Category Archives: Students

Associated Press: 6 of 11 missing Egyptians now in custody

Six of the 11 Egyptian exchange students who recently entered the United States and failed to show up for their college program were in custody today after three more were arrested, officials said.

Police arrested Ahmed Mohamed Mohamed Abou El Ela, 22, at O’Hare International Airport after he tried to check in for a Chicago-to-Montana flight using an invalid ticket marked for a New York departure, Chicago police said.

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In These Times

Students vs. Sweatshops, Round III
The Designated Supplier Program targets college clothing compaines

By Mischa Gaus
In These Times

Claudia Ebel is traveling across Thailand this summer, but her itinerary is no vacation. The University of Colorado at Boulder sophomore is meeting with sweatshop workers, promoting a plan to change how college clothes are made”and the lives of the people who make them.

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The Chronicle: Harvard Study Finds That Students at Private High Schools Have a Clear Edge

Researchers at Harvard University say private high schools give their students an advantage over those who attend public schools. The new findings, presented in a report released today, challenge a recent study by the U.S. Department of Education, which did not find as many statistically significant differences between the effect of private and public schools on student achievement.

The Harvard study found a private-school advantage in 11 of 12 comparisons of students at public and private high schools. In eighth-grade mathematics, for instance, the new study found a private-school advantage of three to seven points on test scores; in reading, the advantage ranged from nine to 13 points.

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The Sacramento Bee: Web site reveals professors’ grading

Web sites that allow college students to anonymously evaluate their professors — slamming them as buffoons or rating them as ”hot” — have grown in popularity in recent years.

Now, a unique site called PickProf, which also posts the numbers of A’s through F’s given out in individual classes, is breaking into the California market of more than 2.3 million public university and college students.

The for-profit company prevailed recently in a public-records lawsuit against the University of California-Davis that was seen as a test case in California. (The school initially refused to hand over the letter-grade information, then backed down and paid PickProf $15,000 in legal fees.)

Now the company is seeking the distribution of grades at other University of California schools, the California State University system and the state’s community colleges — to the ire of faculty members who say students will shop for easy classes.

The Daily Bruin: Class ratings may go public

The results of the university-distributed professor evaluations could potentially be made available to students within the upcoming academic year.

The numerical data from the end-of-quarter professor evaluations are at the center of a proposal currently in the works by Marwa Kaisey, president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council.

According to the Daily Bruin archives, professor evaluations were available in booklets published by the Office of Instructional Development until 1995. The booklets were discontinued because of high printing costs.

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Inside Higher Ed: Mobilizing the Campus Right

We shouldn’t have to have this conference,” Roger Custer, director of the National Conservative Student Conference, said in an interview Monday after delivering the meeting’s opening address. “But these students are so isolated on campus.”

In its 28th year, the Young America’s Foundation annual college student gathering is a well-established Washington tradition — with roughly 400 attendees and a speaker list including Newt Gingrich, Robert Novak and David Brooks. Still, speakers talk with a marked sense of urgency.

There is little tolerance for the conservative viewpoint on campus, panelist after panelist agreed. The charge of a liberal slant in academe is nothing new, but the assertion found new life in each speech. The sense of victimization shone through in the organizers’ description of the conference as a place for students to “learn about conservative ideas and how to advance them in the face of liberal hostility.”

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Inside Higher Ed: Who Decides?

U. of Houston lawsuit asks whether professors should have unlimited leeway to reject requests of students with disabilities.

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Phildelphia Inquirer: College ‘bubble’ is about to burst

These are bountiful days for colleges and universities, inundated as they are with more and better applicants than ever.

Schools that less than a decade ago were eagerly accepting any remotely qualified student have the luxury of turning away even standouts, confident in the knowledge that plenty of stronger candidates are lined up to pay tuition.

But it won’t last much longer.

Fueling the current college admissions frenzy are the “baby boomletters” born in the late 1980s and early ’90s. By 2009, the last of them will reach college age, heralding the first sustained decline in the number of graduating high school students in nearly two decades.

The drop is expected to be about 4 percent nationwide, but far sharper in the Northeast, according to the U.S. Department of Education. In Pennsylvania, a 10 percent decline is predicted. New Jersey’s larger, and growing, Latino and Asian student populations mean that state probably will fare better than most, with an anticipated drop of just 2 percent.

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Associated Press: College student pleads not guilty in terrorism case

A college student accused of discussing terror targets with Islamic extremists and training for “violent jihad” pleaded not guilty Thursday in a case his lawyer said amounts to nothing more than “imprudent talk.”

Syed Ahmed, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech student, and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, were charged with providing material support to terrorists. Among other things, they were accused of undergoing training to carry out a “violent jihad” against civilian and government targets, including an air base in suburban Atlanta.

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The Chronicle: Student Group Sues Arizona State U. for Requiring Liability Insurance for Anti-Abortion Display

An anti-abortion student group at Arizona State University filed a discrimination lawsuit Monday against the university, alleging that administrators had stifled the students’ right to free speech by restricting their ability to hold a campus event.

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Inside Higher Ed:

Providence College will announce today that it will no longer require undergraduate applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores. Officials said that they feared the test score requirement — even though it has not been a major focus of the admissions process — may have discouraged some low-income students from applying. The move follows an earlier announcement that the college was shifting funds from merit to need-based aid as part of a campaign to close the “student accessibility gap.”

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Los Angeles Times: 2 Students Are Accused of Altering Grades in Computer Hacking Case

Two Cal State Northridge students have been accused of hacking into a professor’s computer, giving grades to nearly 300 students and sending pizza, magazine subscriptions and CDs to the professor’s home.

Lena Chen, 20, of Torrance and Jennifer Ngan, 19, of Alhambra are to be arraigned Aug. 21 on misdemeanor charges of accessing computers illegally and other counts. If convicted, they face up to a year in prison.

According to Cal State police, Chen confessed to getting access to the professor’s account by answering a routine security question and changing the password.

“They felt the professor was unfair, and it was on behalf of all the students,” said Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, which filed the charges. “They were trying to be college pranksters.”

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Globe and Mail: Student aid on skids, report warns

Canada’s student financial-assistance program is headed for crisis as governments increasingly support middle-income students with tuition freezes and allow more of them to qualify for loans, a new report warns.

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Washington Post: Put Grad School Within My Grasp

Is access to graduate education in America exclusively for the upper class?

As a first-year graduate student struggling to make ends meet, I believe the answer is yes. In my experience, searching for funding to pay the extensive costs of my higher education has been an upward climb leading only to dead ends.

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Daily Yomiuri: Private universities, junior colleges stuck for students

The percentage of private universities whose enrollment following spring entrance examinations failed to meet their intake quotas was 40.4 percent, up from 29.5 percent in the previous year, according to a recent survey released Monday by a public corporation in the education field.

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The Independent: The Big Question: Why are fewer students from poor backgrounds going to university?

This week official figures revealed that the proportion of state-school pupils at university has fallen to its lowest level for three years. The proportion of working-class students has also dropped, as has the number of young people from the most deprived neighbourhoods. Ministers described the figures as “disappointing”. The drop suggests that the Government’s drive to widen access to higher education has stalled, despite costing £300m.

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