California State University students could have better luck getting into classes next fall.

Chancellor Charles Reed said Friday that CSU is giving campuses an extra $50.9 million for the fall 2010 term. The money will add as many as 8,100 classes, retain instructors and provide student services.

The money comes from $76.5 million in federal stimulus money received by the 23-campus system, where deep budget cuts have made it increasingly difficult for students to get classes.

In October, CSU released $25.6 million of that money to add about 4,000 classes this spring.

Reed says CSU decided to release the remaining $50.9 million because Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget for 2010-2011 restores some of the funding cut last year.

California State University announced today that it will add 8,100 more classes to the fall schedule at its 23 campuses across the state.

The announcement comes as students have been complaining that budget cuts have made it hard for them to get courses they need to graduate on time.

CSU is using $50.9 million in one-time money from federal stimulus funds to pay for retaining lecturers and adding courses, according to a university news release.

“Hopefully, this will help to alleviate some of the shortages in classes, and students will be able to make faster progress toward their degree,” Chancellor Charles B. Reed said in a statement.

California State University officials Friday said they would release more money to the system’s 23 campuses — a move that eases Fresno State’s plans for budget cuts next year.

The CSU will distribute $50.9 million in one-time federal money for classes and student programs. Campuses are expected to add up to 8,100 course sections and retain more lecturers for the fall term.

The windfall amounts to $2.9 million for Fresno State and reduces its potential deficit from $8.5 million to $5.6 million next year. The current budget is about $209 million.

That was one bright spot at a budget summit Friday, where Fresno State President John Welty told about 100 faculty, staff, students and community members that the school must continue downsizing because of eroding state support.

Even a $5.6 million cut could force the campus to eliminate up to 40 lecturers, cut 50 management and staff positions, and make other painful cost-cutting moves, according to a preliminary budget scenario.

The campus already plans to shrink fall 2010 enrollment to about 19,500 — roughly the number of students in fall 2000.

Welty convened his second annual budget summit to collect ideas about saving and generating money. Suggestions ranged from renting vacant offices and cutting down on paper to expanding online class offerings and suspending low-enrollment programs.

Lisa Weston, president of the Fresno State chapter of the faculty association, was one of the participants. While some useful ideas and concepts were offered, she said, “I wouldn’t say that a clear plan was coming out of it.”

Fresno State is steeling for more cuts despite the governor’s proposal to restore $305 million to the CSU budget next year and also provide $60.6 million for enrollment growth.

While that seems promising, some cash depends on federal funding. The state also faces a $20 billion shortfall.

State and CSU budgets won’t be settled for months. Welty said planning in such an unstable environment is like working “in the middle of a hurricane.”

But, he added, “it is important that we start our planning now.” A tentative budget plan could be announced in mid-March.

This year, a $44.6 million funding gap prompted Fresno State to cut hundreds of class sections, eliminate some work for lecturers, chop more than 100 management and staff jobs and curb other spending.

Officials at San Jose State University say federal stimulus money will allow the university to offer additional classes and break up some larger classes into smaller ones.

The university says it will be receiving $3.1 million in one-time stimulus funds.

CSU Chancellor Charles Reed says the extra money should help students make faster progress in attaining degrees at San Jose State. The federal money will go to adding classes required for graduation, but that are not currently accepting new students because of overcrowding.

The federal funding comes after reductions in state funding forced the university to cut enrollment by 3,000 spots for the coming fall semester.

It should be a little easier for Cal State San Bernardino students to get the classes they need this fall.

On Friday, California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed announced that $50.9 million in federal stimulus money would be released to the system’s campuses.

Reed said the money, the remainder of a $76.5 million allocation last fall, had been kept in reserve until university officials saw Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget proposal for 2010-11.

Cal State San Bernardino spokesman Joe Gutierrez said the campus expects to receive about $2 million.

“It looks like we’re going to be using it to restore classes or sections that we had planned to cut,” Gutierrez said. “We had planned to cut 400 sections (in the fall), and it looks like we’ll be able to restore virtually all of them.”

Part of the money will be used to reach the goals of the Cal State system’s new graduation initiative, announced last month. The initiative focuses on increasing graduation rates by 8 percent in the next six years and helping under-represented students complete college. How much of the $2 million will be dedicated to that is uncertain, Gutierrez said.

He said it is too early to know if the increased funds would affect enrollment.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done,” he said, in terms of apportioning the money. “But it will be helping students get the classes they need.”

San Jose State University will receive an extra $3.1 million in one-time funds to provide new classes, as well as improved academic counseling, for the fall term.

The funding will not be used to boost enrollment, which was cut by 3,000 spots this fall because of shortfalls in state funding.

The new money — which comes from the federal stimulus package — means that San Jose State can divide large classes into smaller sections, and add so-called “bottleneck courses” that are essential to graduate, but are overcrowded and cannot accept new students.

“Hopefully, this will help to alleviate some of the shortages in classes, and students will be able to make faster progress toward their degree,” said CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, who allocated the funds.

The San Jose State funds are part of the California State University system’s $50.9 million spending package designed to boost advising and add up to 8,100 new courses across the 23 CSU campuses. In October, CSU spent about $25 million to add 4,000 new courses.

Totaling $76.5 million, the money comes from the federal government — one-time stimulus funding that made it possible for the university system to meet its payroll. Because of that federal support, CSU could direct money from state support and student tuition — previously set aside for payroll — to new course work.

The funding can be used for several different purposes, said San Jose State spokeswoman Pat Harris.

“SJSU is still trying to determine exactly how our share of the funding will be used. This will require discussion led by the president, and planning by the provost,” she said.

“For now, we do know that we will of course comply with the chancellor’s basic request — that funding go to direct support for course sections in fall 2010. How many and what kind have yet to be determined,” she said. “Another possible use of the funding is support of SJSU implementation of the Graduation Initiative, which is an effort to increase graduation rates,” she said. “At SJSU, this will mean intensifying advising.”

With the precision of a laser beam, California’s Legislative Analyst Office focused attention and criticism on the state’s three levels of public higher education.

Specific goals and performance standards, improved coordination, independent oversight and predictable funding are needed to bring programs provided by the University of California, the California State University and the state’s community colleges in line with the needs of California and its students, according to state analysts.

Strongly worded criticism and recommendations were contained in a LAO report released in late January that placed special urgency on reforming California’s higher education system.

The state’s multi-billion dollar budget deficits — and predictions that California soon will have a shortage of educated workers — demand that the governor and Legislature reform the system, the report warned.

As California approaches the 50th anniversary of the adoption of its much touted Master Plan for Higher Education, state analysts concluded the plan’s effectiveness and direction has eroded. They critically compared California’s higher education system, which once was a model for the rest of the nation, to systems in other states.

The LAO’s report is intended to be used by the Legislature and governor to craft and implement reforms. This will be a tedious, time-consuming process with possibly uncertain results. The 28-member Central Valley Higher Education Consortium, which includes public and private colleges and universities in Bakersfield and Kern County, isn’t waiting for the Legislature and governor to act. Central Valley presidents and chancellors will be meeting on Feb. 9 at Cal State Stanislaus to discuss the report and its findings with state analysts.

Under the direction of board president Benjamin Duran, president of Merced College, consortium members will begin searching for ways to better coordinate programs, improve transfer rates and help students succeed in obtaining higher education.

This continues a decade of cooperation that began with a conversation in 2000 between then-UC Merced Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey and Fresno State President John D. Welty that led to the consortium’s creation.

The goal in establishing the consortium, which spreads from San Joaquin and Tuolumne counties in the north to Kern County in the south, was to foster cooperation, rather than competition. Central Valley colleges and universities continue to offer programs that respond to workforce demands, advocate for keeping fees manageable and more financial aid to be available, and provide access to higher education for all students.

Many of the concerns detailed in the LAO’s report, “The Master Plan at 50: Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts — Coordinating Higher Education in California,” have been recognized by consortium members.

At their Feb. 9 meeting, Central Valley presidents and chancellors intend to vigorously discuss the concerns and recommendations of state analysts, and search for additional ways to expand their cooperative efforts.

Cheri Cruz is the executive director of the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium.

After a yearlong review, a panel formed to initiate reform within Humboldt State University is recommending an overhaul of how the college is governed.

The report includes proposals to restructure governing bodies, the creation of some initiatives and groups, and the elimination the General Faculty Association — with the changes meant for implementation by next year.

”It’s very ambitious. We’ll see if they work out, but I think it’s doable,” Provost Bob Snyder said. Snyder was a member of the 13-member Cabinet for Institutional Change that issued the report earlier this week as a response to an accreditation review.

During the review, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, or WASC, said in order for HSU to reach its goals, it must unite around a common vision. Another report issued by a consultant hired by HSU had similar critiques, painting a picture of an HSU that was not coming together as a community to make or implement decisions.

WASC finished its on-campus visit Friday.

The cabinet focused on five areas: vision, campus governance, student success, positive community relations and evidence-based decision making.

The changes that may seem the most dramatic are those in campus government. In addition to the elimination of the General Faculty Association, the report also recommends restructuring the university’s committee system and turning the Academic Senate into a university-wide senate. The new senate would have voting representatives from student, faculty, staff and administrative groups — not just the majority of faculty and some students.
According to the report, the cabinet recommends the elimination of the General Faculty Association because it seems to be an unnecessary governing body with an unclear function. No other California State University campus has both an academic senate and a faculty association, the report said.

General Faculty Association President John Powell said he is open to discussing the association’s elimination, but he argues that the president position should be preserved. The president also serves in the Academic Senate.

”I am not opposed to doing this, though I will push hard for preserving one function of the General Faculty president, namely having one member of the Senate who is not the chair elected by all the faculty and with a full role to play in debates,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Times-Standard.

Powell said he is not entirely confident a university-wide senate will empower the body unless the university’s president decides to put more weight on those decisions. President Rollin Richmond hasn’t listened to HSU faculty opinion for a long time, making for a sore point in campus relations, Powell said.

Snyder said the cabinet based the new senate model on the university senate at San Diego State University and also looked at the governing relationships at California State University, Long Beach, a college that is known to have collegial relationships and shared governance.

Dr. Saeed Mortazavi, the chair of Academic Senate, said the senate is scheduled to discuss the report Tuesday. He said he did not want to comment on the report until the senate conducted its review.

While some changes are already in action, Snyder said he is hopeful that the university will get behind the cabinet’s report and enable other changes to happen quickly. In addition to Tuesday’s Academic Senate meeting, the provost is planning to hold a meeting with campus leadership, students and faculty to further discuss the changes.

”I’m hopeful that by the end of the month, there will be a general endorsement from all the key governance groups to use this report,” he said.

Associated Students President Brandon Chapin said he thinks a university-wide senate could foster improved communication and collaboration among the different groups, especially if there will be voting representatives from the administration.

”I think it is a good first step toward fostering communication and making sure HSU is what we want it to be,” he said.

Chapin said many of the recommendations, including those involving student success — which includes an initiative to increase graduation rates and the creation of a central social space — are realistic goals.

”I think we can because I think we have the momentum going,” he said.

To see the complete report, go to http://change.humboldt.edu.

A dangerous chemical on the site of a former animal-testing laboratory at UC Davis may not have come from experiments there, but rather from a chemical reaction underground in the years since.

For 30 years starting in 1958, the Laboratory for Energy-Related Health Research was, for some, a place of discovery. For others it was a source of nightmares.

The lab conducted Cold War-inspired research for the U.S. Department of Energy, including exposing beagles to lethal radiation to judge how humans might survive.

Waste from those experiments, including hundreds of radioactive dog carcasses, was dumped on-site in crudely built landfills. The 15-acre location south of Interstate 80 was declared a federal Superfund site in 1994, a category reserved for the nation’s most toxic industrial facilities.

Yet the presence of cancer-causing chromium-6 on the site has been a mystery. There is no evidence the chemical was used at the lab, said Sue Fields, an environmental engineer at the university. And the plume of chromium-6 in groundwater is strangely isolated rather than linked to a particular disposal area.

Now a consultant hired by the university has concluded the carcinogen was probably formed by a chemical interaction underground.

Chromium-3 is a naturally occurring and nontoxic chemical that happens to be common in area soils.

Recent research by Stanford University scientists has shown that chromium-3 can be converted into the toxic chromium-6 variety when it mixes with nutrients such as sewage and with naturally occurring manganese in the soil.

