Colleges And Universities

Maryland colleges and universities ended a strong fundraising year with a pair of billion-dollar campaign announcements from the University of Maryland, College Park and the Johns Hopkins University, and a flurry of major gifts that included $50 million to Hopkins and $5 million to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. But in addition to sharing seven figures, the gifts making headlines in recent months had something else in common: Virtually all were made by friends and foundations, not former students of the receiving institution.

Even with early warning signs and multiple campus interventions - as in the case of Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui - a university's options for dealing with mentally ill students are limited by privacy laws and medical ethics. Despite two encounters with campus police in 2005 after harassment complaints by female students, and a brief commitment at a psychiatric hospital because of fears that he was suicidal, Cho remained a Hokie in good standing even as he plotted the massacre of 32 students and faculty Monday in Blacksburg, Va., authorities said yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- Do African immigrants make the smartest Americans? The question may sound outlandish, but if you were judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of evidence to back it up. In a side-by-side comparison of 2000 census data by sociologists including John R. Logan at the State University of New York, Albany, black immigrants from Africa averaged the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, including whites...

And you thought it was hard to get into Amherst? Try the U.S. Naval Academy. U.S. News and World Report released today its annual rankings of universities and colleges in America, and it says that the Annapolis institution is tougher to get into than the top colleges. More important for the Naval Academy, perhaps, is that it beat out the Army and Air Force academies in the first rankings to include the service academies. The Naval Academy was ranked 20th among liberal arts colleges in the country, and the U.S. Military Academy in New York came in 22nd.

College group plans new ranking system A national group of liberal arts colleges announced plans yesterday to develop its own college ranking system as an alternative to the annual U.S. News & World Report listings. Yesterday, the majority of 80 college presidents attending a meeting of the Annapolis Group, an organization of liberal arts colleges, expressed their intention not to participate in U.S. News' "peer assessment" surveys about their fellow colleges and universities, according to a news release.

HARTFORD, Conn. -- A group of entrepreneurs with a lofty idea for a graduate school that emphasizes personal growth, not career training, has won a license to start a college from scratch.Connecticut officials have authorized the group to proceed with plans for an unusual institution that will operate in real classrooms and through computer hookups.The Graduate Institute -- offering master's degrees in areas such as "holistic thinking," "conscious evolution" and "experiential health and healing" -- is believed to be the only school of its kind in the nation.

WASHINGTON -- The nation's Roman Catholic bishops, meeting here this week, will consider today a proposal to implement stricter supervision over U.S. Catholic colleges and universities -- a plan that critics say threatens the American tradition of academic freedom.The proposal, which could come up for a vote this morning, would require university presidents to take an oath of fidelity to uphold Catholic tradition. It states that the majority of the faculty and the board of directors in Catholic colleges and universities should be members of the church "to the extent possible."

FOUR PREDICTIONS for 2000:There'll be considerable turmoil around the school chiefs in Baltimore City and Montgomery County.In the city, here we go again. Two years ago, Robert Booker was hired as chief executive officer in large part because of his financial expertise; he was the chief money man of San Diego County, Calif.But city schools face a budget deficit approaching $30 million, and officials are amending a court-ordered master plan to squeeze out more money. Booker is a quiet and unassuming man at the head of a district many feel needs a 76-trombone parade.

Joel Marshall Bagby, president of his college and university fund-raising firm, died Saturday of lymphatic cancer at Stella Maris Hospice.He was 64 and lived in Monkton.During his long career, Mr. Bagby advised a number of prominent academic institutions on how to woo students and to coax them as graduates to donate money to their alma maters."His forte was that he was a brilliant writer and conceptualizer," said Gerry Willse, a colleague and friend. "He could get to the heart of the matter and make you understand it."

WASHINGTON -- More than a third of the nation's public schools, colleges and universities remain unprepared for the havoc the year 200 computer problem could cause in their computerized systems, the U.S. Department of Education reported yesterday.In a random survey conducted last month, the department found that about 60 percent of the schools were Y2K compliant, but the percentage of school districts saying they won't be Y2K-ready by Jan. 1 has doubled since summer.If the computer problems are not corrected, the department said, everything from a school's payroll records, bus schedules and heating systems to sprinkler systems could malfunction.

