Donna Chiera participates in Read Across America day in Perth Amboy
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For Rutgers athletics, cost of near-solvency by 2022 will be expensive
By Craig Wolff/The Star-Ledger
Rutgers University, banking on the promise of new wealth when it joins the affluent Big Ten Conference this summer, projects it will soon begin slashing subsidy payments to the athletics department and bring the sports program — almost, but not quite — to a break-even point by 2022, according to a draft of the school’s financial forecast obtained by The Star-Ledger.
The projections rely heavily on the prospect of mega-television deals and the allure of the Big Ten to sell tickets and attract donations and sponsors even as the Scarlet Knights face a difficult initiation against more powerful and established opponents.
After giving the athletics department an unprecedented $47 million last year — much of it to cover one-time expenses — the university anticipates its subsidy will be reduced by nearly half over the next two years and continue to fall until 2022, when a $3.1 million subsidy is projected.
The projections contained in the financial forecast fulfill Rutgers’ recently unveiled a long-term strategic plan to begin slicing into the athletic subsidies within five years.
Getting close to solvency will be expensive.
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Equalizers No More
Politics thwart colleges’ role in upward mobility
By Suzanne Mettler
The American system of higher education is in crisis. Over the past 30 years, it has gone from facilitating upward mobility to exacerbating social inequality. College-going, once associated with opportunity, now engenders something that increasingly resembles a caste system: It takes Americans who grew up in different social strata and widens the divisions among them. The consequences are vast, including differences among graduates in employment rates and lifetime earnings, in health, and in civic engagement.
The rise of for-profit colleges, changes in federal student aid, and the demise of state funds for public colleges and universities have helped produce these circumstances. But at its core, this transformation represents a political failure, a breakdown of representative government that no longer provides effective mechanisms by which Americans can pursue a better life. Higher-education policies that worked well in the past to mitigate inequality are still in place, but they have deteriorated and gone off course. Thus we are squandering one of our finest accomplishments and historic legacies, a system of higher education that was long characterized by excellence and wide accessibility.
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An Era of Neglect
How public colleges were crowded out, beaten up, and failed to fight back
By Karin Fischer and Jack Stripling
It happened so slowly that no one really noticed at first. That’s the way erosion works. It is a gradual decay.
But somewhere along the line, over the past three decades or so, the deterioration of support for public higher education became hard to miss. Appropriations tanked. Tuition soared. College leaders embraced gloomy rhetoric about broken partnerships with the very people who had built these institutions from the ground up.
Now we have come to a precipice. College students and their families, who just a decade ago paid for about one-third of the cost of their education, are on track to pay for most of it. In nearly half of the states, they already do.
Behind these changes is a fundamental shift. Public colleges, once viewed as worthy of collective investment for the greater good, are increasingly treated as vehicles delivering a personal benefit to students, who ought to foot the bill themselves.
The story of public higher education’s transition from a key national priority to an increasingly neglected special interest is untidy. It cannot be traced to any single moment in time. It cannot be laid at the feet of any one individual or ideology. Rather, it is the story of dozens and dozens of consequential moves made by individual actors across the country. They are lobbyists and activists, antitax conservatives and big-government liberals, conflicted idealists and self-preservationists. Even college leaders themselves.
They are the American public.
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Can Christie’s plan for longer school days boost U.S. education? A Q&A
By Julie O’Connor/The Star-Ledger
Gov. Chris Christie’s right: In this competitive new world, our kids are falling behind.
On international tests of critical thinking, American students do mediocre at best. We’ve tried for years to improve, to no avail, as other countries make huge strides.
It’s a national vexation. We spend more per student than nearly every other country, have more sports and activities and gadgets. So why are their kids smarter?
Could it be because they’re spending more time in class?
In his budget address last week, Christie announced he was allocating $5 million to study the idea of extending our school day and year. It’s an emerging trend across the country and a reform that’s already helped a number of highly successful charter schools in our state.
Yet while it’s true that Americans spend less time studying than students in some higher-performing countries, that’s not the whole story, says Amanda Ripley, author of “The Smartest Kids in the World — and How They Got That Way.”
Ripley, a journalist who grew up in Lawrenceville, spent a year shadowing American teenagers living in South Korea, Finland and Poland. She found that extra time can help — but it won’t necessarily make kids smarter. She recently spoke to The Star-Ledger about what works and what doesn’t around the world.
