Dartmouth College was ranked seventh in Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine's list of the "Top 50 values in private universities" for 2009. The magazine compared each institution's affordability with its academic excellence to determine value, with academics worth two-thirds of each school's ranking. The universities were evaluated on a variety of criteria, including admission rate, SAT/ACT scores, student-faculty ratio, graduation rate and average debt at graduation.The other Ivy-League institutions finishing in the top 10 were Yale University, Princeton University and Harvard University, at second, third and sixth respectively. Dartmouth did not make the top-10 of Princeton Review's Best Value College's List, which was released last week, although it did rank in the top 50.
Dartmouth's first Big Green Bus, sold to the Clif Bar cycling team, was destroyed in a fire around 5 a.m. on Thursday. The Olde Stage Fire, a forest fire in Boulder County, Colo., spread to the parking area where the bus was stored. High winds in the vicinity of the fire blew burning debris onto the bus, which destroyed much of the vehicle's front end before firefighters arrived. The Olde Stage Fire is estimated to have destroyed approximately 3,008 acres of land in Boulder.
For the first time in five years, state tax support for higher education has increased at a slower rate than the year before, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The annual study conducted by the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University determined that state support increased only 0.9 percent for the 2008-2009 budget year, bringing the total of state tax support to $78.5 billion. State support decreased most sharply in South Carolina, with cuts of 17.7 percent, and increased the most in Wyoming, up 10.9 percent from last year. The cuts could force state-sponsored colleges and universities into a $200 billion budget shortfall, the National Governors Association reported in December.
