California Governor Jerry Brown, D-Ca., announced a $1.5 billion cut from public higher education institutions as an effort to alleviate a $28 billion budget shortfall, Insider Higher Ed reported on Monday. Students and faculty alike have responded negatively to increases in tuition, according to Inside Higher Ed. The budget cuts reduce the state's annual per-student contribution from $7,930 to $7,210. Administrators from various higher education institutions voiced their concerns that the budget cuts would lead colleges and universities to accept fewer students into their programs in future years. Even with cuts, however, support for public colleges and universities has remained a relatively constant percentage of the state's general fund spending in the past decade, California's Legislative Analyst's Office said in a statement on Monday. Still, many administrators at the impacted institutions such as Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott oppose the proposed changes, according to Inside Higher Ed.
A payroll programming error at Yale University will cost 61 employees with same-sex partners thousands of dollars in extra taxes, according to The New York Times. The payroll system registered domestic partner health coverage as nontaxable for both state and federal purposes, failing to calculate that the benefits of same-sex couples are taxable on their federal income tax returns. In an effort to correct the error, the university will cover the federal tax before the deadline but deduct the amount from the employees' paychecks for the first three months of 2011, according to The Times. An unnamed employee told The Times that paying the taxes from only last year will cut take-home pay by 33 percent. Other companies are beginning to reimburse gay employees for the expenses, but Yale employees will still be required to cover these taxes.
The performance rankings of 12,000 public school teachers in New York City could become public following a ruling by a Manhattan judge on Monday, according to The New York Times. The judge's decision to release the data rejected a request by the United Federation of Teachers to keep the information confidential. The union will appeal this decision. The Teacher Data Reports grade teachers based on students' progress on standardized tests. The compilation of the reports began four years ago as an initiative to improve teaching quality, but are now used in tenure decisions, The Times reported. United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew disagreed with the ruling, stating that the reports rely heavily on standardized state tests which contain "huge margins of error" and may "mislead parents looking for real information," according to The Times.