The freshmen arrived in a flood, forcing the Johns Hopkins University to reopen a defunct residence hall, lease a nearby inn and create new sections of popular math and science courses. Those might sound like steps required in a robust economy, when a $54,500 annual price tag would be little impediment to students seeking a prestigious education. The twist is that all of it happened in the past three weeks. Conventional wisdom held that the deep recession might push students away from expensive private schools such as Hopkins to lower-priced alternatives.

If only university systems could clone Christine Sweigart by the tens of thousands. The Silver Spring native is the rare American who loves math enough to make it her college major. She has also wanted to be a teacher since the sixth grade, when she got a mini-chalkboard as a symbol of her career ambitions. "Teachers have such an influence on whether students leave loving a subject or loathing it," said Sweigart, a rising junior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "Working with kids, seeing that light bulb come on, those are the rewards I want in a career."

In a few weeks, students in Maryland and across the nation will be gearing up for a rite of spring: taking Advanced Placement exams. A lot rides on their success on these tests. That's why it's disturbing that - although Maryland leads the nation in the percentage of its high school graduates who pass an AP test - there are such large disparities in AP pass rates and course offerings within and across school districts. Those disparities reflect the widespread patterns of education inequity and access that plague this nation.

SAN FRANCISCO -About six years ago, I was sitting in the student union of a small liberal arts college when I saw a graph on the cover of the student newspaper that showed the history of grades given at that institution in the past 30 years. Grades were up. Way up. I'm a scientist by training, and I love numbers. So when I looked at that graph, I wondered: How many colleges and universities have data like this that I can find? The answer is that a lot of schools have data like this hidden somewhere.

Private colleges a boon to state Len Lazarick's column "A spending problem" (Commentary, March 9) advocates balancing the state's operating budget by "cutting such programs as state aid to private colleges and universities." Unlike public schools in K-12 education, public universities are not open-enrollment institutions. They do not admit all students, offer every academic program or serve every region of the state. To do so would be inefficient and too expensive for taxpayers. Maryland's independent colleges and universities offer many unique education experiences and programs not available at any public university in Maryland.

Extending education offers lasting benefits The recommendations of the Bohanan commission have triggered a typical eruption from the anti-government, anti-education right ("Higher-ed spending not the answer," Commentary, Dec. 17). It contained the usual sort of assertion that "we put more people into universities than can benefit from them," and a reference to "the bureaucratic inefficiencies - and special-interest payoffs - that accompany almost anything that government does." The commission recommends greater investment in higher education by the state, based on the undeniable fact that Maryland's investment in higher education has historically been well below that of many competing states, relative to Maryland's wealth and to the needs of its knowledge-based economy.

After eight years of raising money at the furious pace of $1 million a day, Johns Hopkins University President William R. Brody decided it was time for a break. He had raised billions for Hopkins, and said he didn't have the energy for another major campaign. Last week, Hopkins announced Brody's replacement, University of Pennsylvania provost Ronald J. Daniels, who says he loves fundraising. It's a good thing, too: University presidents spend up to 50 percent of their time raising money.

Maryland must spend more on its historically black colleges and universities if they are to make up a wide gap in graduation rates and campus facilities compared with other public universities, a state panel has found. The panel's 34-page report, released yesterday, identifies many ways in which Maryland's four public historically black colleges have fallen behind other state schools - in science and technology labs, buildings, and retention and graduation rates. "Substantial additional resources must be invested in [the historically black colleges]

No one would argue that a college president who successfully leads an institution through a quarter-century of growth and development shouldn't enjoy a comfortable retirement. But that's not the same thing as the Wall Street-style golden parachute Morgan State University President Earl S. Richardson has negotiated for himself. After Mr. Richardson retires in 2009 from his $389,000-a-year job as president of one of the nation's oldest historically black colleges and universities, he'll remain on the school payroll, get an equally impressive office and collect $300,000 annually as president emeritus - even though his only duties will be to teach a couple of graduate courses a year.

As high school seniors sort through the morass of college brochures flooding their mailboxes this fall, the president of St. John's College in Annapolis takes comfort in the fact that students have a new and, he says, better tool to search for their perfect school. The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities recently relaunched its Web site of independent schools with a new search engine and consumer guide for finding financial aid. It's been a year since St. John's joined 728 other independent colleges and universities on the network of college listings, meant as an alternative to national publications that rank schools.