Student Loan Blog : Butler University

‘Swine Flu’ Causes Colleges to Cancel Study Abroad Programs

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:29:00 GMT

Although the swine flu virus (H1N1) hasn’t hit most U.S. college campuses, college health officials are starting to take precautions, including cancelling study abroad programs in Mexico, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (“Swine Flu Prompts More Colleges to Cancel Study-Abroad Programs in Mexico,” April 28, 2009).

Earlier this week, the University of Minnesota announced it was suspending “all current and planned education abroad programs in Mexico until further notice” and advised its 21 students currently studying in Mexico to return immediately. The school also canceled several other Mexico-bound programs, involving an additional 52 students that were set to depart in May.

The University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire said that it would not be proceeding with its six-week summer program in Mexico, scheduled to begin May 26. The 23 participating students will be given the option to study abroad in Costa Rica instead.

Officials at Butler University in Indianapolis have called off a three–week Spanish language immersion program for more than a dozen students, which was scheduled to begin in about two weeks.

And study abroad administrators at Pennsylvania State University at Altoona said they would be calling off a program in the Mexican cities of Guanajuato and Mexico City, which was to begin in just over a week.

Many college officials are adopting a “wait-and-see” attitude regarding the spread of the swine flu virus in the United States to see how it may affect their campuses and are closely monitoring reports from the State Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for guidance.

So far, only two institutions — both in the state of Massachusetts — have reported possible cases of infection of the swine flu virus: Amherst College and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and clinic.

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Colleges and Universities to Subsidize Unpaid Internships

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:08:00 GMT

Some small, private schools are beginning to offer internship grants to students who would otherwise have been unable to accept an unpaid or low-paying intern position, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Subsidizing the Internship,” July 18, 2008).

“That’s one of the more important aspects of career assistance that a university can provide a student,” said Mark Oldman, co-founder of Vault, a career-information company. Amid so many unpaid and low- paying internships, he told the Chronicle, “the university can come to the rescue financially.”

Once considered an added bonus to a college degree, internships have now become “a prime form of professional capital” for college students. But being that most internships offer little to no financial compensation, lower-income students are often placed at a disadvantage in the competitive internship field.

Internship-grant programs now being offered by schools across the country will subsidize unpaid or low-paying internships and allow more financially needy students to take advantage of these experience-building opportunities:

Connecticut College awarded up to $3,000 grants to two- thirds, or 285, college seniors
Austin College in Texas gave 54 students $2,300 each
Whitman College in Washington paid 26 students $2,100
Smith College in Massachusetts has pledged financial support for all internship-seeking students, regardless of their financial need

American University in Washington, D.C., while unable to offer direct financial assistance for internships, provides room and board for Native American students who secure internships at federal agencies or private corporations.

Butler University in Indianapolis, Ind., offers on-campus housing at a subsidized rate for summer interns through the Brain Gain program, as well as career counseling for those who participate in the program.

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All Work for Little Play: Less Popular Collegiate Sports Teams Forced to Fundraise

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:15:00 GMT

We imagine the life of a standout college athlete as being a glamorous foray into a fame-filled world of celebrity status. For former student sports superstars like Matt Leinart, Diana Taurasi and Carmelo Anthony, strolling through their respective college campuses in their heyday must have been like walking on air.

But life isn’t so light and fluffy for the college athletes playing less mainstream sports.

Due to the lack of visibility and revenue-generating popularity with the TV-watching public for sports like fencing, swimming, softball and soccer, more and more Division I college athletes find themselves participating in “high-schoolish” fundraisers and working in sometimes exhausting odd jobs just to keep their teams alive, according to a New York Times article by Teddy Kider (“Odd Jobs Help College Teams Stay Afloat,” Aug. 24, 2007).

Year after year, NCAA Division I football and basketball teams generate millions of dollars in revenue for their schools from ticket sales, donors and national sponsors, while their coaches rack up salaries of $3 million and $4 million. Meanwhile, their less-followed sports siblings struggle to come up with even the most basic funding.

