More than 110 students and members of the Dartmouth community attended a dinner in which recent recipients of the Olga Gruss Lewin Post-Graduate Fellowship discussed their efforts to pursue careers in social justice, according to event organizer and Tucker Foundation civic intern Paola Murcia '11. The fellowship supports one to three alumni each year who undertake a year-long project that is affiliated with a non-profit organization immediately following graduation. Five fellows spoke at the event, including Sindhura Kodali '08, who spent a year working with South Asian Youth Action, which serves youth from low-income South Asian immigrant communities in Queens, N.Y.; Dailan Long '07, who researched the potential effects of a proposed coal burning power plant on the Najavo community; and Emily Chenel '04, who attempted to document the effects of a proposed mining project on Bristol Bay, Alaska, via a year-long photography project.
Endowment losses have caused Princeton University to delay an estimated $695 million in construction projects, university President Shirley Tilghman said last week in an interview with Bloomberg News. Princeton has already asked departments to make budget cuts and has curtailed the hiring of new faculty and staff. Such plans come after Princeton predicted that its endowment would decline between 25 and 30 percent for the fiscal year, according to a letter that Tilghman sent to the Princeton community last week.
Despite the economic crisis, private colleges and universities nationwide are announcing smaller tuition increases than in past years, averaging about 4 percent, while public schools' increases are higher, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. While the dollar amounts of public school tuition increases remain lower than those of private schools, percentage tuition increases in some state school systems are significantly higher. For example, the governing boards of the University of California system may raise annual basic fees by 9.4 percent, bringing the average undergraduate bill up $8,670, not including cost of living. Private schools are also increasing financial aid funds by an average of 9.2 percent, according to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
