College Inc.

In a recent post, I showed an easy way to boil down the difficult new National Research Council doctoral rankings into a simple top-to-bottom list.

The NRC ranked doctoral programs for the first time in 15 years. Because of the oversimplification implicit in a ranking, the raters chose to rank each program two different ways -- and to present each ranking as a range of numbers. Fairer to all involved, but the resulting data spew undoubtedly left some mathematically challenged scholars befuddled.

I explained, in the earlier post, that a bunch of smart doctoral folk figured out a fairly easy way to condense the data into an old-fashioned ordinal list.

(Here, again, is how to do it: You compute the average of the numbers that represent the high and low end of the statistical range for each of the two rankings. Add those numbers, and divide by two. The result is a single number that weighs each of the two rankings equally. Then, you rank the programs from the lowest number the highest.)

I generated a ranking of political science programs in the previous post. And I invited readers to e-mail me if they wanted to see any other programs ranked.

A request came in for two more rankings: English and education.

English programs are ranked below. (I stopped at 35.) I could not find education among the 62 fields ranked by the NRC.

U.S. News & World Report has released a list of the 10 universities where early application yields the greatest advantage.

Early decision -- and its kinder, gentler counterpart, early action -- is one of the most controversial pieces of an increasingly complex admissions puzzle.

Colleges that offer early decision typically promise a better chance of admission to students who promise to attend if admitted. It's supposed to be ideal for a student with a dream school, a clear first choice. The downside, of course, is that once admitted, the student cannot change her or his mind.

Students game the system by applying early decision to a longshot school that is not necessarily a first choice. That sort of gambit is frowned upon by counselors and best captured by the paradoxical statement, 'I know I want to apply early decision, I just don't know where.'

Colleges game the system by accepting ever greater numbers of students through the early decision process. Doing this, they boost their yield, or the share of admitted students who choose to attend. That's important, because yield is one of the most closely watched metrics in college admissions.

But those colleges pay a price. The very top students aren't likely to apply early decision anywhere. They want their options open. So, a university such as Johns Hopkins or Penn, which is likely to draw the very top students in the nation through regular admissions, probably will lose some of those prospects in early decision, because those students want a shot at Harvard and Yale.

A new initiative called Public Talks asks supporters to post a brief manifesto on the door of every college library.

Founded by a former rock-concert promoter and sailing instructor named John Connolly, Public Talks is a Web-based project with a fairly ambitious goal: to change the way political adversaries settle their differences.

The idea, I think, is to encourage the solution of political conflicts in public, with the participation of a worldwide audience, instead of secret, closed-door negotiations. An e-mail this morning tells me that 32 colleges and universities on six continents are participating by posting a summary of the project on their library doors.

Local participants are said to include American University and the University of Maryland.

Here is a guest blog from Katherine Boswell, who directs the Community College Policy Center at the Academy for Educational Development, a District nonprofit.

If you've tried lately to enroll at your local community college, you might have noticed that no one is a shoo-in these days. Instead, community colleges actually are being forced to turn away students, an almost unheard of scenario in past years.

Enrollment is bursting at the seams as more families are turning to affordable community colleges and as more displaced workers seek retraining. At the same time, state budgets are strapped, so money for two-year colleges is drying up.

Schools across the country are struggling to keep up with the increased demand. Anne Arundel Community College reportedly has run out of parking spots and bike racks. Other schools don't have the money for more instructors, equipment and facilities.

At the first-ever White House Summit on Community Colleges on Tuesday, the Obama administration will announce a new million-dollar annual prize to "recognize, reward and inspire outstanding outcomes" in the two-year colleges.

The Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence will spotlight "outstanding performers and rising stars" in the areas of student completion and workforce training, as well as those who share successful practices and develop ways to assess outcomes in two-year colleges, according to a White House release.

The Aspen Prize will launch in spring 2011 and announce the first winners that fall.

It's one of three large initiatives to be highlighted at the summit, an event staged to promote discussion on how the nation's community colleges can contribute toward the national goal of regaining the world lead in college completion by 2020. The administration calls for an additional 5 million community college graduates by then.