The university once operated a campus sewage treatment plant near the laboratory. And it turns out that sewage sludge from the treatment plant was dumped in landfills on the lab grounds.

The sludge likely migrated into groundwater, feeding a reaction that bred chromium-6.

“I’ve worked a lot of Superfund sites and have really never seen this pattern of contamination before,” said Fields. “We just have this unique area where we have naturally high chromium and manganese in our soil.”

Chromium-6 has been detected at the site at levels 10 times greater than California drinking water standards. But there is no evidence the contaminant has migrated off the site or tainted any active drinking water wells in the area.

University officials plan a pilot project to treat the chromium-6 by converting it back to chromium-3. This will be attempted by injecting calcium polysulfide underground to trigger a reverse reaction.

G. Fred Lee, a consultant in environmental engineering, said success depends on how well the injected chemical can penetrate the soil. Lee works with the Davis South Campus Superfund Oversight Committee, a neighborhood group monitoring the cleanup.

Even if it succeeds, this will not end the cleanup work. The site has a host of other problems, notably a massive plume of hazardous chloroform in groundwater that extends nearly a mile beyond the site.

“They’ll be pumping and treating and using other methods for a very long time,” said Lee. “For a number of years, they didn’t move as fast as they should have. I think they’re making pretty good progress now.”

UC Davis and the Department of Energy have been working to clean up the lab location for at least 15 years. The energy agency on Jan. 29 released a record of decision on final plans to clean its portion of the site. UC Davis expects to submit its own plan to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this fall.

A lingering question is whether the chemical process at work on the UC Davis site could explain other chromium-6 problems in California groundwater – such as near septic tanks or other landfills.

“If we’re right about this, I think that’s something that needs to be studied,” Fields said.

On a mild, overcast day in October 2007, a University of California graduate lobbed a rhetorical bomb at his alma mater: What if the public university went private?

“Suppose,” mused state Treasurer Bill Lockyer in a widely distributed report on California’s fiscal future, that “the state eliminated all its direct general fund support from the UC system, allowing it to set its own budget and raise revenues to replace the state’s share.”

Lockyer’s supposition, which he was quick to point out he wasn’t advocating, sparked an uproar among academic leaders and editorial writers, then slipped back into the Capitol’s sea of partisan squabbling and budget crises.

But the issue has never really stopped making waves. As California’s iconic Master Plan for Higher Education marks its 50th anniversary this year, and the state struggles to balance its books, variations of Lockyer’s “privatization” question are being posed more frequently.

“Should higher education be treated as a public good,” asks Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco, professor of medicine, in a position paper posted on a faculty association Web site last August, “or should it be viewed as a private good to be paid for by its customers (students and their families) and voluntary private donors?” In Sacramento, it’s not so much an ideological issue as a financial one.

The budget share of every other education system that the state (i.e., taxpayers) helps pay for, from kindergarten to community colleges, is in large part assured by Proposition 98. The 1998 voter-approved measure guarantees K-14 schools a set slice of the state’s fiscal pie.

Similarly, the federal government mandates minimum state spending levels on many health and welfare programs. But the 10-campus University of California and the 23-campus California State University system have no such protection. As a result, the state’s support of higher education in the past few decades has ranged from shaky to problematical:

- The portion of the general fund dedicated to higher education has kept pace or grown more than the overall general fund only 12 times in the past 32 years.

- The state’s direct spending on four-year universities has dropped from 11.1 percent of the general fund budget in 1984 to 6.2 percent in 2009. Spending on prisons, meanwhile, climbed from 4.1 percent to 8.7 percent.

- State aid per student at California State University campuses has dropped 57 percent over the past two decades, and 63 percent at the University of California. California government is still more generous than those of other states when it comes to support of public higher education.

The state will spend about $4.6 billion on its four year universities this fiscal year, or about $8,600 per full time student, according to the California Post secondary Education Commission.

While California taxpayers still fund about half of UC’s “core budget” for undergraduate instruction, taxpayers in Michigan, Virginia, Oregon and other states cover less than 15 percent.

But the gap is closing. Of the nation’s 10 most populous states, only Florida’s support of public higher education has dropped more in the past three years than California’s.

“I actually believe that we are in imminent danger of losing our quality and competitive edge,” UC President Mark Yudof told an Assembly committee in December.

Yudof and others have pointed out that as the state’s financial support has waned and the universities’ financial fortunes have ebbed, so have admission rates: In 1977, UC Berkeley accepted two freshmen for every one it turned away. In 2007, it was one accepted for every three rejected. But the laments of higher ed leaders have fallen on only somewhat sympathetic legislative ears.

“We’ve been making cuts across the board, and I don’t like it … none of us do,” said state Sen. Leland Yee, a San Francisco Democrat and a harsh critic of what he says is a “rogue attitude” by the higher ed systems’ administration. “I’m not unsympathetic to their cry for more money … but they can’t ask for more money and then continue to be largely unaccountable for how it’s spent.”

Beyond demands for more accountability, however, is the fact that lawmakers facing a current budget deficit of about $20 billion aren’t likely to find significantly more money to give.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed relatively generous increases for UC and CSU in the fiscal year that starts July 1.

But even if legislators go along, it would still be hundreds of millions of dollars less in state aid than the systems were getting three years ago – and that doesn’t take into account growing enrollment.

It also means trying to find money from sources beyond the state budget, such as:

Tuition

Last November, following a 20 percent cut in state support, UC regents increased undergraduate fees 32 percent, pushing them over $10,000 a year starting next fall.

But even with nose-bleed increases in recent years, the cost of public colleges in California is still one of the world’s great education bargains.

Tuition at UC Berkeley, for example, is still below that charged by flagship public universities in Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania, and far below that charged by similar private institutions.

Moreover, UC’s “Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan” covers fees that aren’t paid for by state and federal grants for students whose family’s annual income is less than $60,000 ($70,000 next year.)

Even so, critics contend that almost-continual hikes – UC tuition has quintupled since 1990 – are squeezing middle class Californians and intimidating low-income students from even applying.

“By cutting state funding, what the Legislature has done is impose a ‘parent tax,’ ” said Bill Bagley, whose perspective is shaped by his experience as a UC grad, a former legislator and a one-time UC regent.

“It’s the easy way out, but meanwhile the costs of getting a public education just keep going up and up for California’s kids.”

The ‘Michigan model’

Faced with a crumbling economy and waning tax revenues, Michigan officials began paring the state’s support of the University of Michigan in the late 1970s.

The university responded by sharply raising tuition, hiring vendors rather than state employees to run cafeterias and other services – and opening up more spots to non-Michigan residents who pay much higher out-of-state fees.

As a result the university, which one of its officials recently referred to as a “privately financed, publicly affiliated” institution, has been able to better weather the vagaries of state government financing.

But its fees are among the highest of any public university, its minority enrollment among the lowest, and a third of its slots go to students from outside the state.

“I can predict, with some certainty, that in the absence of state and federal funding, the University of California would inevitably be compelled to follow the model of Michigan,” warned UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi in a speech last month, “by relying on privatization … access would be determined by assets rather than ability.”

Private sources

Individual gifts and corporate grants have long been a key source of UC funding. But, university officials point out, they almost always come with a requirement that they be spent on specific programs.

In fact, 90 percent of the university’s budget that goes to its “core function” of instruction still comes from tuition and state support.

Private grants also raise concerns that the priorities of individuals and companies will conflict with academic goals.

At Cal Poly San Luis Obsipo, for example, a $500,000 grant from the Harris Ranch cattle company is being held up because company executives are upset about a professor and a guest lecturer who raised the issue of “alternative agriculture” methods with which the executives disagree.

Survival of the fittest

Last June, 22 department chairs at UC San Diego suggested in a letter to university officials that the system “drop the pretense that all campuses are equal, and argue for a selective reallocation of (state) funds to preserve excellence” at the system’s “flagship” campuses: Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD.

Absent shifting more funds to the flagship campuses, they said, one or more of the system’s other campuses should be closed.

“Corporations faced with similar problems eliminate or sell off their least profitable, least promising divisions,” the letter said.

Closing a UC campus or two would be a very tough sell to legislators and the governor, as would giving priority for state funds to certain campuses over others.

But so will finding any way to boost state support for higher education.

“It will cost money. It will require sacrifice. Ideological purity will have to get soiled,” state Treasurer Lockyer wrote in 2007, three weeks after making public his what-if privatization idea.

“We cannot conduct business as usual and wait for the tooth fairy.”

ANOTHER ladies’ night, not by choice.

After midnight on a rainy night last week in Chapel Hill, N.C., a large group of sorority women at the University of North Carolina squeezed into the corner booth of a gritty basement bar. Bathed in a neon glow, they splashed beer from pitchers, traded jokes and belted out lyrics to a Taylor Swift heartache anthem thundering overhead. As a night out, it had everything — except guys.

“This is so typical, like all nights, 10 out of 10,” said Kate Andrew, a senior from Albemarle, N.C. The experience has grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, “because there are no guys.”

North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.

In terms of academic advancement, this is hardly the worst news for women — hoist a mug for female achievement. And certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for men, but because they want to earn a degree.

But surrounded by so many other successful women, they often find it harder than expected to find a date on a Friday night.

“My parents think there is something wrong with me because I don’t have a boyfriend, and I don’t hang out with a lot of guys,” said Ms. Andrew, who had a large circle of male friends in high school.

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”

These sorts of romantic complications are hardly confined to North Carolina, an academically rigorous school where most students spend more time studying than socializing. The gender imbalance is also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as “Girlington.”

The gender gap is not universal. The Ivy League schools are largely equal in gender, and some still tilt male. But at some schools, efforts to balance the numbers have been met with complaints that less-qualified men are being admitted over more-qualified women. In December, the United States Commission on Civil Rights moved to subpoena admissions data from 19 public and private colleges to look at whether they were discriminating against qualified female applicants.

Leaving aside complaints about “affirmative action for boys,” less attention has been focused on the social ramifications.

Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.

“I was talking to a friend at a bar, and this girl just came up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the wrist, spun him around and took him out to the dance floor and started grinding,” said Kelly Lynch, a junior at North Carolina, recalling a recent experience.

Students interviewed here said they believed their mating rituals reflected those of college students anywhere. But many of them — men and women alike — said that the lopsided population tends to skew behavior.

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Faculty members and administrators are well aware of the situation. Stephen M. Farmer, North Carolina’s director of admissions, said that the university has a high female presence in part because it does not have an engineering school, which at most schools tend to be heavily male. Also, he said, more young men than women in the state opt to enter the military or the work force directly out of high school.

And the university feels obligated to admit the most qualified applicants, regardless of gender, Mr. Farmer said. “I wouldn’t want any young woman here to think that there’s somebody we’d rather have here than her,” he said.

The phenomenon has also been an area of academic inquiry, formally and informally. “On college campuses where there are far more women than men, men have all the power to control the intensity of sexual and romantic relationships,” Kathleen A. Bogle, a sociologist at La Salle University in Philadelphia, wrote in an e-mail message. Her book, “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus,” was published in 2008.

“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms,” she wrote. “This results in more casual hook-up encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up losing out.”

W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, which is 57 percent female, put it this way: “When men have the social power, they create a man’s ideal of relationships,” he said. Translation: more partners, more sex. Commitment? A good first step would be his returning a woman’s Facebook message.

Women on gender-imbalanced campuses are paying a social price for success and, to a degree, are being victimized by men precisely because they have outperformed them, Professor Campbell said. In this way, some colleges mirror retirement communities, where women often find that the reward for outliving their husbands is competing with other widows for the attentions of the few surviving bachelors.

“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.

Since that is not her style, Ms. Deray said, she has still not had a long-term relationship in college. As a fashion merchandising major, she said, she can only hope the odds improve when she graduates and moves to New York.

At colleges in big cities, women do have more options. “By my sophomore year, I just had the feeling that there is nobody in this school that I could date,” said Ashley Crisostomo, a senior at Fordham University in New York, which is 55 percent female. She has tended to date older professionals in the city.

But in a classic college town, the social life is usually limited to fraternity parties, local bars or coffeehouses. And college men — not usually known for their debonair ways — can be particularly unmannerly when the numbers are in their favor.

“A lot of guys know that they can go out and put minimal effort into their appearance and not treat girls to drinks or flatter them, and girls will still flirt with them,” said Felicite Fallon, a senior at Florida State University, which is 56 percent female.