And it isn’t always a matter of dollars following success on the field or on the court. Football and basketball teams with persistent losing records may not land lucrative TV deals, but they could still receive millions in donations, while top-ranked sports programs that will never make the ESPN highlight reel must pay for themselves or risk being pushed out of the way.

In January, Butler University, for example, axed its men’s lacrosse team after 14 years and its men’s swimming program after 79 years. According to Butler Athletic Director, Barry Collier, in an announcement released by the university, the decision was made as a means to focus effort and financial support on Butler’s remaining 19 teams (“Butler University Announces Changes to Athletic Program,” Jan. 26, 2007).

Butler’s football team, on the other hand, despite an ongoing decisively losing record (2-9 in 2003, 1-10 in 2004, 0-11 in 2005, and 3-8 in 2006), raised $2.3 million for a renovation of its stadium.

Student Athletes Trade In Sticks and Rackets for Trash Bags and Brooms

It has become increasingly common for lower-revenue college sports to rely on their own means for funding, which often involve services for their cash-producing fellow teams.

As an annual team fundraiser, Kider explains, members of the Penn State co-ed championship fencing team spend one Sunday morning a year ridding their school’s 107,000-seat football stadium of trash left behind by the game-going crowds. The fencing team continues its efforts by selling school merchandise at football games throughout the season.

Members of the University of Utah swimming team also work football games, serving as hospitality workers for the stadium suites. Butler’s softball players work as gate attendants at football games and as concessionaires at basketball games, in addition to cleaning the school basketball arena.

Although the NCAA places restrictions on how much time student athletes can spend on team-related activities, those constraints don’t apply to fundraising, Kider notes.

Jeanne Rayman, Butler’s softball coach, uses fundraisers to provide about 15 percent of her team’s annual budget, but has concerns about how much strain the additional work—serving at school football and basketball games, as well as directing traffic at home games for the Indiana Pacers and Indianapolis Colts—creates for her players.

“They have so much going on in their college lives, trying to be the best athletes they can be and trying to have somewhat of a social life,” Rayman’s quoted as saying in Kider’s piece. “It just becomes a daily grind. It’s more of a drain on them than a morale booster.”

What’s Fair Got to Do With It?

Not all out-of-the-spotlight teams resort to types of fundraising that take additional time away from their athletes. Instead, they find other ways of financially supporting themselves.

For instance, says Kider, sports in need of extra funding at Baylor University rely on alumni and other donations to avoid overexerting their players with yearly moneymaking activities.

Some coaches outright object to their student athletes having to work to financially support their teams, particularly since the practice is blatantly unequal, required only of the non-darlings of the college sports world.

“You’re not going to ask a major Division I football or basketball athlete to do a car wash,” says Bob Reasso, the men’s soccer coach at Rutgers. “We have the same caliber athletes.”

These coaches, writes Kider, maintain it’s “unreasonable to ask Division I athletes to participate in small moneymaking projects, especially those that involve working for more profitable programs”— the haloed college football and basketball teams that exist in a whole other isolated dimension from their school’s other sports, regardless of how superior those other teams’ win-loss records may be.

Whereas the financial livelihood of the Penn State fencing team depends on the money it makes by cleaning the school’s football stadium every year, the football team itself has only faced one year where it had to clean its own stadium—and not to fund its existence, but as a coach-imposed punishment for some of its players’ suspected connection to an off-campus fight.

Some of the fencers on Penn’s team, which won its 10^th national title in 18 years last season, still don’t see the situation as fair, but they’re happy to know their football-playing fellow athletes can partake in their cleaning experience.

“I’m glad for once that they’ll have to do it,” says Penn State fencer Jimmy Moody in Kider’s article. “They’ll get a taste of it. They get to see what we do every year.”

But perhaps the lacrosse and rugby players, the softball and soccer players, the fencers and swimmers and rowers of the college world have at least one thing on their more pampered contemporaries: a hard-earned appreciation for the opportunity they’ve been given.

“It’s unfair that we have to put in extra work because our sport might not be as fun to watch. … But it is fair that the school is giving us a chance to work to keep the program around,” says Andrew Brown, a senior swimmer at Utah. “I’m just happy we still have a swimming team.”

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Student Loan Girl

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