Behind the News

Texas Tech University is the only school in Texas to have an undergraduate institution, law school, and medical school on the same campus. It is also the U.S. university with the happiest employees, according to a new top 10 list released by CareerBliss, an online community featuring company reviews, salaries, and job listings.

When Boston College leaders sent a letter to a student group in March saying its members could expect disciplinary sanctions if they distributed condoms from dorm rooms on campus, a game of sides followed. Some students, members of the media, and the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union stood by the unofficial student group, Boston College Students for Sexual Health.

It used to be that when a student left high school and entered college, he or she could expect to graduate four years later. But the pressures of jobs (to support rising education costs) and the demands of family have increased time spent in school so much that a Time magazine article earlier this year focused on “The Myth of the Four-Year College Degree.”

When students in an honors business and professional communications course at Robert Morris University (Pa.) conducted research on textbooks, a survey revealed that 14 percent of their peers knew at least one student who dropped out of school because he or she could not afford to pay for textbooks. And when administrators learned of that finding, they took action.

Frederik Logevall, the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, has been appointed the university’s vice provost for international relations, to begin July 1. He will succeed Alice Pell, who has served as vice provost since 2008. A history professor with expertise in U.S. foreign relations, Logevall will remain director of the Einaudi Center and will assist the office of the vice provost for undergraduate education in the oversight of the Cornell Abroad program.

As a result of March’s sequestration, colleges and universities are starting to figure out how to deal with government cuts from student loan funding and the trickle down of major cuts to agencies that support the bulk of institutional research and development. Tribal colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and historically black colleges and universities have even more to contend with than the average school with cuts from separate federal grant funding they rely on to operate.