The Kept-Up Academic Librarian

How Harvard Faltered Financially

Stocks were tumbling last fall as the new school year began, but at Harvard University it was as if the boom had never ended. Behind the scenes, though, a different story was unfolding. In a glassed-walled conference room overlooking downtown Boston, traders at Harvard Management Co., the subsidiary that invests the school's money, were fielding questions from their new boss, Jane Mendillo, about exotic financial instruments that were suddenly backfiring. It would have been nice to have cash on hand to meet margin calls, but Harvard had next to none.  Read more at:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0316/080_harvard_finance_meltdown.html

Admissions Adding Glitz To The Acceptance Package

College admissions officers are jazzing up their acceptance notifications—sending out fancy certificates, T-shirts, tubes of confetti, or Internet links to videos of fireworks—in an effort to inspire loyalty and lock in commitments from today's fickle and worried high school seniors. While many students enjoy the new twists on what used to be just fat and thin envelopes, others are criticizing some of the changes to admissions notifications. Some students are less wowed by glitz than by old-fashioned personal letters. Read more at:

http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2009/02/25/college-acceptance-letters-are-glitzier-but-rejections-are-harsher.html

Welcome Back Partying Students

Spring break is back. After years of shunning the traditional college crowd in favor of a more affluent, tamer clientele, hotels and resort destinations are once again rolling out the welcome mat for party-hearty students. The change of heart is a significant reversal for many of these beach destinations, which have been trying to shed their wild-child past as spring break meccas by courting families and hipsters with a new message and upscale developments. But the tough economy is forcing tourism-dependent areas to come up with new ways to attract visitors. And as the luxury market slumps, corporations cancel conventions and families tighten wallets, student travel is showing a certain resilience. Read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/travel/01pracspring.html?_r=1&ref=travel

IHEs Are Told To Expect Declining Donations For Two Years

Gifts to colleges and universities broke all records in 2008, but began to decline as the recession deepened, and will most likely continue to do so for the next two years, according to a survey by the Council for Aid to Education. Every institution she spoke to, Ms. Kaplan said, reported that donors who had made multiyear pledges had asked to renegotiate those gifts, to allow more time to complete them. And last year’s increase mostly reflected the rich getting richer. The 20 universities at the top of the list reported big gains, but gifts to the remaining 1,032 institutions responding to the survey were down 4.2 percent. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/education/25college.html?_r=1

Humanities Feeling Pressure To Justify Their Existence

In this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/books/25human.html?_r=1

A Day With No Mail Or Courseware

You’ve got mail. But today, Southern Methodist University students and professors did not. The seemingly minor server problem brought the campus face-to-face with how much of a university’s operation depends on technology these days. The campus e-mail servers crashed late Sunday night, along with other servers that supported online classroom tools that contained class readings and other documents. Read more at:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/022409dnmetsmuemail.45cb3bde.html

The Three-Year Degree May Catch On

Not much else seems to be helping keep down college costs, so maybe this will: a three-year college degree. It's an idea that's never really caught on, at least in the United States, but it may be gaining traction with the economy in deep recession. It's probably not a solution to the national problem of surging college costs. Faculty may object and worry about standards. And at big public universities, it's already hard enough to get into all the classes you need. Sometimes students are lucky to get through in five years. Still, the economic troubles seem to have generated more buzz around the idea. Read more at: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02/24/some_colleges_offering_degrees_in_3_years_1235504703/?rss_id=Boston.com+--+Education+news

Poor Economy Favors Those Who Can Pay Their Way

For students applying to college, it's a very good year to have strong grades and deep pockets. Especially the latter. As colleges and universities provide more financial aid to families hit by the recession, they are also more likely to give wealthier students preference in admissions and scholarships to help offset that extra cost. That puts wealthier students at an advantage at smaller private institutions that rely heavily on tuition income. Not only are they more likely to be accepted, they also stand to receive more scholarships to sweeten the offer. Read more at:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02/24/economy_lifting_college_prospects_of_the_well_heeled/?rss_id=Boston.com+--+Education+news

IHEs Are Chomping At The Bit For NSF Stimulus Dollars

From proposed animal research laboratories at the University of Arizona, the University of Nebraska and the University of Pennsylvania to empty floors in laboratory buildings at the University of California, Irvine, Ohio State University and Southern Illinois University, colleges across the country have hundreds of shovel- and beaker-ready projects in the sciences that could collectively cost tens of billions and begin within weeks. The law gives the National Science Foundation $2 billion in stimulus financing for research grants, and the foundation also has until September 2010 to spend the money. Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/science/24stim.html?ref=science

The Death Of The Campus Digital Music Service

College campuses were once a prime spawning ground for new digital music services. Those days appear to be over. Closing the book on the role of campuses as digital music laboratories is the recent demise of Ruckus—an ad-supported music download service that was available for free to students at 200 universities. Ruckus joins a list of several other once-promising services, including Napster and Cdigix, that suffered an early death after attempting to offer college students a low-cost, legal alternative to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks.Read more at:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2341517,00.asp