KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Expo Hall at the 62nd annual NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference evokes Disney’s Epcot Center. Foreign countries have staked out territory here in America’s heartland to promote themselves as destinations for international students: Study in Japan , Malaysia , Korea ; “Study in the heart of Europe !” (in Belgium ). Over in Canadian country, signs prompt passersby to “Imagine studying” — “?tudier en” — British Columbia , Ontario , Saskatchewan …. Quebec ‘s universities have a separate booth nearby: “A unique crossroads.” The international student market is booming. Foreign student enrollment in the United States is at a record high of 671,616 students. Worldwide, upwards of 3 million students now study outside their home countries, an expanding pie that every country wants a piece of. “As the pie’s increased, more countries are hosting more international students,” Robert Guttierez, senior manager for research and evaluation for the New York-based Institute of International Education , said during a session Tuesday on trends in global student mobility. “So actually the relative share, if you want to call it that, of the United States has dipped from 28 to 21% [from 2001 to 2008], though we host the largest number of international students worldwide, followed by the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia .” Among the countries clamoring to increase their share, China hopes to play host to 300,000 international students by 2020; its current enrollment, per the Institute on International Education’s Atlas of International Student Mobility, is 195,000. Japan, too, has a target of 300,000; it’s at 123,000. “We’ve also seen increased competition, from the U.S., from the U.K and from Canada,” Jen Nielson, manager of education for Australian Education International, said during the session. “Canada has told us that they want to overtake Australia as the third-most popular English-speaking destination. They’ve been really ramping up in certain markets. But also I think [we're facing competition] from more nontraditional competitors, like Singapore, for example, which has positioned itself in the Asia-Pacific region as a hub for attracting international students.” U.S. COMMUNITY COLLEGES: Strive to boost study abroad OPEN DOORS: More U.S. students studying abroad and vice versa Q&A: How to raise ‘global students’ International student inflows and outflows are complex. Students from different countries tend to go to different countries for different reasons. Australia’s largest source country for international students is China, and 40% of Chinese students in Australia are undergraduates, the most popular major being business. Australia’s second-largest source of international students is India, and about two-thirds of Indian students in Australia are in the vocational education sector; the most popular degree is in hospitality management. In the United States, by contrast, Indian students are concentrated at the graduate level, in engineering, computer science, management and business programs, and they are mainly clustered geographically in five states — California, Florida, Massachusetts , Texas and New York , said Rahul Choudaha, associate development of director and innovation for World Education Services, during a session on international student mobility. India sends more foreign students to the United States than any other country, and Choudaha doesn’t expect the numbers to drop any time soon. INTERNATIONAL RECRUITERS: Ethical debates remain as practice grows INSIDE HIGHER ED: EU business schools look for U.S. respect, market ON THE WEB: Entangling alliances between British recruiters, U.S. college Although India has rapidly been building up its own higher education system — enrollment in Indian engineering programs grew from 115,000 to 653,000 between 1997 and 2007, for example — the expansion, he said, has come at the expense of quality. Much of the growth has been among poor or average-quality institutions, which he called the “laggards” (as opposed to the “achievers” and the “aspirers”). (“Maybe,” he said, laughing, during a follow-up interview, “I should be more politically correct.” He cautioned, too, that he was speaking of the quality of the institutions and not of the students they attract.) The whole point is that, while the system is developing, there aren’t yet enough high-quality Indian institutions for high-quality students to attend. This being the case, Choudaha said, “I believe that the demand for international education will remain very high.” In Latin America, demand for international education is very low, as is supply: “Mobility to and from Latin America is unfortunately very low, and not only is it low, it’s uneven,” said Thomas Buntru, director of international programs for the Universidad de Monterrey and president of the Mexican Association for International Education. Just 0.17% of students in Latin American universities are of foreign nationality, and just 0.87% of Latin American students study abroad. Most exchange that does happen involves the United States (65%) and Europe (21%), followed by Asia (8%), Oceania (3%) and Africa (3%). Buntru cited a number of limiting factors, among them low academic reputations of Latin American universities (as measured, for instance, in international rankings), insufficient course offerings in foreign languages, especially English, and financial constraints, as most countries in the region have either developing or emerging economies. All that said, Buntro said he was cautiously optimistic about the potential for growth, in part because of the growing importance of Spanish as an international language. Back in the Expo Hall, countries and colleges promoted themselves, as did a wide range of for-profit companies that have developed to support study abroad and international student recruitment and services: credential evaluators, insurance companies (Cultural Insurance Services International: “You can’t imagine what kind of trouble your students can get into”), study abroad providers, testing companies, and recruitment agencies (the use of agents in recruiting in international students to the United States is on the rise). At the very back of the expo hall were the hometown institutions — Kansas State and Park Universities, the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the Study Missouri Consortium all have booths. Of the 671,616 foreign students studying in the United States in 2008-9, 11,285 came to Missouri, and 8,668 to Kansas.