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In a speech this afternoon, President Obama is expected to unveil a ten-year, $12 billion proposal to improve American community colleges.
The bulk of the money will take the form of challenge grants to support curricular and other innovation. The plan also includes $2.5 billion in seed money for facilities renovation and $500 million for free, public domain, online courses.
White House sources say part of the funding for the project could come from the $4 billion a year in savings expected from a pending restructuring of the nation’s college loan system.
More than a quarter of American colleges are now charging processing fees to students who pay their tuition with credit cards, and the practice is becoming more common.
Colleges typically pay credit card companies a 2% fee to handle such transactions, and with budgets shrinking, they are increasingly passing those fees — along with a surcharge, in some cases — on to students.
Virginia’s George Mason University, where half of all students pay by credit card, is imposing a new 2.75% fee for credit card use. The university’s controller expects that the change will produce revenue of $1.5 million a year.
July 14 update: Now comes word (from @globecampus on Twitter) that some Canadian students are banning such transactions entirely. As of September, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia will prohibit the use of credit cards for tuition payments, in a move that may generate as much as $1 million in annual savings.
Cripchick has a great, thorough post up on how to ensure that your events are accessible to everyone. Here’s the list of topics she covers:
- childcare
- sliding pay scales
- different ways of getting information out
- gender-neutral bathrooms
- food options
- wheelchair and other mobility-related access
- structured schedules and awareness of time
- alternative formats
- audio description
- accessible language
- understanding different learning styles
- access to quiet space
- commitment to being anti-oppression
- trigger warnings
- arrangements for carpools/room sharing
- identities and experiences
There’s more in comments, too. Go read.
The Providence, Rhode Island mayor’s proposal to slap a “student municipal impact fee” on the city’s college students is being introduced as legislation in the RI state legislature.
The student tax, which I discussed here last month, would be an assessment of $150 per semester for all undergraduate and graduate students at the city’s four private universities. It’s intended to help close a multi million dollar municipal budget deficit.
Mayor Cicilline also put forward an alternate funding mechanism — a bill that would allow the city to collect fees directly from its largest tax-exempt institutions (the four universities plus five private hospitals). That bill would permit the assessment of such fees up to twenty-five percent of the taxes that the institutions would pay if they were not exempt.
In a 2002 interview Judge Sonia Sotomayor said that she felt “isolated … and very unsure about how I would survive” as an undergraduate at Princeton, and that campus organizations for students of color “provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.”
Sotomayor grew up poor in the Bronx, and she discovered in her first semester at Princeton that her educational background “was not on par with that of many of my classmates.” She became involved in Accion Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican student organization, and the campus’s Third World Center, and she credits “the third-world students who preceded me and those who had supported me while I was at Princeton” for helping her to thrive on campus.
The complete article, from Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, is not online, but extended excerpts can be found here.
studentactivism.net 
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