Several male students acknowledged that the math skewed pleasantly in their favor. “You don’t have to work that hard,” said Matt Garofalo, a senior at North Carolina. “You meet a girl at a late-night restaurant, she’s texting you the next day.”

But it’s not as if the imbalance leads to ceaseless bed-hopping, said Austin Ivey, who graduated from North Carolina last year but was hanging out in a bar near campus last week. “Guys tend to overshoot themselves and find a really beautiful girlfriend they couldn’t date otherwise, but can, thanks to the ratio,” he said.

Mr. Ivey himself said that his own college relationship lasted three years. “She didn’t think she would meet another guy, I didn’t think I would meet another girl as attractive as her,” he said.

Several male students from female-heavy schools took pains to note that they were not thrilled with the status quo.

“It’s awesome being a guy,” admitted Garret Jones, another North Carolina senior, but he also lamented a culture that fostered hook-ups over relationships. This year, he said, he finally found a serious girlfriend.

Indeed, there are a fair number of Mr. Lonelyhearts on campus. “Even though there’s this huge imbalance between the sexes, it still doesn’t change the fact of guys sitting around, bemoaning their single status,” said Patrick Hooper, a Georgia senior. “It’s the same as high school, but the women are even more enchanting and beautiful.”

And perhaps still elusive. Many women eagerly hit the library on Saturday night. And most would prefer to go out with friends, rather than date a campus brute.

But still. “It causes girls to overanalyze everything — text messages, sideways glances, conversations,” said Margaret Cheatham Williams, a junior at North Carolina. “Girls will sit there with their friends for 15 minutes trying to figure out what punctuation to use in a text message.”

The loneliness can be made all the more bitter by the knowledge that it wasn’t always this way.

“My roommate’s parents met here,” said Mitali Dayal, a freshman at North Carolina. “She has this nice little picture of them in their Carolina sweatshirts. Must be nice.”

The National Merit Scholarship Corporation has used legal pressure to stop an independent college counselor from publishing the state-by-state cutoff scores for its prestigious scholarship program.

Nancy Griesemer, the counselor, says she wasn’t looking for trouble, just pursuing her favorite hobby with the help of a laptop computer. Ms. Griesemer, 59, works from her home, in Oakton, Va. On weekday mornings she sits down at her dining-room table to write. With Tom, her arthritic tabby cat, perched beside her, she types short entries about college admissions trends, which she posts on her blog, College Explorations, as well as Examiner.com, a vast online hub for bloggers.

All told, Ms. Griesemer gets between 150 and 250 page views per day, not bad for someone who doesn’t write about politics or sex. It’s a safe bet that most of her readers are local high-school students and their parents.

Recently, someone else started reading her blog. That someone works for the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, which conducts the annual competition for its high-profile National Merit Scholarships. Based in Evanston, Ill., the privately financed nonprofit organization is a powerful—and controversial—player in the realm of selective admissions. Ms. Griesemer characterizes the group this way: “It appears that they go after people who are critical of them.”

An Unexpected Call

In late January, Ms. Griesemer received a telephone call from Eileen Artemakis, the corporation’s director of public information. Ms. Artemakis asked Ms. Griesemer for the name of her lawyer. The counselor was stunned. “What’s the problem?” she asked.

The answer: the blog entry Ms. Griesemer had published on January 26. In that post, she described how the National Merit Scholarship program works. The corporation uses just one measure, PSAT scores, as the “initial screen” to determine which students are eligible for the scholarships. The corporation uses a specific methodology to ensure an equitable geographic distribution of the awards, which means that the cutoff scores vary from state to state.

In her post, Ms. Griesemer explained that a student in Massachusetts needs a higher PSAT score than a student from Wyoming does. “Unfair?” she wrote. “Maybe.”

Ms. Griesemer also listed the 2010 minimum qualifying scores for each state, which range from 201 to 221 (on the PSAT’s scale of 60 to 240), according to information she compiled. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation does not release those data to the public, though it does publish the information in its “Guide to the National Merit Scholarship Program,” mailed each summer to high schools throughout the nation. Test takers are informed only of the qualifying score in their own states. “Surely,” Ms. Griesemer writes of the variances among state qualifying scores, “there must be a better way.”

Ms. Griesemer, who says she has never seen the guide, obtained her information from other Web sites, including College Planning Simplified. It was the first site that came up in a Google search, says Ms. Griesemer, who later double-checked the numbers on the Web site College Confidential’s discussion board, where various commenters had posted the minimum scores in their respective states.

‘Misleading to the Public’

In other words, the cutoff scores are hardly a secret. Still, Ms. Griesemer says Ms. Artemakis told her that she had published proprietary data. Although Ms. Artemakis did not ask Ms. Griesemer to remove the information, she told the consultant that she would soon hear from the corporation’s lawyer.

Last Thursday, Ms. Griesemer received a letter from J. Kevin Fee, a lawyer in the Washington, D.C., office of Morgan Lewis. Mr. Fee wrote that Ms. Griesemer had used proprietary data from the corporation’s “copyrightable materials,” referring to the guide it sends to high schools. He also wrote that her posts contained incorrect information: “Using inaccurate … information out of context is misleading to the public and highly damaging to NMSC.”

The letter urged Ms. Griesemer to remove the data, as well as links to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, from her posts. “Your unauthorized posting of them without clear explanation or any ability to confirm their accuracy is a serious problem,” the letter says, “and doing so to benefit your personal consulting business is unlawful under various federal and state laws.” Which laws those are, the letter does not say.

Ms. Griesemer did not think that she had done anything wrong, but she did not want to get sued. “They scared me,” Ms. Griesemer says. “This is a page out of the bully’s handbook.” Although she did not pull her posts from the Web, she removed all the cutoff scores, as well as each mention of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation and its scholarship program.

Copyright’s Reach

Although the letter achieved its intended effect, several lawyers contacted by The Chronicle described the corporation’s assertions as questionable. “It sounds pretty outrageous,” said Greg Beck, a lawyer with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, in Washington, who works on free-speech and intellectual-property cases. Mr. Beck described the letter as “inconsistent” in asserting that Ms. Griesemer’s post was both inaccurate and a copyright infringement.

“It’s public information,” Mr. Beck said of the data. “You can’t stop someone from relaying a fact to someone else.”

James Grimmelmann agreed. “Facts are emphatically not copyrightable,” said Mr. Grimmelmann, associate professor at New York Law School who teaches courses on intellectual property and legal issues arising on the Internet. He believes that the corporation would have trouble arguing that its data constitute a trade secret, especially because it widely distributes the information to high schools. “All she’s done,” he said, “is to look at information that’s available publicly, and tried to see how it works.”

Ms. Artemakis, the corporation’s public-information director, told The Chronicle that the corporation informs high-school officials that the data they receive is for their use only. “We just don’t want it out there for public consumption,” she said, “because there’s a lot of confusion and invalid conclusions that are made based on that information.”

What kind of conclusions? That the scores might be used to make unfair comparisons about the quality of schools in different states, for one, Ms. Artemakis said. She conceded that there are other ways for students and parents to share information about the cutoff scores. “People try and circumvent us,” she said, “but if someone were to call from Texas and ask what the qualifying score was, we would tell them.” Nevertheless, the corporation would not tell that caller about the qualifying scores in Colorado, Oklahoma, or any other state, she said.

‘A Negative Tone’

Although Ms. Artemakis said Ms. Griesemer reached “invalid conclusions” in her post, she declined to cite specific examples. “I can’t say what it was, but she did take a negative tone,” she said. As for why the corporation tapped its lawyer to contact her, she said: “We believe it’s a matter of proprietary information, and maybe we just wanted to be strong about it.”

Last week, Ms. Griesemer contacted Robert A. Schaeffer, public-education director for FairTest, a testing watchdog group that has long challenged the scholarship program’s eligibility rules. Several years ago, Mr. Schaeffer’s group brought a gender-bias complaint against the College Board and the Educational Testing Service, which run the PSAT with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. That complaint prompted changes in the exam, yet Mr. Schaeffer continues to chide the organization for not disclosing the racial and ethnic breakdown of students who receive its scholarships, which he and other critics contend disproportionately benefit white and Asian students from upper-income families.

After Ms. Griesemer contacted Mr. Schaeffer last week, he compiled his own list of state-by-state cutoff scores, which he planned to post on FairTest’s Web site on Monday.

“This behavior is bizarre, but consistent with past behaviors,” Mr. Schaeffer said of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation’s communications with Ms. Griesemer. “It really suggests that they’ve become quite defensive in the face of criticism. It’s as if they want to keep it secret because they’re concerned about what would happen if people knew how arbitrary and unfair the system is.”

In recent years, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation has drawn criticism from other stakeholders in the admissions field. In 2005, the University of California announced that it would pull out of the National Merit Scholarship program, citing concerns about the use of a single test score for eligibility. Last fall, the University of Texas at Austin announced that it would follow suit. Recently, a panel of experts on standardized testing convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling called on the National Merit Scholarship Corporation to stop using PSAT cutoff scores to determine eligibility for its awards.

Before receiving the letter, Ms. Griesemer had planned to write about other aspects of the National Merit Scholarship program that trouble her. She thinks she will do that despite the letter she received last week.

“My view is that if you run a good program, administer it fairly, and are proud of the results, you don’t have anything to fear from the press,” she said. “Here they seek to squash a two-bit blogger who’s no threat to them.”

Cal State Fullerton is considering eliminating degree programs in French, German and Portuguese as a way of saving money on a campus that had to reduce its own budget by more than $30 million over the past year to help balance the state budget.

The campus will hold open public hearings on the matter next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The university says it has already voted to cancel the bachelor’s and Master’s degree programs in German and is now considering eliminating the language as a minor area of study. Cal State Fullerton also is considering eliminating a minor in Portuguese, and the bachelor’s and Master’s programs in French, and well as the minor in that subject.

“It’s too early to say that these programs will be eliminated,” said Christopher Bugbee, the university’s chief spokesman. “But the campus is reviewing programs that either have low registration or have been trending that way. The same thing is being done at other CSU campuses.”

Bugbee added by email this evening: “PLEASE NOTE that ‘Programs’ in this case refers to those that lead to a specific major or minor and not to any specific courses. Instruction in a language will not automatically terminate with the cancellation of a program; individual courses may still be offered in one or more of the languages as is currently the case in the teaching of Korean, Chinese, Arabic and other languages. This is in keeping with the Department’s continued adherence to the resolution of the CSU Foreign Language Council supporting “a diversity of language offerings . . . Serving the needs of diverse communities and countries throughout the world.”

“The university’s policy on Program Discontinuance identifies several criteria to be used in assessing program viability, including “insufficient student demand.” In the data review mandated as part of the Program Discontinuance process, a review of recent enrollment patterns in the Department of Modern Languages revealed the following:

“In Fall 2009, the courses constituting the undergraduate and graduate programs in French enrolled a total of 137 students, for a Full Time Equivalent Student count of 36.3 students (FTES converts the raw number of students taking courses and the total number of credit hours they are taking into the equivalent number of full-time students. One FTE equals 15 units for undergraduate/postbaccalaureate students or 12 units for graduate students and is the basis for allocating state funding to the campus.

“In Fall 2009, the courses constituting the undergraduate and graduate programs in German enrolled a total of 33 students, for 11 FTES.

“In Fall 2009, the courses constituting the undergraduate minor program in Portuguese enrolled a total of 9 students, for 1.7 FTES.

“In Fall 2009, the total number of students enrolled in all of the courses making up the undergraduate program in Portuguese and the undergraduate and graduate programs in French and German totaled 179, for 49 FTES.

“The combined programs produced a total number of 29 degrees awarded in 2008-2009. Similar numbers are reported in all three programs going back several years.”

Figures were not immediately available on the number of students who seek degrees in these three languages. It’s also unknown, at this hour, how much money would be saved by ending these degree programs.

Here is the hearing schedule for the proposed cuts:

Tuesday, Feb. 9: 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., Landsdorf Hall, room 307

Wednesday, Feb. 10: 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., Academic Senate chambers

Thursday, Feb. 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., Steven G. Mihaylo Hall, room1112

Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College.

When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home.

There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years — completely free.

Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students — a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.

Here, and at North Carolina’s other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.

“We don’t want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu,” said Lakisha Rice, the principal. “We want the ones who need our kind of small setting.”

