Higher Education Quick Takes

Vermont State University has abandoned plans to go all virtual in its libraries, VTDigger reported. Earlier versions of the plan eliminated the books and all librarians from five campuses and drew widespread criticism.

The new plan is to keep about 30,000 books, or about 10 percent of what the university currently has.

The university “will maintain volumes that have been accessed or checked out between January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2022 and have been deemed academically valuable by the academic department chairs and the provost,” according to the new plan. The university will also keep a small collection of “popular, casual, reading books” and children’s books in the libraries, administrators wrote.

Another undergraduate institution has dropped out of the undergraduate rankings of U.S. News & World Report.

Bard College president Leon Botstein announced the change. “The educational character and comparative merits of colleges cannot be distilled into a uniform numerical ranking,” said Botstein. “Particularly one that does not take into account the curriculum and faculty and is based on flawed and irrelevant metrics, many of which concern only institutional wealth.”

Bard’s move follows similar announcements from Colorado College, the Rhode Island School of Design and numerous law and medical schools.

A new version of the Graduate Management Admission Test will debut this year.

The Graduate Management Admission Council, which runs the test, announced the change Thursday without providing much detail. It said the GMAT Focus “is more efficient, flexible, and insightful by honing in [sic] on the higher-order critical reasoning skills and data literacy especially relevant and applicable in the business environment of tomorrow.”

But Business Because, which is owned by the GMAC, said the new test “comprises three 45-minute sections, reducing the test time by one hour.” The writing of an essay will no longer be part of the test.

Stacey Koprince, director of content and curriculum at Manhattan Prep, which prepares students for the test, said, “This is easily the biggest change to the GMAT since it moved from a paper and pencil format to a computer-adaptive format in 1997. While there is not yet a lot of information on the GMAT Focus Edition, from what we can see, these are very student-friendly changes. It’s hard to say that an exam that’s one hour shorter will frustrate test takers, particularly when GMAC has also indicated that there will be fewer topics to study. Not including break time, the new GMAT will be more than an hour shorter than the GRE. Test takers will be able to review problems after the fact and change a small number of answers. And there will be no essay. In our opinion, these changes sound great.”

In recent years, the GMAT has faced increased competition from the Graduate Record Examination.

The University of Iowa will pay the full amount of a legal settlement that ended a racial bias suit filed by former members of the university’s football team.

The university’s president announced Thursday that the payment would be made after an uproar among state lawmakers over an earlier plan to use taxpayer funds to cover $2 million of the $4.2 million settlement, The Des Moines Register reported.

“After listening to the concerns of Iowans and in consultation with the Board of Regents leadership, I have determined the University of Iowa Department of Athletics will reimburse the state general fund for the $2 million due to the recent settlement,” President Barbara Wilson said in a statement.

Lawmakers and the state’s auditor have been critical of the university’s athletic director, Gary Barta, among others. A legislative subcommittee meeting held Thursday morning included discussion of a bill requiring athletic departments at universities overseen by the state’s regents to repay the state for unbudgeted legal settlement costs. A lobbyist read Wilson’s statement during the meeting.

“I am delighted that she listened to the outcry from taxpayers who wanted real accountability,” Rob Sand, the state’s auditor, told the Register.

University officials admitted no wrongdoing as part of the settlement. The former football players, who are Black, filed their lawsuit in 2020. They alleged the use of racial slurs as well as being required to abandon hairstyles and other aspects of their culture to fit in with what the lawsuit called the “Iowa Way” under Coach Kirk Ferentz, and that they were retaliated against after speaking out.