Plans for the UK?s first newly built university for three decades will be unveiled today ? specialising in engineering and aiming for women to comprise half of all its students and teaching staff.

The Government has been accused of helping indoctrinate children with pro-military values through a new schools pack aimed at promoting the armed forces.

Nearly half of parents in some parts of the country have had their first choice of secondary school rejected, with families in inner cities faring the worst.

Ed Miliband challenged David Cameron and Nick Clegg last night to pledge that they will not raise tuition fees beyond £9,000.

Schools should be more sophisticated about the way they teach British values, Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt said yesterday. Too many just rely on sticking up pictures of the Queen and double-decker buses in the school hall, he told the London Festival of Education conference in London.

Girls should start careers lessons from the age of seven to encourage them to become more ambitious, Labour?s shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt said yesterday.

“Everyone should have an opportunity to participate in higher education.”

With those words, Michael K. Young, President of the University of Washington, opens a new video from his institution’s AccessComputing Project, IT Accessibility: What Campus Leaders Have to Say. Developed with support from the National Science Foundation, this video presents university presidents, chief information officers, and other higher education leaders who stress the importance to higher education of accessibility for persons with disabilities, and of having campus technology environments that support it.

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“When we were doing our studies for the National Academies, the typical first response of university presidents or CFOs or provosts was to say: ‘I understand things are changing very rapidly, but I'll ask my CIO to take care of it. The CIO usually can.’ We would then ask: ‘Suppose you wake up in the morning and come in to your office and nothing works anymore. You can't access e-mail. All of your course systems have collapsed. Who fixes the problem?’ They begin to scratch their heads, and pretty soon it's like the five phases of grief. They start off with denial and anger, move through bargaining and depression, and finally reach acceptance.” — James J. Duderstadt, Change and the Research University

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The EDUCAUSE annual publication of top IT issues has long resonated as a yearly snapshot of the most pressing issues for IT leaders in higher education. At the top of list for 2012:

Below are the EDUCAUSE Review article summarizing the IT Issues Panel's findings for 2012 and accompanying resources.

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This free hour-long session, “Rolling Out a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) Program,” will offer ideas, sample policy statements and guidelines, and lessons learned for campuses interested in implementing a BYOD strategy for mobile devices on campus.

Those unable to attend may wish to visit the archives after the event or browse related resources.

Interact on Twitter at #EDULive.

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As someone who has a vested interest in higher education IT, you are part of a dynamic and close-knit community where we share new ideas, network with peers, and work toward the common good of the profession.

EDUCAUSE provides opportunities to be an active member by volunteering in a variety of roles, either short- or long-term, throughout the year. These opportunities include:

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Gartner predicts that by the end of 2012, agile development methods will be used on 80 percent of all software development projects. Project Management Institute’s research shows that agile project management tripled from December 2008 to May 2011, and can help decrease product defects, improve team productivity, and increase business value.

Read the latest article release on agile project management from the Project Management Institute.

To help you apply project management processes at your organization, EDUCAUSE members have access to a selection of professional development resources:

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Once you begin to play sports seriously, you will most likely spend a lot of time at it. Between games, practice and weight training, more time than you think will be spent striving to become a better player. Because of this, there's a good chance you'll have little time left for anything else.

In 2009, Sports Illustrated did a study of former NFL and NBA players.

This is what the study showed:

To me, these statistics are staggering. How does a person make millions of dollars over his career, yet go broke within five years of leaving his sport? How is this even possible?

The reason this happens though, is because these athletes have no idea what to do outside of their sport. Their minds are so hard-wired for training and practicing, they don't cultivate themselves in other areas of expertise. They spend the prime years of their lives training to be world class athletes, yet they don't realize that they have over 40 years left to live once their careers are over.

This is why you will hear from everybody to get an education. And if you have the opportunity to get one, make the most of it. I know lots of athletes who receive a college scholarship, yet get terrible grades or do something to get into trouble. It's hard enough to receive a college scholarship of any kind. But when you receive that scholarship and blow it all away? That's the worst possible thing you can do.

Excel in school, but you can only learn so much from the classes you take. Learn about lots of different subjects and become an expert in what you are passionate about. Read books, magazines, listen to audio books and start to cultivate your mind early, because the life cycle of most athletes ends at age 25 -- maybe age 30, if you are really good.

However, the life expectancy of a human is over 70 years. After 25 years of playing a sport, you will have at least 45 years left to live. You can ask lots of athletes who have played professionally, and they will say they never thought their careers would end. They thought they would be in the NBA for 10 to 15 years and couldn't even fathom their careers ending.

The average NBA career is less than 3 years, and a player can get injured at any moment or be called into the coach's office and told he is being released from the team. Unless another team picks that player up, he is without a job. This is the career of a professional athlete. It is unstable, ever-changing, risky and short-lived.

My advice: Prepare yourself in all aspects of your life so you don't become a one-dimensional person.

