With two-thirds now over, it’s time to check in on the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s 10-years old, 15-year initiative to close the gaps between Texas and other states in student achievement in higher education.
Higher Education
Coverage of universities, colleges, student issues, and education policy shaping Texas’ campuses, from The Texas Tribune.
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Higher Education
TribBlog: The 51st State
How can Texas rank last in the nation — 51st — in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas, and simultaneously rank 22nd in the percentage attending at least some college?
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Demographics
TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
Ramshaw’s question about an insurance company denying coverage for an infant vaccine prompts a reversal; Stiles’ new app lets you poke through mid-year campaign reports on donations and spending; Ramsey finds foreshadowing of the state’s big fall races in the campaign finance reports; Aguilar interviews Henry Cisneros about current politics; Dawson finds Texas environmentalists getting advice from an unexpected place; Galbraith on “demand response” that might cut the need for power plants and on the next wave of electric cars; Aguilar on increasing trade through Texas ports of entry; M. Smith on affirmative action battles in higher education; Titus on Mexican college students’ drift from border universities to UT-Austin and Texas A&M; and Hamilton on controversy over private, for-profit colleges: The best of our best for the week of July 19 to 23, 2010.
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Higher Education
TribBlog: Storming the Tower
A group of environmental advocates is planning a protest on the UT campus tomorrow afternoon to express their displeasure with new tower-shaped plastic bottles.
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Higher Education
Hopwood 2.0
A court case involving two University of Texas applicants who believe they were denied admission because they’re white threatens to reinvigorate an ideological skirmish that peaked in the late 1990s. The first lawsuit of its kind brought against a university since a pair of landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 2003, Fisher v. Texas has observers everywhere wondering if the state’s troubled history with race-based admissions makes it the ideal incubator for the next round of affirmative action battles.
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Higher Education
The “Career” Path
Private, for-profit colleges, which offer professional certificates at a steep cost, have come under fire for peddling big student loans to vulnerable Texans in exchange for credentials of dubious value.
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Demographics
TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
Grissom’s three-part series (here, here and here) on prosperity and peril along the U.S.-Mexico border, Hu on the Division of Workers’ Compensation audit report, Stiles puts more than 3,000 personal disclosure forms filed by politicians, candidates and state officials online, M. Smith on attempts to curb the practice of barratry (better known as ambulance chasing), Ramsey interviews the chair of the Texas Libertarian Party, Hamilton on attempts to improve the success rates of community colleges, Galbraith on whether electric deregulation has helped or hurt Texans, Aguilar talks to a chronicler of the bloody narco-wars and Ramshaw on doctors who most often prescribe antipsychotic drugs to the state’s neediest patients: The best of our best from July 12 to 16, 2010.
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Higher Education
TribBlog: Goodbye, Simkins
The University of Texas System Board of Regents voted unanimously this morning to rename an all-male dorm Creekside Residence Hall after weeks of debate about the man the building was originally named for: William Stewart Simkins, a dead UT law professor and Ku Klux Klan organizer.
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Higher Education
Naming Rights
The University of Texas once admired Ku Klux Klan organizer and law professor William Stewart Simkins. Today the UT System’s regents meet to consider whether the tree-shaded all-male residence on San Jacinto Boulevard that bears his name still should.
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Health care
TribBlog: Not That Kind of Shot
What do college students and preschoolers have in common?