Modest Gains for Pell Grant
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Postsecondary students and their schools were dealt a sound blow recently when lawmakers failed to prevent a change in the way financial need is calculated. Experts believe this change will result in approximately 80,000 to 90,000 current Pell Grant recipients losing their awards entirely and more than a million Pell recipients experiencing reduced eligibility.
Funding concerns underscore key issues important to higher education as the second George W. Bush administration and a new Congress get under way in Washington.
There are many people in this country--and around the world--who assert that oil is the underlying motivator for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The argument goes like this: Bush is an oil guy, from an oil state, has oil friends, and Iraq possesses an estimated 112-billion barrels of known oil reserves under its sand--second only to Saudi Arabia in the global reserve rankings.
With the recent and very public resignation of two TIAA-CREF trustees for tripping over federal auditor independence statutes, the corporate accounting scandals have officially crossed into higher education. Clearly, academe has the same vulnerabilities to fraud that corporate America has, and any thought to the contrary is naive.
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The basic rationale for a college or university to outsource to a vendor could be summed up this way: I can't do this, others can, I think I'll let them.
Never doubt the importance of good surveillance technology. Take, for example, the case of a missing former University of Wisconsin-Madison student, which occurred last spring. Police searched for Audrey Seiler and after finding her in a marsh, went on the hunt for a "bad man" Seiler accused of abducting her from her campus apartment and holding her captive. Several hundred volunteers joined the effort and a national media blitz followed.