Results have been impressive. Not all students at North Carolina’s early-college high schools earn two full years of college credit before they graduate — but few drop out.

“Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that’s just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years,” said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit group spearheading the state’s high school reform.

In addition, North Carolina’s early-college high school students are getting slightly better grades in their college courses than their older classmates.

While North Carolina leads the way in early-college high schools, the model is spreading in California, New York, Texas and elsewhere, where such schools are seen as a promising approach to reducing the high school dropout rate and increasing the share of degree holders — two major goals of the Obama administration.

More than 200 of the schools are part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Early College High School Initiative, and dozens of others, scattered throughout the nation, have sprung up as projects of individual school districts.

“As a nation, we just can’t afford to have students spending four years or more getting through high school, when we all know senior year is a waste,” said Hilary Pennington of the Gates Foundation, “then having this swirl between high school and college, when a lot more students get lost, then a two-year degree that takes three or four years, if the student ever completes it at all.”

Most of the early college high schools are on college campuses, but some stand alone. Some are four years, some five. Most serve a low-income student body that is largely black or Latino. But all are small, and all offer free college credits as part of the high school program.

“In 27 years as a college president, this is just about the most exciting thing I’ve been involved in,” said Rick Dempsey, the president of Sandhills. “We picked these kids out of eighth grade, kids who were academically representative at a school with very low performance. We didn’t cherry-pick them. Their performance has been so startling that you see what high expectations can do.”

Initially, the prospect of two years of college at no cost was less appealing to Ms. Holt than to her mother, Simone Dean, an Army mechanic at nearby Fort Bragg.

“I didn’t want to do it, because my middle school friends weren’t applying,” Ms. Holt said. “I cried, but my mother made me do it.

“The first year, I didn’t like it, because my friends at the regular high school were having pep rallies and actual fun, while I had all this homework. But when I look back at my middle school friends, I see how many of them got pregnant or do drugs or dropped out. And now I’m excited, because I’m a year ahead.”

Because most of the nation’s early-college high schools are still new, it is too soon to say whether strapped states will be impressed enough to justify the extra costs of college tuition, college textbooks and academic support,

A recent report from Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit group that is coordinating the Gates initiative, found that in 2008, the early-college schools that had been open for more than four years had a high school graduation rate of 92 percent — and 4 out of 10 graduates had earned at least a year of college credit.

With a careful sequence of courses, including ninth-grade algebra, and attention to skills like note-taking, the early-college high schools accelerate students so that they arrive in college needing less of the remedial work that stalls so many low-income and first-generation students. “When we put kids on a college campus, we see them change totally, because they’re integrated with college students, and they don’t want to look immature,” said Michael Webb, associate vice president of Jobs for the Future.

The first early-college high schools — Simon’s Rock at Bard College, a residential private liberal-arts college in Great Barrington, Mass., and Bard High School Early College, a public school in New York City — were selective schools intended to cure the boredom that afflicts many talented high school students.

“The philosophy behind the school was that the last two years of high school are not engaging, and we would set up something that would make them intellectually exciting.” said Ray Peterson, the principal of Bard High School Early College.

But at the City University of New York’s early-college schools, the emphasis is less on preventing the senior slump than on aligning high school with college.

“Our students are actually planning for college-level coursework from their first day in the school,” said Cass Conrad, executive director for school support and development at CUNY, which has a dozen early-college high schools. “And their teachers plan backwards from college, to make sure they’ll know what they need to be successful in college-level classes.”

In the pine woods of North Carolina, SandHoke students start in a small Hoke County school down the road from a turkey-processing plant, and begin traveling to the Sandhills campus, nestled among the golf courses of Moore County, only as seniors. Their first college class, in 10th grade, is a user-friendly communications course taught by Cathleen Kruska, a high-energy teacher who had them discussing job interviews, learning which kinds of questions are legally permissible and doing mock interviews.

Ms. Kruska teaches the same course to college students at Sandhills, and said the only difference was that the high school students were needier.

These days, aspirations run high. Ms. Holt, for example, is aiming for medical school. She was disappointed last semester to get three B’s and two A’s.

“That’s not what I was hoping for,” she said, “and I’m going to work harder this semester.”

Her high standards have affected the whole family.

“My 13-year-old is going to apply to SandHoke for next year,” Ms. Dean said. “And I’m actually learning from Precious. When I’m done with the military, I want to get my degree.”

Fresno State UniversityCalifornia State University, Fresno President John D. Welty pledged to increase the number of quality mathematics and science teachers prepared at the university as part of a nationwide Science and Mathematics Teacher Imperative.

The university is one of 121 public research universities involved in the program, 41 of which joined in a letter Jan. 6 to President Obama, pledging their institutions to train 10,000 math and science teachers by 2015.

The imperative reflects the goals of President Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign to elevate science and mathematics education in order to make the U.S. more competitive in the world.

The imperative program was initiated in November 2008 under sponsorship of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, of which Fresno State is a member. The university’s own Mathematics and Science Teacher Initiative has been praised by the state Teacher Credentialing commission for doubling the number of math and science teachers since 2006.

The initiative offers free or low-cost courses and workshops to elementary and middle school teachers who wish to expand their teaching credential to embrace science and math. Financial support is also available for prospective teachers in those fields.

Between her job at Victoria’s Secret and pitching for the California State University, Stanislaus, softball team, Stacy Hains doesn’t have a lot of time during the day or evening to attend classes.

The senior education major found that taking some of her courses online solved her time crunch.

“There’s a lot of versatility of when I have time to sit down and do my work,” Hains said. “I can go on at 11 o’clock at night.”

Demand from students such as Hains has driven rapid growth in the university’s online classes in the four years since CSU, Stanislaus, started offering them.

In the fall, 1,400 students took 42 online classes. In spring, the university will offer 61 online or hybrid (with online and traditional components) classes, said Brian Duggan, director of learning services at CSU, Stanislaus.

“The growth is really stunning,” he said. “We haven’t advertised these classes. Students are finding these offerings in the course catalog and choosing to take them.”

Duggan and his staff work with faculty to convert classes to an online format.

“It’s not just a matter of putting lectures on video,” he said. Other tools include chat rooms, videos posted on sharing sites and interactive activities.

“The trick for us is to help the faculty member figure out what’s right for them,” Duggan said.

Online classes aren’t for everybody, or for every subject, he said. But for people with time constraints, or who live in outlying areas, online classes offer access to the university they otherwise wouldn’t get.

Duggan said faculty members are not forced to teach online classes.

But John Sarraillé, a computer science professor and local California Faculty Association president, said there is some pressure.

“A lot of this goes back to money,” he said. “It’s always in there somewhere.”

Accommodate more students

Online classes can accommodate more students because they don’t have to fit into a classroom. The university, which has cut classes and faculty because of the faltering state budget, implemented them too quickly, some instructors believe.

“They’re unfolding in the wrong way,” Sarraillé said. “In my department, we had to take a course we were teaching and in a big rush change the way it was configured.

“A small subset of people cobbled something together.”

Sarraillé said he’s not against online classes, but that the university should go through regular channels, which include consideration by curriculum committees, before putting them together.

Duggan said he encountered some early skepticism from faculty, but that it has largely fallen away.

“Now what we’re finding is there are faculty who are choosing to do this without necessarily coming to me. They’re finding their own resources,” he said. “The way I interpret that, it’s sort of spreading like a grass fire.”

CSUS President Hamid Shirvani said online classes are one way the university can remain accessible to students despite the budget cutbacks.

“The online education sector is growing at a phenomenal rate nationally, and CSU, Stanislaus, must help meet that demand from students in order to better serve their education needs,” Shirvani said.

Though some universities offer complete degrees online, CSUS doesn’t. Yet.

“We’re seeing some movement that way,” Duggan said.

At this point, he’s satisfied that online classes are meeting a need for students. “They’re finding it to be an integral part of their move toward graduation.”

That includes Hains, who expects to graduate in the spring. Though she still takes traditional classes, she appreciates the flexibility of having both.

“I feel like it’s easier to get ahold of (online professors) sometimes,” she said. “They’re always checking their e-mail. And if I have a question about material, I’m more than welcome to come in and talk to them.”

At a time when American public higher education is cutting budgets, laying off people, and turning away students, the rise of for-profit universities has been meteoric.

Enrollment in the country’s nearly 3,000 career colleges has grown far faster than in the rest of higher education—by an average of 9 percent per year over the past 30 years, compared with only 1.5 percent per year for all institutions, according to an industry analyst. For-profit universities now educate about 7 percent of the nation’s roughly 19 million students who enroll at degree-granting institutions each fall. And the proportion rises to 10 percent, or 2.6 million, if you count students who enroll year round. Just this academic year, the University of Phoenix eclipsed California State University as the second largest higher-education system in the country, with 455,600 students as of this month—behind only the State University of New York.

“It’s been a tremendous growth story,” says Jeffrey M. Silber, a stock analyst and managing director of BMO Capital Markets, which figures the for-profit sector brought in $26-billion in 2009. Most of that was earned by 13 large publicly traded companies that now dominate the market.

As those companies face shareholder pressure to expand, the for-profit sector is poised to capture students that public institutions can’t accommodate and that small private colleges desperately need to maintain their enrollments. The sector is likely to be a key beneficiary of President Obama’s $12-billion plan to produce five million more two-year-college graduates over the next decade. That’s partly because for-profit colleges, which first opened more than 150 years ago offering certificates and diplomas, are increasingly encroaching into the territory of traditional higher education by awarding degrees. “All of the conditions are there for them to capitalize on their advantages and continue to grow,” says David S. Baime, vice president for government relations at the American Student Association of Community Colleges.

Yet most professors and administrators on traditional campuses continue to dismiss for-profit colleges as inferior alternatives that cost too much, consume more than their fair share of federal student aid, and turn out unprepared graduates who default on their student loans. “Traditional faculty members think of this as a little sideshow or as those matchbook places you see advertised on the bus,” says Mark S. Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research.

But the for-profit sector is not only more robust than the rest of higher education, it is helping to force some changes in the way traditional colleges do business. Like for-profit institutions, traditional colleges are reaching out to adult students, starting online programs, and saving money by rejecting tenure in favor of hiring professors by the class. Still, traditional higher education is not known for being nimble. It has been operating in roughly the same way for hundreds of years, so by its very nature it may not be well suited to respond to competition from the for-profit sector. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, likens the for-profit sector to “the blob,” an alien life form that consumed everything in its path in the 1958 Steve McQueen movie of the same name.

“The blob would shimmer and then be half again as big as before,” Mr. Nelson says. “You’d turn your attention away and look back and suddenly, it’s blocking out most of the sun.” At the end of the movie, Steve McQueen kills the blob. The difference here? For-profit colleges aren’t going away.
Neon Lights

Just over 30 years ago, fewer than 100,000 students attended for-profit colleges and universities. The sector was populated primarily by small, privately owned businesses, “mom and pop” enterprises that looked little like their traditional, four-year counterparts. The colleges—the first of which had started primarily in port cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston—taught skills for front-line jobs in high-demand fields, including business and health care, and later, cosmetology and food and secretarial services. And they enrolled people that traditional higher education tended to ignore: working-class adults with children of their own who needed more skills to get better-paying jobs but couldn’t take time out to attend a traditional campus.

For-profit colleges maintain much of the same mission today, but the market has seen sweeping changes. Of the roughly 3,000 for-profit institutions, 40 percent are now owned by one of 13 large, publicly traded companies. And whereas only 10 percent of the institutions offered associate, bachelor’s, or professional degrees in 1990, half do so today. Further, more than 90 percent of students at for-profit institutions are now enrolled in degree programs. Only about 30 percent attend part time. As the sector expands, it is attracting students who might otherwise have attended community colleges or even four-year institutions. “They are clearly a threat for both public and private schools,” says Jim Scannell, president of the higher-education consulting group Scannell & Kurz, “especially for adult students returning to get a B.A. or going part time to get a master’s.”

Some small, private liberal-arts colleges, seeing enrollments decline because of the economic downturn, are looking to make up that lost tuition revenue by boosting their enrollment of adult students. Such institutions are competing head to head with for-profit colleges. In addition, students who have been turned away by budget-strapped public colleges, or who simply find the bureaucracy there too difficult to deal with, are being welcomed by the for-profit sector. It’s not clear whether this shift of students from public institutions to for-profit universities will be permanent, industry analysts say, but for now it adds to the size and legitimacy of the for-profit sector.