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Expo Hall at the 62nd annual NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference evokes Disney’s Epcot Center. Foreign countries have staked out territory here in America’s heartland to promote themselves as destinations for international students: Study in Japan , Malaysia , Korea ; “Study in the heart of Europe !” (in Belgium ). Over in Canadian country, signs prompt passersby to “Imagine studying” — “?tudier en” — British Columbia , Ontario , Saskatchewan …. Quebec ‘s universities have a separate booth nearby: “A unique crossroads.” The international student market is booming. Foreign student enrollment in the United States is at a record high of 671,616 students. Worldwide, upwards of 3 million students now study outside their home countries, an expanding pie that every country wants a piece of. “As the pie’s increased, more countries are hosting more international students,” Robert Guttierez, senior manager for research and evaluation for the New York-based Institute of International Education , said during a session Tuesday on trends in global student mobility. “So actually the relative share, if you want to call it that, of the United States has dipped from 28 to 21% [from 2001 to 2008], though we host the largest number of international students worldwide, followed by the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia .” Among the countries clamoring to increase their share, China hopes to play host to 300,000 international students by 2020; its current enrollment, per the Institute on International Education’s Atlas of International Student Mobility, is 195,000. Japan, too, has a target of 300,000; it’s at 123,000. “We’ve also seen increased competition, from the U.S., from the U.K and from Canada,” Jen Nielson, manager of education for Australian Education International, said during the session. “Canada has told us that they want to overtake Australia as the third-most popular English-speaking destination. They’ve been really ramping up in certain markets. But also I think [we're facing competition] from more nontraditional competitors, like Singapore, for example, which has positioned itself in the Asia-Pacific region as a hub for attracting international students.” U.S. COMMUNITY COLLEGES: Strive to boost study abroad OPEN DOORS: More U.S. students studying abroad and vice versa Q&A: How to raise ‘global students’ International student inflows and outflows are complex. Students from different countries tend to go to different countries for different reasons. Australia’s largest source country for international students is China, and 40% of Chinese students in Australia are undergraduates, the most popular major being business. Australia’s second-largest source of international students is India, and about two-thirds of Indian students in Australia are in the vocational education sector; the most popular degree is in hospitality management. In the United States, by contrast, Indian students are concentrated at the graduate level, in engineering, computer science, management and business programs, and they are mainly clustered geographically in five states — California, Florida, Massachusetts , Texas and New York , said Rahul Choudaha, associate development of director and innovation for World Education Services, during a session on international student mobility. India sends more foreign students to the United States than any other country, and Choudaha doesn’t expect the numbers to drop any time soon. INTERNATIONAL RECRUITERS: Ethical debates remain as practice grows INSIDE HIGHER ED: EU business schools look for U.S. respect, market ON THE WEB: Entangling alliances between British recruiters, U.S. college Although India has rapidly been building up its own higher education system — enrollment in Indian engineering programs grew from 115,000 to 653,000 between 1997 and 2007, for example — the expansion, he said, has come at the expense of quality. Much of the growth has been among poor or average-quality institutions, which he called the “laggards” (as opposed to the “achievers” and the “aspirers”). (“Maybe,” he said, laughing, during a follow-up interview, “I should be more politically correct.” He cautioned, too, that he was speaking of the quality of the institutions and not of the students they attract.) The whole point is that, while the system is developing, there aren’t yet enough high-quality Indian institutions for high-quality students to attend. This being the case, Choudaha said, “I believe that the demand for international education will remain very high.” In Latin America, demand for international education is very low, as is supply: “Mobility to and from Latin America is unfortunately very low, and not only is it low, it’s uneven,” said Thomas Buntru, director of international programs for the Universidad de Monterrey and president of the Mexican Association for International Education. Just 0.17% of students in Latin American universities are of foreign nationality, and just 0.87% of Latin American students study abroad. Most exchange that does happen involves the United States (65%) and Europe (21%), followed by Asia (8%), Oceania (3%) and Africa (3%). Buntru cited a number of limiting factors, among them low academic reputations of Latin American universities (as measured, for instance, in international rankings), insufficient course offerings in foreign languages, especially English, and financial constraints, as most countries in the region have either developing or emerging economies. All that said, Buntro said he was cautiously optimistic about the potential for growth, in part because of the growing importance of Spanish as an international language. Back in the Expo Hall, countries and colleges promoted themselves, as did a wide range of for-profit companies that have developed to support study abroad and international student recruitment and services: credential evaluators, insurance companies (Cultural Insurance Services International: “You can’t imagine what kind of trouble your students can get into”), study abroad providers, testing companies, and recruitment agencies (the use of agents in recruiting in international students to the United States is on the rise). At the very back of the expo hall were the hometown institutions — Kansas State and Park Universities, the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the Study Missouri Consortium all have booths. Of the 671,616 foreign students studying in the United States in 2008-9, 11,285 came to Missouri, and 8,668 to Kansas.