One by one, the nation's elite independent universities have joined the Common Application. A student now can apply to the top 20 national universities on the U.S. News rankings with a single application -- well, two, if you count MIT.

The one-click application is a fundamental change in college admissions, one that took hold over the past decade as selective independent universities came to view their "signature" applications as roadblocks.

There are still a few exceptions. One is Georgetown University, whose 38-year admissions dean hews to a signature application as a way to frustrate the noncommittal applicant. Another is MIT, a school that presumably will draw the top math-science applicants even if it makes them submit their papers in person.

Some top public universities (including the University of Maryland) have resisted the Common Application, but that's a comparatively safe choice for a school in a vast public system with a guaranteed pipeline of local students.

But the trend is clear.

Publicly, no admissions dean among the top-tier universities seems to agree with Georgetown admissions Dean Charlie Deacon that the Common Application is stoking a trend of runaway applications. Deacon contends that universities are joining the Common App under competitive pressure, worried about rising applicant numbers at rival schools.

(The actual worrying may be being done by people higher up the university food chain than admissions deans.)

Deacon just returned from a national conference of admissions officials in St. Louis. He said he was somewhat surprised by how many of his peers congratulated him on his stance.

Speaking by e-mail, Deacon said, "Of particular interest to me were the number of those who were deans of admissions who told me they agreed with me but had been pressured to make the move by those higher up in their universities."

The next top private university to join the Common Application may be USC.

Update, 12:05 p.m.

Georgetown University officials now say that the "loose hanging rope" found hanging from a pipe in a locked utility room this week was not left there to resemble a noose.

Julie Green Bataille, chief university spokeswoman, says it's now believed the coiled rope was "for climbing activity," and used by students horsing around in the utility tunnels that run beneath campus. Not exactly legal -- but not a hate crime.

University safety officials had alerted the campus community Thursday evening that employees had found "a loose hanging rope with a knotted loop at one end" in a locked utility area in a sub-basement of Healy Hall, an area that's generally off limits but "can be accessed through underground utility tunnels."

After an investigation, the university safety department "ruled out legitimate uses for a rope" in that sub-basement by employees. So they reported it as a "possible noose."

The investigation also found "racist graffiti and vandalism" in underground areas near the sub-basement, evidence of illegal trespassing "over an extended period of time."
Taken together, the discoveries "are disturbing and undermine the values of our community," the e-mail states. "The possibility of this kind of symbol on our campus is deeply troubling and extremely serious."

Georgetown has had a fair number of publicized racist incidents in recent years, with the newly discovered racist graffiti in the campus tunnels now standing as the latest example.

But Bataille said campus leadership is fairly sure they have not found a noose.

"The area that we're talking about, it's literally the size of a closet . . . You could put your legs on the interior wall and use the ropes to climb," she said.

Follow College Inc. on Twitter.

Research and development spending by universities rose 5.8 percent in fiscal 2009, with private industry chipping in a small but growing share of the money, according to the latest National Science Foundation survey of R&D; spending.

Johns Hopkins University, with its massive Applied Physics Laboratory, continues to lead all universities in R&D; expenditures, with $1.9 billion in science and engineering spending in fiscal 2009.

Industry R&D; spending rose 12 percent to $3.2 billion from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009, while the much larger category of federal spending rose 4 percent to $32.6 billion.

The higher education community was first elated, then confused, by yesterday's release of definitive but almost indecipherable rankings of doctoral programs by the National Research Council.

It's the first time in 15 years the nation's Ph.D. programs have seen themselves definitively ranked. That's longer than even most doctoral students have been in college.

So, the rankings were highly anticipated. But upon their release, faculty and students quickly learned they were in for a bit of a data slog.

An estimated 37 million American adults ages 25 to 64, or about one-fifth of the working population, started college but never finished.

With President Obama pushing for the nation to regain the world lead in college completion by 2020, it's not surprising that the research community is beginning to pay more attention to the "some college" crowd. In terms of reaching the president's goal, they are the low-hanging fruit. It's a group some had previously ignored.

