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World & Nation
Qvisory Tools for Life, a nonprofit organization set up with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Service Employees International Union, plans to provide services to young workers, such as helping them find health insurance and handle debt.

The nonprofit plans to open up shop later this year, primarily through its Web site, www.qvisory.org, where it hopes to have blogs and forums in which workers aged 18 through 35 can discuss jobs and other concerns.

Andrew Stern, president of the service employees’ union, said he hoped Qvisory might get its members to make themselves heard the way MoveOn.org does. Qvisory, open to union members and nonmembers, will likely promote issues like higher minimum wage, broader health coverage, and greater government support of child care, he said. Mr. Stern said it made sense for his union to undertake this because unions had to find new ways of serving workers—even when they were not union members.

Venezuela President Hugo Chavez has announced that the nation will drop both its national college aptitude test and public university entrance examinations.

“These old methods were instruments for exclusion,” Mr. Chávez said of the entrance tests. “They will now be substituted with a unified system of admission.”

As a result of inequities in the educational system, most students in Venezuela’s public universities, which do not charge tuition, come from the nation’s small, middle and upper classes, while lower-income students must often pay to attend private universities if they manage to continue studying after high school at all.

Nationwide, just over 5 percent of all full-time faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States are black, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. This percentage has increased slightly over the past decade. In addition, the percentage of Black faculty at almost all the nation’s high-ranking universities is significantly below the national average of 5.2 percent, notes the JBHE.

Faculty & Staff
The union advantage for low-income workers is undeniable, according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The report, “Unions & Upward Mobility For Low-Wage Workers,” found workers in unions made 16 percent more money and they were much more likely to have health insurance or a pension plan.

A new survey finds that not one of a host of policies designed to help young female and minority faculty succeed was judged effective by those they were designed to help. The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, a research project at Harvard University, finds none of the policies considered rated even “fairly effective” by faculty members. The policies included an upper limit on teaching obligations, an upper limit on committee assignments, and travel funds for conferences or research. On a 5-point scale, informal mentoring ranked as the most effective practice at only 3.69.

Professional News
More than two-thirds of part-time students who started college in 2003-04 left the higher-education system without a degree by June 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

About 69 percent of part-time students who started at four-year institutions and 70 percent of those who started at public two-year institutions left without a degree, according to the Department of Ed report “Persistence and Attainment of 2003-04 Beginning Postsecondary Students: After Three Years.”

By contrast, only 17 percent of full-time students at four-year colleges and 40 percent of those at public two-year colleges left without a degree.

Community colleges need to do a better job of designing student services, like advising, with part-time students in mind, said Kay M. McClenney, director of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. She suggested advising be incorporated into classes for students who spend little time on campus.