Cordiss A. Ford attended a public junior college more than 25 years ago to earn her associate degree in nursing. But when she decided to go back to earn her bachelor of science in nursing two and a half years ago, she chose a for-profit, Kaplan University. Because she works two jobs, she says, she would never have had time to travel to a traditional campus. “Trying to make it to a place where you sit in a class was almost impossible,” she says. At Kaplan, she started her program during the summer and took online classes in the evenings. “I could start anytime online,” says Ms. Ford, who graduated from Kaplan last month and already has a new job as director of nursing for a home-health-aide company.

While Kaplan Higher Education is one of the country’s largest for-profit companies, with approximately 103,800 students, it is owned by the Washington Post Company and so is not one of the 13 large publicly traded for-profit universities.

The biggest player among those is the Apollo Group. Its flagship University of Phoenix has morphed from an institution with 25,100 students in 1995 to one with 455,600 today. That means that 15 years ago Phoenix was about the same size as George Washington University. Now it is larger than the entire undergraduate enrollment of the Big Ten.

Phoenix, by far the biggest part of Apollo, has 200 campuses in 39 states, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Puerto Rico. Still, much of the university’s growth has been fueled by students who work primarily online (one of its key targets: working mothers, who can take classes from home in the evenings while their children are sleeping). Phoenix’s enrollment dwarfs that of each of the other 12 publicly traded companies, including Education Management Corporation, with 136,000 students; Career Education Corporation, with about 113,900 students; and DeVry Inc., with 101,648 students.

Education Management is a case study in the trajectory of the for-profit sector. When John R. Mc­Kernan Jr. took over as vice president in 1999, the company had 19 art institutes with 24,000 students. Since then, the company’s student population has increased more than fivefold as Education Management has purchased a set of junior colleges in the Midwest, a small group of health-sciences colleges, a law school, and Argosy University—which began as a graduate institution. Whereas in 2006, 4,000 of the company’s students worked fully online, says Mr. McKernan—who is now the company’s chairman—that number has grown to more than 30,000 today.

At first glance, the corporation’s flagship art school—the Art Institute of Pittsburgh—doesn’t look like a traditional college. The “campus” is a 10-story building, just off the Monongahela River, that blares the institute’s name at the top in red and white neon. Each floor is devoted to a different program, starting at the top with culinary arts and descending through industrial design, Web design, fashion and retail management, interior design, and photography. The walls of each floor contain glass cases that display posters, furniture, clothing, photographs, and even wrapping paper and greeting cards—all the work of the institute’s students and some of its 55,000 alumni.

But on the fourth floor is a classroom labeled “Western Civ. I,” a course the institute added in 2001 after it began offering bachelor’s degrees. The institute also has a library and a writing center, where a teacher and a handful of students work quietly. And a few blocks away are three residence halls that the art institute opened in 2007 and 2008.

George L. Pry, the president, says that like other for-profit universities, the institute—which opened in 1921—has reinvented itself during the last decade, converting many of its associate-degree and diploma programs into bachelor’s degrees.

“Employers were asking for more well-rounded employees coming out of here, with communications skills and the ability to comprehend more complex issues instead of just hands-on skills, ” he says. “What I see happening is the maturation of our sector, moving more and more toward traditional higher education.”
Student Focused

A big reason places like the Art Institute have been so successful is that they offer course schedules that suit students’ lives. At traditional colleges, students might have a class at 9 a.m., another at 11 a.m. and a third at 3 p.m. The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, however, runs three sessions each day: from 8 a.m. until noon, 1 p.m. until 5 p.m., and 6 p.m. until 10 p.m. By concentrating their courses in one block, it is easier for students to negotiate time for school and work, and 85 percent of the students at the institute have jobs.

The University of Phoenix has pioneered another model that allows students to concentrate on one or two classes at a time. Each class lasts from five to nine weeks, and students take courses year round. When students enroll at Phoenix, the university lays out their entire course plan all the way through graduation. “They know what that schedule will be, and they can plan their lives around it,” says William J. Pepicello, the university’s president.

Unlike traditional colleges, Phoenix never turns away students because classes are full. It simply adds more, depending on demand. And for-profit institutions move quickly, adding new programs to match careers that are on the rise and getting rid of others that are on the decline. Phoenix can be so agile because it is a business, with a 10-story, glass-and-copper corporate headquarters where most decisions are made. Traditional campuses, by contrast, are run not only by administrators but by powerful faculty committees that must approve most academic changes—a process that can take months, if not years.

Gregory M. St. L. O’Brien left a long administrative career in traditional higher education at the University of New Orleans and then at the University of South Florida before serving as president of Argosy University from 2004 until 2007. “I used to joke that if, at my public university, we were going to host the world’s fair and try to develop a program to manage it, the world’s fair would be over by the time our committee finished meeting on it,” he says.

On traditional campuses, says Mr. O’Brien, the focus is on faculty members. At for-profit institutions, he says, students are the No. 1 concern. “One senior faculty member would say: ‘I just don’t teach on Tuesdays or Thursdays,’ and we’d rewrite our schedule to accommodate that professor,” says Mr. O’Brien, recalling his days in traditional higher education. At for-profit institutions, faculty members teach courses established by the university at times that work best for students.

“We have crafted our entire world around students,” says Donna M. Loraine, vice president for academic affairs at DeVry University, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in technology, science, business, and management. “We are here to improve their futures, not make it more convenient for us.” Ms. Loraine, who has worked for DeVry for 17 years and was a professor there herself, says the university offers early Saturday-morning classes because students have said that’s a convenient time for them. And in major urban areas like Washington, DeVry waits until after 10 a.m. to start the day because students complained that crowded commutes made it difficult for them to get to class earlier.

The process of enrolling at a for-profit institution is often much quicker than at a traditional college. Prospective students who make an inquiry at a traditional campus might get something in the mail a week or two later, telling them how to apply. Then it takes months for the college to review their application and either admit or reject them for the following fall.

At for-profit institutions, the timetable is entirely different. “If you express an interest today at a for-profit, you will get a phone call from someone within 15 minutes, and that person will work with you to complete your application and figure out what program makes sense for enrollment starting the next month,” says John Katzman, chief executive of 2tor—a company he founded that works with traditional universities to establish online degree programs.

For-profit universities spend a lot of money to get students in the door. For the three-month period ending November 30, 2009, the Apollo Group spent $275-million on “selling and promotional” expenses, or about 20 percent of its total net revenue of $1.3-billion for that quarter, according to a report the company submitted to the federal government. Turn on a television, and within a half-hour, you’ll most likely see a slick commercial touting a for-profit university, complete with personal testimonies from graduates who say the experience changed their lives—and pushed them up the economic ladder. If you telephone the main number of a for-profit university, a recruiter is likely to call back to ask when you want to enroll (even if you are a newspaper reporter trying to reach the university’s president). The big-bucks advertising campaigns and marketing savvy, plus the high-pressure recruitment techniques, have helped the for-profit industry blossom.

Once students are enrolled, for-profit institutions work hard to hold on to them. Phoenix has what it calls an “early alert” system. If a student is absent or struggling in class, the student’s professor contacts one of three counselors who are part of the student’s “graduation team”: an enrollment counselor, who helps choose and plot out students’ program of study; an academic counselor, who works with them on any classroom difficulties; and a financial counselor, who helps them complete student-aid applications and sort out financial concerns. Of course, it’s in a for-profit university’s financial interest to hang onto students through graduation, so that tuition money (and financial aid) keeps flowing.
Cost Questions

Proprietary schools charge a lot more than public colleges—an average of $14,174 this year, compared with $2,544 at public two-year institutions and $7,020 for in-state tuition at public four-year institutions, according to the College Board. But students frequently choose proprietary schools over public colleges because for-profits do so much to limit the hassle of enrolling and applying for aid, and because students can take the classes they need quickly and get on with their lives. Ms. Ford, the Kaplan student, said she chose it for her nursing degree “because I could get into the class without having to wait.”

Still, there are plenty of horror stories about career-college students who never graduate, or those who leave with large student-loan bills and then fail to get jobs. Students from proprietary institutions borrow more than students in other sectors of higher education, and have the largest student-loan default rates. But they graduate from two-year programs at a much greater rate than do students at community colleges: 60 percent in 2007 compared with 26 percent, according to the U.S. Education Department. In addition, for-profit university leaders say their students are bound to have higher loan-default rates because they are more likely than students on traditional campuses to be low income, to live on their own—without their parents’ support—and to be the first from their families to attend college.

When it comes to jobs, some for-profit institutions have become key suppliers of workers in certain markets. Keiser University, a privately owned institution with 15 campuses in Florida, has been the No. 1 producer of associate-degree graduates in health professions and related sciences in the state for three of the last five years. “Students like our culture,” says Arthur Keiser, founder and chancellor of the university. “It’s very personal.”

And employers like his graduates. The Cleveland Clinic Florida has hired more than 50 Keiser graduates in the last five years. Keiser students, who become radiology or surgical technicians and medical assistants, for example, are more mature and focused than those from other institutions, clinic officials say.

Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, acknowledges that for-profit institutions aren’t for everyone. “You don’t go to one of our schools to be a classics major,” he says. But proprietary schools are often the top choice of students who want skills “related to a real job in the real world,” he says. And not just in the United States. If the growth curve for proprietary schools continues, they could be educating more students than any other sector of higher education worldwide by 2020, says Mr. Miller.

The stocks of publicly held for-profit education companies have outperformed the Standard and Poor’s 500 by about 40 percentage points in each of the past two years. And companies like Stifel Nicolaus that analyze the market predict that the sector will continue to enjoy a “significant tailwind.” Indeed, BMO Capital Markets predicted in the fall that revenue from the for-profit sector would rise by 10 percent per year through 2014.

But a report issued last month by Stifel Nicolaus says there is evidence that the rate of growth may be slowing and that for-profit universities may have seen their largest enrollment gains this past summer and fall. “Although we believe the benefits of the economic cycle will eventually wane, and growth for these entities will slow to more normalized levels (and in some cases turn negative),” says the report, “we see favorable prospects for potential price appreciation.”

That doesn’t deter Mr. Miller. “When you ask where the capacity is,” he says, “the short answer is primarily in our sector. We have the capital to invest the dollars to hire faculty, to make sure technology is up to date, and to make sure these are real skills people can contribute to the economy.”

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Some UC Merced researchers have been taking the slogan “Think globally, act locally” to heart.

A new task force made up of eight University of California at Merced academics and affiliates and three community members is in the early stages of launching a campaign targeted at UC Merced faculty to promote the idea of doing research that benefits the local community.

Jan Wallander, a UC Merced psychology professor and task force member, said that more and more there is a push for research to be useful to society.

For example, a UC Merced public health professor could partner with local organizations to study the rise of Type 2 diabetes among teens in Merced or the greater Central Valley.

“This is not the only research a university should do,” he added. “There is also research for the sake of knowledge.”

This type of socially beneficial research, called Community Engaged Scholarship (CES), is sometimes hard for some academics to perform because of other job-related pressures.

Amy Moffat, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit UC Merced affiliate Great Valley Center, said often the emphasis on making tenure keeps some academics from conducting research that serves the local community.

Some professors want to to get published in prestigious journals in hopes of improving their chances for tenure.

That may leave less time for research that directly benefits the surrounding area, Moffat said.

Part of UC Merced’s mission is to make a positive impact on the local community, Moffat added.

“I think this is a step toward fulfilling that mission,” she said.

UC Merced Chancellor Steve Kang set aside $8,000 this semester for the promotion of this type of research.

Some professors at UC Merced already are involved in community-engaged scholarship.

UC Merced anthropology professor Robin DeLugan is assessing the health of two communities, Planada and South Merced, by measuring the quality of life of their residents.

Instead of using typical indicators of quality of life, such as income level and employment, residents answer a number of questions about civic engagement and how connected they feel to their community.

So far, her preliminary research shows that residents of Planada have a greater feeling of social cohesion than residents of South Merced, she said.

However, compared to findings in a similar study of Chicago residents, people in South Merced feel more socially connected than those in the Midwestern city.

There are a lot of gaps in data when it comes to rural unincorporated communities and even urban neighborhoods, DeLugan said. This research should home in on those overlooked intricacies of communities in hopes of improving them.