"It's really sort of morally objectionable to write off everyone over 30," said Jamie Merisotis, CEO of Lumina, in a recent interview at The Washington Post.

The Lumina Foundation Wednesday announced a $14.8 million, four-year effort to support 19 projects around the nation that have found different ways to help adults find their way back to college and finish their degree.

A gunman who fired shots from an automatic weapon on the University of Texas campus this morning and then apparently shot himself acted alone, the Austin American Statesman reports this afternoon.

Police now say the gunman "appears to have been a UT student," the report says.

The campus was locked down all morning, then evacuated and closed at noon.

According to the Austin newspaper, the gunman fired an AK-47 near a campus intersection around 8:15 a.m. "With students pointing the way, officers chased the shooter, who ran into the Perry-Castaneda Library and up the stairs to the sixth floor. That's where he appeared to have shot himself," the story says.

Follow College Inc. on Twitter.

Universities have waited 15 years for today's release of a report and spreadsheet that rank thousands of doctoral programs in overall quality.

The National Research Council report updates a study last completed in 1995. It rates doctoral programs across more than 60 fields, and ranks them in a way that passes muster with academic leaders.

That's a significant feat, considering how many misgivings presidents and researchers have about the many other academic rankings on newsstands now.

If it's past 1 p.m. and you're reading this, that means the entire data dump is live and available online. Try clicking on this link or go to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which promises a user-friendly and searchable way for readers to find their favorite university and see how its classics program stacks up.

The rankings will launch a thousand press releases and glossy mailings, giving every doctoral university a chance to tout the merits of its programs based on a solid foundation of quantitative research. Every component of the NRC rankings seems to be statistical. Gone are the "reputational ratings" that apparently factored into the 1995 release. (Update: It turns out they're still there, in modified form.)

UPDATE 3:49 p.m.: Authorities have concluded that the gunman acted alone, and the lockdown has ended at the Austin campus.

A gunman fired "several shots" inside a library at the University of Texas and then shot himself, according to a breaking news report in the Austin American Statesman.

Police "are looking for a possible second suspect" as of late this morning, the report says.

UT was the scene of one of the most notorious university shootings in history: Charles Joseph Whitman, a student and ex-Marine, killed 14 and wounded 32 in a mass shooting in August 1966.

Tuesday's incident serves as a live test of the emergency response systems all universities have developed in the decades since, a trend that has accelerated in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.

The speed and effectiveness of administrative response to violence resurfaced as a major issue in higher education after the Virginia Tech shootings. Student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in April 2007 and then himself, making it the deadliest college shooting attack in the nation's history.

In Tuesday's incident, the shooter is dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The UT campus was reported to be locked down. Officials said it appeared no one else was injured by the gunman, who was said by witnesses to be carrying an automatic weapon.

A new survey of admission officers at 387 386 colleges finds that helicopter parenting is on the rise.

Of the colleges surveyed by Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions (which is part of The Washington Post Co.), 77 percent reported that parental involvement is increasing. As a result, 61 percent reported they were developing new programs for parents -- special Internet sites, seminars and tours. Other schools "are cutting parents out of the admission process entirely," Kaplan states in a release.

College is increasingly competitive and increasingly expensive. Parents want the most from their investment. "These concerns may cause some parents to do a lot more than they have in the past," and sometimes "a lot more than they should, from filling out applications for their children to calling the admissions office with questions, to even writing their children's personal essays," said Justin Serrano, president of pre-college programs at Kaplan.

Two organizations of independent colleges unveiled a new Web site Thursday that brings together hundreds of existing or proposed initiatives at member colleges toward meeting President Obama's goal of regaining the lead in college completion by 2020.

Building Blocks to 2020 is a joint effort of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and the Council of Independent Colleges to highlight and encourage programs that increase enrollment of at-risk students or boost retention and graduation rates.

At present, the site lists 535 existing or proposed programs at 250 colleges. David Warren, president of NAICU, said independent colleges will be key to meeting the completion goal, as they enroll 19 percent of students and award 26 percent of degrees.

Here are some local programs listed on the Web site: