From Duke Office of News & Communications

For the fourth consecutive year, Duke has been named as one of the best colleges in the country to work for by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

After an independent survey of employees for the 2011 "Great Colleges to Work For" program, Duke earned high marks for its commitment in five workplace categories. Duke was among colleges highlighted for programs and achievements in:

• Professional/ career development programs (Employees given opportunity to develop skills and understand requirements to advance in careers).
• Facilities, workspaces and security (Facilities adequately meet needs, appearance of campus is pleasing and the institution takes steps to provide a secure environment).
• Job satisfaction (Provides insight into satisfaction with job fit, autonomy, resources).
• Work/life balance (Policies give employees flexibility to manage personal lives).
• Supervisor/department chair relationship (Supervisor makes expectations clear, solicits ideas).

This year, 310 colleges participated in the program, and Duke was one of 111 institutions that received recognition in various categories.

The spending freeze President Obama called for in his Tuesday night State of the Union address would largely spare higher education.

Obama's  proposed five-year discretionary spending freeze would spare education and research, which are too critical to the nation's future to sacrifice, he said.

"Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine," he said. "It may feel like you're flying high at first, but it won't take long before you'll feel the impact."

Obama indicated a desire to invest in biomedical research, information technology and energy. He proposed paying for those initiatives by cutting oil company tax breaks, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This sits well with higher education backers.

"We agree with the president that the nation needs to take strong action to reduce budget deficits, and that as we do so, we must continue to direct additional resources toward research and education to ensure America's economic competitiveness and global leadership," said Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "It is our hope that sustained investment in research and education, even as we reduce deficits, is something Democrats and Republicans can agree on."

But as the Chronicle reports today, that investment may not go over well in the Republican-led House of Representatives.

Read on.

If you teach at a university, this will the most frightening thing you read today.

Written under a pseudonym for the Chronicle of Higher Education, this is an essay by a professional writer who gets paid to help college students cheat.

He writes term papers on pretty much any subject you can imagine.

In this essay, he tells of the astonishingly vapid and intellectually challenged college students he routinely connects with - students who are desperate - and yet can't actually spell "desperate."

One telling graf.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?

This essay is causing some heads to turn across higher education today. The online comment section is a particularly lively community.

Here's the story.

Want your kid to go to the nation's top public university?

Start saving those pennies. And dimes. And hundred-dollar bills.

The University of California's Berkeley campus, generally regarded the nation's top public institution, has hit a dubious milestone this year. It now charges out-of-state students more than $50,000 a year.

That's $50,649 in 2011 for tuition, fees, room and board, an increase of nearly 11 percent from a year ago, according to a cost-of-attendance survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education. (You may need a Chronicle premium content password.)

It's jarring to see a public university anywhere hit the $50,000 mark, even for out-of-state students, but it's a sign of the times in California, which has had more severe budget struggles of late than most states.

And Californians are getting hit, too. Cal charges in-state residents $27,770 this year for tuition, fees, room and board.

By comparison, UNC-Chapel Hill charges $15,972, though the total cost of attendance is a few thousand bucks higher if you factor in books, travel and other incidentals.

The law school at the University of Miami has found an unusual way to solve the job-hunt problems for its new graduates.

The school has created a fellowship program for its new graduates - essentially guaranteeing them six months of work after graduation.

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the school will offer an unlimited number of $2,500 monthly stipends to recent law grads who pass the bar exam and take unpaid jobs in government or with nonprofit agencies.

The stipends each last for six months and are intended to give these new lawyers some real-world work experience. After six months, they're on their own.

It's a good time to be hiring young faculty.

This, according to Holden Thorp, chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill, in an audio interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Speaking with Chronicle editor Jeff Selingo, Thorp hits on ongoing themes Carolina is facing these days. One is its aggressive pursuit of talented young faculty.

Another: the struggle to retain more seasoned professors being lured away by other institutions, often privates, with deeper pockets.

Three local colleges have been recognized as top places to work.

Elon and Duke universities and Wake Technical Community College made the latest "Great Colleges to Work For" survey from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle, a national trade publication covering higher education issues, noted 97 of 275 universities it surveyed. Designated universities had to stand out in at least 1 of 12 categories the magazine deemed crucial to maintaining a good workplace.

Wake Tech was honored in five categories:  collaborative governance, job satisfaction and support, confidence in senior leadership, supervisor or department chair relationship, and respect and appreciation. In addition, Wake Tech was named to the 2010 Great Colleges Honor Roll for receiving the most recognition in its size category.

Duke was recognized for facilities, workspaces and security, while Elon ranked high for collaborative governance, teaching environment, facilities, workspaces and security, confidence in senior leadership, and respect and appreciation.

Think the academy is a cushy gig?

Well maybe it is, in some ways. But this year, one-third of the nation's college professors took a pay cut, according to a new report.

Overall, faculty salaries stayed flat, according to the report from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. That group's annual survey found that only faculty members at private doctoral institutions saw a salary increase of any significance, and it was about 1.7 percent, on average.

The association collected data from more than 200,000 faculty members and 4,000 researchers for the period September 2009 to January 2010. Overall faculty pay showed no growth since last year, compared with average growth of 3.7 percent in 2008-9 and 4 percent in 2007-8.

Here's the Chronicle of Higher Education's report.

And you thought Randy Woodson was doing well when N.C. State agreed to pay him $420,000 to be its next chancellor?

Peanuts. At least when compared to what Gordon Gee is making as president of Ohio State University. 

Gee is leading the nation in pay among leaders of public universities, netting a cool $1.5 million - and change - in total compensation. This according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks this stuff carefully.

About $800,000 of that is salary, while the balance is the other perks - deferred compensation, supplemental pay, dues at a country club, that sort of thing.

In North Carolina, university leaders get nothing like that, though they do live in a house and drive a car provided by their institutions.

Here's the Chronicle of Higher Ed's top 10 earners.

Are there too many students going to college?

That's the question the Chronicle of Higher Education asks this week in a roundtable discussion with panel of higher ed experts.

It's an interesting point to ponder: Should students on various academic borderlines take a chance when the odds say they won't make it?

Says one panelist: "A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a noncollege postsecondary option. Students' lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets."

Here's the story.

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