Higher Education News

http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007022202n.htm

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Private Donations to Colleges Increase for Third Consecutive Year

By ERIN STROUT

American colleges and universities raised an estimated $28-billion in private donations in the 2006 fiscal year — $2.4-billion, or 9.4-percent, more than in 2005, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Council for Aid to Education. The significant jump, the biggest one-year increase since 2000, was the result of larger donations from alumni and other individual donors, many of whom were solicited through numerous major fund-raising campaigns.

According to the report, which describes results from the council’s annual “Voluntary Support of Education” survey, alumni and other individual donors gave just more than half of the total amount raised. Alumni donations were up 18.3 percent from 2005, and giving by non-alumni individuals rose by 14 percent. But for the first time in four years, the number of alumni donors did not increase, dropping slightly, by 0.02 percent.

Foundation support accounted for 25.4 percent of the dollars contributed, rising by 1.4 percent, after a 12.9-percent increase in 2005. (In that year, a foundation grant of $296-million to the University of Wisconsin at Madison skewed the results. Without that grant, the increase in dollars from foundations in 2006 would have been 5.9 percent.)

Corporate giving was 16.4 percent of the total private donations in 2006, an increase of 4.5 percent from last year.

Over all, the increase — which was 6 percent when adjusted for inflation — can be attributed to the strong economy and stock-market performance, said the director of the survey, Ann E. Kaplan. “The other side of the coin,” she said, “is that somebody has to be out there asking, and more institutions are asking.”

‘Focused on Ideas’

The top 10 institutions in the survey accounted for half of the total growth in private donations during the 2006 fiscal year, which ended on June 30 at most colleges. Once again Stanford University raised the most money, bringing in $911.16-million, which was $307.56-million more than it raised last year and $316.22-million more than Harvard University’s second-place total in 2006.

Stanford, which ended a $1.1-billion campaign for undergraduate education at the end of the 2006 calendar year, began a $4.3-billion campaign — the largest higher-education fund-raising campaign in the nation — in the fall (The Chronicle, October 11, 2006). Both the end of one drive and the start of another resulted in spikes in donations, said Martin Shell, vice president for development at Stanford.

“There’s a reason why colleges and universities do campaigns,” he said. “They provide a vehicle to raise the most money, and they are focused on ideas that individuals want to invest in.”

Stanford’s $4.3-billion drive is intended to raise money for research programs focused on health, environmental sustainability, and international peace and security. It is also for support of programs in the arts and for improving elementary and secondary schools.

Although Stanford is conducting the largest campaign, several other institutions have mounted major fund-raising drives as well. Of the top 10 colleges in the council’s survey, five are in the middle of efforts to raise $3-billion or more. Twenty-six higher-education campaigns of $1-billion or more are under way nationwide (The Chronicle, February 7).

John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, said he had expected higher education to experience a “solid” year of private fund raising, but not the largest increase in six years.

“It would seem that the impact of the number of institutions in $1-billion campaigns has raised the sights of many colleges,” he said. “It seems that more institutions are establishing very ambitious fund-raising goals, and that certainly contributes to the totals.”

Institutions of all types saw higher fund-raising totals. Liberal-arts colleges enjoyed a 10.2-percent increase in private support, raising $2.54-billion. Two-year institutions raised a total of $197.4-million, up from $162.6-million in 2005.

Alumni Participation Falling

One aspect of fund raising that institutions of all sizes continue to struggle with is the alumni participation rate. It fell from 12.4 percent in 2005 to 11.8 percent in 2006, continuing a trend over the past several years. Even when two-year institutions, which traditionally have much lower participation rates than four-year colleges, are not taken into account, participation is declining, the Council for Aid to Education’s survey shows.

The increase in the dollar amount of alumni giving is due to an increase in the value of the average gift, not a result of more alumni making gifts. The number of alumni of record (people for whom an institution has correct contact information) has increased faster than the number of alumni who donate, making alumni participation rates drop. Many colleges also choose to focus on securing larger donations, not necessarily spending resources on receiving many smaller donations.

The report from the council notes that if alumni give money through a family foundation, a company, or a donor-advised fund, that entity, not the individual, receives the credit.

“Colleges continue to do a good job of capturing alumni information, so we’re going to continue seeing a lag in the participation rate,” said Mr. Lippincott. “But it’s good for the institution in the long term to know all of their alumni.”

For the first time, the survey also calculated a sample from institutions that report alumni with undergraduate degrees separately from other alumni (such as former students who never graduated and alumni who earned graduate degrees), because donors are more likely to give to the colleges from which they earned undergraduate degrees.

Even so, “counting only undergraduate-degreed alumni, alumni participation still declined from 2005 to 2006,” said the report.

Alumni records do not entirely account for the decline in participation, however. Many institutions must decide whether to devote resources to contacting many alumni to donate smaller gifts, or to focus more on groups likely to give larger donations, whether they are alumni, foundations, or other individuals.

At Ursinus College, for example, which concluded a $120-million campaign in November, the emphasis was on the smaller, wealthier groups.

“We had a highly directed, small number of prospects who were ready to support the campaign,” said Hudson B. Scattergood, senior vice president for college relations. “We maintained our annual fund but did not put a lot of time and energy in that direction.”