This is a preview of a week-long video series starting Monday, May 24 about people who are veterans, single parents, full-time workers — and students, too. Click “see trailers” (above, left) now for the preview, and check back here, students2.usatoday.com , next week for the full video on each featured student. What comes to mind when you hear “college student”? To many Americans , it’s someone who goes to college straight from high school, lives in a dorm, and gets a degree four years later. But things have changed. Three-fourths of today’s students no longer fit that traditional model. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, about half of today’s students are financially independent; 49% are enrolled part-time; 38% work full time; 27% have dependents of their own. Almost half — 12 million — attend two-year community colleges rather than four-year schools. And most students who start college don’t finish. Only 56% of students at four-year colleges complete a degree within six years, and just 20% of first-time students at public community colleges get a degree or certificate within three years. In their own words A video project dubbed “Take America to College” aims to tell the story of today’s non-traditional college students in their own words and images. The project organizers in January put out a casting call and more than 200 nontraditional college students responded by sending in their stories; 78 uploaded audition videos. Five were chosen to represent the millions of students who struggle to complete a college degree. They are: •Dennis Medina, a police officer and a night student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston; •Kathryn McCormick, a single mom who waitresses 35 hours a week and is enrolled at Valencia Community College in Orlando •Shane Burrows, who works full-time as a sales assistant while studying at Sierra Community College in Rocklin, Calif.; •Brandon Krapf, an Iraq war veteran studying at American University in Washington, D.C.; •Charnee Ball, a Navy veteran, also at Valencia Community College in Orlando The students each received $500 and won a trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with policymakers. Their stories are featured in a week-long series of videos airing online here at students2.usatoday.com starting May 24. The videos are produced by Purple States TV, a media company that uses both professionally filmed and self-filmed video footage to dramatize issues of public policy, in collaboration with DCTV and the Seattle-based social marketing firm Banyan Branch, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Kodak donated Zi8 Pocket Video Cameras used by the students to capture and share their stories. Real students, real stories More background on the five team members and their stories: •Dennis Medina — a Boston police officer chosen for the team in an online contest. “I’m not your stereotypical student,” Medina says. “I wear plain clothes with the Boston Police Department Youth Violence Strike Force also known as the gang unit. When I was employed by the corrections office, I started taking college classes, but money got tight, and life got in the way. When I moved to the Boston Police Department, I realized that without a college degree I couldn’t further my career. I can only take one or two classes a semester. Going to college is almost impossible … I have court during the day, then I have my regular shift which is 4 p.m. to midnight. I also have family obligations. I live with my wife, two sons and a daughter and my grandson also lives with us.” •Kathryn McCormick — A single parent and full-time waitress, studying to become a physician assistant. “Each year I take out about $15,000 in student loans to pay my bills. This is an incredibly large amount of money that is going to take me a long time to pay off when I get out of school,” she says. “It’s also not enough to pay my bills. I still have to work. The program I’m trying to get in is extremely competitive and I need every single ounce of my time that I can possibly squeeze out of my day to make sure that my grades are perfect. I’d love to see a change in financial aid as far as the one-size-fits-all cap that they have. It doesn’t matter whether you are a single mom of two kids and struggling and working and trying to do the best that you can. A person who’s a single person still gets the same amount of money as you do. That’s really hard.” •Shane Burrows — Works full time as a sales assistant while accumulating college credits toward an associates degree; he wants to be a music teacher. He is having trouble completing his degree because core courses aren’t available in the evenings, or are being cut because of California’s budget crisis. “When I turned 18, I dropped out of college and worked two jobs because I just couldn’t afford to pay for my education,” he says. “I lost my mom when I was only 7. My dad could only afford to provide a house over our heads, food, clothing, and basics to get by. I needed to work to live and unfortunately I had to put school on the side. After taking five years off school, I decided to go back part time at a junior college. I work full time and quit my second job so I could have time for school. I would love to take more than four classes a semester but I can barely afford to live let alone pay for classes and books. I’m drowning in debt and on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. With rising tuition costs and budget cuts cutting classes, I feel like I’ll never finish.” •Brandon Krapf — an Iraq war veteran, now in the Army reserves and a senior at American University, in Washington, D.C. “When you get the GI Bill it’s supposed to cover tuition but you end up living off of it. They don’t come and tell you, ‘Oh hey, listen, you also have to cover books, rent and your regular bills on top of that.” Luckily with the post 9-11 GI Bill it’s been a lot easier for student vets but there’s still been a lot of troubles with it, especially last semester when they had a huge influx of new applications for the GI Bill. Going to school’s probably put me in debt with student loans a good $100,000 dollars.” •Charnee Ball — Navy veteran who wants to be an aviation mechanic. She is not receiving GI benefits because she was discharged under the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. “I know the people who make those decisions think it’s for the greater good, but believe me, there’s been so many qualified technicians and officers and people who went and did their job and served their country that have been discharged for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I did my job. I served my country. And when I need it most, I’m not eligible (for benefits). So it’s really hard for me to make it through, to realize my dream of becoming an aviation mechanic. Right now I’m about $38,000 in debt from student loans. It is a struggle every day to find the money to make ends meet.” Have questions about the students’ college experiences? Leave them in the comments, or save them for a live discussion with Take America to College participants on May 26, 2010 at 1 p.m. ET. You can set an e-mail reminder for the chat in the window below. Chat with the students

