen to the audio of a chat with Philip Babcock of the University of California Santa Barbara and Jen Day Shaw of the University of Florida. Students are studying far less than they did decades ago, and that Read more →