The Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings recently announced future plans to re-work the financial aid system.

Uwire with the story:

Spellings described five “actions” under her plan, including the creation of a “higher education information system” and the expansion of President Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind program.

The information system would use privacy-protected, student-level data to improve the Department of Education’s ranking and searching systems.

These changes, according to Spellings, would provide more resources to help students research higher education and would allow for higher education to be judged on performance, not reputation. The data, however, would have to be provided by the colleges and universities themselves…

Another facet of Spellings’ plan involved improving the affordability of college through streamlining the financial aid process, and reducing the turnaround time for students to discover their financial-aid eligibility.

“We must increase need-based aid,” she said. “I look forward to teaming up with Congress again to improve the financial aid process and to help the students who need it the most.”

Spellings plan, however, has not gone without criticism.  Some Democrats are arguing that the system is squandering money and not serving the student’s best interests.  For the full article, click here.

Boston is home to a large amount of schools that include Harvard, UMass, Emerson, amongst others.  So when the students go back to school, they’re not only taking over campus, they’re taking over the entire city.

The Onion with the story:

The now-monthlong invasion carried out by more than 200,000 college students who bombarded this normally quiet, historic city has forced native Bostonians to relinquish their rights as citizens and settle into a new life under occupation…

With their concentration in liberal-arts colleges spreading from a centralized location to the outlying suburban areas, the students have made certain that they will maintain a constant presence in all parts of the city.

Some complain that these students presence is overwhelming and burdensome, but when it comes right down to it, they better starting getting used to a large student population, because student numbers are on the rise.

We’ve all had the uber-liberal professor who spouts off his or her left-wing political interpretations, and they seem to represent a much larger percentage of the academic world. But how liberal is academia?
The New York Times reports:

“Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations — except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies.” The political tilt of American college faculties is a fact well established, though the actual ratio of liberals to conservatives — just under 3 to 1, according to the most comprehensive survey, conducted by U.C.L.A. researchers — is routinely exaggerated (10 to 1! 20! 30!) by those who believe that we liberals are actively conspiring to keep dissenting voices off the faculty roster.

But should professors need to worry about presenting their own political ideologies?

Article continued:

Every responsible teacher should think of the classroom as a relatively safe space, free of intimidation or coercion. But in return, every responsible student should realize that the classroom is only relatively safe, because arguing about ideas isn’t risk-free. Of course, students sometimes have qualms about taking classes with overtly partisan professors. “As conservatives,” Julie Aud, a student at the University of Indiana and press secretary for her chapter of the College Republicans, told CBS News, “we should never have to feel uncomfortable in the classroom because of our beliefs.” Perhaps so, but as students, you should expect to feel uncomfortable about your beliefs as a matter of course — that is, if your professors are doing their job properly, and keeping the floor open for every reasonable form of debate and disagreement.

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