The Journal Gazette, a local newspaper serving Fort Wayne, recently ran this piece about the drop in per-student college aid. It was forecast that the amount of aid would necessarily go down for at least the next couple years, but now we’re getting some of the exact numbers.

The Gazette had this to say,

Even though there is more money to work with, the state must spread it out among more students…[because] the economic downturn led more than 60,000 additional Indiana students to apply for financial aid.

Also, in a related matter, IU Bloomington has proposed a 4.6 percent in state tuition hike for next year, and double digit hikes for some graduate schools (especially law school).

Liberty University, a private university founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell, recently banned a student Democrat club, claiming that “the Democratic party violated the university’s principles, because it supports abortion, socialism and the agenda of gay, bisexual and transgender people.”

Although Liberty University is a private institution and therefore should be allowed to perform such an action, this instance makes me wonder how they came up with their name. After all, banning a student organization, especially one as benign as College Democrats, contradicts the idea of “freedom from restriction of doing or thinking something.”

As well, according to the University’s statement, “Everything we do here is designed to develop Christ-centered men and women with the values, knowledge and skills essential to impact tomorrow’s world.” That’s fine, they admit their Christian bias. But I wonder then, why are “socialist” values objectionable?

The college experience should certainly challenge and test our beliefs, but its ability to do that is gone when the university itself doesn’t facilitate free discussion.

“Area Man First In His Family To Coast Through College.” Once again, the Onion’s satire seems to be spot on. But seriously, congratulations graduates of 2009!

Last week IU’s Kelley School of Business was given the crown of best in entrepreneurship research. Meanwhile, in a somewhat ironic – but not contradictory – article from the Indianapolis Business Journal, it was reported that the state of Indiana is struggling with entrepreneurship. The IBJ’s explanation was that the recession devalued university endowments, which have been major contributors to venture capitalist investments.

The recession has cost most institutional investors, such as university endowments, about a quarter of their value. As a result, venture capitalists’ primary source of funding has dried up. The implications for Hoosier entrepreneurship are stark.

It seems that even now, near what some economists think is the bottom of the recession, we are still finding new side-effects of last fall’s financial fiasco.

“Doggone it, I’m still in this Senate Race” — the Minnesota Coleman/Franken recount is STILL undecided. Franken’s up by 225 votes; the whole lot of it is about to crash on Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s desk. Less intuitive implications of this could have lasting effects on Pawlenty’s potential gubernatorial reelection chances, if he decides to run in 2010.

BREAKING. Michelle Obama causes a media storm by touching the Queen. Semi-relatedly, OMG I can’t believe she looks that good in J. Crew. Awesome. Thanks, global media. Now, let’s please fix our international crisis.

Wonkish but good: nice blog commentary from the development field on the possible pros and cons of World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s call to the G20 conference for a global Vulnerability Fund, wherein wealthy nations place 0.7% of any stimulus package into what is essentially a social safety net for impoverished nations. Nick Kristof mentions it in his excellent NYTimes column today, too.

And finally, a really uplifting blip about education policy in Uganda. Hat tip to development guru/Yale professor Chris Blattman for continuously good coverage of the economic development scene.

The State of Texas, credited with being one of the nation’s biggest buyers of textbooks, is considering revising its science curriculum.

In the past, the board of education has lacked a sufficiently conservative membership to pass the changes, which would force science teachers to use materials that emphasize what conservatives say are potential faults with evolutionary biology.

But the changes the board proposes to make would do more to harm the minds of young children than to promote a healthy skepticism.  The chairman of the board, for example, is a dentist who has stated he believes the world is merely a few thousand years old, not 4.5 billion years old as scientists project.

Rather than insinuating that some of the best minds in the world are completely erroneous for their belief in evolution, it just might – perhaps – be virtuous to teach students the facts about evolution so they will have a solid grounding in science and will be able to dispute unrealistic claims analyzing real facts and current, academic debate.

But the plan is problematic regardless of what you think of the substance of the proposed changes.  If passed, educators worry that they would be able to get their hands on text books that would satisfy legal requirements for classroom use.  Textbook suppliers aren’t likely to make changes for a single state.

And even if they are willing to do so, textbooks are costly.  Purchasing new books in order to teach an unrealistic, religiously-motivated view of science will be costly.

Both the quality of Texas education and its economic accessibilty will suffer if Texas introduces such draconian measures into its curriculum.

In an intensely comical moment, a 29-year-old Iraqi journalist – Muntader al-Zaidi, chucked his shoes at George W. Bush during the President’s final visit to Iraq.

It made me glad I chose to study Arabic:

It seems Mr. al-Zaidi was yelling “Ibn al-hooza,” what international news organizations have translated as “son of a shoe.” It is one of the worst insults in Iraq.

When the firey journalist was finally floored by a posse of security guards, he continued screaming, in the midst of which I believe I can make out the words “dog” – kalb – and “forty” – arbiyoon.

I’m dissappointed in major American news organizations.  So many reported only that Mr. Bush had been called a dog, completely missing on the opportunity to highlight the “son of a shoe” line for their audiences. Then again, what can you expect from the country whose linguistically inept president has to giggle to himself when he hears himself speaking one of them “fo-rine” languages two seconds before the shoes are chucked?

Americans missed out on much of the humor of the incident thanks to the lack of contextualizing their news did for them.  It was a funny scene. Projectiles and a lot of international anger were heaved at Mr. Bush even as he managed to escape unharmed.  If anything worse had happened to the President, the incident would hardly have been funny.

The lesson of the day seems to be that until Americans learn to speak the languages of the world, we won’t share in laughter – the international language – as much either.

White, Evangelical Christian teens make their sexual debut at an average age of 16, the youngest of all religious and ethnic groups save Evangelical African Americans.  But they are preached and “teached” up in abstenince education.  Shocking how that fails, really.

While I’ve been predicting this sort of thing for ages, you don’t have to take my word on it any longer: belive the New Yorker.

They nicely surmise:

“Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.”

This world view shows that abstenince education is really just an intersection of the “moral” and the disastrous.  Encouraging teenagers to have their children (after telling them that the means to have those children is evil) is hardly likely to promote a home environment where children are cared for by financially stable, emotionally stable and – dare I say? – qualified parental figures.

Too bad McCain’s smear ad against Obama’s alleged support for comprehensive sex ed in kindgergarten is all untrue.  It might be nice to have children who can deal with their bodies and other people’s futures in a responsible manner.

The Economist reports that British Universities are hurt by an increase in admissions over the past decades.  In the 60’s only 10 percent of students continued on to the university.  Today, that number has increased to 40 percent.

Is the B.A. worth substantially less now that there are so many graduates?  Would it be worthwhile to either make the B.A. more difficult or will serious students inevitably have to continue heading to grad school?

Is Bloomington made better-off by providing more egalitarian degrees, or would be do better to focus on educating only the best and brightest?

Check out this story from the Chronicle about textbook piracy. This is especially concerning:

If the problem worsened, he said, publishers may have to take other steps to prevent piracy, like releasing new versions of most textbooks every semester. The versions could include slight modifications that could be changed easily, like altering the numbers in math problems.

Now, I suppose they have to do something, but changing the versions more often? Should they do a better job of going after those who pirate the technology, lower the price to appease them, or what?