In a major win for students and faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s Humanities Center, school administrators have decided not to shutter their department at the end of the spring semester.
Tag: university
Morgan State Plots $149 Million Expansion
Morgan State University is undergoing a major expansion of its campus in northeast Baltimore, on property it owns at Hillen Road and Argonne Drive. The new west campus will contain the long-awaited Earl G. Graves School of Business and Management, opening in 2015, and the Behavioral and Social Sciences Center, to open in 2017. Together, the two buildings cost around $149 million.
An undetermined amount of funding is being sought for a third building and parking garage on the site, according to Cynthia Wilder, a Morgan State planner. Morgan State, part of the state university system, owns more than 170 acres, of which 143 acres constitute the main campus for its approximately 8,000 students.
Lacrosse Early Recruiting Has Players Committing to Colleges in Ninth Grade
We’ve been hearing rumblings for the past few months about early lacrosse recruiting at Baltimore area high schools, sometimes as early at the ninth grade. Now the Washington Post is reporting the same trend in the DC suburban private school community, too. Parents and fans are asking: Isn’t it a little much?
“I can maybe see [early recruiting] in the sports in which the professionals are paid tens of millions of dollars — lacrosse doesn’t have that,” US Lacrosse President Steve Stenersen says in the article. “To what end are we creating this culture of pressure on younger and younger kids to make a college decision?”
What do you think? How early is too early to recruit for lacrosse, or any college sport for that matter?
Read High School Lacrosse faces Challenging New Reality With Early Recruiting at washingtonpost.com
Notre Dame of Maryland’s Winter Open House
Open to all prospective students! During Winter Open House prospective students and their guests will have the opportunity to tour the campus, meet the admissions team, and attend special information sessions and listen to the experiences of current Notre Dame students.
What: Notre Dame of Maryland University Women’s College Winter Open House
When: Saturday, January 12th, 2013
8:30 a.m. to noon
Where: Knott Science Building, Auditorium
4701 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21210
For additional information, call 410-532-5330, or email [email protected]. To register, visit events.ndm.edu
Larry David + Dozens of Other Famous People Went to the University of Maryland
We’ve always thought highly of the University of Maryland at College Park, but now that we know sitcom innovator Larry David’s an alum — he graduated in ’70 with a double major in business and history — we pretty much revere the place. More impressive yet: Life-changing, well-meaning, happy-message-sending Muppets-god Jim Henson graduated from Maryland in ’60! Super fun to read the Sun’s photo tour of famous U. of Maryland alums this afternoon. Oh, television legend David Simon’s on the list, too.
Why is it so exciting to learn that a person you admire attended college at a school near you? Maybe because it makes the broad world seem momentarily smaller, in a very good way, when we understand that giant movers and shakers, who’ve made reality of imaginative possibility, walked the same streets we walk as we daydream tomorrow.
Other Earth-Shattering Terps: Google founder Sergey Brin ’93, broadcast journalist Connie Chung ’69; Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Karen Allen took courses at Maryland for a period. See the story for more striking surprises!
Baltimore: Number Three "Metroversity" in the U.S.
Pittsburgh and steel; Los Angeles and the movies — many American cities are defined by the industries that shape them. And while in Baltimore that may have once meant shipping and port activities, these days we’re a university city. And that’s not a bad thing at all.
In a recent survey, education expert Dr. Evan Dobelle quantified the economic impact that colleges and universities have on major metropolitan areas… and ranked the Baltimore area as the number three “metroversity” in the U.S. In other words, higher education is a huge economic force around these parts. Of course, there’s the impact of teaching and research, but consider also how the many Baltimore-area schools impact their communities through acting as community and business partners. And, according to Dobelle, students are a kind of “permanent tourist” in metroversity cities (like Baltimore), where they help boost economies that might otherwise suffer significant downturns.
The metroversity list (which is topped by Boston and Raleigh) just reinforces something that any Baltimorean who’s been paying attention already knows: that our universities (most prominently Johns Hopkins, but the others as well) have a big impact on our city.
The Best College in the WORLD is…
Sometimes being the best in the country just doesn’t feel… impressive enough, which must be why the QS World University Rankings exist. If you’ve ever had the sneaking suspicion that Harvard isn’t quite as #1 as it seems to think it is, well, you were right; the top-ranking school in the world is, once again, Cambridge. (Rounding out the top 5: Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Oxford.) Baltimore’s very own Johns Hopkins is the 16th best school in the world, which sounds very nice indeed.
This year, the organization included a new and upsetting feature — well, upsetting if you’re paying for college in the U.S., that is — where you can compare international universities by both rank and tuition costs. #1 (Cambridge) costs around $15,000/year for domestic undergrads, and $5,000 (!) for post-grads. (No, that last figure is not missing a zero.) The #2 school, Harvard, runs around $39,000 for undergrads and $37,000 for post-grads. It’s enough to make you consider moving to England.
More sticker shock from survey organizers: “In Paris, École normale supérieure ENS, ranked 33rd, and Ecole Politechnique ranked 36th both offer undergraduate courses for less than a $1000 and Postgraduate courses for less than $8,000. In Germany, the highest ranked universities are; University of Heidelberg at 53rd and Technical University of Munich at 54th in the world, each charging less than $2000 for domestic and EU citizens.”
View the complete rankings here, and a discussion of survey methodology here.
College Touring: Finding The Right Fit
“Too much flannel.” This was the text message our high school senior sent to our second child, a junior in high school, as she drove into Burlington, in the Green Mountain State. Emily and my husband were on the first of what promise to be many college tours. They have been across the back roads of New England, looking at some of the finest institutions a young person might attend: Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, Dartmouth, and University of Vermont. My sarcastic reaction to the flannel observation? “Well, it’s good to know that she’s evaluating the University on its merits!”
It is hard to know what the real purpose of the college touring process is. Of course, we want our kids to see campuses, to get a sense of the college life. And to distinguish among the many different experiences they might have: urban, suburban or rural; large, medium or small; liberal arts or specifically oriented to a certain discipline, like math or engineering. We want them to “demonstrate interest”, as the colleges put it. We want them to get their foot in the door. But there is a finer, truer purpose, as well.
One of the things we have observed as our daughter engages in this fantastic step of growing up is that choosing a college, and the culture that comes with it, is really about choosing who she wants to be. So, when she glows about the range of courses offered or the kinds of entrepreneur programs one or the other school has, she is really learning, and telling us, that these elements are a reflection of her future self. She is choosing a match for the person she wants to become.
What a gift we offer our children. Unlike so many places around the world where the options are limited, we have, for better or worse, created and supported a system of education where the sky is the limit. There are so many different kinds of colleges and universities, and our children really have the chance to “match” with a place—to connect in a hopeful, growth-filled way. So, while my first reaction to Emily’s text message was along the lines of an eye-rolling “Oh God,” my considered reflection is that her text message may be a fair observation about the fabric of the place, and one that did not feel right for her. And that is good enough for me.
