On campus, Oct. 4
1. Forget Abbey Road posters or twinkly lights — students at Harvard University are now able to hang a Picasso on their walls. For the first semester in seven years, the Ivy-League university is offering its students the chance to hang up famous pieces from renowned artists like Picasso and Andy Warhol in their dorm rooms for $50 per academic year, The Harvard Crimson first reported. “This close contact fosters an appreciation of art as students learn to care for the works, interpret their meanings, and come to understand the intrinsic power of art,” says Jessica Diedalis, a curricular registrar at the Harvard Art Museums. “I hope that this experience encourages students to develop a lifelong love of art.”
2. Universities like George Washington, Temple and Cornell may have adopted a “test-optional” approach to SAT and ACT scores, but Hampshire College went one step further last fall when it wouldn’t take test scores at all. One year later, the private liberal-arts school in Amherst, Mass., now has the initial results. According to Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash, class diversity “increased to 31% students of color, the most diverse in our history, up from 21% two years ago.” And the percentage of students “who are the first-generation from their family to attend college rose from 12% to 18%.” Lash also says that "no scores meant “every other detail of the student’s application became more vivid.
3. A survey conducted by the Media Insight Project this week suggests that when it comes to Millennials’ news and Internet habits, people fall into four distinct types: the Unattached, the Explorers, the Distracted and the Activists. The largest group at 34%, the Unattached represent those that occasionally look at news, but typically go online for gaming and Netflix. This group, which falls into the 18-24 range, mostly gets its news by running up against it. The people in it don’t have many responsibilities — they haven’t started a family, often don’t have a job — and they’re into social media big time to stay connected with friends, look for jobs, etc. Learn more about the other groups — and discover which group you belong in‚ by visiting college.usatoday.com.
4. When Morgan Briggs’ brother Blake texted her to go find a book in her college library last month, the Wake Forest University freshman couldn’t figure out what he could possibly want. After having her read a specific passage of a poem, Blake asked her to reach under the shelf. She found a note written to her by her brother two years earlier — at a time he couldn’t possibly have known she’d end up at Wake Forest. “We were never really at the same school for long when we were younger,” says Blake, who is seven years older than Morgan. “I didn’t have the opportunity to guide her in school then, so I wanted to leave a note that could serve that purpose.” So he wrote her the letter of advice while she was still a high school sophomore as a kind of map for navigating the four years ahead.
5. It's official — the world's top university it Caltech. London-based Times Higher Education (THE) published its 12th annual World University Rankings Wednesday, and while American schools as a whole have lost some of the mojo they’ve showed in past years, they continue to dominate. THE, a higher-education news source, uses 13 performance indicators when evaluating colleges around the world. These include the international staff-to-international student ratio, and “research excellence assessed through the examination of more than 11 million research papers,” according to the study. THE lists the top 10 schools in the world as:
- California Institute of Technology
- Oxford University
- Stanford University
- University of Cambridge
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
To learn more about the world's top universities, head over to college.usatoday.com.