Government to aid vocational schools
The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday to approve extending the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, a law that provides federal support for vocational education. Last year, the federal government provided $1.33 billion to the states under this law.
On Wednesday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved extending the act. A similar bill in the U.S. House of Representatives has also passed its committee and awaits voting action on the floor.
The act gives around 40 percent of its money to community colleges. Lobbyists for these institutions were pleased that the new law did not extend its aid to four-year institutions.
College officials are unhappy about one provision in the House form of the bill which allows the government to lump federal funds into one program, known as Tech-Prep. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, this program allows students to get a technical education after two years of high school and two years of college.
Business schools catch impatient applicants
Prospective students applying to six business schools attempted to take an early peek at their admissions status and, because of this, are all being denied admission.
An unidentified person posted instructions on how to do it on Business Week's Web site.
According to the instructions, students had to log on to the admissions Web site and view the source code for the page to find a unique identification number. Students then had to plug the identification number into a URL provided by the hacker.
Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) all said that they knew exactly which applicants attempted to break into the system and would deny admission to all of them. Dartmouth College, Duke University and Stanford University are still debating how to deal with the break-ins.
Almost immediately after the three institutions released their decision to deny all applicants came the backlash from the applicants themselves, bloggers, and ethics professors around the country.
One of the applicants, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Chronicle that he was not a "hacker" as the colleges accused and merely followed the instructions on the Web site out of curiosity. He told the Chronicle he did not believe what he did was hacking because even a novice like himself could do it.
"I'm not an IT person by any sense of the imagination. I'm not even a great typist," he said.
Len Metheny, Chief Executive Officer of ApplyYourself Inc. - the company that provided the application software used by all six colleges - believed that the applicants should have known they were doing something wrong because of how complicated the procedure was to follow.
"These students used this procedure that was posted by a self-identified hacker himself to get unauthorized access to an otherwise restricted page. That is wrong," Metheny said in an interview with the Chronicle.
--Compiled by Brian McPartland from the Chronicle of Higher Education
