Maryland Higher

Politicians, parents and taxpayers are demanding that universities assess the quality of education, but something is fundamentally wrong with the way educators evaluate their own institutions, according to Donald T. Langenberg, chancellor of the University of Maryland System."

WESTMINSTER -- When half of Carroll County undergraduates go away to college in the fall, they won't even cross the county line.They won't really go away at all. They'll go to Carroll Community College, which is attracting undergraduates at about the same rate as more established independent community colleges around the state, according to figures from the Maryland Higher Education Commission.That means they're also attracting at least as many freshman as four-year colleges now, and that could increase, said Executive Dean Joseph F. Shields.

COLLEGE PARK -- Gov. Parris N. Glendening told a gathering of Maryland higher education leaders yesterday that there is major additional money coming for campus building projects, but he would not say how much or for which buildings.Speaking to a conference on the future of higher education in the state, Glendening said he had planned to announce the specific figures but had been talked out of it by his press office."It will be a very, very striking increase" in funding, Glendening said. "This is what is known as a teaser."

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller and a number of campus presidents within the University of Maryland engage in sheer sophistry by calling for abolition of the UM system. They see secession as the solution for the current university budget woes and lack of funds to achieve academic greatness. Such fundamentally flawed logic would earn them failing grades in any college classroom.Dismantling the UM system won't solve anything. It will not end the campus presidents' main complaint: scarcity of money to upgrade their schools.

ANNAPOLIS -- The Schaefer administration will ask the General Assembly to abolish the state's largest college scholarship program and replace it with one that eventually would pump more than twice the current program's $11.6 million to needy students.One key element would be an attempt to identify eligible students with college potential as early as the sixth, seventh or eighth grades and promise them financial assistance upon graduation from high school."Too many students don't even understand the possibility of college in their lives until it is too late, when they haven't got the grades or haven't taken the courses they need to get into college," said Jeffrey R. Welsh, a spokesman for the Maryland Higher Education Commission, which developed the plan.

The Supreme Court today rejected an appeal from education agencies in Maryland and other states, which had argued that they should not be required to return to the federal government millions of dollars of their college loan programs' reserve funds.In Maryland, the ruling applies to $10.8 million in reserves from the Maryland Higher Education Loan Corporation.The court, without comment, left intact a ruling that a federal law requiring return of the reserve funds to the federal government did not violate property or contractual rights of state agencies that help run the program in Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina.

A federal judge, in a significant ruling on direct public subsidies for religious colleges, has cleared the way for a Takoma Park institution run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church to seek more than $800,000 in state funds. This was the first victory for Columbia Union College in an eight-year feud with the Maryland Higher Education Commission over state funds to cover basic educational activity at the institution. U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis of Baltimore ruled Thursday that Columbia Union is a religious institution but that it would not be unconstitutional for the state to give it money.

In a move that has caught some Maryland college officials by surprise, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has chosen former Coppin State College President Calvin W. Burnett as his new secretary of higher education. Ehrlich spokesman Shareese DeLeaver said yesterday that the governor would likely make his formal announcement on Burnett next week. As higher- education secretary, Burnett would lead the Maryland Higher Education Commission, an agency with a paid staff of 60 and unpaid board of 12 that is charged with coordinating policy among the state's private and public colleges.

With state budget cuts wreaking havoc among Maryland's public colleges, Secretary of Higher Education Shaila Aery is asking state college and university presidents whether some of their institutions could become quasi-private schools.Aery told the Maryland Higher Education Commission's Finance Policy Committee today that the issue is particularly pressing because the state may have to impose additional cuts of up to $150 million this year, and higher education remains vulnerable.Those cuts could come on top of the $450 million Gov. William Donald Schaefer cut from the state budget earlier this week.

Maryland's new college savings plan offers a generous state tax break, so much so that the General Assembly might review it next year. The Maryland College Investment Plan, begun this month, allows people to invest for a student's education in as many as 10 accounts managed by Baltimore's T. Rowe Price Associates. In a booklet describing the program, Marylanders are told that they can deduct up to $2,500 in contributions per account each year when filing state income taxes. That means that it is possible for a parent to open 10 accounts for one child and claim as much as $25,000 in state income tax deductions.