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Colleges expand housing options through public-private partnerships
By Tom De Poto/The Star-Ledger
Lior Naor is a junior at Rutgers University living in Rockoff Hall in downtown New Brunswick. She won the apartment through a lottery that about 12,000 students looking for housing enter every year.
“I love it,” the psychology major said. “The location is great and there’s a lot of Rutgers students in the area.”
In February, however, a private, Pennsylvania-based company purchased the building for $44.1 million.
Naor will be returning in September and didn’t have to enter any lottery. Instead of paying Rutgers, she’ll be sending a monthly rent check to McKinney Properties, which bought the building.
The Economic Stimulus Act of 2009 paved the way for public colleges to partner with private developers to keep up with demand for upscale dorms without taking on more debt.
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Rutgers faculty denounce selection of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker
By Peggy McGlone/The Star-Ledger
NEW BRUNSWICK — The Rutgers University New Brunswick Faculty Council approved a resolution yesterday urging the university’s Board of Governors tor rescind its invitation to Condoleeza Rice to speak at commencement.
Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice will give the commencement address at Rutgers University this spring, a decision that has come under fire from a Rutgers New Brunswick faculty committee. (File Photo)
The Board of Governors voted earlier this month to award an honorary Doctor of Laws degree to Rice, who served as Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. She will be paid $35,000 for her commencement address.
But the faculty council cited her war record and her misleading of the public about the Iraq war as reasons for their opposition.
“Condoleezza Rice … played a prominent role in (the Bush) administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction,” according to the resolution. And she “at the very least condoned the Bush administration’s policy of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ such as waterboarding,” it said.
“A Commencement speaker… should embody moral authority and exemplary citizenship,” it continued, and “an honorary Doctor of Laws degree should not honor someone who participated in a political effort to circumvent the law.”
Though a largely symbolic measure, the resolution is intended to voice the opposition on campus. Several petitions are circulating, one with at least 100 faculty signatures, some faculty said.
“I’m a member of the faculty council and this seemed the right forum to raise the concern,” Robert Boikess, a Chemistry professor who introduced the measure, said after the closed meeting. “Many students are very concerned as well.”
Rudolph Bell, a professor of history, said Rice would be welcome to speak on campus at other events, but graduation is different. “But the person invited for the graduation, which is supposed to inspire graduating seniors, that is a different kind of setting,” he said. “Academic freedom doesn’t guarantee the right to be a speaker or receive an honorary degree.”
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User fees for drivers a family-friendly approach
By Dan Aronson
This is part of an ongoing series demonstrating the potential for common ground between progressives and conservatives on labor and environmental issues.
High school students strive to get into the best colleges, and college students strive to get good grades to further their career. But with all this frenetic activity, we don’t pause to consider the meaning of the term “college.”
[...]
Donna Chiera, president of AFT New Jersey.
While Ms. Chiera does not have a specific opinion about parking fees, she issued the following statement regarding this series: “When we approach negotiations from the standpoint of what is good for students, we end up identifying mutually beneficial contractual provisions such as opportunities for professional development, peer mentoring and prep time to plan lessons and collaborate with other teachers,” Chiera said. “This should not detract from the importance of critical issues such as pay and benefits for education workers, but it helps us realize that on the big issues of providing quality educational opportunities for students from Pre-Kindergarten through higher education, we have shared goals with our local boards of education and higher education leadership.”
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Letter from Randi Weingarten to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on the school crisis in Newark
The Honorable Chris Christie
Governor of New Jersey
PO Box 001
Trenton, NJ 08625
Dear Governor Christie:
There is a crisis in Newark. And that crisis was made worse by your schools Superintendent Cami Anderson opting not to attend last night’s School Advisory Board meeting to hear the concerns and desires of parents, educators, students and the people of Newark.
Governor, you have complete and total control over the schools—the way they are managed, the way they are funded. The Newark community has met state requirements to regain local control twice now, in 2011 and 2013. But your administration kept changing the bar, and the state remains in control.
At the very least, then, your superintendent has the obligation to listen to the people of Newark—the people who send their children to our schools, and the people who spend their working lives trying to make a difference in children’s lives.
So we’re clear, please know I don’t condone disrespectful behavior, be it at a school board meeting or when, in my opinion, you bullied teachers. However, the potential that some at a school board meeting could be boisterous does not justify the superintendent skipping it entirely.
The people of Newark want their schools back. They don’t want the One Newark plan, and they have lost faith in the way Superintendent Anderson has managed the city’s public schools.
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