The strategy worked, with total donations increasing by $2-million from the 2005 fiscal year, while the alumni participation rate dropped by only 1 percent, to a still-impressive 35 percent. (The national average in 2006, according to the survey, was 11.9 percent.) The campaign also exceeded its original $115-million goal. Ursinus officials hope to go on to diversify the college’s base of support.

“Now the campaign is over, and we have to figure out how to continue to raise money,” said Mr. Scattergood. “We’ve built the base, and now we’re working on closer ties to the community.”

The full results of the council’s survey, along with an analysis of giving trends, will be published this spring. More information is available on the council’s Web site.

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Colleges Should Beware of Using Social-Networking Sites to Monitor Their Students, Speakers Say

By MARTIN VAN DER WERF

Clearwater, Fla.

When a sculpture of a deer on DePauw University’s campus was vandalized, in October 2005, administrators got a tip that they would find the perpetrators by looking at postings on Facebook.

The Indiana university eventually identified and disciplined several students for defacing the sculpture. DePauw would probably not have found them without using the social-networking Web site, says James L. Lincoln, vice president for student services.

But is Facebook a law-enforcement tool?

Lawyers, professors, student-affairs administrators, and others attending a conference here on higher-education law, sponsored by Stetson University, debated that question and others on Monday. Participants in the session discussed the uses and misuses of social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, and related sites, like YouTube, where anyone can post video clips.

Facebook has signed up an estimated 90 percent of all undergraduates on campuses where it is available. The site allows students to share personal information about themselves, but only people they identify as “friends” can get access to their postings. However, about 30 percent of students admitted in a poll that they had allowed people they had never met to become “friends,” said Linda Langford, an associate director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention, in Newton, Mass. The center does research for the U.S. Department of Education.

Some colleges increasingly wonder if they should monitor Facebook and MySpace for signs of illegal behavior by their students.

Last summer a number of colleges were embarrassed when photographs of their athletes apparently being hazed appeared on online photo-sharing services. The incidents led to the suspension of some teams, and to worries that colleges might be held legally liable if someone were injured in a hazing that college officials might have learned about online (The Chronicle, June 2, 2006).

And more recently a series of racially offensive student parties on or near campuses across the country have drawn exceptional attention in part because the events — which featured “gangsta” and “ghetto” themes — were recorded on social-networking Web sites (The Chronicle, January 31).

But panelists at the conference warned that colleges on the lookout for lawbreaking or just crude and insensitive behavior could be setting themselves up for a new line of litigation if they did so.

Fred H. Cate, a professor of law at Indiana University at Bloomington and director of the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, said he knew that security officers at his institution passed the time looking at Facebook profiles. But they have a policy of not acting on what they find.

“My guess is that the admissions department or the athletics department is on Facebook every day, and they may be acting, based on what they see,” Mr. Cate said. “They might tell an athlete to remove a posting, or something like that.”

The problem, he said, is that if one department of the university is actively monitoring postings, and taking actions as a result of what it finds, while another department is not taking any action based on what it sees, the university could be accused in a lawsuit of having a double standard — or worse, of willfully ignoring illegal activity.

If illegal activity involves a child, “we are obligated to report it,” said Mr. Cate. But can a university open an investigation every time a photograph appears to depict people under the age of 18 drinking alcohol or doing something else that is illegal?

“The law is not going to be much of a guide in this area — there are lots of conflicting laws, and very little privacy protection,” said Mr. Cate. “It’s a nightmare for universities.”

For those reasons and others, speakers at the conference advised university officials that it would be unwise to attempt to monitor the social-networking sites. It would be impossible anyway, said Steven J. McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design, given that Facebook has an estimated 7.5 million users and MySpace has nearly 100 million. In addition, he said, there are at least 200 other smaller sites comparable to Facebook and MySpace.

“This is a very interesting window into student life,” he said. But universities do not need to monitor it, he argued. Courts have held that the students themselves are responsible for information and images that they post, even if they are using campus computer networks when they do so. Even though information that was once considered private is openly shared, colleges should avoid the temptation to snoop, he said.

“This may surprise you, but students were engaging in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll long before Facebook, and will long after Facebook is not of interest to anyone,” Mr. McDonald said.

Many college officials have adopted the approach that they will not look at postings on Facebook and other sites unless they are contacted by a student’s parent or someone else concerned about a specific posting on one of the sites, said Ms. Langford. That is the standard adopted by DePauw, said Mr. Lincoln.

But Mr. Cate said he worried that colleges were being inconsistent in how they viewed and reacted to the sites. Are colleges now writing policies about how the sites should be used? “I think people are just getting started,” he said.

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Conference Roundup: American Colleges Seem Ill-Prepared for Foreign Competition and Natural Calamities

By MARTIN VAN DER WERF

Clearwater, Fla.

American colleges and universities have become complacent about their standing in global higher education, even while other countries are surpassing the United States in their citizens’ attainment of bachelor’s degrees, a speaker said here on Monday at an academic conference.

