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    The date is fast approaching when students will receive their college acceptances from the most competitive colleges in the country. Most students have already heard from several colleges as all but the most competitive let students know much earlier than the beginning of April. Only 3% of the four-year colleges and universities in the United States accept fewer than 25% of their applicants and these schools enroll fewer than 4% of all new freshmen. This is a very small group of students and schools but the publicity surrounding these schools has lead many people to think that it is impossible to get into college and has resulted in great angst among students and parents about the college admissions process. On the other hand, 18% of the four-year institutions and all of the more than 1,000 community colleges in the U.S. are open admissions which means they have minimal admissions criteria and accept almost all students who apply if they have graduated from high school and complete all the required paperwork. Why do we have such misperceptions about getting into college? Too many people think that all schools are like the Ivies and the Little Ivies but that is far from true. There is a school for everyone and, in most cases, many schools that will be a good match for you. It is quite easy to predict your chances of getting in to a school as most schools accept all students who meet their stated criteria and have scores that are close to the school’s average scores. There are very few schools who have the luxury of turning away qualified students who meet their criteria. The very selective schools are able to fill their freshmen class many times over from their applicant pool while most others struggle to fill their class and find that they have to discount their tuition significantly to get the number of students that they need to operate in a financially viable way. The average discount rate at private four-year colleges is almost 50% meaning that on average students will pay only half of the published tuition
    6 years ago by @prophe
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    The NCAA is an organization full of hypocrisies. It rakes in billions of dollars, but says there’s no money to pay the student-athletes. It works overtime to appease high-dollar corporate sponsors, but won’t let a star basketball player accept any perks. It routinely looks the other way when it comes to abuse scandals, and marginalizes its female athletes, all while running commercials focused on safety and equality.
    6 years ago by @prophe
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    Khalsa University, established by disintegrating 125-year-old Khalsa College, is ready for its first full-fledged academic session a fortnight after Captain Amarinder Singh, who had vowed not to allow it, took over as the chief minister of Punjab. On February 17, 2016, Amarinder Singh had famously barged into the Khalsa College campus and declared that after becoming the CM, he would undo any attempts to set up Khalsa University on the 330 acres land of Khalsa College. However, though Amarinder has now become the CM, the Khalsa College management seems unruffled. Khalsa College Governing Council (KCGC) honorary secretary and Khalsa University Pro-Chancellor Rajinder Mohan Singh Chhina said, “It will have no impact on us. Captain Amarinder Singh is a very wise man. These were all talks before the elections. Khalsa University is constituted by passing a Bill in Punjab Assembly in September 2016. I don’t think Captain Amarinder Singh will have any problem with it.” Asked if the university administration will try to clear air by meeting the new chief minster, Chhina said, “We don’t have to. There is no such issue to discuss.” Chhina had unsuccessfully contested the Amritsar Lok Sabha bypoll on a BJP ticket in February this year. Despite the fact that his daughter-in-law Harsimrat Kaur Badal’s father Satyajit Singh Majithia has been the president of KCGC, former CM Parkash Singh Badal had avoided to establish Khalsa University during his first term of 2007 to 2012 due to huge protests against this move from different quarters of the Sikh community. Many Sikh bodies had claimed that Khalsa College was raised with the donation of community and should not be converted into a private university. KCGC then came up with an amended proposal to disintegrate Khalsa College to create a private university. Badal gave nod to the university only during the last Assembly session (in September 2017) of his 2012-2017 tenure as the chief minister amid protests from Congress and AAP. It did not give much time to university to start all
    6 years ago by @prophe
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    The University of Costa Rica (UCR) climbed 30 spots in the “QS World University Rankings” for the 2016-2017 period. The QS World University Rankings provides an index of the world’s leading higher education institutions, based on six performance indicators: Academic reputation, Employer reputation, Student-to-faculty ratio, Citations per faculty, International faculty ratio and international student ratio; In this way the ranking evaluates performance in four areas: research, teaching, employability and internationalization, each indicator carries a different weighting when calculating overall scores; in this last edition the ranking was expanded to feature 916 universities (25 more than in the previous year) in 81 countries, following assessment of more than 3,800 institutions. The academic institution was ranked in the previous edition in the range 501-510 and this year it appears in the range 471-480, within the best 500 universities in the world. When it comes to the QS World University Rankings by subject, the University of Costa Rica got its best