You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Finances’ category.
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.
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.
So this isn’t something I would have expected to see in the Chronicle, even as a guest opinion piece.
In this Friday’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that students should appoint trustees to public colleges and universities in proportion to the support that their tuition and fees provide to those institutions.
As “state support has dwindled,” Schwartz argues, tuition and fees have come to underwrite an ever-growing part of universities’ operating budgets. Given that, the principle of no taxation without representation argues that students (and, in situations in which they are not paying their own way, their parents) be given a voice in choosing university trustees and regents.
This is more than just a provocation on Schwartz’s part. He offers several sensible mechanisms by which this reform could be implemented, notes a parallel structure in the management of California’s public employees’ retirement fund, and even suggests that such representation could be mandated by federal law if it is not implemented on the state level.
Is such a change coming anytime soon? No, probably not. But it’s absolutely true that students directly fund public colleges and universities to an extent that was unimaginable just a few decades ago, and Schwartz is absolutely right to point out that right now “the industry of higher education treats undergraduate students as cash cows.”
Good for him, and good for the Chronicle for publishing him.
The second of three students charged in a computer-hacking case at Florida A&M University has been sentenced to prison.
As Student Activism noted in March, Lawrence Secrease, Christopher Jacquette, and Marcus Barrington were accused of breaking into FAMU computers to raise students’ grades and change their residency records to allow them to pay in-state tuition rates. Seacrease and Jacquette pled guilty and testified against Barrington, who was tried and convicted.
Seacrease was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison yesterday, and Jacquette received the same sentence several weeks ago. Barrington faces sentencing next month, and could receive a term of thirty years.
The Associated Students of the University of Arizona took a $917,000 hit when a concert they sponsored drew a smaller-than-expected crowd.
ASUC paid a total of $1.4 million to mount the show, and brought in barely a third that much in revenue. Jay-Z headlined the concert, whose bill also included Kelly Clarkson, Third Eye Blind, and The Veronicas.
The loss wipes out ASUC’s $350,000 emergency reserve fund. The remainder of the debt will be covered by the campus bookstore, which provides the student government with more than half a million dollars in support each year. For the next five years, those annual payments will be cut by $114,000.
The Jay-Z concert was ASUC’s first stadium show in more than thirty years, and the culmination of a four-year campaign by the student government to bring large-scale performances to campus.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments