The nonprofit group Complete College America introduced a new program on Tuesday that will aim to increase graduation rates at colleges across the country, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. The $10 million nationwide grant program, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will provide states with the opportunity to compete for awards of $1 million to be administered over 18 months by submitting grant proposals to the organization. Complete College America's founded in 2009 aims to improve remedial education, to shorten degree completion times and to shift the focus of higher education from enrollment to student performance, The Chronicle reported.
European higher education institutions must diversify their funding so that they are not overly dependent on public financing, especially given the expectation that public funding for teaching will decrease over the coming years, according to a recent European University Association report. Of the institutions surveyed over 100 European universities across 27 countries tuition and fees on average constituted about 9 percent of a university's budget, though the number varied widely across the survey pool, the report said. The report, which began surveying the institutions during the global financial crisis in 2008, called for maintaining or increasing public funding of universities and for finding additional sources of funding such as private donations. Administrators, faculty and staff should be active and engaged in finding additional sources of income, although these other sources cannot fully replace public funds, according to the report.
The Louisiana Supreme Court denied a bid by Newcomb College supporters to reverse the merger of the former women's college with Tulane University's arts and sciences undergraduate school on Friday, according to Inside Higher Ed. Founded with a $100,000 donation from Josephine Newcomb to honor her daughter in 1886, Newcomb College fully merged with Tulane in 2006 after many years of gradual integration, Inside Higher Ed reported. Newcomb supporters argued that with the merger, Tulane violated Josephine Newcomb's wishes for a separate women's college. Tulane, the American Council on Education and other college organizations across the nation argued Josephine Newcomb's wishes were non-binding. To honor the original donation after the merger, Tulane created an institute named for Sophie Newcomb, Josephine Newcomb's daughter, according to Inside Higher Ed.
