Universities Weblog

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"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

Narcissism can have benefits, said study co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, suggesting it could be useful in meeting new people "or auditioning on 'American Idol.'"

He even posted a photo of his dog, paws planted next to a stack of files, on the Hopkins admissions Web site.

Creasy is trying to lighten things a little and ease some of the anxiety of the application process as the admissions frenzy whips up. With more applicants than ever competing to get into the top schools, students' stress is obvious. It chokes online message boards about college admissions. (One site — where overachievers crunch numbers, analyze their chances and obsess over scores — had 17,048 posts about Hopkins alone.)

Now, some schools have staff members like Creasy who not only read files but monitor message boards, field questions on their own Web sites and try to humanize the process.

In charge of Hopkins Insider, "a behind-the-scenes look at the Johns Hopkins Admissions Office," Creasy hopes to take away some of the mystery, correct misinformation here and there, crack some jokes and, occasionally, talk students off the ledge.

"I think Salem State University would be terrific," said Joe DeNisco, 21, of Peabody, a senior at Salem State College. "The change in name would solidify us in the eye of a lot of people."

Bridgewater State and Salem are leading the charge, and presidents of other state colleges say they would probably follow suit if the two colleges get the necessary approval. A bill filed last month in the Legislature would allow a state college to become a university if it grants doctorate degrees or at least 50 master's degrees a year. Currently, the Legislature considers name changes on a case-by-case basis. [....]

Bridgewater and Salem State leaders say the name change would also help them as they try to start up their first doctoral programs — something state law prevents them from doing as state colleges. If they succeed with the name change, they would not suddenly join the University of Massachusetts system. The state would maintain a two-tier system of four-year institutions, but one set would include schools known as "state universities" or "state colleges," and the other group would be the UMass schools.

Bridgewater State College president Dana Mohler-Faria, Governor Deval Patrick's education adviser, said the Bay State is way behind the nation in adopting the state university moniker.

"It will clearly raise stature," said Mohler-Faria, speaking in his capacity as college president.

The state colleges might have a better chance of winning grants as universities because the title is considered more prestigious, Mohler-Faria and other college officials said.

The state colleges, like many others across the nation, say that changing their title is a part of their evolution. Most of the nine state colleges started as normal schools, or teachers colleges, in the 1800s, enrolling primarily women pursuing teaching careers. They became state colleges in the 1960s and began offering an array of academic programs.

An expert on the Civil War and the American South, and the leading figure in Radcliffe's transformation from a college into one of the country's foremost scholarly institutes, Faust was elected to the Harvard presidency today by the members of the Harvard Corporation, with the consent of the University's Board of Overseers.

The appointment concludes a search launched in the spring of 2006, involving far-reaching consultation with faculty, students, staff, alumni, and others nationwide.

"This is a great day, and a historic day, for Harvard," said James R. Houghton, the senior member of the Harvard Corporation and chair of the presidential search committee. "Drew Faust is an inspiring and accomplished leader, a superb scholar, a dedicated teacher, and a wonderful human being. She combines a powerful, broad-ranging intellect with a demonstrated capacity for strong leadership and a talent for stimulating people to do their best work, both individually and together. She knows Harvard and higher education, and her interests extend to the whole of the University, across the arts and sciences and the professional domains.

The Corporation, as the board is known, will present its recommendation Sunday to an elected group of about 30 alumni, the Overseers, who must approve it, according to one of the people.

Drew Gilpin Faust, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has been the front-runner over the past week, and several people close to the search said they were unaware of any other candidates being considered in the final stages of deliberation. Longtime Harvard insiders said yesterday that all the chatter on campus was that the 59-year-old Faust was the Corporation's choice.

Board members expect to make the decision public Sunday, according to one of the two sources familiar with the search process. The Overseers, who wield far less power than the Corporation, are considered all but certain to approve the recommendation, as they have done in the past.

The candidate will be present at the meeting, according to one of the sources, although it was unclear whether the nominee would field questions or just greet the group after the vote.

The university, which had begun to lag behind its competitors in graduate student aid, will invest an additional $50 million over the next six years, an increase that will make its graduate students among the best financially supported in the country, officials said. The university currently spends about $60 million a year on graduate student aid in the humanities and social sciences.

Beginning this fall, PhD. students will get a minimum package of five years of tuition, health insurance, a $19,000 stipend per year and two summers of financial support for research worth $6,000. Most of the university's social science and humanities graduate students currently get a four-year tuition package and annual stipends ranging from $4,000 to $18,000. Some students get no aid.

Though other universities such as Northwestern have boosted graduate student support in recent years, they often have done so by reducing the number of students. The U. of C., however, will continue to enroll about 250 new graduate students in the social sciences and humanities each year, one of the largest programs among top private research universities.

A graduate school offering programs in Education, Psychology and Business, Argosy University
not only offers the convenience of online degree programs, but also something that is just as crucial to the online learning experience – a fully supportive and interactive academic environment.

This support comes in the form of Argosy University's networking groups, 24-hour classroom technical support, career services, professional networking, on-demand tutoring, online libraries and bookstores and student organizations. Students are assigned an academic advisor and mentor professor and have plenty of two-way communication with faculty and other students, just as students would expect in a live classroom setting. Students also experience active learning through Argosy University's multiple interactive methods such as text, video, animation and live chats.

Argosy University, which is geared toward graduate level education, proudly supports one of the largest communities of graduate student in the nation. When students enroll, they join a community of adults that want to expand their knowledge, build on their expertise and advance their career.

Argosy's flexible online programs are taught by seasoned faculty members in a small class setting. The University offers a professional education that includes Master's and Doctorate programs in Educational and Instructional Leadership, and Business Administration; Doctorate programs in Organizational Leadership and Counseling psychology; and a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology.

The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state's vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.

The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm – in this case, of the nation's most populous, most demographically dynamic state – and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.

But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it – specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.

In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles – the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).