News from Texas Campus Compact

Texas Campus Compact Board Member, Immediate Past Chair, Dr. Juliet Garcia of UT-Brownsville made Time Magazine's list for one of the top 10 college presidents in the United States. Texas Campus Compact extend our congratulations to Dr. Garcia, and to University of Texas, Brownsville for this wonderful

achievement.

"We are very close to Mexico," says Juliet García, who has led the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) for 18 years. And she's not just talking culturally. The 17,000-student campus is located literally blocks from the U.S.-Mexico border. And as the first female Hispanic to lead a U.S. college or university, García takes pride in her young institution's makeup: 93% Hispanic, mostly bilingual and 91% first-generation university students. "We are a preview of what the rest of Texas and the rest of the U.S. is going to morph into," says García. Established in 1991, UTB is the result of a partnership between the University of Texas system and a then 65-year-old community college. García refers to the setup - an open-admissions school that offers baccalaureate and graduate degrees - as a "community university" that has eliminated many of the barriers that first-generation students usually face when transferring from two- to four-year campuses. Given that only about a quarter of community-college students make that transition, García hopes that UTB can serve as a model for how to make it work. Says she: "We're trying to send a very clear signal that the Latino human capital in this country simply needs access to the same opportunities that have been present for other people." -Gilbert Cruz

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College and university leaders are regularly criticized for making too little information available or presenting only the data that show them in the best light.

No such statement can be made about the leaders of 24 public college systems that on Thursday -- as part of a two-year-old initiative aimed at boosting college completion and closing racial and socioeconomic gaps in enrollment and graduation -- released extensive data about their performance on those fronts.

The data collected by Education Trust and the National Association of System Heads, as part of the Access to Success initiative, represent a breakthrough of sorts, in that they suggest a path to improving on the existing federal graduation rate and other data that are widely acknowledged to be inadequate (that's the polite term). By including part-time students and those who transfer in and out of a system's member institutions, they nearly double the number of students covered by the existing federal graduation rate measure.

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Onstead Fellows Fund supports graduate art education students

DENTON (UNT), Texas -- Selected graduate art education students in the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design will be granted full tuition and fees, as well as other educational expenses, thanks to a donation of $200,000 to date from Dr. Charles Onstead to establish the Jody and Charles Onstead Master Fellows Fund.

"Through this fellowship, we are able to support excellent students who are planning to dedicate their careers to working with north Texas children as professional art educators," said Kelly Donahue-Wallace, chair of the Division of Art Education and Art History in the College of Visual Arts and Design.

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White House Begins Campaign to Promote Science and Math Education

By KENNETH CHANG

To improve science and mathematics education for American children, the White House is recruiting Elmo and Big Bird, video game programmers and thousands of scientists.

President Obama announced on Monday a campaign to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math.

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Calling Out America's Worst Schools: A $3.5 Billion Plan

Like a family that has finally hit the lotto after years of hard living, the Department of Education is dropping money all over the place. Following two decades of relative poverty, its latest stimulus-supplemented gambit is to devote billions to try to fix the nation's very worst schools. After having directed almost $50 billion toward saving teacher jobs and $4 billion toward its Race to the Top program, in which states vie for reform-oriented funding, the department just made available applications that will allow districts to compete for $3.5 billion earmarked for turning around failing schools. As part of the application, each state will have to identify their most "persistently lowest-achieving schools." The submission deadline for this race to the bottom is Feb. 8.

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ACC graduate part of research team in Antarctica
Rachel Price plans to return to school after her South Pole adventure.

One day you're a student at Austin Community College, snapping up what you expect to be part-time, temporary work doing odds and ends at an engineering firm.

Two years later, still on the payroll, you're a technician on a research team using a 3,000-pound, 7-foot-wide robotic vehicle to take photographs and measurements beneath the ice of Antarctica. Oh, and you've earned an associate's degree in robotics, automation and controls technology in a warm-up for pursuing a bachelor's degree in computer science.

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Texas colleges counting economic blessings - for now

Apprehension is building for 2011 legislative session.

SAN ANTONIO - Denise Trauth, president of Texas State University, tries not to gloat. But when she meets with counterparts from across the nation, as she did at the annual gathering of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities recently, she feels fortunate to be in Texas.

Many public colleges and universities across the nation are laying off employees, reducing student financial aid and taking other painful steps to cope with the economic downturn and declining state appropriation

The University of North Alabama, for example, has raised tuition 9.5 percent in each of the past two years. California State University, Bakersfield, has scaled back academic programs and enrollment in response to a $15 million, or 25 percent, cut in the state portion of its budget. And Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has proposed merging three public, historically black universities to cut costs.

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