The United States ranks first among the largest modern democracies in attainment of bachelor’s degrees by those ages 55 to 64, at 35 percent. But the country drops to eighth in the rankings of bachelor’s degrees by those ages 25 to 34, said Dewayne Matthews, senior research director at the Lumina Foundation for Education.

He presented the statistics, which compared the United States with the other 29 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at a conference on higher education and the law, presented here by Stetson University.

About 37 percent of Americans ages 25 to 34 have bachelor’s degrees, said Mr. Matthews. Canada, at 53 percent, and Japan, at 52 percent, lead the list. Other countries with percentages higher than the United States are, in order of ranking, South Korea, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Belgium, said Mr. Matthews.

“Other countries are not complacent, and their young people are increasing their educational attainment levels,” said Mr. Matthews. His research buttresses arguments raised in the recent best-selling book The World Is Flat, in which the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes that other countries are catching up to and surpassing the United States in areas where this country once dominated, such as science and technology education.

The trends for attainment of bachelor’s degrees are likely to worsen in the United States, Mr. Matthews said. The country’s fastest-growing minority group is Hispanic Americans, and they have traditionally gone to college at lower rates than all other segments of the population.

Paul Lowell Haines, a higher-education lawyer in Indianapolis who was formerly a vice president at Taylor University, took Mr. Matthews’s argument several steps further.

“This is a system that is apparently failing its populace,” he said. “We need to refocus on serving the public good.”

American colleges now are too focused on competing to serve only the best students, rather than giving a leg up to all students, he said. “We need to educate more minority students,” said Mr. Haines, who is now a trustee at Taylor.

To overhaul the system, he said, federal student aid should be redirected from wealthy institutions that don’t need it to community colleges and other institutions that have no endowments and serve those least able to afford an education.

He suggested that earnings from endowments be taxed, and the resulting proceeds used to give financial aid to needy students. He also suggested that students seeking to enter the most lucrative careers, such as medicine or law, should pay higher tuitions than those studying social work or other low-paying professions.

As if those proposals were insufficiently provocative, he also said tenure must be abolished. “I understand the reasons for tenure,” said Mr. Haines. “There are a lot of good reasons. But in this situation, we have to take on sacred cows. Tenure gums up the works. It makes it hard to be flexible, to move people.”

* * *
Recent natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, have many colleges wondering if they are doing an adequate job of preparing for floods, windstorms, blizzards, and even outbreaks of contagious diseases.

“If you have 400 kids stranded on your campus because they had nowhere else to go, would you be held liable for their safety?” said Christiane Groth, a risk analyst with United Educators, an insurance company for universities, colleges, and elementary and secondary schools. She spoke at a conference session about strategies for avoiding liability for negligent management of emergency situations.

Most of the 100 or so people in attendance agreed that the university probably would be liable and would have to have a plan to keep the students safe.

After talking for an hour about different possible emergencies, Ms. Groth asked the audience members if any of them felt that their emergency plans could withstand thorough scrutiny. Not a single hand was raised.

“We have well-written stuff, it’s well thought out, but I’m not sure we’ve trained enough people,” said Benjamin Evans, director of risk management and insurance at Temple University.

Future claims are likely to be based on whether an institution could have predicted the calamities it might face. “Foreseeability is very fluid,” said Ms. Groth. “You need to have an ongoing emergency-planning process in place, and constantly update it.”

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Monday, February 19, 2007

De-emphasizing Darwin Might Advance the Argument for Evolution, Biologist Says at Scientists’ Meeting

By SUSAN BROWN

San Francisco

In his controversial book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins insisted that scientists should work to dispel the idea that God exists. Without religion, Mr. Dawkins has said, the conflict between scientists’ beliefs about evolution and the fundamentalist religious belief that a supernatural intelligence created all life would vanish. Now an evolutionary biologist has proposed a different tack. In a meeting last weekend in San Francisco, he suggested scientists might win the argument by ditching Darwin.

“Evolutionary biology is a branch of natural science that is far beyond anything Darwin could have imagined,” said the evolutionary biologist, Ulrich Kutschera, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday.

Mr. Kutschera, a professor of plant physiology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kassel in Germany, said scientists should emphasize that evolution is a fully formed field of biological study “built up by generations of non-dogmatic scientists.” Terms like Darwinism can make evolutionary biology seem like an ideology, rather than a focus of empirical work, he said.

Few think that Darwin himself is such a divisive figure. But at a session on growing anti-evolutionary sentiment in Europe, scholars from both sides of the Atlantic agreed that scientists should change the way they present their views.

Pressure from religious groups to teach alternatives to evolution, such as intelligent design, in science classes once seemed mostly an American problem, but that is no longer true.

In September a creationist group called Truth in Science mailed teaching packets that promote intelligent design as an alternative to evolution to every secondary school in Britain. In October, Maciej Giertych, a member of the European Parliament from Poland who has a Ph.D. in tree physiology, organized a workshop for other members of parliament called “Teaching Evolution Theory in Europe: Is Your Child Being Indoctrinated in the Classroom?”

And a book called Evolution - A Critical Textbook, which describes a version of intelligent design, has been published in Germany and has been translated into 10 European languages, Mr. Kutschera said.

