Higher education

Hu explores on the schism between Bushworld and Perrywold and the increasingly curious question of what Debra Medina wants; Stiles goes all Shark Week on gubernatorial campaign finance, with searchable databases, bubble maps and word clouds; M. Smith on what happens if there's a GOP runoff; Rapoport on the sniping between Perry and KBH on transparency; Hamilton on KBH's abortion issue odyssey; Ramshaw exposes the disgracefully low percentage of state school employees who abuse or kill profoundly disabled Texans and are then prosecuted for their acts; Thevenot on higher ed's tuition time bomb; Aguilar on the Latino pay gap; Ramsey on Farouk Shami's "gift" to Hank Gilbert; Ramsey and Philpott on the the Supreme's Court's corporate campaign cash fallout; and E. Smith's interviews with House Speaker Joe Straus with retiring Republican state representative — and future Texas State chancellor? — Brian McCall. The best of our best from January 18 to 22, 2010.

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Your afternoon reading:

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A new study gives a window into the wide variety of ways college presidents get paid. Think houses, cars, deferred comp — and private monies supplementing public funds.

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Your afternoon reading.

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Low-income and minority students have every right to expect the same level of educational excellence experienced by their peers in more affluent settings. We literally cannot succeed without setting high expectations for them and fully developing their talents.

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In Texas, they earn 35 percent less than their Anglo counterparts — a disparity that's bigger here than elsewhere. Is it because of education, age, discrimination, or some combination of the above?

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It costs an average of 63 percent more to attend a four-year state school today than it did in 2003 — and that's still not enough to keep pace with bulging university budgets. Some policy makers see the higher education business model on the cusp of collapse.

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As El Paso begins to wear the new off its hard-fought medical school, another Texas border community is starting on the long road to establishing its own. University of Texas System officials are evaluating how long it will take and how much it could cost to train the next generation of doctors in the Rio Grande Valley.

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To restore jobs lost during the recession and to prepare for those ready to enter the job market, Texas must create more than two million jobs in the next decade. A key factor in achieving this target is having educated employees available to fill positions as they become available.

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That's my prediction; what's yours? Correctly guess the outcome of tonight's game and you could win a Texas Tribune hat — perfect for beating Ben Philpott about the head and face.

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The president of UT-Austin goes all 21st-century-transparent on us.

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Who said it was easy being a university chancellor?

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Texas Tech University got sued by one of its employees this week: Head football coach Mike Leach says the school is improperly barring him from coaching the team in the Alamo Bowl on the basis of a complaint it hasn't substantiated.

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Border communities struggle to keep younger, educated residents when larger cities dangle economic and quality-of-life opportunities. They're afflicted with the reputation of being black holes of talent — where escape is necessary in order to prosper.

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In 2008, the file at DPS headquarters in Austin still said Scotty Caven III caused the August 2004 car crash that killed him and two others. Officials there had declined to reopen and investigate the case. But his father, UT System regent Scott Caven Jr., wouldn’t take no for an answer.

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After his son and two others died in a horrific car wreck in 2004, former UT Regent Scott Caven Jr. set out to prove that his namesake, Scotty, wasn't to blame. He eventually persuaded the Texas Department of Public Safety to change its accident report — a rare feat: In the last five years, DPS has changed the final reports in fewer than 1 percent of fatal crash investigations.

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Researcher finds social networking allows genuine, not idealized, personalities to shine through

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A shortage of a particular sort of medical care could have a far-reaching effect on the state’s economy — in a very unexpected way.

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Should Texas medical schools be responsible for relieving the state’s primary care shortage? Advocates for family physicians think so. They want state lawmakers to reward medical schools that groom young doctors for family medicine — and penalize those that don’t.

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The number of Mexican-born professionals living in the United States has more than doubled since 1995. They're not the undocumented workers you see in evening-news mug shots or aerial photographs of a littered and barren desert. They're college graduates — some with multiple degrees — who join their blue-collar counterparts in their journeys north.

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