The most inspiring buildings on the campus of Cal State San Marcos are the three structures under construction.

One of them is a parking garage. And it’s stunning.

Not the architecture. It’s a garage, after all.

No, the sublime beauty is in the fact that it’s being built, it’s moving forward. The hard hats are broadcasting the message that the region-changing university North County imagined in the ’80s will not, as President Karen Haynes said last week in her unsinkable “Report to the Community,” “hunker down” during the economic storm.

As a whole, higher learning may be sucking wind — state funding down 20 percent, faculty furloughs, enrollment cuts, fee hikes — but Haynes is putting it on the line, urging political, business and educational leaders to keep the faith, to join her in celebrating the 20th anniversary of the campus groundbreaking at a San Marcos poultry farm.

“So, today, as we ROAR into our 20s,” Haynes exhorted, “we do so by honoring the inspiration of those community leaders who first dreamed of building Cal State San Marcos; by commemorating the innovation of our staff to create, for the first time in our nation, a new 21st-century university pushing beyond traditional models, and by celebrating the transformational impact that your university has on this region.”

That’s a mouthful, but each clause packs a point.

Cal State San Marcos, North County’s signal achievement in the 25 years I’ve been working here, began with people. (Curiously, Haynes mentioned none by name in her speech.)

Although it grew from humble, dependent beginnings, Cal State San Marcos was ultimately sold as a shining campus on a hill, a trailblazing university of the 21st century.

But all the lofty rhetoric notwithstanding, its success will be measured in hard human terms, as an economic engine pumping out enriched social capital.

It’s a remarkable, character-driven story that’s easy to let slip as the years roll by.

In the mid-’70s, a divorcee working as a supermarket checker was angry that her daughter couldn’t get the classes she needed at San Diego State University, a 40-minute drive away.

Carol Cox stormed the bureaucratic barricades, finally persuading then-Assemblyman Bill Craven and newly named SDSU President Thomas Day to offer SDSU classes in North County, initially at Vista High School and then next to Jerome’s and a water-bed store in San Marcos, off state Route 78.

Craven had been interested in a SDSU satellite since the late ’60s, but it took Cox’s fixated moxie to get Job One done. (A good judge of character, Craven later hired Cox as an influential aide.) Job Two was a real campus. Working with Day, Craven and Cox got that done, too.

In July 1986, when CSU trustees chose the San Marcos site over a Carlsbad location near the airport, San Marcos City Manager Rick Gittings opened champagne. Councilwoman Pia Harris wore a T-shirt with “SDSU North County” lettered on the front.

At that celebration, no one was thinking of independence. Day was the protective godfather offering a deal no one in North County was refusing.

Four months later, however, in a direct rebuke to Day and Craven, CSU trustees, led by CSU Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds, voted for a new university independent from SDSU. The chairwoman of the CSU board of trustees said that one of the goals was to hire more women and minorities and promote them into positions of authority.

From its inception, Cal State San Marcos (not, to Craven’s dismay, San Marcos State University) was seen as a pilot in academic and cultural modernity.

Bill Stacy, the founding president, was acutely aware of that sweeping ambition by Feb. 23, 1990, the day of the groundbreaking.

The core curriculum fashioned by the unusually diverse founding faculty included 15 units that promoted “global awareness.” A class focusing on “race, class and gender” was required, as were a foreign language and computer literacy, a novelty at the time.

The irony was rich. Conservative North County was destined to be home to one of the most progressive academic institutions in the country.

Planned as an Italian Renaissance-style village, Cal State San Marcos has grown to 19 buildings and a million square feet of interior space, excluding the buildings under construction. A university mixed-use district is under way.

Twenty years after its founding, 23,000 graduates have entered the work force, the majority of them remaining in the region.

True, the town-gown relation has been uncomfortable at times. Craven, a moderate Republican, was vilified by the faculty for his stances on illegal immigration. Appearances by left-wing lightning rods like Angela Davis and Michael Moore roiled public opinion.

But those were minor distractions, growing pains as North County and the university have matured together.

As Haynes, the university’s lead cheerleader, says, there’s reason to celebrate. Despite a punishing economic climate, the building hasn’t stopped. Cal State San Marcos remains North County’s proudest work in progress, a vision that’s too big to fail.

Cal Poly will roll out a new book rental program in the fall to give university students a cheaper option for finding their course texts.

Other Cal State University campuses already operate book rental programs — including Fresno State University, where more than 80 percent of books are available for rent at the campus bookstore.

Cal Poly’s fledgling rental program will be limited to an estimated 14 of the most heavily-used books campuswide from a variety of disciplines, though that number hasn’t been finalized, officials said.

The local university’s program could grow, though, if students show demand.

Students will be able to pay nearly 60 percent less up front for books compared with new book prices and then return them to Cal Poly’s campus bookstore, El Corral, at the end of the quarter.

The students can make light markings on the rental books, but they must keep the texts in good condition, said Bonnie Murphy, Cal Poly’s executive director and associate vice president of commercial services.

Murphy said that renting books may not always be the best deal for students, considering students can recoup more money by buying used books and selling them back to the bookstore at the end of the quarter.

New books also can be resold to the store and some of the money made back, but typically rentals would be cheaper.

“Also, some students might have a book they’ll need for three quarters and in that case, it’s best to buy the book because they’d have to rent the book each quarter and pay each time,” Murphy said. “What we’re saying is that the rental program is another option, but we want students to know it’s not always the best or cheapest option.”

Students interviewed at Cal Poly this week said they spend between $300 and $800 per quarter on books; some use online stores to buy books cheaper.

Online vendors rent books as well, and Cal Poly students could go that route, instead of the campus bookstore, but they’d have to pay shipping costs, which could be around $8.50 for a 3-pound book.

E-books also can be downloaded onto computers. But those haven’t been very popular, and students sometimes don’t save much if they have to cover costs of printing pages.

Freshman Leila Tebyani, an aerospace engineering major, said she welcomes the rental book program and plans to look into it.

“I don’t want to buy a book if I don’t have to,” Tebyani said. “And the whole online renting thing is too complicated.”

University of California regents, meeting Thursday in San Francisco, approved $3.1 million in performance-based payments for 38 executives at the system’s five UC hospitals throughout the state.

The incentive payments range from $30,120 for a UC San Diego executive to $218,728 for the CEO of the UCLA Medical Center.

Seven UC Davis Medical Center executives will receive awards, with CEO Ann Madden Rice getting a $167,986 payment on top of her base salary of $584,300.

“They’re not bonuses, they are incentive pay to get certain behavior,” UC President Mark Yudof said during the meeting.

The payments reward hospital employees for meeting goals such as reducing infection, increasing patient satisfaction, getting more reimbursements from insurance plans and saving money on expenses and supplies. Incentive pay is common in hospitals, leaders from non-UC health systems said at the meeting.

Rank-and-file workers in the UC hospitals — such as nurses, clerks and janitors — also receive incentive pay. But their payments are much lower, because the amounts are tied to base salary.

More than 22,000 of those workers at UC medical centers already have received $30 million in incentive payments for their performance in 2008-09.

The payments approved Thursday are for the executives’ performance during the same time period.

Regents delayed the payments until now to study whether the incentive program was effective and typical in other hospitals, said UC spokesman Peter King.

The payments do not come from the state’s general fund. The money comes out of revenues generated by the hospitals in billing patients and insurers.

Still, the payments for executives drew criticism from union workers, who have been asked to take furloughs as a result of the state’s fiscal crisis.

“Workers are being asked to put less food on their families’ tables while UC executives continue to enrich themselves,” Lakesha Harrison, president of Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement.

“Students are asked to pay more but get fewer services. This is outrageous and unacceptable.”

Regents said the incentive payments are appropriate but put the university administration in an awkward political position.

“Our decision today is complex,” regent Eddie Island said.

Island said it’s appropriate for regents to oversee compensation of UC employees whose salaries are paid by taxpayers. But he asked that decisions about compensation for medical center employees be directed to another body because their salaries don’t come from public funds — they are generated by hospital business.

Science and business are merging to chart new territory inside the Inland Empire Center for Entrepreneurship at Cal State San Bernardino, where both disciplines are being utilized to catapult students into the entrepreneurial world.

With Mike Stull at the helm, one of the center’s programs won the 2010 Entrepreneurship Education National Award for “Outstanding Specialty Entrepreneurship Program” – complements of the U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship in Nashville, Tenn.

“This is a first for us,” said Stull, director of the center. “More than anything, this builds our awareness among our peers.”

Stull isn’t the only driving force behind the Integrated Technology Transfer Network, the program which won the award.

He gives credit to Clifford Young, a special assistant to the university president on federal relations, and who founded ITTN in 2005.

These fellows – who are baccalaureate graduates and come from a broad spectrum of science fields at historical black universities – focus on commercializing their scientific ideas. The one-year program tests their ability to perform creatively in the business world.

Students completing ITTN, or “fellows,” become entrepreneurial scientists, earning course credit towards an MBA in entrepreneurship and a highly sought technology entrepreneurship certificate from the center.

We talked with Stull about ITTN, its fellows, and the program’s future.

Question: The students who come from a background in science, technology, engineering and mathematics – what are they like compared to your average non-science student?

Stull: They bring technical and science knowledge. They’re trained a certain way, and they think a certain way. They bring a real strong grounding in science and technical disciplines, whether its physics, engineering, chemistry, computer science or biology. That’s both an advantage and disadvantage.

They’re so used to learning differently, but then again, business tends to be more experiential according to the way we do it. When you combine two chemicals, you know what you’re going to get out of the science experiment. But in business, that’s not always the case – it may change.

Q: Where have some of these ITTN-certified fellows gone to after completing the program?

Stull: They’ve gone to areas where we thought they would go to. We knew some of these fellows would move into technology transfer and commercialization, or the corporate sector, or federal labs. And we knew some would start their own businesses, or go on to complete graduate education.

We’ve had one fellow working as a technology commercialization consultant for the Small Business Technology Development Center, a network of small business development centers in North Carolina.

One fellow has gone to work for the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and another one went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy-in-technology consulting firm.

Other fellows have gone to work for Fortune 100 companies.

They’re all across the board in terms of what they’re doing. Slightly less than 20 percent of fellows have stayed here to work on their MBA.

Q: What are some areas where ITTN has changed dramatically over the years?

Stull: Over the years, we’ve gotten better at selection… in terms of the quality of students coming in. We’ve really refined the process they go through. It’s more comprehensive, both academically and experientially.

The first year, we didn’t have the 40-hour boot camp where students are completely immersed in business concepts. The same thing goes for the experiential projects, so we built that in as well.

The comprehensive exam, reflective portfolio and step-by-step assessment was built into the program over the last year on improvements we thought made sense.

And we really beefed up professional development activities and mentoring – learning how to network, learning business etiquette, attending workshops and seminars, and having mentors work with them.

Q: Since ITTN started five years ago, what has been the biggest challenge to overcome in developing the program? And why?

Stull: It was the recruitment process, because it’s a national recruitment. The big part was building awareness of the program and communicating with all the key people that could steer us to the most promising, qualified students, which is the type we look for.

The quality of applicants depends largely on building relationships and talking to the right people. It takes a while to build those relationships with various universities.

Q: How do you envision ITTN in five years from now?

Stull: First, we’d like to get even more science-technology-engineering-math students involved. It would be nice to expand the program, maybe creating a parallel ITTN program that focuses on Hispanic students. We want to touch more lives with the program.

Second, we want to get more participation from our alumni. Once they leave here, they scatter all over the country. We need to keep them engaged in the program, because they are great role models for the current fellows. The current fellows come in with much more excitement and hope, but much trepidation. When you have alums involved, they can be very strong mentors.

We’ve had a number of them involved, but we’d like to find ways to keep them more involved on an ongoing basis.

Third, we’d like to have long-term committed funding. Our funding is year-to-year. Ideally, we’d like to have some funding that’s written into the budget. We’ve been very fortunate already, but it’d be nice to get to a point where we don’t have to worry about it in the budget. That’s a long-term goal.

Citrus College has received a six-year reaffirmation of accreditation, the longest period of accreditation a community college can receive.

The approval from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges was the result of nearly two years of self-evaluation and preparation that involved 175 Citrus College faculty, staff, students and board members.

“The fact that our accreditation was reaffirmed validates Citrus College’s effectiveness in meeting our institutional mission through the dedication of our highly qualified faculty and staff, through the institution’s outstanding academic programs and student support services,” said Citrus College Superintendent/President Geraldine M. Perri.

