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Higher Education News
World & Nation
The University of Tehran won top billing on
Mother Jones magazine’s list of the 2002 Top 10 Activist
Campuses.
In a country where dissent can result
in imprisonment or worse, students at the University of Tehran were fearlessly
vocal in their protests when one of their professors, Hashem Aghajari,
was sentenced to death for questioning why clerics alone should have the
power to interpret the Koran.
Their resistance brought about a Supreme
Court review and ultimately a lesser sentence for Aghajari—eight
years of imprisonment and 74 lashes.
Other universities in the top 10 are California
Community Colleges, New York University, Howard University, University
of Michigan, James Madison University, University of Chicago, St. Joseph’s
University, UC Berkeley, and Yale University.
The overwhelming
majority of students pay back their student loans, according to
the U.S. Department of Education. Officials announced that the rate of
default by student loan borrowers has dropped to an all-time low of 5.4
percent. The precipitous drop in student loan interest rates over the
last several years has been a large factor in students’ abilities
to pay back their loans.
For the first time since tracking default
rates began in 1989, not one college had a default rate high enough to
exclude it from the federal student-aid programs. Another factor: Over
the past 10 years, almost 1,200 educational institutions have been barred
from the programs.
Since President
Bush took office in 2001, the United States has lost 3.2 million
private-sector jobs, the worst job-loss crisis since the Great Depression.
One key factor contributing to the loss is the outsourcing of hundreds
of thousands of manufacturing as well as white-collar jobs to lower-cost
labor populations abroad. Not only are nearly 11 million unemployed workers
searching for jobs, but the quality of jobs has gotten worse as well.
Job security, pension coverage, and employer-subsidized health insurance
are all declining.
Faculty & Staff
A special committee of the American Association
of University Professors, the Special Committee
on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis, has issued
a report calling for more freedom of inquiry and openness in academic
settings.
The report, which assesses the risks
to academic freedom and free inquiry posed by the nation’s response
to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
focuses on sections of the USA Patriot Act that threaten academic freedom.
It is available at www.aaup.org.
New York Gov. George Pataki
has signed a bill authorizing the state’s
84 public colleges and 4,000 public schools to refuse to sell sports equipment
manufactured in sweatshops, even if the firms give the lowest bid. The
bill, signed into law in September, follows comparable bills in 2001 and
2002 that apply to clothing sold in school stores.
Similar policies have been adopted
in Minneapolis and Los Angeles.
Professional News
Only one-third of eighth graders in 1988 earned
a college degree by the year 2000, according
to Jobs for the Future, a Boston research organization. A separate report
finds that a majority of Americans feels that high schools are not adequately
preparing students for college.
The two reports were released at
Double the Numbers, a national conference on improving college completion
rates among low-income and minority students held in October in Washington,
D.C.
The public-opinion survey also finds
that 62 percent of Americans feel that taking one or more college courses
while in high school increases students’ chances of entering and
succeeding in college. Nearly one-third of respondents miscalculated the
proportion of college students that drop out—nearly half. And 57
percent feels that better coordination is needed to help students bridge
the gap between high school and college.
More information is available at
www.jff.org/jff.
Trends in Share
of Income Required for Tuition
Source: National Center for Public Policy and
Higher Education, 2002.
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