Category Archive

The website Pro Publica has a great piece up about how for-profit colleges are luring in prospective students with misleading online ads about a mythical “Obama Mom” scholarship program.

The whole piece is really worth a read, but one fact stuck out for me — a quarter of all Pell Grant money now goes to for-profit colleges and universities. That’s $7.3 billion dollars a year. And that’s before you start figuring in all the federal student loans these students are taking out.

These are mind-boggling numbers, particularly when you consider the hijinks that some of the colleges are up to.

Seriously. Go read the whole story. (And read this USA Today piece on a separate coming Department of Education crackdown on scammy for-profit programs, while you’re at it.)

This is without a doubt the coolest zombie Whitney Houston lip-sync video I’ve ever seen on YouTube.

A judge has ruled that Quinnipiac University in Connecticut can’t replace its women’s volleyball team with a cheerleading squad under federal laws governing gender balance in college sports.

Quinnipiac had axed volleyball as a budget-cutting measure, hoping to save some $5000 per student per year by replacing it with cheerleading. But the anti-discrimination law known as Title IX requires gender equity in varsity sports, and the volleyball team sued, saying cheerleading didn’t qualify.

In a decision handed down this week, federal judge Stefan Underhill declared that cheerleading is “too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic participation opportunities for students.”

Quinnipiac says they now plan to create a women’s rugby team.

The UCLA Daily Bruin ran two pieces on last week’s USSA Congress — an overview/intro story and a piece on the Association’s plans for the coming year.

USSA gave the Los Angeles Free Press a Congress preview here.

My own coverage included two posts about the Association’s elections, a liveblog of its plenaries, and an overview of the biggest developments there, including a discussion of the group’s four major campaigns for 2010-11.

I also posted updates on Twitter, and on the Student Activism Facebook page.

For more, check out the USSA website and the #NSC10 Twitter hashtag. You can also follow more than thirty Congress participants on Twitter here.

If you’ve got other links, post them in comments and I’ll add them to this post.

Saturday Update | New links: A USSA intern and a young workers’ rights advocate blog about their impressions of the Congress.

Lesbian high schooler Constance McMillen has won her lawsuit against the Mississippi school district that refused to let her attend prom with her girlfriend.

The school agreed to have a judgment entered against them in the case on Monday. They will establish what the ACLU — who brought the suit on McMillen’s behalf — called a “comprehensive nondiscrimination and nonharassment policy that covers sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.”

And they’ll pay her an additional $35,000 in damages. Plus court costs.

The ACLU’s suit charged that the district violated McMillen’s freedom of speech — in addition to forbidding her to attend with her girlfriend, they also banned her from wearing a tuxedo to the event. When the story broke in the media the school arranged for her to attend a rescheduled alternative prom, but that turned out, bizarrely, to be a fake.