IRVINE, Calif. — If campus activism still brings to mind peace signs, a sea of white faces and liberal strongholds like Berkeley , meet Jesse Cheng. Cheng is a third-year Asian-American studies major at the University of California , Irvine, a campus less than five decades old in the middle of Orange County , a place of strip malls and subdivisions that gave birth to the ultraconservative John Birch Society . Comfortable talking with both administrators and anarchists, Cheng is a presence at protests but avoids getting arrested. He doesn’t want to put his graduation at risk or upset his mother, who worked hard to get him here and worries for his safety because she witnessed what happened to dissidents in her native China . Cheng is part of a growing movement of minority students rallying around a new cause — fighting a budget crisis that’s undermining access to higher education at a time when students of color have become a stronger demographic force. “For a lot of students of color, this is our dream and our hope — to get to college,” said Cheng, who is about to start a one-year term representing students from all 10 University of California campuses on the system’s board of regents. “We never thought we’d make it and we’re here. And we’re not going to give it up so easily.” While talk about a rebirth of student activism surfaces every few years whenever sweatshop labor or some other cause draws a decent crowd, some observers believe organizing around threats to higher education has the potential to grow into something big, maybe even a national movement. But a visit to a developing activist hotspot like UC-Irvine — where tensions have run high this year over everything from student tuition hikes to gender-neutral bathrooms and Middle East politics — illustrate the challenges involved. The increased diversity of students, many of them the first in their families to attend college, is both a strength and a liability. Splits have emerged over tactics and agendas, making coalition-building more challenging than ever. “It’s a very diverse group, a lot of students of color, which makes it more difficult to organize,” said Alejandra Ocasio, a fourth-year student from San Diego active in a Hispanic campus student association. “We all have our own interests. It can be difficult to reconcile those things.” At 27,000-student UC-Irvine, the scene includes a Pakistani-American working behind the scenes on budget issues as her own financial aid disappears, a Filipino-American struggling to shake fellow Asian students from political apathy and a gay African-American activist who thinks the focus on student fees obscures larger problems like the evils of capitalism. The fact that students of color are at the forefront of campus protests marks a significant shift, said Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University in New York who has studied student activism. “In the past, minorities have tended to provide leadership for the minority protests,” Levine said. “Now they’ve moved to center stage. They’re leading the protests.” On a recent morning, Cheng led a quick tour of activism at UC-Irvine. Here, he explained, is the designated “free-speech zone” in front of the administration building. About 1,000 people, a big crowd for a campus often maligned as apathetic, crowded onto the steps and filled an area between two flagpoles on March 4, a national day of college student demonstrations against tuition hikes and program cuts. “Everyone was silent,” Cheng recalled. “It felt more like a lecture. I mean, it was a great moment — a teaching moment. But it wasn’t a punch-you-in-the-face kind of deal.” Therein lies one challenge to organizing a movement around budget issues: a massive fee increase like the one UC students are facing this year is painful and personal. But it’s not as visceral as, say, the Vietnam War , which was a matter of life and death for students of the 60s and 70s facing the draft. “Our crisis is different — and our demographics are very different,” Cheng said. The March 4 Day of Action for Public Education began as a California-only event, a sequel to fall demonstrations against the state Board of Regents’ decision to boost UC undergraduate fees, the equivalent of tuition this fall by 32% for in-state students. The $2,500 fee hike brings UC education fees to about $10,300, plus about another $1,000 for campus-based charges. Despite no real organization, the protest spread nationwide. Most demonstrations were peaceful, although protesters threw punches and ice chunks in Milwaukee and shut down a major freeway in Oakland, during rush-hour traffic. It’s no accident that California, with its ethnic diversity and severe budget problems, is the epicenter of revived activism, said Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism who teaches at the City University of New York. The momentum building over budget problems, Johnston said, “speaks to the demographic transformation of the student body. In the 1960s, the average student was coming from a family of means, someone who was white, male, with a history of academic achievement in the family. In 2010, none of those things are as likely.” Johnston said the combination of students of lesser means taking on greater loans and American public higher education buckling under diminished state support and recession is a recipe for greater student engagement. In California, Cheng is joined in the cause by first-generation minority college students such as Victor Sanchez, who attends the University