The book presents the view that a creator made basic types of animals: birds, bees, and humans, for example, and then a rapid microevolution spawned the diversity of species found today — although not within the human type, of which there is only one.

That belief in human uniqueness lies at the heart of the problem, said Jon D. Miller, a professor of integrative studies at Michigan State University, in a separate briefing on scientific literacy. “As you begin to really unravel the mysteries of this world, the true understanding of the structure and nature of life will be a challenge. These issues come closer to people.”

Antje Jackelén, an associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, agreed. “It is the dethronement of humans that is so scary,” she said.

Ms. Jackelén thinks that part of the solution is to bring God back into the classroom, just not in science classes. “Scientific literacy is very important, but we also need to raise religious literacy,” she said. A broader understanding of religion, its historical background, and its role in cultures might lead to more reasoned views, she said. “The only religious education that most American children get is in their Sunday school, where some teachers presuppose a conflict that is not really there, that doesn’t need to be there.”

Including a scholarly approach to religion in public education might help in the United States particularly, said Bronislaw Szerszynski, a sociologist and philosopher of science, technology, and religion at Lancaster University, in England. Where religion is woven into the fabric of society, he said, “there’s less resentment, a sense of banging on the door to be let in.”

So in February 2009, should we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth? That was the question posed by Daniel Glaser, a neuroscientist and development manager for the Wellcome Trust, an independent charity in London that finances biomedical research. He is contemplating such a celebration for the trust. Mr. Miller, of Michigan State, replied that he doesn’t think Darwin’s birthday party should be canceled. “I think we should treat Darwin as the person who got the natural-selection idea right.”

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Huge IPEDS Lives

The U.S. Education Department is quietly moving ahead with plans to significantly expand the information and data it collects from colleges each year through an online survey — including an entirely new section that would require institutions to report on the accountability measures they use and their scores on those tests or tools.

The proposal appears to be another prong in the department’s multi-faceted campaign to carry out the recommendations of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education. By proposing this expansion of what it collects through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the department could go a long way (without potentially controversial legislation or regulatory changes) toward achieving its goal of establishing a federal system for reporting student learning outcomes and other information on colleges’ performance, as called for in the final report of Spellings Commission. The department’s announcement says that most of the new information it is seeking to collect would be added to the department’s existing Web site for college information, the College Opportunities Online Locator.

Inside Higher Ed reported in December that the department was contemplating such an expansion, which its officials had internally dubbed “Huge IPEDS,” as an alternative to the more controversial federal “unit records” system. (IPEDS is the federal government’s primary database for information about colleges, their staffs and their students, although it doesn’t collect information about individual students, like the unit records system the department also coverts.) In recent weeks, department officials had seemed to back away from the idea, telling a meeting of college association leaders as recently as this month that no such expansion of IPEDS was planned soon.

But in a January 24 announcement in the Federal Register, the department seemed to be laying the groundwork for just that. The announcement invited comments on its annual proposal to revise what it collects from colleges through the postsecondary database system. In a document explaining its request, which must be approved by the federal Office of Management and Budget, the department said that most of the changes were based on recommendations made by an advisory panel of users of the IPEDS database.

The document acknowledged, though, that some of the new information requests were driven by the report of the Spellings Commission, which called for the department to “collect data and provide information in a common format so that interested parties can create a searchable, consumer-friendly database that provides access to institutional performance and aggregate student outcomes in a secure and flexible format.” (The Spellings report added: “The strategy for the collection and use of data should be designed to recognize the complexity of higher education, have the capacity to accommodate diverse consumer preferences through standard and customizable searches, and make it easy to obtain comparative information including cost, price, admissions data, college completion rates and, eventually, learning outcomes.”)

Some of the department’s requests, even if they flow from the Spellings Commission report, are unlikely to be particularly controversial. The data collection plan asks institutions, for instance, if they post their transfer of credit policies online, and to provide a link. It also asks them to report how many full- and part-time students are enrolled exclusively in online programs.

The two most significant categories of new information that the department is requesting (which, if approved by OMB, would be voluntary in 2007-8 and required in 2008-9) would be what the department calls “a new accountability part” and an expanded section of information about financial aid, which seems to be designed to help the department come up with a method of reporting on the “net price” that different categories of students might really pay (as opposed to the “sticker price” that gets widely reported) to attend a particular college.

Under the “new accountability part,” colleges would be asked a set of four questions. Some are straightforward; the department asks if institutions have online “fact books” and if they post information on their Web sites about assessment or student learning outcomes, and requests links to those pages, which the department says it would add to the Web-based College Opportunities Online Locator.

But the department also asks whether colleges use specific student learning assessments, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement, Community College Survey of Student Engagement, Collegiate Learning Assessment, and National Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, and to specify which other assessment tools they use. Colleges would also be asked to say if the institution makes its results on these measures available online on its own Web site, and to provide the appropriate Web address, which would also be added to the COOL Web site.

The department’s plan would also ask (and by 2008-9 require) colleges to provide, in matrix form, data on all accountability measures they use and “the institution’s score” on those measures. (The document does not make clear whether this information would be shared with the public, but if it would, colleges that now use these surveys and tests for internal purposes only would presumably be forced to reveal them.) The department’s request that a college report a single score for the institution is likely to renew concerns higher education leaders have expressed that the Spellings Commission’s push for accountability is overly simplistic, since most accountability measures that institutions use can’t be summed up in one “score.”