There are many reasons why sports are so valuable for our children to play, no matter what age those children may be. Of course, helping kids develop and maintain physical fitness is one extremely important reason why kids should play sports. Playing sports helps kids stay healthy. In an age of almost epidemic numbers of people suffering from diseases and physical ailments related to obesity or not being at their optimal weight, the more opportunities for kids to be healthy and fit, the better it is for all.

On top of the physical benefits, there are many other reasons why kids should play sports, probably too many to cover in a single blog post. We have all heard it many times now, but sports can teach kids so many valuable life lessons. As coaches, many of us focus on intentionally teaching those life lessons to the young people in our care. The booklet and presentation by the same name, Life Lessons for Athletes, by Bruce Brown, the director of Proactive Coaching, highlights 10 behavioral characteristics that we should be helping kids to learn, understand and develop, not only for their involvement in sports, but for all aspects of their lives. The 10 characteristics are:

While there are certainly more things that playing sports can teach young people, this list is a prime example of many of the qualities and characteristics we can help young people learn by being involved in sports.

However, there is an extremely important caveat to this. In order for us to make sure that sports are teaching young people these things, we must make sure that we are intentional and purposeful about teaching them to our student-athletes. So often we hear people say that sports teach character, but when we look at the games that kids (and adults) are playing, we do not see examples of great character -- and all too often we see the exact opposite. Just because a child runs around on a soccer field or a basketball court for two hours, it does not mean that s/he will learn how to be a better person or learn the value of working hard or any of the other elements on the list above. In fact, too often children are taught (whether intentionally or not) how not to behave. Oftentimes children learn how not to behave from the example of the people who should be teaching them the right way to behave -- coaches and parents. But when coaches (and parents) intentionally design lessons and practice plans that include various elements of character, sportsmanship and life lessons, and then go out and work on those things with their teams, children have a much better chance of learning many positive lessons from their involvement in sports.

So how can coaches and athletic administrators do this? It's quite simple -- incorporate into your practice plans daily or weekly themes and lessons that you will teach. This can be done for 10 or 15 minutes prior to or after practice, where you take a theme of the week (for instance, something on the list above) and you read a paragraph or two about that theme and then discuss it. It is helpful to have some quotes by famous (and not-so-famous) people about that quality and discuss those quotes with players. Some of my favorite moments as a coach have been those 15-minute lessons I have had with my teams, to hear how certain ideas or quotes have affected certain players, and to hear the discussions that were then spawned because of it. This can be a very powerful part of any team's season.

However, it doesn't end there. If we take 15 minutes for four days in a week to discuss sportsmanship or poise, and then in the game on Friday night, I act like a raving lunatic at every call I disagree with, or I run the score up on a much weaker opponent, the 15-minute lessons were worthless -- and possibly even damaging. We must go out and live by the very principles and lessons we are trying to espouse. During the week when we cover sportsmanship, for instance, I will set up moments in practice (that the players don't know are coming) that will test our sportsmanship. I have purposefully made bad calls in scrimmages to see how we handle ourselves and then stopped the scrimmage to address the right or wrong response that we saw.

Sports can be extremely valuable in the growth and development of young people. However, it is up to us as the adults to do everything we can to make sure that what we want them to learn and enjoy from the experience are the very things that we are teaching them.

For more information on Proactive Coaching, visit www.proactivecoaching.info or check out their Facebook page.

Despite all of the wonderful advantages associated with BS/MD programs, they are not appropriate for all students. There are several potential disadvantages. Most of the BS/MD programs prohibit a student from applying to medical schools other than the one associated with the program. While this may not seem like much of a disadvantage, medical schools...Continue Reading >

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There are a number of potential advantages to the student considering a BS/MD program. The obvious advantage is that if you are accepted into a BS/MD program, you no longer have to worry about whether you will be accepted into a medical school. You are accepted. Early acceptance into a BS/MD program can ease your...Continue Reading >

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Starting in April 2015 the MCAT is brand new. So what does this mean for those of you who are interested in attending medical school? The biggest practical change is that the MCAT now has four sections vs the three sections of the old MCAT. The new sections are Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological...Continue Reading >

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We will sometimes have a student interested in a traditional pre-med program also be considering a major in some field of engineering. I have discussed in the past my concerns about majoring in engineering if you want medical school in your future. But for the student who really wants an engineering background, there is another...Continue Reading >

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This time of year many high school juniors are thinking about visiting some colleges over the Spring break. But how do you decide which colleges to actually visit? For most students, it isn’t so much about which specific colleges you visit as it is about visiting different types of colleges. Start by visiting colleges near...Continue Reading >

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We are sometimes asked how we decide on which college to recommend for each student. There are several factors that go into our college recommendations. One of the biggest factors is having the knowledge of hundreds of colleges which we have visited. Kelley and I each visit a number of different colleges around the US every...Continue Reading >

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