California residents voted against a $6-billion cut to public education spending and granted Democrats a supermajority in both houses of the state legislature in Tuesday's election, Inside Higher Ed reported. Proposition 30, a sales and income tax increase initiative projected to raise $34 billion in new revenue over the next seven years, passed with 54 percent of the vote. While the tax hike prevents further cuts to the University of California and California State University systems this year, Proposition 30 is expected to provide long-term stabilization as opposed to radical transformation of California's educational system, according to Inside Higher Ed. With a democratic supermajority in the state legislature for the first time since 1933, Democrats will not need Republican support to bypass certain legislative actions and overrule vetoes by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.
Former Dean of St. John's University Cecilia Chang wasfound dead in her Queens, N.Y., home hours after going on trial for stealing over $1 million from the university and using students as her personal servants, The New York Times reported this week. Chang was arrested and charged in 2010 after prosecutors presented evidence that she had subjected students to servitude by threatening them with expulsion and had taken money from the university by creating false bank accounts in students' names. After rising through the ranks of academia, Chang raised more than $20 million for St. John's University during her tenure as dean, according to The Times.
Young voters surprised statisticians by participating at nearly as high a rate in Tuesday's election as they did in 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Despite overall turnout declines of four percentage points nationally, approximately half of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 29 chose to vote, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. While the majority of young voters still supported President Barack Obama, the percentage of young people who voted for his election declined from 66 percent in 2008 to 60 percent this year. Political scientists attribute the large turnout in the youngest age bracket to the fact that both parties focused on appealing to young voters, The Chronicle reported.