George D. Kuh, a professor of higher education at Indiana University and the director of the National Survey of Student Engagement, said the idea of collecting information about which accountability measures colleges were using and posting links on the department’s Web site to their results made good sense.

But trying to collect information about colleges’ scores on various accountability measures through one or two cells in a spreadsheet is “singularly problematic,” Kuh said. The fewest number of scores an institution could report to even begin to make its NSSE results meaningful, he said, is 10 — scores for both first-year students and seniors on each of the survey’s five main measures. But even that, he said, would fail to tell any interested parent or student how that student might fare at that institution, because it wouldn’t take into account his or her gender or race, whether he or she started at the institution or transferred in, etc.

“That’s where it becomes problematic and potentially very misleading to the public,” Kuh said. “It may not be very well thought through at this point.”

Clifford Adelman, a longtime Education Department researcher who is now a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, echoed Kuh’s comments, describing the accountability grid as taking an “incredibly dangerous, reductionistic” approach. “It implies that there is a finite, standardized set of acceptable measures on which institutions can receive ’scores,’ and that these ’scores’ (whatever that means) can be annualized,” Adelman said.

More Information on Financial Aid

The other major category of expanded information that the department proposes collecting relates to financial aid. The proposal calls for colleges to report significantly more information about the kind of financial aid that their students receive (from the current four categories to seven (Pell Grants, Academic Competitiveness Grants, other federal grants, state grants, institutional grants, federal subsidized loans, federal unsubsidized loans, and other loans).

Then colleges would then be asked to fill out a 9-cell grid in which they would break those aid recipients down by their dependency status (dependent, independent with dependents, independent without dependents), their living arrangements (on campus, off campus without family, off campus with family), and, at public institutions, whether they attend in-district, in-state, and out-of-state.

The additional financial aid information that the department is seeking to collect would appear to further its goal of reporting information related to colleges’ net price rather than their sticker price. Collecting information about financial aid recipients based on whether they live on campus or off, etc., would go part of the way toward allowing the department to report how much different types of students really pay for their college educations on average.

But college financial aid administrators warn that while the proposed expansion of IPEDS would provide better information than the department now has at its disposal, the information the department would be able to provide would be too generalized to significantly help individual students. “I’d be concerned about how accurate it would be, if families depend on it too much,” said Pam Fowler, director of financial aid at the University of Michigan.

Fowler also noted that some of the information the department seeks to collect in this part of the new collection would be extremely difficult and time consuming to track down. For instance, her office does not even collect data on students’ living situations, which would only be available from the Free Application for Federal Student Assistance.

A department spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said that some of the changes the department is seeking in its IPEDS proposal, including some related to the race and ethnicity of students, have been mandated by federal law. “Others are merely under consideration and reflect an interest by [the National Center for Education Statistics] in gathering additional information,” she said. “The department will carefully consider any comments received during the public comment period before making decisions about changes in IPEDS.”

— Doug Lederman

© Copyright 2006 Inside Higher Ed

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Friday, February 16, 2007

70 College Presidents Sign Commitment to Limit Carbon Emissions on Their Campuses

By ERIK VANCE

A growing number of college and university presidents are signing on to a pact under which they agree to cut their institutions’ carbon emissions to zero over time. Called the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, the agreement is modeled after a similar pact made by mayors across the country.

Each institution will set its own date for reaching campuswide “carbon neutrality” — the point at which its carbon-dioxide emissions are offset by the use of renewable sources of energy and the oxygen released from trees and other plants on the campus — and each will determine for itself how that goal will be achieved.

The 70 presidents who have signed the pact on so far represent institutions as diverse as the University of Florida, with more than 50,000 students, and Pennsylvania’s Allegheny College, with about 2,000 students.

Colleges that sign the commitment will have two years, starting in June, to catalog their sources of carbon emissions and lay out a timetable for achieving carbon neutrality. In the meantime, they agree to adopt several energy-saving measures — like requiring the use of appliances that carry the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star symbol for energy efficiency, or obtaining at least 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources.

Carbon-dioxide emissions are among the human-caused pollutants that an international group of scientists recently blamed for a warming trend in the global climate (The Chronicle, February 2).

“It’s a crisis in slow motion, but it’s one that can be mitigated and reversed with action like the one we’re taking,” said Amy Gutmann, who is president of the University of Pennsylvania and a recent signer of the pledge. “As educators, universities and all of higher education have a responsibility to enhance environmental literacy.”

This June, college presidents who sign the pact will meet to agree on specifics, such as how they will publicize their progress. Each participating college agrees to create a plan and make statements to students and the public on its progress in carrying out that plan.

Kathleen Schatzberg, president of Cape Cod Community College, is a founding member of a leadership circle that promotes the agreement, which means she acts as a recruiter to get other college leaders to commit to the pact.

“Like just about everybody else these days, I am worried about our future,” Ms. Schatzberg said. “I am convinced that colleges and universities can make a difference. We each run what amounts to a little city.”

