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Higher Education News
World & Nation
The College Board and ACT, the nation’s
college entrance exam providers, have announced that they will
no longer flag score reports of students given extra time on their tests
because of physical or learning disabilities.
Around 2 percent of the two million high
school students taking the SAT each year receive accommodations because
of disabilities.
Advocates for the disabled applaud the
announcements, saying the move will help to de-stigmatize students with
special needs.
The College Board will stop flagging scores
beginning October 2003, while ACT will stop sometime in the fall of 2003.
The number
of African-American men in jail or prison has grown fivefold in
the past 20 years, to the point where more Black men are behind bars than
are enrolled in colleges or universities, according to a recent study.
The increase in the Black male prison
population coincides with the prison construction boom that began in 1980,
the report from the Justice Policy Institute notes.
The study found that in 2000 there were
791,600 Black men in jail or prison and 603,032 enrolled in colleges or
universities. By contrast, the study said that in 1980 there were 143,000
Black men in jail or prison but 463,700 enrolled in colleges or universities.
During the prison-building boom of the
last two decades, the number of Americans of all races in jail or prison
increased by almost 400 percent, to 2.1 million in 2000 from 502,000 in
1980, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The American
Sociological Association announced that the proportion of minority
students graduating from sociology programs increased from 18 percent
to 33 percent at the 11 institutions taking part in the association’s
Minority Opportunities Through School Transformation program.
The eight-year-old program increased the
number of minority students getting degrees through a set of changes in
curricula and institutional attitudes, rather than an increase in recruitment
numbers.
Faculty & Staff
Over 60 percent of full-time doctoral students
have paid assistantships, earning on average
$12,837 per year for their work.
Student Financing of Graduate
and First-Professional Education, 1990-2000, a U.S. Department of
Education report finds students in engineering and the sciences receive
the largest stipends, averaging $14,994. Students in humanities and social
sciences get the smallest awards at $10,886. For more information, visit
the education department website at www.ed.gov.
People with doctoral degrees
earn an average of $3.4 million over the
course of their working lives, compared with $2.5 million for those with
a master’s degree, $2.1 million for those with a bachelor’s
degree, and $1.2 million for those with only a high school diploma, a
study by the U.S. Census Bureau shows. People with professional degrees,
the study finds, take home an average of $4.4 million over the course
of their careers.
Professional News
Colleges that train teachers should raise
academic standards and emphasize content
over method in the curriculum, according to Meeting the Highly Qualified
Teachers Challenge: The Secretary of Education’s Annual Report on
Teacher Quality.
Secretary Paige wants more rigorous
standards, fewer cumbersome requirements, and increased efforts to attract
candidates who have expertise in the subject areas. He urges states to
increase teacher salaries and to consider alternative teacher certifications.
The report is available online at www.ed.gov.
Academic couples working at the
same university are happier and experience
less stress than couples with one spouse working at a university and the
other working at a different institution or outside the academy, according
to a Cornell University Career Institute report, Intimate Academics:
Co-Working Couples in two American Universities. The report notes
that both men and women report greater family success.
Higher
Education Dramatically Increases Earning Power of Women
Source: National Urban League Institute for Opportunity
and Equality—June 2002 Report
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