scoring in Agriculture & Foresty earning a position in the range 201-250. Within the Latin America University Rankings, the UCR holds position 18; in these region the best ranked was the Buenos Aires University (Argentina) which is in position 85 of the global ranking, being the only Latin America University to make the top 100. Brazil’s Sao Paulo University (120), Mexico’s UNAM (128), Chile’s UC (147), Brazil’s Unicamp (191) and the University of Chile (200), are all within the best 200 universities in the world. The top spot was earned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for fifth consecutive year, followed by Stanford University which climbed one place, Harvard University is in the third position while it used to lead the ranking from 2004-2009, the University of Cambridge is holding the fourth place and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) completes the top 5. The University of Oxford, University College London, the Swiss Federal
    6 years ago by @prophe
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    Are there no Indian universities with potential for competing with the best in the world? And if the answer is yes, then what’s holding them back from becoming truly world-class?” These and similar questions would be answered at the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) conference on Internationalisation of Higher Education 2017, being hosted at Symbiosis International University (SIU)’s Lavale Campus from April 8 to 10. The three-day conference would be inaugurated by Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar and attended by over 100 vice-chancellors from Indian universities, both public and private, besides senior academicians, policy advisors, educational agencies and university representatives from the US, Europe, Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Japan. The organisers said that through this conference they planned to present a policy paper to Javadekar on the roadmap to making Indian universities world-class. Amongst the prominent speakers at the conference include Prof Ellen Hazelkorn, policy advisor to Higher Education Authority (Ireland); Prof Philip Altbach, director, Center for International Higher Education (USA); Prof Bertil Andersson, president, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore); Prof Jamil Salmi, global tertiary education expert; besides UGC chairman Ved Prakash, D S Chauhan, president, AIU, D P Singh, director, NAAC. “Recently, the Indian government had announced that they will be selecting 10 public and 10 private universities to develop them into world-class universities and it is a very good decision. But what are the parameters that make a university world-class? Is research the core parameter, or does developing infrastructure suffice to make it amongst the best in the world? While the Indian government will work towards making these 20 universities world-class but how do others work towards making their varsities also amongst the best in the world. For this, we need to have dialogue and collaborations with world-class universities abroad. Hence we have organised this conferen
    6 years ago by @prophe
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    Autocrats dislike independent, internationally-oriented, autonomous universities free of corruption and hence, they attack them. In order to add the appearance of legitimacy to purely political actions, autocratic regimes use the law to advance their goals. That is why their favorite strategy is to work through the legislature and courts. This seems to be the case with the European University at St. Petersburg and the Central European University in Budapest, both currently being harassed by the ruling political regimes. The European University at St. Petersburg is a private university, founded in 1994 by the Committee for Real Estate Management of St. Petersburg City Government, St. Petersburg Institute for Economics and Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg branch of Sociology Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and St. Petersburg Association of Scholars with support from the MacArthur, Ford and Soros Foundations. Organizations funded by George Soros, through the Open Society Foundation, were expelled from Russia in 2015. This is no surprise, since authoritarian regimes fear democratic initiatives and do not share the idea of civil society that is promoted by George Soros. Russia’s Federal Agency for Supervision in Education and Science says that the university’s political science and sociology departments do not have a sufficient number of full-time faculty who do applied research, and that faculty on fixed-term employment contracts are not properly certified. Quite a few other minor violations, including missing a fitness center, are cited as well. While the university administration works on addressing these issues, the state agency continues its offensive. The European University at St. Petersburg has lost its state license and accreditation and may well lose its historic building, the Small Marble Palace. It turns out that the university installed new plastic windows in parts of the old building, and it goes against the city’s historical preservation ordinance. Russian Pr
    6 years ago by @prophe
