The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may increase the size of its student body by more than 300 students if it is able to construct more housing, according to The New York Times. MIT's dean of admission, Stuart Schmill, said higher enrollments could increase MIT's revenue, according to Bloomberg News. Schmill told The Times that the institution's main goal is to expand the 4,200-person undergraduate student body to the size it was in the 1980s and 1990s, or approximately 4,500 students. Classes have become smaller over the past two decades because housing options were limited when MIT began requiring that freshmen live in dormitories, according to The Times. An increase in the undergraduate enrollment might not affect freshman admissions, as increased numbers of transfer students can also expand enrollment, Schmill told The Times.
Many of the 450 college provosts who attended the Council of Independent Colleges' meeting on Tuesday voiced concerns about three-year bachelor's degree programs, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. "There's a huge amount of interest now in these three-year programs," Point Loma Nazarene University Provost John Hawthorne told The Chronicle. "It's one of those ideas that seems very appealing at first glance. But when you look more closely, you see that there are a lot of complications. Some of these programs might work only for a certain slice of students." Several dozen of the provosts attended a meeting the day before, however, where they discussed the success of two existing three-year programs Southern New Hampshire University's honors program in business, and Green Mountain College's resort and hospitality management program. Although students enrolled in Green Mountain's three-year program pay higher tuition than do students in four-year programs, Green Mountain's provost, William Throop, said that many still find the program "financially attractive" because participating students graduate before their peers.
Although electronic medical records make patient information more accessible for physicians and physicians-to-be, they can also "depersonalize" the way medical students are taught, according to a presentation at the annual meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges on Tuesday. A survey conducted by the Alliance for Clinical Education found that of the 129 medical schools polled, 74 percent use electronic patient records. Many medical professionals feel that reliance on electronic records depersonalizes students' relationships and limits discussion with their mentors because students are often focused on a computer screen, according to The Chronicle for Higher Education.