In October, an 11-member team of California community college faculty and administrators spent four days at the college interviewing employees, visiting classes and reviewing documents to assure the quality of education at Citrus College.

Taking shape toward the north end of Cal State San Marcos is the university’s newest building, which will be the largest academic building on campus when it opens in the fall of 2011.

The Social and Behavioral Sciences Building at the 20-year-old university will be an educational focal point, an imposing, sleek, four-story structure facing a long promenade that traverses the campus.

The university is not expected to be built out until about 2050, depending on enrollment growth and the health of the state’s economy. But California State University San Marcos is looking more and more like a major California university with each new building.

With an enrollment of about 7,800 full-time students, Cal State San Marcos is being built to serve 25,000 — and that growth will require “continuous construction” for decades, said Gary Cinnamon, associate vice president for facilities development and management.

The university sits on 308 acres south of state Route 78 and east of Twin Oaks Valley Road. About 290 acres are suitable for development, and 40 to 50 acres have been developed, said Bradly Fenton, director of planning, design and construction for the university.

About 1 million square feet of academic and housing space has been built, and the school will eventually have up to 3.5 million square feet, he said.

The Social and Behavioral Sciences Building will house numerous academic departments, including American Indian studies, anthropology, communication/mass media, economics, human development, liberal studies, political science, psychology, sociology and women’s studies.

Adding more than 106,000 square feet to the campus, the building will have two lecture classrooms that together will seat 739 students, six classrooms, seven conference rooms, 13 laboratories, 125 faculty offices and 14 academic department suites, and space for graduate research.

Construction began last March on the $40 million building, which is being paid for by a state bond passed in 2006. The university plans to raise philanthropic support for laboratory equipment and other interior supplies.

AC Martin Partners Inc., with offices in Sacramento and Los Angeles, is the building’s architect. EDGE Development Inc., based in Temecula, is the building contractor.

Next to the new academic building, the university has completed a parking garage to accommodate 1,600 cars. The garage is scheduled to open in April, Fenton said.

Directly to the north of the new academic building, four structures are planned in coming years to house humanities, the sciences and other academic departments.

One of the next large projects will be a student union building, expected to be completed by 2014. Phase 1 of construction will include conference rooms, food services, lounges, retail space, meeting rooms, student organization offices, recreational and game areas and student union administrative offices.

Physicians and scientists this week will begin moving into a new $40.5 million medical education center at UC Irvine that features a 60-seat “televideo” auditorium where students can watch doctors use teleconferencing to provide care to patients in rural and remote areas of the state. Medical students also will be able to watch real-time medical procedures that doctors perform at UCI Douglas Hospital in Orange.

The auditorium is part of a growing effort by the University of California system to expand in “telemedicine,” a type of care that’s considered especially important to patients who currently have limited access to specialists. UC San Diego and UC Davis are currently building similar centers, and UCLA has been expanding its well-established telemedicine system.

The initiative is largely being funded by the public, following the 2006 passage of Proposition 1D, which, among other things, provided the UC with $200 million to expand medical schools and telemedicine. The UC lobbied hard for the proposition, saying that the state faces a major shortage of doctors in the next decade.

UCI’s new 65,000 square-foot Medical Education Building also is meant to broaden and improve teaching at the UCI School of Medicine, which has about 400 medical students. UCI says the building also includes “a clinical simulation lab and clinical skills center. Students will utilize digitally controlled, full-body simulators in operating-room and trauma-room settings, and the televideo room will allow students to see medicine practiced at distant locations with real-time ability to communicate with clinical instructors.

“(Students) study everything from how to respond in a medical crisis to how to suture a would and draw blood properly. They do all this and more under the watchful eye of professor-physicians or via sophisticated simulation technology.”

A coalition of academic associations is today issuing a joint statement calling on colleges to recognize that they have “one faculty” and to treat those off the tenure track as professionals, with pay, benefits, professional development and participation in governance.

The joint statement, “One Faculty Serving All Students,” calls for colleges to adopt a series of policies that would significantly improve the treatment of adjunct faculty members at many institutions. The statement was organized by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, and has been signed by 14 disciplinary associations as well as by the American Federation of Teachers. The disciplines involved represent such major fields as anthropology, art, composition, English, foreign languages, philosophy and religion.

Among members of the coalition, one notable non-signatory was the American Association of University Professors, where some viewed the statement as not sufficiently focused on the tenure track. But at least some adjunct leaders applauded the statement for exactly that reason.

A Set of Principles

The statement notes the increase in part-time faculty members, from around one-fifth of teaching faculty in 1970 to about half today.

“No matter the conditions, full- and part-time faculty members teaching off the tenure track are professionals who make indispensable contributions to their institutions. They are committed educators who often serve institutions for significant periods of time,” the statement says. “A third of full- and part-time faculty members teaching off the tenure track in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences have been in their current teaching position longer than six years; a fifth or more have held their current position longer than ten years. These faculty members effectively function as permanent members of the staff at their colleges and universities, yet institutions often perpetuate outdated personnel and compensation policies that assume non-tenure-track faculty members are short-term employees who will make up only a small proportion of the faculty.”

Specifically, the coalition calls on colleges to:

* Set minimum levels of per-course pay for adjuncts that are “equitable to those of tenure-track faculty” and to make those pay levels public.
* Provide health and retirement benefits to all faculty members, including adjuncts, who teach more than 50 percent of a teaching load.
* Compensate all faculty members for “work outside of the classroom, including student advising, committees, and other service work.”
* Provide adjuncts and all faculty members with “regular support for professional development in regard to teaching skills, new course creation, scholarship, and occupational promotion.”
* Maintain tenure lines “sufficient to cover courses in the upper-division undergraduate and graduate curricula and to ensure an appropriate presence of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the lower division.”
* Organize departmental course offerings such that “the percentage of course sections taught by full-time faculty members does not drop below the majority of the course sections a department offers in any given semester.”
* Make all faculty members, including adjuncts, “eligible to teach upper-division undergraduate and graduate curricula when they are qualified and can contribute to their respective programs.”
* “Ensure that the percentage of course sections taught by full-time faculty members does not drop below the majority of the course sections a department offers in any given semester.”
* Include those off the tenure track “in curriculum planning, student advising, and other aspects of college life fundamental to sustaining good learning environments and positive departmental cultures.”

These standards would represent significant movement for many colleges. While some colleges have improved benefits for adjuncts who teach more than half a normal course load, health insurance is more common than retirement benefits and many colleges do not offer even health coverage. Likewise, while some colleges have raised per-course pay, it rarely meets standards of being “equitable” to that for tenure-track faculty members, and compensation for out-of-class work remains uncommon. Many departments today commonly have a significant majority of sections taught by part-timers.

Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, one of the groups that signed the statement, said that she saw it as part of a long-term effort to change the way faculty members are hired and treated. Disciplines (as the statement notes) have individual standards on many of these issues, she said, which makes it an “extraordinary accomplishment” for so many groups to “come together and say that the balance is off and that we must correct the balance.”

She said she hoped that departments would first share the information. She said it is still the case that many tenure-track faculty members are “surprised if not shocked” by how extensively colleges rely on those off the tenure track. She said she hoped that departments would then try to enact the various measures and encourage discussion at their institutions about ways to offer adjunct faculty members working conditions that are appropriate and that promote “optimal” student learning.

In many cases, she noted, colleges have not adopted their policies on the use of adjuncts through some thought-out strategy, but step by ad hoc step. Faculty leaders need to be armed with information such as that contained in the new statement to push back, and to raise questions when institutions try to move toward further use of adjuncts without treating them professionally.

Robert B. Townsend, assistant director for research and publications at the American Historical Association, another signatory to the statement, said that this is a good time to come forward with such principles. While the economic downturn has depressed hiring in many fields, he said, hiring will return eventually. When that happens, he said, “we don’t want departments just filling positions with part-time faculty without thinking about these issues,” he said, which should lead them to improve working conditions for adjuncts and to devote more resources to restoring tenure-track positions.

Why the AAUP Didn’t Sign

Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the AAUP, issued a statement that praised the report as “an important step in recognizing problematic academic staffing issues” and “laudable.” While the statement noted a recent AAUP call for the conversion of adjunct jobs to tenure-track positions, Rhoades didn’t specify which parts of the coalition statement discouraged the group from signing.

Marc Bousquet, an associate professor of English at Santa Clara University and co-chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Contingent Faculty and the Profession, said that while he agreed with “90 percent of the statement,” there were “troubling” sections that worried him and some of his colleagues. He said that the statement’s call for tenure-track faculty to “cover” upper level courses basically “abandons the lower division to a system of contingent faculty being supervised by tenure-stream faculty and that’s a very troubling abandonment.”

Further, he questioned why the statement was calling for 51 percent of positions to be full-time, given that many full-time positions these days are not on the tenure track. He said that departments and colleges that have irresponsibly small percentages of tenure-track faculty, but have many full-time adjuncts, will be “legitimated” and that there may be “downward pressure” from more colleges to bring their departmental hiring down the lowest level that the coalition report endorses. The report should have focused further, he said, on the importance of tenure-track positions and the need for departments to restore them.

Feal said that she agreed that colleges should restore tenure-track lines. And she said that the “minimal standards” in the statement should be viewed as a floor only, and that she applauded efforts to go beyond those measures. But she said it was appropriate for the associations in the coalition to also recognize the realities that so many colleges depend on (and unfairly take advantage of) contingent faculty members.

“There are so many positions of people not on the tenure track, positions that do not require a Ph.D. or a research career,” she said. “Many of them are not tenure track but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have job security, appropriate professional review standards, support for professional development. If you make your battle exclusively about tenure, you may miss” the needs of this large group of faculty members, she said.

Maria Maisto, president of the board of New Faculty Majority, a national adjunct group, said that she agreed with the statement, and in particular with its “one faculty” theme. The idea of viewing professors as having similar jobs — whether on or off the tenure track — “is a fundamental change in the culture of higher education and a rejection of the class structure, multi-tiered system” present today, she said.

Maisto said her major concern was over how to be sure departments and colleges act on these principles. “Many adjunct and contingent faculty have become cynical about these statements if they don’t see follow-up,” she said. What she would like to know, she said, is what impact it would have on “a department’s standing” with one of the disciplinary associations if it didn’t follow these goals.

Keith Hoeller, co-founder of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association, said his major disappointment with the coalition report was that it didn’t outline a path toward meaningful job security off the tenure track. Hoeller is among those adjuncts who believe that people like himself, who have worked for years off the tenure track, will lose their jobs if colleges convert many part-time positions to tenure-track jobs. (While the AAUP report calls for converting the adjuncts themselves, and not just the positions, Hoeller doubts that would happen.) The only way adjuncts can be “fully enfranchised” as part of “one faculty,” as suggested by the coalition report, he said, is with specific measures to provide “real job security and academic freedom for existing adjuncts.”

Hoeller praised the coalition report for seeking to improve the treatment of adjuncts while “not seeking to create more tenure track positions at the expense of adjunct jobs.” He said that the coalition’s support for “sufficient” tenure-track faculty was much better than the views of the AAUP and the AFT (although the latter endorsed the coalition statement). In contrast, he said that the AAUP “has insisted that there should be only two types of professors: those serving a probationary period on the tenure track, and those who have passed a tenure review process, usually after seven years, and then been awarded tenure.”

Given that such a model has long ceased to exist, and left many adjuncts without decent working conditions, Hoeller said it made sense to look at new models. And even if he doesn’t think the new report goes far enough in that direction, he said it was recognizing that the traditional tenure system wasn’t helping enough people. “For 40 years now, the two track system has meant job security for the lucky few at the expense of job insecurity for the unlucky many,” he said. “We must think outside the tenure box and put contingent faculty job security first.”

New company, new controversy. Same familiar faces.

Just over a year after College Prowler got outed as the force behind a marketing campaign on Facebook designed to steer first-year students to its Web site, a roommate matching start-up called URoomSurf last month began trying to penetrate the market using similar tactics.

It might come as little surprise, then, that the new campaign was co-led one of the main perpetrators of the College Prowler effort, Justin Gaither, and brought to light by Brad Ward, now the CEO of the higher-ed marketing firm BlueFuego, who exposed the College Prowler campaign in late 2008.