As a community college, she said, Cape Cod may not do cutting-edge research, but it offers an environmental-technology program with internships at alternative-energy companies and the Environmental Protection Agency. Already she has experimented with a fuel-cell stack, which powered buildings on the campus for five years using hydrogen from natural gas. Now she is working to set up a windmill to harness the breezy cape weather.

A Broad Stroke

Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University and another founding member of the leadership circle, said the commitment focuses on colleges of varying enrollments and endowments in order to brush higher education with a broad stroke. Mr. Crow said widespread problems deserve widespread solutions.

“We are teachers, fundamentally, at the end of the day,” he said. “If the Americans can’t make their emerging cities work on a sustainable basis, then how can anybody else?”

Arizona State, with more than 63,000 students at three campuses in the Phoenix area, has one of the largest university enrollments in the country. But the population of the metropolitan region, with more than 3.8 million people, dwarfs the university. Phoenix has had the largest annual population growth of any American city for the past two years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and Arizona was the fastest-growing state in the country in 2005.

Mr. Crow said part of his university’s commitment is to help its surrounding region become a model for sustainable growth. He said colleges have not done enough and have only themselves to blame for any confusion about climate change. To meet the carbon-neutrality goal, he is hiring economics, engineering, and public-policy faculty members, and offering discounted or free public transit to students.

In Philadelphia, Ms. Gutmann is also encouraging the use of public transportation. But for getting around on Penn’s urban campus, she said, other strategies might do more good.

“Our campus is designed to be environmentally friendly because it is designed for walking,” she said. “It is far better for people to walk between their meetings and get exercise than to have to scurry to find half an hour on a treadmill.”

Penn has also raised thermostats one degree in the summer and lowered them one degree in the winter. The savings allowed the university to buy a third of its energy demands from wind farms. Last summer, Ms. Gutmann said, the university saved $1-million by conserving during peak hours.

The organizers of the commitment for college and university leaders hope it will have 200 signatories by June and 1,000 by 2009. The pact was modeled on the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which was devised in 2005 and now has 402 signers.

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Thursday, February 15, 2007

At Last, Congress Approves Spending Bill for Remainder of 2007

By JEFFREY BRAINARD
Washington

Congress finally completed work on Wednesday on a spending measure to finance higher-education programs for the remainder of the 2007 fiscal year that will raise the maximum Pell Grant award by $260 and increase spending for physical-sciences research.

The Senate approved the bill 81 to 15, and President Bush was expected to sign it by today. The House of Representatives had passed the measure in January (The Chronicle, February 9).

Some senators grumbled that the $463.5-billion bill (House Joint Resolution 20) neglected key nonacademic priorities, such as costs to close and modernize military bases. Ultimately, however, those senators gave in and approved the measure without any amendments, in order to avoid shutting down the federal government. A temporary, stopgap spending measure for 2007 expires today.

The vote ends what has been one of the more difficult and long-lasting Congressional appropriations processes in years and clears the way for Congress to consider Mr. Bush’s budget for 2008, released this month (The Chronicle, February 16).

Republican leaders of the Senate failed last year to complete nine of the 11 spending bills to finance the federal government in the 2007 fiscal year, which ends September 30. After Democrats won control of Congress in November, Democratic leaders proposed the single spending bill approved on Wednesday, which provides flat financing or cuts for many federal programs and increases for a select few, including several benefiting academe.

Among the good news for universities: The maximum Pell award will rise 6 percent, to $4,310, from this year’s level of $4,050, which has remained unchanged since 2003. The National Science Foundation and the Energy Department’s Office of Science will both receive increases well above inflation, and the National Institutes of Health will get an increase of about 2 percent.

“Higher education should be very pleased with the outcome because it addressed a number of our concerns,” said Tobin L. Smith, associate director for federal relations at the Association of American Universities.

NIH Cuts Eased

The increase for the NIH, the largest source of funds for university research, will help avoid disruption of studies that are under way. In October, officials at the biomedical-research agency said that until Congress approved appropriations through the end of 2007, the NIH would provide only 80 percent of the amounts promised for grants awarded in previous years. The move was a precaution, they explained, because the agency could not depend on having even a flat budget this year.

However, even with the 2-percent increase that Congress has now approved, the NIH still plans to provide no cost-of-living increase this year for continuing grants. Instead, the agency plans to increase the number of new grants awarded in 2007 by as many as 500 over 2006.

One of the losers under the bill will be scientific research sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Although spending for NASA’s science directorate as a whole will remain level, funds for the agency’s basic-research programs will fall by 6 percent, to $2.17-billion, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And decreases for basic and applied research combined are close to 15 percent.

What’s more, NASA is expected to try to divert money from science in 2007 to finance shortfalls in its human space-flight programs.

As Democratic leaders had promised, the bill eliminates Congressional earmarks, the controversial, noncompetitive grants directed by lawmakers to specific constituents, including colleges.

According to the AAAS, the bill did not divert the money that was spent for those projects in 2006 to other purposes in 2007. Congress provided a total of $2.3-billion in earmarks for research and development in 2006. However, total spending for research and development will get an increase of $93-million, not a decrease, in 2007.

