Undergraduates

Gov. Martin O'Malley, sleeves rolled up, perched on a stool in the Towson University student union Thursday, moments after the Board of Regents voted unanimously to freeze in-state undergraduate tuition for the fourth straight year. "That is quite an accomplishment," he told a group of students. Regents said they would have raised tuition by 4 percent, but the governor provided the state system with an extra $16 million to hold the line. The accomplishment, then, was as much O'Malley's as the regents', and he savored the victory yesterday in a year that has not always been kind to him. "Our state's future competitiveness, our global strength, depends on our ability to invest in the skills of our people," O'Malley said.

Oregon's state Board of Higher Education is expected to vote this morning to select University of Baltimore Provost Wim Wiewel as the next president of Portland State University, Oregon's largest college, officials said yesterday. Wiewel, 58, chief academic officer at the 5,400-student downtown Baltimore school since 2004, would replace Daniel O. Bernstine, who stepped down last year after about 10 years in the president's office to head the Law School Admission Council. In a statement yesterday afternoon, University of Baltimore President Robert L. Bogomolny thanked Wiewel for his "many contributions" and congratulated him on his appointment.

Anyone sending a child to an expensive college these days undoubtedly looks askance at the difference between the high cost of tuition and the amount of financial aid available. Some members of Congress are also skeptical, and they have floated the idea of requiring universities to spend 5 percent of their endowments each year to give students and their families more tuition relief. Given the value of higher education and the tax-exempt status of universities, it's fair to ask them to do all they can to make higher education accessible and affordable to as many students as possible.

The nation's colleges and universities may need better ways to show that they are doing a good job of educating students, but giving standardized tests to undergraduates shouldn't be one of them. That's the least plausible part of an otherwise sensible plan to make more information about higher-education institutions available to students, parents and the public. Many critical elements of the college experience simply can't be captured by uniform tests - and efforts to homogenize that experience should be discouraged.

Should an undergraduate studying business pay more than one studying psychology? Should a journalism degree cost more than one in literature? More and more public universities, confronting rising costs and lagging state support, have decided that the answers may be yes and yes. Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates....

Imagine building a robot so small that it looks like a fire ant, even when magnified by a factor of 50. Now picture the nano-sized David Beckham bot playing "soccer" on a field about one sixteenth the size of a quarter. Sound like a feat? For a handful of midshipmen and one recent graduate of the Naval Academy, it certainly was - given that there are no existing tiny robot parts, not to mention screwdrivers or hinges. The students spent much of the past year looking into microscopes and using chemistry and light to shape the tiny bots.

Who's the hottest blogger in Baltimore? The answer might surprise you. He is Brian Stelter, a 21-year-old student at Towson University, whose nonstop reporting of the ups and downs, ins and outs of the television news industry has earned him the faithful attention of a national audience of television news people and broadcast executives. Earlier this year, when CBS publicists handed out a photo of Katie Couric, altered to slim her by 20 pounds or more, it was Stelter who broke the news.

The University of Baltimore will offer every freshman who enrolls in the fall of 2007 a one-year scholarship covering all out-of-pocket tuition and fee expenses - a bold move designed to attract students to its first freshman class in three decades. University officials hope that the one-time grant program will help publicize the downtown college's conversion from a school serving only junior and senior undergraduates - as well as graduate students - to one offering a full four-year undergraduate education.

As a teenager, Mary Sanford Williams yearned to become a lawyer. But at the time, there was no money for college. Finally, now that she has graduated from Baltimore City Community College - at age 80 - the West Baltimore resident is closer to her goal. BCCC's oldest graduate this year plans to become a legal assistant. According to The Sun's Sumathi Reddy, Ms. Williams, who had a 3.5 grade-point average, did not attend the graduation ceremony last week because she is in summer school and has started course work at the University of Baltimore on the way to getting her bachelor's degree.

Greater accountability - via standardized testing of undergraduates - is a concept whose time has come in higher education. This is partly the result of sharply rising costs and partly a logical extension of the test-based reforms that have swept through elementary and secondary education. In Maryland and elsewhere, virtually every public or private college these days is studying or trying out some means of better demonstrating the overall learning gains of its undergraduates. But now the Bush administration has a commission looking at the feasibility of comparing colleges by administering nationally standardized tests to their students - a superficially appealing but highly questionable proposition.