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News reports this morning suggest that summer Pell Grants will be eliminated under President Obama’s budget deal with congressional Republicans, but that the Pell program would be otherwise untouched.
The elimination of summer Pell comes as no surprise, as Obama floated the cut in his own budget proposal two months ago. But as course offerings are being scaled back at campuses across the country, ending aid for summer classes will make it even more difficult for low-income students to complete their degree requirements in a reasonable time.
Republicans had sought to cut the maximum Pell Grant award, which now stands at $5,550, by fifteen percent.
There’s a fascinating piece up today at The Chronicle‘s website on a new trend in student course evaluation — “smart” recommendation systems.
The premise is that course evaluations, on their own, don’t tell provide you with as much information as they could about how you’re likely to respond to (and how well you’re likely to do in) a particular class. If most of the folks taking “Immigration in America” are upper-level Sociology majors, and you’re a Bio student looking to fill out a distribution requirement, the fact that the prof gets high ratings for clarity doesn’t tell you a lot about whether you’re likely to sink or swim.
A smart course recommendation system, on the other hand, can pull out course evaluations from students like you — same year, same major, even similar GPAs — to see how folks in your position responded to a given class or professor. As the Chronicle notes, it’s basically applying the Netflix “our best guess for you” approach to movie ratings to the world of academic advising.
While writing my dissertation, I uncovered evidence that student course evaluations first appeared in the late 1940s as a program of the National Student Association, a student-run organization that eventually grew to be one of the largest and most important student activist groups in American history. The course evaluation program at my own alma mater, in fact, started as an NSA-inspired project.
Student course evaluations have since been adopted by colleges and universities themselves, of course, even as sites like Rate My Professor have sprung up to provide students with franker, less filtered feedback. But as someone who is now on the receiving end of such evaluations, I know that they’re still often frustratingly vague and incomplete, and this kind of demographic number crunching strikes me as a big step in the direction of making them more valuable for everyone.
Seven students were arrested yesterday at a demonstration against a ban on the admission of undocumented students to some state universities in Georgia. All of those arrested are reportedly undocumented themselves, and they may face deportation as a result of their protest.
The arrests came at the end of a rally and march that drew more than a hundred people in support of the DREAM Act and in opposition to a ban on admission of undocumented students to University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Georgia College & State University and the Medical College of Georgia. The students called upon GSU president Mark Becker to refuse to comply with the ban, which was implemented by the state board of regents last fall.
Only five of the nearly forty state colleges and universities in Georgia are covered by the ban, but new regulations require all public colleges and universities in the state to determine students’ residency status. Undocumented students in the state are charged out-of-state tuition, however long they have lived in Georgia.
Seven of the nine students who “occupied” a high ledge on the face of Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall last month have been charged with trespassing.
The Wheeler ledge action was the first Berkeley protest in recent memory to end in a negotiated settlement with the university, as administrators agreed to drop conduct charges against students who had participated in previous protests … and to forego such charges against the ledge protesters themselves.
But although Berkeley’s chief of police apparently promised one student that he would recommend against criminal charges, that promise was not part of the formal agreement. The students were cited and released when they came down off the ledge, and misdemeanor charges of “trespass with intent to interfere” were brought yesterday.
The seven students who now face charges have previously been arrested in Berkeley protests. The other two, who have not been arrested in the past, were not charged.
See my previous post on the ledge occupation for more on that action.
The internet is abuzz with the news that Rutgers paid MTV reality star Snooki more ($32,000) for an appearance than it paid celebrated author Toni Morrison ($30,000). Morrison is delivering the commencement address at Rutgers’ graduation exercises this year, while Snooki did two shows on campus last night. And I’ve got to say, I’m more troubled by Morrison’s paycheck than Snooki’s. Here’s why:
Commencement addresses are traditionally given free or at reduced rates. This is, in fact, the first time in history that Rutgers has paid a graduation speaker. It turns out that the university recently renovated its football stadium, and wants to christen it with a blockbuster graduation event.
There’s a difference in funding, as well. Snooki was booked by a student-run, student-funded programming board whose money comes from student activity fees. The Rutgers University Programming Association exists for the sole purpose of bringing entertainment to campus, and by all accounts this was a popular booking — both of Snooki’s shows were standing-room-only. (Snooki’s fee won’t all go to her, by the way. Her two shows were in a mock interview format, and her interviewer, comedian Adam Ace, charges $2500 for solo appearances.)
Morrison’s fee, on the other hand, is being paid out of revenue from the university’s vendor contract with Pepsi. That money is being drawn out of a fund that is administered at the president’s discretion. It’s not a programming budget. It’s university money. Though Rutgers made a point in media coverage of saying that it didn’t dip into state funds or tuition to pay Morrison, that strikes me as a distinction without a difference, because if they hadn’t used the $30,000 this way, they would have had it available for something else.
I’m not saying — quite — that it’s a bad idea to give Toni Morrison $30,000 to deliver a commencement address, although it does seem a little weird to me to turn the awarding of an honorary doctorate into a paid gig. I’m just saying it’s not obvious to me that universities spending university money on a big-name speaker so they can justify holding graduation in a football stadium is a better idea than students spending student fees on programming that students are interested in.
studentactivism.net 
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