Some agencies, like NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency, that will get no outright increase in research spending for 2007 might get in effect a net increase because of the elimination of earmarks, said Kei Koizumi, a budget analyst for the AAAS. With no explicit direction from Congress, the agencies are in principle free to distribute the formerly earmarked money using merit-based reviews, which agencies typically use to award most federal grants for research.

Some senators who are critics of earmarks predicted during debate on the bill that this wouldn’t happen because, they said, the measure’s ban on earmarks was toothless.

The bill says that earmarks financed in 2006 have “no legal effect” in 2007. Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, both Republicans, pointed out, however, that almost all of the earmarks from 2006 carried no legal force in 2007 because they were included in advisory reports that accompanied appropriations bills and that Congress wrote to explain its intent.

Federal agencies generally followed the recommendations anyway. In January, though, President Bush asked Congress to help him cut the number of earmarks in half.

Senator DeMint voiced skepticism that earmarks would be reduced by the Congressional language alone. “Our agencies have been under the thumb of powerful appropriators for so long, it may be difficult for them to transition to a world without earmarks,” he said.

The senator said he feared that lawmakers would try to intimidate federal agencies to voluntarily continue to finance their pet projects previously supported by earmarks. He offered, unsuccessfully, an amendment to the spending bill that would prevent legislators from privately lobbying the agencies. It was unclear, though, that such a restriction could have been enforced.

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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BUSH’S BUDGET FOR 2008

President Bush proposed on Monday a federal budget of
$2.9-trillion for the 2008 fiscal year. Here is how the plan
would affect higher education:

* STUDENT AID: To pay for his proposed increase in the maximum
Pell Grant, the president would cut lender subsidies and
eliminate the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant
program, which augments Pell Grants for low-income students.
–> SEE http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020601n.htm

* SCIENCE PROGRAMS: Proposed spending for scientific research
in 2008 would continue Mr. Bush’s drive to double federal
funds for agencies supporting physical-sciences research over
a decade. But his plan would give other agencies small
increases or cuts, compared with 2006.
–> SEE http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020602n.htm

* VOCATIONAL PROGRAMS: A year after deriding it as ineffective,
Mr. Bush now would spare the Carl D. Perkins Career and
Technical Education program from oblivion but subject it to
a sharp cut.
–> SEE http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020603n.htm

* NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION: The agency would receive
$6.43-billion, a 13.9 percent increase, with most of the
gains going to bolster physical-sciences, engineering, and
other research that administration officials hope will help
the United States remain a global leader in innovation.
–> SEE http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020605n.htm

* NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: The agency would receive
nearly 2 percent less than the amount Congress is poised to
approve for 2007, a scenario that has raised concerns among
biomedical-research advocates. The president’s proposal
would, however, allow an increase in the number of new
research grants.
–> SEE http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020606n.htm

* DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE: Research dollars would shift away
from individual colleges and toward cooperative,
multi-institutional projects. Over all, spending on
agricultural research would decline by 14.4 percent.
–> SEE http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020607n.htm

* NATIONAL ENDOWMENTS: The humanities endowment would see a
gain just 0.3 percent, while the arts endowment would receive
a 3-percent increase.
–> SEE http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020608n.htm

* TABLE: A chart shows details of the portions of President
Bush’s budget proposal that affect higher education.
–> http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i24/table_new_one_budget.htm

Chronicle of Higher Education

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http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020104n.htm

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Industry Support for Academic Research Rebounded in 2005, After 3-Year Slump, NSF Reports

By RICHARD MONASTERSKY and LAUREN SMITH

After three years of declining support from industry, colleges and universities saw a sharp upswing in the amount of money they received from industry for science and engineering research and development in the 2005 fiscal year, according to a report released this week by the National Science Foundation.

The report, on the agency’s latest annual Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges, finds that industrial financing climbed by 7.7 percent, reaching a record $2.3-billion that year. Even with the increase, however, the industrial component of research and development financing remained just 5 percent of the total, lagging behind the support from the federal government, state and local governments, and institutional sources.

Colleges and universities spent $45.8-billion on research and development in 2005, a 5.8-percent jump over the previous year. That increase falls below the double-digit gains that academic institutions made in the 2002 and 2003 fiscal years. Over all, academic spending on research and development has climbed more than 50 percent since 2000.

The federal government provided the largest share of that money, totaling $29.2-billion in 2005. That amount surpasses the previous year by just 5.6 percent, a significantly smaller increase than those in the previous three years. Those gains were 13.7 percent in 2002, 13.2 percent in 2003, and 11.6 percent in 2004.

The National Science Foundation surveyed 640 institutions that have bachelor’s or higher-degree programs in science and engineering and spend at least $150,000 on research and development in those areas. Although survey respondents were instructed not to include money provided for clinical trials, many institutions did so, said Ronda K. Britt, who managed the survey for the agency. The next round of the survey will include clinical trials.

In a ranking of institutions by which received the most federal funds, the top four remained the same. The John Hopkins University again was miles ahead of the rest, thanks to its Applied Physics Laboratory, which received $649-million in federal research expenditures. But breaking into the top five for the first time in recent years was the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The main campus at Arizona State University was the only new institution involved in last year’s survey to break into the top 100 this year, gaining five places to land at 100. The Scripps Research Institute, which was not scored last year, made its debut at No. 30.

