NEW YORK — Universities are buying up chunks of land at bargain prices, sometimes without a clear idea how they’ll be used. Some are taking advantage of good sales during a sluggish economy, while others, like Columbia University , are continuing a practice they’ve done for decades, buying even if the price isn’t discounted. The University of Dayton last year acquired the 115-acre world headquarters of technology company NCR Corp for the fire sale price of $18 million after buying 50 acres from the company for three times the per-acre price in 2005. And the University of Delaware last year bought a 272-acre former Chrysler auto plant for $24 million. The schools are banking on future growth to make their purchases good investments. In the interim, many are leasing the properties they’re not using until they need them. It’s good that colleges are looking years or even decades ahead, but investing in real estate can be risky, academic research analyst Jane Wellman said. “People who just lost their shirts in the last real estate crash know the risk of real estate as an investment portfolio,” Wellman said. Colleges “are banking that now is the low point in real estate, and it may not be.” For years, Columbia bought land wherever it could, amassing more than 17 acres on Manhattan’s Upper West Side between 2002 and 2009. Construction has begun on a multibillion-dollar expansion that would build new housing, laboratories, open space and tree-lined sidewalks. University President Lee Bollinger said it won’t be finished for at least 30 years. And while some of the space has been dedicated to specific departments, Bollinger said he’s intentionally not deciding how the rest of the buildings will be used. Dan Fasulo, a managing director for real estate research firm Real Capital Analytics, says many colleges are jumping at new opportunities to buy land cheaply since the economic slump. Some schools say the economic downturn drove prices so low that it was cheaper to buy land with existing buildings now than it would be to construct new ones later. University of Dayton President Daniel Curran thought he got “the deal of a lifetime” five years ago, when the Ohio university bought 50 acres from NCR Corp. for $25 million. Then he got a better offer: the company’s expansive world headquarters property — complete with a moat and a mini golf course — for $18 million. The former Chrysler Group LLC plant the University of Delaware bought won’t be completely built out for 50 years, said Executive Vice President Scott Douglass. Since nearly a quarter of it has no specific plans, it may be used for scientific testing, Douglass said. At Columbia, where tuition and living expenses are soaring in New York , junior Jose Robledo said although he’d like his university to put more money toward financial aid, it’s more important for it to expand and try to improve — even if he’s not around to see it. Fasulo offered colleges some words of caution, though, saying land investment in a rural area is riskier than near a place like Columbia, in one of America’s most desirable real estate markets. “From a market perspective, there would be a lot less risk worrying about surplus property in a place like Manhattan than if you were out in the woods somewhere,” he said. “Let’s say enrollment falls in half, you can sell it off as a condominium.” And Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, a nonprofit studying college costs, noted that even when a building isn’t being used for academics, a university still has to pay to maintain it. “You’re going to have to keep raising money and getting more money every year just to keep the hamster running in the cage,” she said. “They’re perpetuating a very expensive cost structure, and I don’t think every school can maintain that.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

ATLANTA (AP) — The U.S. Education Department said Tuesday that nine states and the District of Columbia will get money to reform schools in the second round of the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” grant competition. Florida, Georgia , Hawaii , Massachusetts , Maryland , New York , North Carolina , Ohio , Rhode Island and Washington, D.C ., will receive grants, department spokesman Justin Hamilton said. The amounts for each state were expected to be announced later. The aim of the historic program is to reward ambitious changes to improve schools and close the achievement gap. The competition instigated a wave of reforms across the country, as states passed new teacher accountability policies and lifted caps on charter schools to boost their chances of winning. Tennessee and Delaware were named winners in the first round of the competition in March, sharing $600 million. The applicants named winners Tuesday will share a remaining $3.4 billion. Another $350 million is coming in a separate competition for states creating new academic assessments. The historic program, part of President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, rewards states for embarking on ambitious reforms to improve struggling schools, close the achievement gap and boost graduation rates. “New York’s schools have made strong strides toward excellence and this grant will accelerate that progress,” said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer , D-N.Y., who met with Education Secretary Arne Duncan on New York’s proposal. “This is great news for parents, teachers, and taxpayers across the state.” Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia applied for the second round of the competition. The Education Department named 19 applicants finalists in July. More than a dozen states vying for the money changed laws to foster the growth of charter schools, and at least 17 reformed teacher evaluation systems to include student achievement. Dozens also adopted Common Core State Standards, the uniform math and reading benchmarks developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. “The change unleashed by conditioning federal funding on bold and forward-looking state education policies is indisputable,” the Democrats for Education Reform said in a statement. “Under the president’s leadership, local civil rights, child advocacy, business and education reform groups, in collaboration with those state and local teacher unions ready for change, sprung into action to achieve things that they had been waiting and wanting to do for years.” In a speech announcing the finalists last month, Duncan called the change a “quiet revolution.” Between both rounds of the competition, a total of 46 states and the District of Columbia applied. While the program has been praised for instigating swift reforms, the competition for many states was an uphill battle, with teacher unions hesitant to sign on to reforms directly tying teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests, and education leaders concerned winning meant giving up too much local control. A number of states that did not win the competition said they still planned to proceed with the reforms they had proposed, though they acknowledged change would take place at a slower pace. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York spent $17,173 per student for public education in 2007-08, more than any other state and 67% more than the U.S. average, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics released Monday. The $10,259 national average — $6,914 less than New York — was a 6.1% increase over 2006-07, the Census Bureau said. New York’s spending went up 7.4% over the two years. New York’s per-student spending was highest in 2006-07 too at $15,981 per student, and the national average was $9,666. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia spent more than $10,259 and 32 spent less in the 2007-08 school year. States and state equivalents that came close to New York’s spending per student in 2007-08 were New Jersey ($16,491), Alaska ($14,630), the District of Columbia ($14,594), Vermont ($14,300) and Connecticut ($13,848), the Census Bureau found. At the other end of the spectrum were Utah ($5,765), Idaho ($6,931), Arizona ($7,608), Oklahoma ($7,685) and Tennessee ($7,739). Public education is the single largest category of all state and local government expenditures, Lisa Blumerman, chief of the Census Bureau’s Governments Division, said in a statement. In New York, lawmakers and Gov. David Paterson have been considering placing a cap on how much school-district expenses can increase each year as a way of providing property-tax relief to strapped homeowners. The amount of property taxes that went to New York education in 2007-08 was $14.8 billion, compared to $14.1 billion in 2006-07, the Census Bureau said. Paterson and lawmakers are also fighting over how much aid to provide to schools. Members of the Assembly and Senate said they plan to pass a joint budget that restores $600 million of the governor’s proposed $1.4 billion school-aid cut. The governor’s revised budget proposal would restore $300 million of the $1.4 billion cut. Public schools nationally spent $593.2 billion in 2007-08, a 6% jump over the previous year, the census report said. Total funding that public-school systems received in 2008 was $582.1 billion, 4.5% more than in 2006-07. State governments’ portion of that totaled 48.3% and local governments contributed 43.7%. The remaining 8.1% came from federal sources, the report said. In New York, state government’s portion was 45.4% in 2007-08, and local governments contributed 48.7% of the total, with 5.9% from federal sources. The spread in 2006-07 was 45.2% from the state, 48.4% from local governments and 6.5% from federal sources. Outstanding debt at the end of the 2006-07 fiscal year was $28.7 billion in New York, and it increased to $29.5 billion the following year, census statistics show. The amount of revenue New York received from the federal government dropped from one year to the next — from $3.3 billion to $3.1 billion. The report was compiled based on data from all 15,569 public-school districts around the U.S. Other highlights in the 2007-08 report: • School districts’ debt totaled $377.4 billion, a 7.9% increase. • The largest single category of spending was for instructional salaries, which were $203.5 billion, 40.2% of the total. • Louisiana had the highest percentage of public-school funding from the federal government at 16.8%, followed by Mississippi (16%) and South Dakota (15.2%). The lowest percentages were in New Jersey (3.9%), Connecticut (4.2%) and Massachusetts (5.1%). • Vermont had the highest percentage of state-government funding at 88.5%, followed by 84.8% in Hawaii, where state government runs elementary and secondary education. States with the lowest percentages of funding from state government were Nebraska (33%), South Dakota (33.2%) and Illinois (33.8%). • States with the highest percentage of local-government funding were Illinois (58.2%), Nebraska (57.3%) and Connecticut (57.3%). The lowest were Hawaii (3%), Vermont (5%) and Arkansas (13.4%). • Nearly 64% of revenue for public education from local sources came from property taxes. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.