Unlike College Prowler, which created general “Class of” groups without revealing their commercial underpinnings, the groups created by URoomSurf explicitly advertised the company’s services — using its own (relatively ambiguous) logo as each group’s thumbnail image and occasionally naming URoomSurf in the group title.

But some college admissions officials have been rubbed the wrong way by the company’s marketing strategy, which they say has involved no consultation with campus housing officials. Instead, the company has been marketing directly to students through Facebook, creating hundreds of Facebook groups with names such as “Students of University of Iowa Class of 2014 – Looking For Roommates!” Most of the groups have attracted several dozen students, some of whom might be unaware that the colleges themselves did not create the groups.

Dan Thibodeau, who co-founded URoomSurf with Gaither, said this was a perfectly legitimate approach. “Our Web site is a meeting place where students can find future classmates and be matched to potential roommates,” Thibodeau wrote in a response to Ward’s blog post, which framed the company as a scam. “…We are trying to make students aware of our Web site and are doing so transparently and with no ill intent, contrary to what this blog seems to imply.” The company offers the matching service for free, and says it plans to monetize the business through display advertisements. It said it also may add paid features.

But some college officials view the company’s Facebook-based marketing strategy as inappropriate. J.D. Ross, director of new media at Hamilton College, said the URoomSurf-sponsored Facebook groups are likely to confuse incoming students and create unrealistic expectations about the college’s ability to match them with the classmates they had found on URoomSurf. Some colleges also prefer to avoid having incoming students select their own roommates because it could discourage them from branching out.

“We think we can create ways to help colleges handle volume of roommate requests if they are willing to work with us in the future,” a URoomSurf spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. “But for now, our focus is to deliver value to our student users who have been asking for this type of service for years.”

Ross also said URoomSurf had posted advertisements on the wall and discussion forum of the official Facebook group the college had set up for the incoming first-year class, even after he had requested that they not do so. Another commenter on Ward’s blog reported similar behavior, and others echoed Ross’s concern that having a third party inserting itself into the housing process without coordinating with campus officials could mislead students and create confusion.

“They’re coming into a place where they haven’t had a dialogue with us, they just posted in our groups where we don’t want them,” Ross told Inside Higher Ed.

“I’m not saying bad business model or bad idea,” he added. “Just the way they’ve chosen to market themselves — they’re not doing it in a professional manner; not in a way that establishes trust on behalf of the institutions.”

The founders of URoomSurf have been rebutting charges in the lengthy comment thread, which has accumulated more than 50 posts over several weeks. Another commenter, named “Steven Moseley,” who claims to be a business associate of Gaither and Thibodeau, defended the young entrepreneurs. He said that while the pair might have been somewhat tactless in their dealings with college officials, it was unfair to call them fraudulent.

“I think many of you are prejudging[sic] the company without basis, and as a result LOOKING for a scam,” Moseley wrote.

“Maybe it’s not welcomed by university housing professionals because it does your job for you?” he wrote. “I can certainly understand that one could become defensive if he feels his job is at risk… But stop being closed minded and think of how such tools could HELP your job. Think of how it would improve the dynamic of college housing in general. You won’t have as many transfers. You won’t have people requesting placement with other roommates as often.”

At first blush, the very idea of threatening to yank a college’s accreditation when the state is in a full-blown budget crisis seems woefully out of touch.

Cuesta College can’t even afford to run a full summer school program, thanks to state budget cuts. Now it’s going to have to jump through various hoops to satisfy the whims of an accreditation committee?

What’s more, it’s not going to be cheap — the college is going to have to fill some vacant administrative positions and invest $50,000 in a strategic plan.

On the one hand, we wish these funds could be spent on something that would more directly benefit students, such as restoring some summer classes.

Yet we have to acknowledge that a long-term plan would be valuable at times like this if it helps the college spend its waning resources where they are most needed.

Also, lack of strong, consistent leadership has been an ongoing issue at Cuesta College — witness the recent turnover in the presidency — that must be addressed.

So as much as we’re itching to throw (proverbial) stones at an out-of-town accreditation committee for waltzing in and telling Cuesta College how to run its business, we can’t do it.

If any fault is to be found here, it’s with the Cuesta College administration and board of trustees for not addressing these deficiencies earlier.

A caveat: We don’t mean to point fingers at current interim President Gil Stork; he inherited the situation that he’s now attempting to sort out, and we commend him for that.

We’re especially relieved to see that he’s taking the threatened loss of accreditation seriously.

It is true that it’s extremely rare for a public community college to lose its accreditation. In California, the most recent case we found occurred in 2006, when Compton College lost accreditation amid allegations of financial fraud and fake student enrollments.

In that situation, the community college was taken over by a neighboring district and continued to operate as a satellite center.

That’s a solution, but we don’t believe county residents would be happy to lose local control.

Fortunately, Cuesta does appear to be on track to cure the deficiencies by the October deadline.

In fact, an announcement of the hiring of a consultant to help with the strategic plan could come as early as Monday.

We look forward to it.

The college should have a plan in place that covers, among other things, long-term demographics, job trends, needs of employers and community interests. Otherwise, it’s basing important decisions involving capital improvements, program offerings and staffing on information that could be out of date or, even worse, based on assumptions.

Thankfully, the Cuesta College Foundation — the nonprofit, fundraising arm of the college — has agreed to contribute $50,000 toward the planning effort. (The final price tag isn’t known — it could wind up costing more or less than that.)

But here’s the catch. If the study is going to be useful, it has to be, well, used.

Too often, we’ve seen government agencies prepare expensive studies to meet some mandate, only to see those reports wind up forgotten on a bookshelf.

That’s where strong leadership comes in — which is one of the reasons we fully support the accreditation committee’s request to see key administrative positions filled.

Bottom line: We agree that some of the committee’s requests are nitpicky and bureaucratic, and it’s unfortunate that Cuesta should have to deal with them right now.

But others, such as strategic planning and keeping key leadership positions filled with competent staff, are fundamental to the success of any organization, including Cuesta College.

In the end, we believe the college will be stronger for going through the process.

The leaders of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities breathed a sigh of relief last week when they learned that President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget includes a $30 million funding increase for their financially struggling schools.

Last year, many black educators were shocked by what they considered to be substantial cuts to black colleges and other educational institutions dedicated to select minorities, such as Native Americans, in Obama’s first budget proposal.

“The United Negro College Fund and the entire community of minority-serving institutions were disappointed at last year’s budget proposal, which recommended a decrease from previous funding levels,” fund President Michael Lomax said in a written statement analyzing Obama’s latest budget. “The increase – $30 million higher than last year’s levels – proposed in the budget that has just been released shows that the administration was listening.”

For the fiscal year that will begin on Oct. 1, Obama proposes $279.9 million for historically black colleges and universities – $30 million more than he proposed for fiscal 2010 and $13 million more than Congress appropriated, according to the United Negro College Fund. Including other minority-oriented educational institutions, Obama’s total budget request is for $520 million, up from $496.3 million this year.

The proposed funds are discretionary, meaning that colleges that receive the money would have leeway to spend it on items ranging from academic programs to construction and maintenance of instructional facilities to student services.

Administration officials said the funding request reflects the premium it places on minority education institutions, which they say will play an important role in helping to meet Obama’s goal of the U.S. having the world’s highest college graduation rate by 2020. The U.S. ranks 15th among 29 developed countries in college completion, according to the most recent National Report Card on Higher Education.

“I said from day one we desperately need historically black colleges and universities not just to survive, but to thrive,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent television interview with syndicated columnist and talk show host Roland Martin. “So, we want to support the institutions. We’re going to make sure many more students can go through.”

HBCUs – 105 federally recognized schools that were accredited and established before 1964 for the purpose of educating black Americans – are just 3 percent of the nation’s higher education institutions, but they produce almost 20 percent of blacks who earn undergraduate degrees.

More than 50 percent of black public school teachers and 70 percent of black dentists are HBCU graduates, according to the United Negro College Fund.

The impact of the nation’s weak economy is being felt at all of America’s colleges and universities, but officials at black colleges say their schools have been hit harder than most.

Heavily dependent on tuition, with modest endowments and dealing with declining student enrollment, even some of the most prestigious black colleges are shedding faculty, reducing course offerings and weighing other measures to stay afloat.

Atlanta’s all-female Spelman College, one of the wealthiest black campuses, eliminated 35 teaching positions last year. Its neighboring brother school, all-male Morehouse College, saw its endowment take a $40 million hit last year. North Carolina’s Barber Scotia College made news last year when its enrollment dwindled to double-digits.

In Mississippi, Republican Gov. Haley Barbour is advocating merging three state-supported HBCUs – Jackson State, Mississippi Valley State and Alcorn State – to save money.

Several black higher-education officials quietly questioned the first black U.S. president’s commitment to black colleges last year.

They pointed to the administration not renewing a two-year, $170 million program that provided direct funding to HBCUs.

White House officials said they increased other direct aid support for the schools, but officials at black colleges argued that the expiration of the two-year program yielded a $73 million cut.

Administration officials disputed the claim, asserting in a May e-mail to BET.com that they’d raised discretionary funding for HBCU undergraduate and graduate programs by 5 percent – “more than twice the rate of inflation.”

“There were a lot of high expectations among (black) educators because of who (Obama) was that they would do much better; he’s a black president, they’re black colleges – you expect to do better,” said Ronald Walters, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. “There was a lot of grumbling.”

“Obama is under pressure to be everyone’s president, and that’s a difficult line to walk,” said Marybeth Gasman, an expert on black colleges at the University of Pennsylvania. “I do think he’s cognizant of the contributions of black colleges and the challenges they have.”

Seeking to avoid last year’s controversy, black higher education officials have stepped up their lobbying on Capitol Hill and at the White House.

“We’d like to see President Obama engage HBCUs and (minority-serving institutions) in a more robust way,” said Edith Bartley, the United Negro College Fund’s director of government affairs, “to really taking a strong look and understand the role that our schools play.”

Though he was revered for understatement, Dr. John Kashiwabara was remembered Friday in a setting that commands attention.

The late harbor commissioner, physician and Korean War veteran was memorialized at The Walter Pyramid, the large athletic center at Cal State Long Beach.

“John Kashiwabara is the kind of citizen you really wished you had more of in your city,” Mayor Bob Foster said after a memorial he described as personal and emotional. “He’s humble, kind, civic-minded, very generous and a family man.”

Kashiwabara died of pancreatic cancer earlier this month. He was 88.

Friends, family and high-ranking political figures from city and port life attended the service, along with the late physician’s family and a list of friends at least 300 long who came in from the rain.

Former Gov. George Deukmejian, former Mayor Beverly O’Neill, Harbor Commissioner Mike Walter, former City Manager Jim Hankla, former Mayor Eunice Sato and philanthropist Jean Bixby Smith were among those who came to pay their respects.

“Everybody talked about how John was so quiet and liked to play behind the scenes, but what a powerful figure he was in the community,” said attendee Jim Worsham of the Long Beach Community Foundation. “There was the A-list of who’s who from Long Beach here.”

The office of U.S. Rep. Laura Richardson, D-Long Beach, provided an American flag that had flown over the Capitol to honor the life of a man who spent three and a half years of his childhood in a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans, but then went to medical school and served the United States as a doctor in the Korean War.

At the service, there was an invocation, prayer and song. A personal history of Kashiwabara’s life was delivered by former Harbor Commissioner and tire magnet George Talin.

Kashiwabara was born Nov. 30, 1921 in Florin, Calif., the third of six children. His father, Matsuo, came to California in 1905 as a railroad worker.

In 1942, after the United States had entered World War II, he, his parents and five siblings were sent to camps in Tulare and Colorado, where they spent three and half years with other Asian Americans.

Upon discharge from Korea, he returned to California, moving in 1954 to Long Beach, where he ran a private practice until 1990. He was also active in the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach.

An avid sports fan, he served as athletic physician at Long Beach City College and as LBCC’s director of Health Services, a position he retired from in 1988. He was also known as an avid golfer, playing in high-stakes foursomes – the money went to charity – at Virginia Country Club.

From LBCC, he joined the California State University Board of Trustees.

O’Neill appointed him to the Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners in 1996, where he served until 2002. Port officials credit him with helping bridge cultural and language gaps with trade partners in Asia.

In early November, John was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died at home in Long Beach earlier this month.

He will be buried in Northern California near the graves of other members of his family.