Falling out of the top 100 were Utah State University, which slipped 22 spots to 101 (the largest drop in 2005) and Thomas Jefferson University, which fell 11 spots to 106 (the second largest drop).

Universities within the top 100 that raised their rankings the most include Virginia Tech and the University of California at Santa Barbara, both leaping up eight positions to 83 and 88, respectively. The second-largest gain was of seven places, made by both Texas A&M University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry at New Jersey.

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/02/2007020103n.htm

Thursday, February 1, 2007

At Selective Colleges, More Than a Quarter of Black Students Are Immigrants, Study Finds

By DAVID GLENN

More than a quarter of the black students enrolled at selective American colleges and universities are immigrants or the children of immigrants, according to a new paper by sociologists at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The finding suggests that native-born African-American students are even more underrepresented at selective colleges than is commonly understood. The paper is likely to add fuel to a long-standing debate about the meaning and purpose of affirmative-action programs.

Selective colleges have expanded their enrollments of black students by “increasing the number of immigrant and multiracial black students,” Camille Z. Charles, an associate professor of sociology at Penn who is one of the study’s authors, said in an interview on Wednesday.

“If you’re a purist” — that is, if you view affirmative action as restitution for the harm done by American slavery and segregation — “then you’ll think that this is not in the spirit of affirmative action,” Ms. Charles continued. “But if you’re a diversity purist, and your idea is to expose everybody to as many different kinds of people as possible, then you’ll think this is great.”

The paper, “Black Immigrants and Black Natives Attending Selective Colleges and Universities in the United States,” appears in the February issue of the American Journal of Education. In addition to Ms. Charles, its authors are Douglas S. Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton, and Margarita Mooney and Kimberly C. Torres, both of whom are postdoctoral fellows at Princeton’s Office of Population Research.

The paper draws on a study of 1,051 black students who enrolled at 28 selective institutions in 1999. Those students were part of a larger project, the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, that was financed by the Mellon Foundation and led by scholars at Princeton.

Of those 1,051 students, 27 percent were born outside the United States or had at least one parent who was born outside the United States — most commonly in Jamaica, Nigeria, Haiti, Trinidad, or Ghana. By contrast, only 13 percent of the general population of 18- and 19-year-old black Americans in 1999 were first- or second-generation immigrants, according to data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

At the most selective of the 28 schools, the ratios for non-native black students were even higher. The study included four Ivy League universities — Columbia, Penn, Princeton, and Yale — and at those universities, 41 percent of black students were first- or second-generation immigrants.

What explains the high representation of immigrants among black students at selective institutions? Ms. Charles and her colleagues report that the immigrant black students and native-born black students in their study had generally similar family backgrounds and high-school preparation. But they also noted several significant differences that might explain immigrant students’ relative success. Among those differences are the following:

The immigrant black students were much more likely than native-born black students to have at least one parent who has earned an advanced degree. (A high proportion of immigrants from Jamaica and Nigeria, Ms. Charles and her colleagues point out, were professionals who were frustrated by their home countries’ labor markets.) Forty-four percent of the immigrant black students’ fathers had advanced degrees, versus 25 percent of the native-born black students’ fathers.

The immigrant black students were significantly less likely to have grown up in segregated black neighborhoods and significantly more likely to have attended a private high school.

The immigrant black students had significantly higher average SAT scores than did the native-born black students — 1250, versus 1193, respectively.

Those advantages do not seem to translate into stronger performance at college: In the study, the immigrant black students’ college grades were no higher than those of the native-born black students. Ms. Charles said that she and her colleagues are exploring a number of potential explanations for that finding. One possibility, she said, is that immigrant black students are more likely to choose certain majors — particularly engineering — where grade-point averages are relatively low across the board.

In their paper, Ms. Charles and her colleagues do not weigh in directly on the debate over affirmative action. That debate, they write, “cannot be settled empirically, of course, because ultimately it involves a contest between two different moral visions — the moral imperative to right past wrongs versus the ethical need to represent the diversity of contemporary society as it now stands.”

“Nonetheless,” they add, “reliable data can and should inform the debate.”

Social scientists and policy makers too often fail to appreciate the heterogeneity of the black population in America, Ms. Charles said. If, for example, college administrators are comparing black students’ experiences today to black students’ experiences in 1970, “you have to realize that that’s a different black population, with many fewer immigrants. You’re not comparing apples to apples.”

Ms. Charles and her colleagues are conducting further research, including detailed interviews with students at Penn. She said that she hopes to learn more about how self-perceived ethnic identity affects students’ academic performance.

“There are differences in racial identity among black students,” Ms. Charles said. “In terms of their vulnerability to stereotype threat, it’s certainly possible that students who don’t identify strongly with an African-American identity don’t experience that kind of anxiety.”

“On the other hand, it’s possible that even though they don’t identify themselves a certain way, they realize that other people might be pigeonholing them. So it could go either way. That’s what we’re trying to parcel out.”

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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