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    The future of thousands of medical students may hang in the balance, as the Medical Council of India (MCI) has started taking action against private medical colleges. These colleges are believed to have illegally admitted students in Under Graduate Courses by ignoring the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET). Students must pass this test before they can gain admission to any medical college. Keeping a tab on the admission process to ensure that all admissions were being done through clearing NEET, the MCI has recently issued a discharge notice of at least 36 students admitted in Ponnaiyah Ramajayam Institute of Medical Sciences, Manamai-Nellur, Tamil Nadu. The students did not appear for the NEET exam but still were given admission in the college. “Our monitoring committee is keeping a strict vigil on admissions in all the medical colleges. We haven’t yet found out the exact numbers of students who were admitted without appearing in NEET. But we are aware that there are several medical colleges who have provided back door admissions by ignoring the NEET exam. Such admissions will not be considered,” said Dr Jayshree Mehta, President, MCI. Similarly, the Dental Council of India (DCI) is also scrutinizing admissions in dental colleges. “It has come to our notice that in states such as Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh some dental colleges have taken students without NEET. We are under a process of scrutinizing the list of admissions. We will take appropriate action against the erring colleges once we find out the exact number of students admitted illegally,” said Dr A K Chandna, member, DCI. Through NEET, the government is aiming to bring in more transparency in the admission process and curb the practice of capitation fee charged by private colleges. Also, common counselling for admission to all Undergraduate and Postgraduate Courses (Diploma/MD/ MS/DM/M.Ch.) in all medical educational institutions on the basis of merit list of the NEET has been introduced by the Union Health Ministry to curb malpractices
    6 years ago by @prophe
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    Finishing an engineering project does not require knowledge but money. At least that’s the case in a few colleges in the city. Most of the students have been found resorting to buying readymade projects from small firms who are into this business full-time. These firms also help in getting research papers published for students. Some of these firms have even taken the route of e-commerce and have displayed the projects on their website in detail according to the technology it is based on, its price along with pictures, abstracts and research papers. Engineering students are expected to put the concepts that they learn into practice twice in their four-year long course –once in the third year as a mini project for 50 marks and again in their final year for 200 marks. However, majority of the students buy readymade projects which can cost anywhere between Rs 2,500 to Rs 50,000 depending on the technology, components used and complexity of the project. When contacted, JNTU-Hyderabad registrar, Dr N Yadaiah, said, “The university cannot ensure that at each and every affiliated college, students are genuinely doing the projects. The colleges also share this responsibility and should take required measures for it.” Private colleges in cahoots with project vendors While the university says that the onus is on private colleges, unfortunately these colleges are also involved with students in making a mockery of engineering education for earning a quick buck. A senior professor of a well-known engineering college said, “In many private engineering colleges, the teachers and Heads of Department provide business to firms selling engineering projects. They take commission on the cost that the students pay to such firms for buying projects. Not just this, but some college managements too are involved in this business by setting tie-ups with firms selling engineering projects. When the time comes for external evaluation, even invigilators are handled by the college management. It does not usually happen that some student i
    6 years ago by @prophe
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    As the Trump administration tries to roll back education regulations, one city is attempting to stay a move ahead by fortifying its own protections for some college students. The Milwaukee Common Council unanimously passed legislation last week to prohibit financial assistance to for-profit institutions unless they meet federal financial aid regulations. The legislation, which updates a previous rule, means the city won’t provide monetary aid to for-profits or to related development projects if the involved colleges fail to meet federal financial aid regulations that were in force on Jan. 1, 2017, before Trump's inauguration. “Considering the leadership change at the federal level and who is now over the Education Department and her relationship with private for-profit colleges, it was thought that the federal guidelines could change, and our ordinance was predicated on what the federal guidelines were at that time,” said Alderwoman Milele Coggs, who sponsored the legislation. “So if those guidelines change, it doesn’t affect the standard we set as a city for education.” Coggs said Milwaukee has a right to be concerned about the types of education institutions that want to do business there. The original ordinance was put into effect following the 2009 arrival of Everest College, which received development money from the city. “We had major reservations about them coming in here, and we put them through the paces and [made them] jump through a series of hoops to demonstrate they could be successful in serving students,” said David Dies, executive secretary of the Wisconsin Educational Approval Board, the state’s for-profit oversight agency. Coggs said she and other residents in the city also had reservations about Everest. But the institution eventually opened its doors with the help of $11 million in bonds from the city’s redevelopment authority, she said. It wasn’t too long after Everest opened that the EAB noticed problems. “They only operated here about 18 months, and early on we started sensing issues based
    6 years ago by @prophe
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