Economy

MANY PEOPLE HAVE stopped watching the evening news. Why bother? More corporate greed. More stocks plummeting. More people losing their jobs, homes, or life savings. There’s the occasional “nearing the end of the recession” headline thrown in, but budget struggles have caused a number of layoffs on campuses.

SINCE WORLD WAR I, FORT ORD IN SALINAS, CALIF., HAD BEEN AN ARMY training facility and artillery target range. Today, 15 years after the army left, the property’s main feature is a growing regional university—California State University, Monterey Bay.

IN THE MEDIA, FINANCIAL aid coverage tends to focus on topics such as the tensions between funding merit scholarships versus need-based grants, the growth in student and parent borrowing, and the need to increase funding for Federal Pell Grants. Federal or state work-study programs get little focus.

When Vincennes University introduced the Blazer OneCard on its three Indiana campuses a year ago, students and parents were skeptical. Why, they wanted to know, was the university asking students to carry a MasterCard?

Welcome to the second Streamlined of 2009! My colleagues and I are proud to continue this series of publications designed to inform college and university administrators about new and innovative methods of streamlining business office operations.

Our process was pretty much like everybody else’s. It was all about paper and very time consuming.

TODAY’S JOBS MEAN NOTHING without tomorrow’s education. To be sure, stimulus dollars should be deployed to create jobs now. But that deployment also represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in the expansion of our nation’s educational capacity and facilities.

IN MAY 1994, ENRIQUETA CORTEZ became the first Hispanic woman in Texas to earn a PhD in physical chemistry. Just a decade earlier, no one could have foreseen her achievement. As a high school student in the Rio Grande Valley, Enriqueta followed the cotton crop more than the school football team.

Yes. Every OneAccount is insured by the FDIC, currently for amounts up to $250,000.

Seeking an alternative to the slow and inefficient system of mailing financial aid and other refund checks to students, Imperial Valley College set up its own direct deposit system. The only problem was just one out of 10 students signed up.