of California, Santa Cruz and leads the University of California Student Association. “It’s more than just fighting for what’s morally right,” said Sanchez, who has a Mexican father and Costa Rican mother and describes fighting for access to honors programs and Advanced Placement courses in high school. “It’s righting the wrongs of our own experiences, the stuff we’ve gone through, for our brothers and sisters and generations after.” Like much contemporary student activism, Sanchez and Cheng combine direct action and lobbying. Their pragmatism leads them to meet with administrators to press causes such as preserving the Cal Grant program for low-income students and boosting financial aid for their undocumented peers. But Sanchez also sees value in standing apart when the moment is right — like when he was kicked out of the state Capitol after staging a “study-in.” The point was to call attention to diminishing state support that has led to fee increases, staff furloughs and program cuts at a system considered the jewel of American public higher education. “For me, it’s most effective to have one foot in and one foot out,” Sanchez said. “What’s the point of addressing the powers that be if you don’t meet with them? We have to be a thorn in their sides and strong enough to advocate without losing our position.” At UC-Irvine, capturing students’ attention is another challenge shaped by cultural currents. Many Asian and Asian-American students, who are by far the largest racial group on campus at 47% of the student body, come from more moderate to conservative families and shy from political action, said Justine Calma, who became involved in campus activism by co-chairing a Filipino student organization. “Who isn’t opposed to a 32% fee increase?” Calma said one recent afternoon at the university’s Cross-Cultural Center, or “The Cross,” a gathering spot for minority student activists. “It’s not really a contentious issue. To see just a few of us come out … I fight for every handful.” UC-Irvine’s year of tumult is catalogued in messages scrawled in chalk on campus sidewalks and stairwells. “Free Gaza,” reads one. “Funeral for Education” says another. Then there is the more benign, “Good luck on your midterms.” The university has long been a hotbed of Muslim-Jewish tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the latest flare-up, 11 students, afterward known as the “Irvine 11″ were arrested in February for repeatedly interrupting a talk by Michael Oren , Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Next came the “Irvine 17,” a group staging a sit-in with a list of a dozen demands ranging from gender-neutral bathrooms for transgender students to disarming police officers of Tasers. Restoring budget cuts was on the list, too. A group that included members of the Radical Student Union, a group of self-described anarchists and Marxists, occupied the library to protest reduced hours. Then, on May 4, students dressed in black staged a mock “Funeral for Education” complete with a wooden coffin. Some longtime activists, minority students among them, are wary of focusing too narrowly on the higher-education budget crisis. Ryan Davis, a gay African-American student and one of the Irvine 17, said rising student fees are just a symptom of the larger problem of a “racist, hetero-normative, capitalist structure we want to take down by any means necessary.” To Davis, that flawed structure allows for curriculum that glosses over minority contributions, campus workers not extended job protections and student bodies that don’t reflect the state’s diversity well enough. “We’re just trying to make sure that’s highlighted and we’re not just washing over that in all the rhetoric over fee hikes,” said Davis, of San Diego. Yet Davis said he doesn’t see student activists who work with administrators and elected officials on the budget crisis as enemies. And work-within-the-system students like Sarah Bana say they need students like Davis. “If Ryan doesn’t yell at people and tell them what is wrong, I can’t say, ‘Here is one little way you can fix it,’” said Bana, executive vice president of Associated Students of UC-Irvine, the undergraduate student government. A Pakistani-American whose father is a wholesale jeweler in downtown Los Angeles, Bana said the budget crisis drew her into activism. She receives both Pell and Cal Grants for low-income students. Over the last three years her financial aid was cut in half. An extra roommate recently moved into her apartment to save another $100 a month in rent. Manuel Gomez, UC-Irvine’s vice chancellor for student affairs, said the efforts of student leaders such as Cheng and Bana have already made a difference. He pointed to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘s recent promise to veto any state budget that does not include more money for higher education as a gesture that might not have happened without student protests. “There’s traction here, real traction,” Gomez said. “This affects children. It affects children’s futures … My question is, ‘Is the vision compelling enough to sustain itself beyond reducing fees?’ Is has to go beyond anger.” With the mass actions from two months ago fading from memory, attention now shifts to a high-stakes California budget revision this month. Higher education’s share hangs in the balance. The next student regent for the UC system, the friend to radicals and administrators alike, has three simple goals moving forward: to get students into college, make them feel safe there and get them out with a degree. “I definitely think this is the birth of something,” Cheng said. “I’m not sure what the something is yet.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

