Higher education

The dance ensemble, the Brian Brooks Moving Company returns to Wesleyan University for a pair of performances tonight and tomorrow night at Wesleyan's Center for the Arts Theater in Middletown. On the program is the New England premier of his new work Big City. The dance company has performed all of the world. Joining us by phone this morning is dancer and choreographer Brian Brooks. 

Title IX is 40 years old this week...and slowly over that time, it’s meant a big boost in Women’s athletics.

Just to give you some idea - there are nearly 10 times as many high school girls playing organized sports today as there were the year the law went into effect. At the college level, nearly half of the athletic scholarships go to female athletes.

Today's announcement by the Obama Administration that it will allow certain illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S. and have the ability to work without penalty is being embraced by undocumented students in Connecticut.

Fairfield University is participating in the nationwide initiative, Joining Forces, to to help veterans. WNPR's Lucy Nalpathanchil spoke with the Dean of the School Of Nursing, Dr Suzanne Campbell.

We tend to see familiar patterns in the life around us. When a Trinity student was badly beaten on a street bordering the college, we saw violence coming from the neighborhood. When the Hartford police released a description of the suspects as white women and men in their twenties, many of us didn't let that alter our understanding of what had happened.

But in the four weeks since the assault, other versions of the story have trickled out across the campus and through the city.

Our friends at Sitar in New Haven were kind enough to keep their amazing buffet open a little later than usual on a recent Sunday afternoon, and the result was a rollicking editorial meeting for the RLSG!

We talked about April Fool's Day (of course!), college admissions - and meatballs - with guest editors Joanne Kahan, Kim Garley-Erb, Erika Horne and David Bailin.

Joanne Kahan describes herself as a “sometimes bored suburban housewife, volunteer, and retired mother”. (Which, translated, means she's an empty nester exploring new paths!)

Almost a month after a Trinity College student was brutally attacked in the middle of the night just outside campus, it’s still not clear who his assailants were. College administrators have demanded better security in the surrounding neighborhood, frustrating nearby residents who say they’ve been unfairly blamed time and again. WNPR’s Neena Satija reports on their reactions.

Thousands of troops are home from Iraq - and soon from Afghanistan - to a country that, in many ways, barely noticed they were gone. These wars have been fought at such a distance from a public that was told to “go shopping” to support a war effort, that we don’t have the impact of similar returns from Vietnam or World War 2.

The Yale Muslim Students Association was shocked to learn over the weekend that the New York Police Department spied on their organization in 2006 and 2007.

We gathered to record Episode 30 at Cafe Romeo, the hip, delicious East Rock coffee shop. We were joined by Anne Witkavitch, Kristin Huffman, and Mark Branch, and hosted by Chris Mordececai.

There has been a lot of talk recently about whether a Liberal Arts college degree is worth it. Some leading liberal arts schools are trying to make their case.

Think college music program in Connecticut and the Hartt School of Music springs to mind. There’s the Yale School of Music and Wesleyan’s ethnomusicology program. Now, a report on the quiet transformation of Southern Connecticut State University’s Music Department – thanks to the generosity of a state resident.

SCSU student Andrew Pinto sings a song he composed. Pinto, a music theory major, says he’s benefited from free private singing lessons at Southern.  

A University of Connecticut professor has been studying two treatment therapies for post traumatic stress disorder. The study focuses on the military community which sees a disproportionate number of PTSD cases.

Mark Demers is a Fairfield University Professor who just got a grant to study “chaos theory.” Could the gentle flap of a butterfly wing in China set off a tornado in Texas? He’ll study the evolution of systems that change over time and attempt to understand their stability and predictability.

It's been several months since a new law went into effect allowing illegal immigrants to pay the in state tuition rate at public colleges and universities in Connecticut.

As WNPR's Lucy Nalpathanchil reports, more than one hundred undocumented students have signed affadavits to qualify for the rate this semester.

Newsflash -- on this show Garrison Keillor threw cold water on his much-publicized earlier statements that he would retire from PHC in 2013.

You can hear him say, on the audio here: :"I’m starting to doubt that myself. I’ve been thinking about it, thinking: what else would I do? And I can’t come up with anything….If I didn’t do it I would wind up in a tiny walk-up apartment with a couple of cats."

Veterans who have served in the last decade are eligible for benefits under the Post 9-11 GI bill. As WNPRs Lucy Nalpathanchil reports, recent changes to the bill will help veterans pay for vocational training.

Under the current GI bill, veterans can get all or part of their college tuition paid for depending on years of military service. But not all veterans chose four-year schools.

There are several thousand veterans in the community college system in Connecticut. David Welsh is a Veterans Advisor at Tunxis Community College in Farmington.

Recent college graduates are finding it difficult to get a job at a time when the national unemployment rate remains stagnant at nine percent. But imagine if you're a veteran just back from serving overseas. You're trying to find employment while carrying the physical and mental effects of war. A consortium of schools including the University of Connecticut are helping turn disabled veterans into small business-owners. As part of WNPR's Coming Home Project, Lucy Nalpathanchil introduces us to a entrepreneurship 'bootcamp'.

What are we watching when we watch (and cheer about) a college game?

Historian Taylor Branch disputes the notion that we are watching a logical, natural outgrowth of the college's academic identity. If you're a student, are those your fellow students playing football? If you're an alumnus, are those people on the basketball court extensions of what you used to be?

WANTED: Point Guard. $70K/yr. Must work weekends. Student-athletes generate billions of revenue for universities and private companies while they earn nothing. Some who’ve been badly hurt don’t get the care and coverage they’d get with workers comp. Others see their scholarship canceled after a year and find themselves on the hook for expensive tuition if they want to go further. Others object the the use of their images on licensed products long after their scholarship expire. Atlantic and Taylor Branch tackled this in a feature last week.

Small businesses everywhere are learning the lesson – adapt to technology or die. Consumers increasingly look for both marketing and retailing online and companies need to meet those expectations or lose sales. In the first of a series of reports on the rise of social media in marketing, WNPR’s Harriet Jones looks at how one manufacturer is facing up to the challenge.

It’s an exciting time for college freshman as they begin classes this week. Among them are students who just a few months ago didn’t think they could afford college. That changed July 1 when a new state law went into effect, making illegal immigrants eligible for the in state tuition rate at Connecticut colleges and universities. WNPR’s Lucy Nalpathanchil introduces us to one of those students, an 18 year old named Karen.