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On April 22, 1969, hundreds of black and Latino students at New York’s City College took over seventeen campus buildings demanding reforms in the university’s treatment of students and faculty of color.
They shut down the university for two weeks, and their protests — which continued throughout the spring — led directly to the establishment of open admissions at the City University of New York a year later.
Open admissions nearly doubled the size of CUNY, and transformed the university forever. (It also helped open the door to the implementation of tuition in the system for the first time six years later.)
Today, students at City College will mark the anniversary with a 2 o’clock walkout in protest of budget cuts and tuition increases.
San Jose State University had to turn away more than four thousand qualified applicants this spring. So now, in an effort to make more room for newcomers next year, it’s looking to cull its returning roster.
Fifteen percent of SJSU’s ten thousand seniors have held senior status for at least three years, and three hundred of them have accumulated 150 credits or more. Thirty-five of those have been undergrads at the school for a decade or longer, and two have been there for fifteen years — each of them earning more than 360 credits.
A bachelor of arts degree at SJSU requires only 120.
There’s not much SJSU can do to force these students to graduate, though it does intend to give them a nudge. Students with 120% or more of the credits they need to graduate will be required to sit for a session of “intrusive advising” with a dean, in which they will be shown — and urged to do — what it takes to finish and leave.
Other colleges are taking different approaches to the problem. California State East Bay is cutting off financial aid for third-year seniors. Baylor University charges full-time tuition to all students, and UNC hikes tuition once you hit 140 total credits.
A federal court has found that a student who erased her tuition bills by filing bankruptcy has a right to force her alma mater to provide her with transcripts.
Stefanie Kim Kuehn earned a Master’s degree from Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, but she graduated owing $6000 in tuition and fees. She later declared bankruptcy, discharging that debt, but the university refused to give her her transcripts.
A judge ruled that the university, having allowed Kuehn to graduate, could not now withhold transcripts in the face of a bankruptcy filing. That ruling was upheld at the federal circuit court level in 2007, and at the appellate level yesterday.
The court’s ruling provides little comfort for other broke students, though — the judges ruled that CSU would have been within their rights to delay granting Kuehn’s degree until she paid her bills.
A student who prosecutors say hacked into his university’s computer network last fall, raising students’ grades and cutting their tuition charges, has been found guilty of five federal charges.
The government says that Marcus Barrington, then a student at Florida A&M University, conspired with a group of other students to alter fellow students’ grades and change residency records from out-of-state to in-state. The university is said to have lost more than $100,000 in out-of-state tuition revenue as a result.
Barrington’s two co-defendants, Lawrence Secrease and Christopher Jacquette, filed guilty pleas. Both testified against him in his trial, which ended Friday. The jury took just two hours to find Barrington guilty on all charges.
Barrington’s attorney made a statement after the verdict. “It’s sad to see these young people get in trouble especially on this kind of conduct,” he said. “In my day, it would have been a cheating incident and today it’s a federal crime. I just don’t understand what the difference is.”
Barrington faces a possible prison term of nearly thirty years when he is sentenced in June.
(via UWire)
A Vietnamese university has cancelled a 19% tuition hike in response to student protest.
Students arrived at Hong Bang University in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday morning to discover that their fees for the upcoming semester had been raised with no notice. Several hundred of them rallied all day in 95-degree heat at the university gates, snarling local traffic.
College officials met with student representatives at the end of the day, and emerged with an agreement to drop the tuition increase.
The increase was announced at a time of rising unemployment in Vietnam, as the worldwide economic crisis depresses the country’s exports.
studentactivism.net 
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