SACRAMENTO (AP) — The state of California would hold parents responsible if their children regularly skip school, under a bill passed Thursday by the state Senate. The measure would let prosecutors charge parents with misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine if their kids are chronically truant. Sen. Mark Leno , a Democrat from San Francisco, says SB1317 is a public safety measure because children who do poorly in school or drop out are more likely to commit crimes. Judges could delay the punishment to parents as an incentive to get their children in class. The measure passed the Senate on a 21-9 vote and now goes to the Assembly. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — A first-of-its-kind law bars public high schools in Maryland from automatically sending student scores on a widely used military aptitude test to recruiters, a practice that critics say was giving the armed forces backdoor access to young people without their parents’ consent. School districts around the country have the choice of whether to administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery exam, and ones that offer it typically pass the scores and students’ contact information directly to the military. Topics on the test range from math and reading to knowledge of electronics and automobiles. The Maryland law, the first in the nation after similar California legislation was vetoed, was signed last month and bars schools from automatically releasing the information to military recruiters. Instead, students, and their parents if they are under 18, will have to decide whether to give the information to the military. The law takes effect in July. One other state, Hawaii , has a similar policy for its schools, but not a law. Roughly 650,000 U.S. high school students took the exam in the 2008-2009 school year, and the Department of Defense says scores for 92% of them were automatically sent to military recruiters. In the fiscal year that ended in September, 7.6% of those who enlisted in the military used scores from the test as part of their applications. Nancy Grasmick , Maryland Superintendent of Schools, said in a letter to lawmakers that the test and score analysis are “free services that public schools often utilize as part of their ongoing career development and exploration programs.” Grasmick took no position on the legislation in her letter and did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. Defense Department spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said the data is used both to screen students’ enlistment eligibility and to determine their interests and skills for nonmilitary careers. Asked about criticism that the military is going around parents, Lainez said in an e-mail that “parents and other influencers are in the best position to help advise students of various career opportunities, and the pros and cons associated with each of the choices.” PROTESTS: Military-backed public schools on the rise HIGHER ED: Military academies, few others tuition-free JUNIOR ROTC: ‘More than a class’ to students Members of the Maryland Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, which pushed for the legislation, argued the military isn’t upfront about the test’s real purpose. Coalition member and high school teacher Pat Elder said he became involved in the issue after volunteering on a phone hot line for troubled soldiers. Many told him they hadn’t considered the military until a recruiter who’d seen their scores contacted them. “I’ve spoken to ‘C’ or ‘D’ students who are called by a recruiter and told ‘Dude, you’re really good at this kind of stuff,’ and that’s what it takes for them to join,” said Elder, who teaches at the Muslim Community School in Potomac, Md. “There is an insidious, psychological element to these tests.” While Maryland is the first state to pass a law prohibiting the automatic release of scores to military recruiters, some individual school districts elsewhere, including the Los Angeles school system, have policies to the same effect. Hawaii’s Department of Education implemented its statewide policy last year. Four Maryland counties — Howard, Frederick, Montgomery and Prince George’s — also blocked the direct release of scores to recruiters before the state law was passed. State legislators in California passed a similar measure in 2008, but it was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger . School districts in Maryland have had different policies for when and how they administer the roughly 3.5 hour multiple-choice exam. Some school districts, like rural Allegany County, only offer the test to students at a technical high school, while individual schools in the Baltimore City district can choose whether to administer the exam. Maryland state senator Jamie Raskin, D-Montgomery, said he sponsored the bill partly because school districts’ approaches varied. He said constituents also told him they didn’t think local school districts knew their options. “They thought they had to turn over information to recruiters,” Raskin said. Some argued that the measure was antimilitary. Baltimore County Republican Sen. Andy Harris said the legislation gives students the impression that they should be skeptical of military careers. “I think sending any message while we’re at war overseas that the military in any way is not an honorable profession is the wrong message to send,” Harris said. Del. Sheila Hixson, D-Montgomery, sponsored the bill in the House, bristled at that argument. “For me, it wasn’t the military piece, it was the parental permission,” Hixson said. “Parents didn’t know what was going on and children didn’t realize what was going on.” Toria Latnie, who now lives in Michigan, said a counselor at her son’s Florida charter high school told seniors in late 2008 that the military aptitude test was a requirement for graduation. Latnie researched the exam online and refused to allow her son to take the test. “I was angry, very angry,” said Latnie, a mother of five. “I felt lied to, deceived, like people were trying to go behind my back and give my child’s private information to the military.