A transgender high school student has had her application to a prestigious all-women’s college denied because she is tagged as legally male on government documents, prompting a vocal online and social media campaign on her behalf, Reuters reports. Calliope Wong, 17, a Connecticut senior who was born a male but has identified as female since adolescence, says Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, twice opted not to read her application and returned it in the mail. Almost all of Wong’s paperwork to Smith, including transcripts and references, identifies her as female. But the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form from the U.S. Department of Education marks her as male, she told Reuters on Thursday. Smith’s admissions office told her the FAFSA designation makes her ineligible, based on Smith’s policy that applications and supporting papers consistently reflect that the student is a woman…
…Read MorePodcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Amazon plans to buy social network for book fans
Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it plans to acquire the book recommendation website, Goodreads, Reuters reports. In buying Goodreads, Amazon gets a community of bibliophiles primed to buy and recommend books – one of its key areas of business.
“Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world,” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon vice president, Kindle Content, said in a release.
Based in San Francisco, Goodreads is a social network site that lets bookworms catalog and review books. Co-founded by Otis Chandler, whose family once published the Los Angeles Times, Goodreads has more than 16 million members, who have generated more than 23 million reviews……Read More
North Carolina University halts trial against student critic
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said on Tuesday it had asked its student-run honor court to halt proceedings against a student who claims she is facing retaliation for criticizing how the school handles sexual assault cases, Reuters reports. Student Landen Gambill is accused of violating the university’s honor code and could be expelled if found guilty of intimidating the male student she says raped her. On Monday, her attorney asked university officials to dismiss the honor court’s “reckless prosecution.” He said Gambill had filed a retaliation complaint against the state’s flagship public university with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
“The retaliatory charges against my client are inappropriate, unconstitutional and utterly without merit,” attorney Henry Clay Turner said in a letter to university Chancellor Holden Thorp.
The federal education department is looking into allegations lodged in January by five women, including Gambill, who said reports of sexual harassment and assault have not been properly investigated by the university……Read More
Student loan write-offs hit $3 billion in first two months of year
Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013, up more than 36 percent from the year-ago period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped in a slow U.S. economic recovery, an Equifax study showed, Reuters reports. The credit reporting agency also said Monday that student lending has grown from last year because more people are going back to school and the cost of higher education has risen.
“Continued weakness in labor markets is limiting work options once people graduate or quit their programs, leading to a steady rise in delinquencies and loan write-offs,” Equifax Chief Economist Amy Crews Cutts said in a statement.
Equifax analyzes data from more than 500 million consumers to track financial trends……Read More
Top China college in focus with ties to army’s cyber-spying unit
Faculty members at a top Chinese university have collaborated for years on technical research papers with a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit accused of being at the heart of China’s alleged cyber-war against Western commercial targets, Reuters reports. Several papers on computer network security and intrusion detection, easily accessed on the Internet, were co-authored by researchers at PLA Unit 61398, allegedly an operational unit actively engaged in cyber-espionage, and faculty at Shanghai Jiaotong University, a centre of academic excellence with ties to some of the world’s top universities and attended by the country’s political and business elite. The apparent working relationship between the PLA unit and Shanghai Jiaotong is in contrast to common practice in most developed nations, where university professors in recent decades have been reluctant to cooperate with operational intelligence gathering units…
…Read MoreStates’ aid to public colleges has fallen 28 percent since 2008
State governments, which have been battling slow economic growth, cut aid to public colleges for five years and now spend 28 percent less per student than they did in 2008, according to a study published on Tuesday, Reuters reports. The reductions in every state except Wyoming and North Dakota average $2,353 for the 75 percent of undergraduates who attend public colleges and show few signs of easing soon, according to the study’s lead writer, Phil Oliff of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“The rate of decline has moderated somewhat, but we don’t see clear signs that states are reinvesting in their higher education systems,” Oliff said in a conference call with reporters. “They are coming out of an enormous hole.”
Revenues for state governments have risen for nearly three years, but are not matching the bounceback after previous recessions, with the rate of increase slowing in the 2012 third quarter, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government……Read More
Missouri college no longer accepting students who take out loans
A private, four-year Missouri college is so concerned about mounting debt of college graduates in the United States that it no longer will take students who insist on taking out loans, Reuters reports. The policy on loans set by College of the Ozarks, an evangelical Christian school of 1,400 students located in a rural area near Branson, Missouri, may be a national first, according to Roland King, vice president for public affairs at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. College of the Ozarks is unusual, however. All students work on campus, and they do not pay tuition, said Jerry Davis, president of the southwest Missouri four-year school. Ninety percent of each entering class at the college must demonstrate financial need, according to the school’s website, which says that tuition is covered by credits for campus work, along with any federal and state aid and a college scholarship, if necessary…
…Read MoreStates’ aid to public colleges has fallen 28 percent since 2008
State governments, which have been battling slow economic growth, cut aid to public colleges for five years and now spend 28 percent less per student than they did in 2008, according to a study published on Tuesday, Reuters reports. The reductions in every state except Wyoming and North Dakota average $2,353 for the 75 percent of undergraduates who attend public colleges and show few signs of easing soon, according to the study’s lead writer, Phil Oliff of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“The rate of decline has moderated somewhat, but we don’t see clear signs that states are reinvesting in their higher education systems,” Oliff said in a conference call with reporters. “They are coming out of an enormous hole.”
Revenues for state governments have risen for nearly three years, but are not matching the bounceback after previous recessions, with the rate of increase slowing in the 2012 third quarter, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government……Read More
Apple’s iPad to fall behind Android as tablet war grows
Shipments of tablets running Google Inc’s Android will overtake the iPad this year for the first time, research house IDC predicted on Tuesday, as Apple Inc cedes more mobile market share to hard-charging rivals around the globe, Reuters reports. A growing variety of smaller and cheaper Android tablets from Google to Amazon.com Inc will catch on this year with more consumers and chip away at Apple’s dominance since the first iPad launched in 2010, International Data Corp said. iPad and iPhone shipments are expected to keep growing at enviable rates, but arch-rival Samsung Electronics and others have hurt Apple with a combination of savvy marketing, greater variety and rapid technology adoption. On Thursday, Samsung takes the wraps off the fourth generation of its flagship Galaxy, the smartphone that helped the South Korean giant knock the iPhone off its top ranking for part of last year…
…Read MoreUniversity research discovers hard truth of budget crisis
Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Carol Greider used to have eight to 10 young researchers working in her university laboratory, but with U.S. government funds for scientific research shrinking in recent years, she’s gone down to four, Reuters reports. Sequestration, Washington’s name for $85 billion in federal spending cuts this year, promises to cut even deeper into Greider’s team at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She’s decided she cannot afford to hire “a promising young researcher” she wanted to add to her staff for the next academic year.
“I’m not sure in the current climate we have for research funding that I would have received funding to be able to do the work that led to the Nobel Prize,” Greider said at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) event last month, adding that her early work on enzymes and cell biology was well outside the mainstream. The NIH has been funding her research for the past 23 years. Federally funded, university research has long been a major engine of scientific advancement, spurring innovations from cancer treatments to the seeds of technology companies like Google…