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON — Facing a recession and the coming end of billions of dollars in federal stimulus funding, school districts nationwide are handing teachers pink slips for the upcoming school year. The Obama administration estimates that as many as 300,000 teachers could lose their jobs unless Congress steps in with emergency money. The cuts may ultimately be milder than the dire predictions — and critics are already joking that school advocates should soften the “teacherpocalypse” rhetoric. But the grim predictions have already generated protests. Teachers in several states have rallied to keep school funding, and across the USA, teachers today will wear pink hearts as part of a national “Pink Hearts, Not Pink Slips” campaign organized by the American Federation of Teachers , the nation’s second-largest teachers union. A Los Angeles-area PTA even persuaded actress Megan Fox to film a comedy short dramatizing the effects of school budget cuts — and mocking California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘s tough-guy image. The film, viewed nearly 1 million times on the Funny Or Die website, closes with Fox urging viewers to “call, write and annoy the governor until he cries for his mommy.” California hit hard U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday that the situation was serious. “I’m very, very concerned,” he said in an interview. “I can’t say that strongly enough.” Although most of the pink slips are conditional on final budget calculations — and in many cases warnings are required by teacher contracts — the teachers federation says there’s little good budget news in most of the hardest-hit states, which include California (36,000 pink slips), Illinois (20,000 jobs threatened), Michigan (4,000) and cities such as New York (8,500). ANALYSIS: Pension funds for teachers are short billions REVERSAL: Teacher shortage gives way to teacher glut FIRING TEACHERS: Useless or 1st step to reform? The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in March that state deficits “of a very large magnitude are likely to persist for another two or three years,” and that despite improvements in the economy, state budget pictures in 2011 and 2012 “look as bad, or nearly as bad, as those for 2009 and 2010.” It estimates that states will face total deficits as large as $260 billion beyond what the stimulus can provide. Sen. Tom Harkin , D-Iowa, has proposed $23 billion to help schools keep hundreds of thousands of teachers. Duncan hasn’t endorsed the bill but says Congress should act soon. “There are pink slips being sent out as we speak,” Duncan said, “so unless something changes, those are layoffs that are going to happen.” A few critics have pointed out that virtually all of the pink slips are based on preliminary budget estimates and that real job losses could be smaller. “This is a slightly larger than normal version of the nearly annual phenomenon in which school districts and teachers unions use the media to try and scare parents to scare lawmakers into funding education,” says education blogger Alexander Russo. The short Fox film dramatizes the effects of budget cuts on an L.A.-area elementary school. It was sponsored by the Wonderland Avenue Elementary School PTA in Laurel Canyon. Principal Don Wilson, who appears briefly in the film, says the project began as a letter-writing campaign for kids, but the PTA expanded it and asked Fox’s boyfriend, Brian Austin Green , a Wonderland Avenue parent, to pitch in. The duo and production staff worked free. Cuts are real for one principal Response to the film, Wilson says, has been “overwhelmingly positive.” Among other things, it earned the PTA president a trip to Sacramento to talk with Schwarzenegger’s staff. Wilson says most of the cuts at his school are real — since last May he has lost an assistant principal and special-education teacher; his nurse now shows up just once a week. This year, three of 21 teachers have been pink-slipped — he believes that two of the jobs will be saved. In one of the film’s more jarring moments, Fox looks on as a fifth-grader complains about school conditions — in Korean. No one can translate. Wilson says the exchange is fairly typical. Though most of the Korean-American children at Wonderland Avenue speak English, few Korean parents do. He has been trying to get a translator on staff “for years,” he says: “Almost half of our school is Korean, and nobody speaks Korean.”

A few years ago, any discussion of the master’s in business administration would begin with discussions of scandal and mismanagement. Look at instances of accounting fraud at Enron and WorldCom : MBAs behaving badly. A president of the United States with mixed approval ratings and plenty of opponents in his own party: an MBA whose leadership skills seemed lacking. Business school discourse today has a new set of topical lessons, emphasizing the roles played by MBAs in precipitating the global recession and creating financial products that benefited corporations but hurt consumers. “When we bring students into business school, we narrow their vision,” says Stephen Spinelli, president of Philadelphia University and co-founder of the Jiffy Lube auto service company. “We teach them to focus with increasing blinders until they have pinpoint recognition, but that limits what they can see on the periphery.” A much-maligned concept like mortgage-backed securities, he says, “in its construct … could be taken as being sound — a hard asset that has clear value.” With broader perspective, they’re tougher to define and much riskier than they might seem. “You become dislocated from the person and their ability to pay that loan, the value of the property, what’s happening in the neighborhood around that property and what’s happening with the job market in that city and region.” The financial crisis has administrators and faculty at business schools around the country rethinking that narrowing approach. Courses and curriculums are being revised to avoid building silos in business schools and students’ minds. Words — and ideas — like globalization, innovation and sustainability are taking hold. Though he first started thinking about broadening students’ perspectives a decade ago while serving as vice provost at Babson College , Spinelli says that his ideas solidified as he watched investment banks crumble and ordinary people face foreclosure. “If we don’t teach people to sort of look around and have greater peripheral vision, then we’ve just set ourselves up for the next crisis,” he says. In the fall of 2011, Philadelphia will roll out a revamped MBA program that will emphasize collaboration with the university’s engineering and design schools. Business students will work on hands-on projects with students in other fields, all with the aim of preparing them to collaborate once on the job. “We used to think it was highly collaborative when marketing and finance were working together,” Spinelli says. “Now we see that partnerships need to be much broader; three-dimensional collaboration needs to be taught.” Yash Gupta, dean of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, has a similar perspective. “What has happened in the last 18 months has shown that you cannot manage a complex system by dividing it into smaller pieces and optimizing those pieces without considering the whole,” he says. “You cannot build an organization by simply maximizing shareholders’ value. Customers, employees, the general public are important.” BEFORE COLLEGE: In-school banks dispense financial sense In building a curriculum at Carey, which spun off from Hopkins’ School of Professional Studies in Business and Education in 2007, Gupta looked to industry for recommendations. Among the abilities and skills companies said they wanted from their employees: adapting to change and being flexible; critical thinking; a broad worldview; connecting invention with innovation; and linking content to context. All of those things, Gupta says, will be interspersed throughout the global MBA program that Carey is beginning this fall. Rather than simply having one class on ethics or decision making as some other schools do, the curriculum will include those skills throughout. “We’ll teach students about decision making — behavioral, rational, how the brain functions — in the first year, but we’ll also give them chances to make decisions,” he says. “We’ll bring in CEOs or prominent academics to talk about ethics and ethical concepts, how managers sort things out and decide which decision is the right decision.” Carey will treat globalization similarly. Rather than taking a few classes on international business or an optional specialization, all students will work on projects in the developing world and spend time learning to work with people from different backgrounds. The school is taking the right approach, says John J. Fernandes, president and CEO of the AACSB: Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the world’s largest business school accreditor. “You can’t look at things as compartmentalized,” he says; everything needs to be interconnected, and everything must be contextualized to everything else. “After Enron and WorldCom, everyone said, ‘Let’s teach ethics,’ but they did it in the corner as this separate discussion,” Fernandes says. “But it is best taught across every business discipline because they all have different ethics challenges.… It’s best taught across everything we do.” At Harvard Business School , where administrators insist that ethics has always been incorporated throughout the MBA curriculum, it became clear that there was a need for students to get a solid dose of ethics. In 2004, the school began requiring all students to take “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” during the second term of their first year. David A. Garvin, a professor of business administration, describes the course as “a way to give students a sense of the responsibilities that they will have to all these different stakeholder groups.” With shareholders, they’ll have to worry about fiduciary responsibilities. With customers, “information asymmetries” (as Garvin explains it, “Under what circumstances do you need to disclose?”). With employees, students will be educated about treating them fairly. With the public at large, MBAs’ responsibilities may be even greater — to deal with issues like child labor and freedom of speech. Though these were all pre-financial crisis concerns, the high-profile ethical lapses that helped precipitate the downturn have only intensified the sense that MBA programs need to do more to create ethical graduates. Students in Harvard Business School’s class of 2009 drafted and spread “The MBA Oath,” a brief code of ethics that has been signed by more than 2,500 MBAs and business students. In conducting research for Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads , a book published last month, Garvin says he heard from executives and deans who, after well-publicized accounts of unfair business practices and gigantic post-bailout bonuses, hoped to see ethics education ramped up. “There was a sense of a greater need in helping students understand the roles, responsibilities and purpose of business and business leaders.” ON THE WEB: The B-school glass ceiling INSIDE HIGHER ED ARCHIVE: De-departmentalizing biz school Executives and deans also told Garvin that they saw a need for students to better understand “the limits of models and markets — risk, restraint and regulation,” he says. Before the economic crisis, they came up with an even lengthier list of near-universal needs: 1. Having a global perspective. 2. Developing leadership skills. 3. Improving integration skills. 4. Understanding organizational realities and implementing them more effectively. 5. The ability to act creatively and innovatively. 6. Thinking critically and communicating clearly. None of the needs are too surprising, but they are tough things to teach that business schools must continue working on. Creativity and innovation are at the core of a new report from the AACSB, in which a task force of deans, university presidents and business leaders calls on business schools to play a larger role in innovation. Although business schools are “built to go in a lot of different directions, and we as an accrediting body don’t try to push them one way or the other,” says Fernandes, the association’s president, innovation is something administrators and faculty should be thinking about. “If the light’s not already turned on, it turns that light on for them, that they should apply an innovative intention to their strategies.” Business schools don’t have to be hotbeds of invention, just places where students and faculty develop better processes and products. Robert S. Sullivan, dean of the Rady School of Management at the University of California at San Diego, points to Apple ‘s creation of devices like the iPad as the sort of thing business schools ought to be training students to do. “The technology in the iPad is not a new invention,” he says, “but Apple looked around the corner in terms of figuring out what people want without necessarily asking them.” And the products that business schools must train students to develop aren’t just glitzy gadgets or risky financial instruments; they’re things that will benefit humanity — business schools hope. “If the world has shrunk, then business schools must solve the world’s problems,” says Gupta, of the Carey School. People who face challenges of “poverty, education, health: these are going to be my customers and employees tomorrow, so business schools must help them, too.”