A way must be found to tell students, their parents and the public about the effects state funding cuts are having on services, agreed a group of UW-River Falls educators. About 20 UW-RF faculty members, a handful of students and others met Nov. 9 in a meeting called by academic staff union President Kurt Leichtle and Student Body President Tyler Halverson. The intent of the meeting was to discuss a new round of university budget cuts announced in October and the future of public education in Wisconsin...

For the first time in 11 years, a UW-Madison student earned a Rhodes scholarship. UW-Madison senior Alexis Brown was announced Saturday as one of 32 recipients of the prestigious award, which will grant her two to three years of study at Oxford University...

A senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Wisconsin native who is studying at Princeton University are among 32 American students named Rhodes Scholars for 2012. Alexis Brown is an English and history major at the University of Wisconsin in Madison...The other Rhodes Scholar with Wisconsin ties is Astrid Struth, from Hubertus. The senior, who's majoring in East Asian studies at Princeton, plans to study international relations...

When you talk about the high cost of college athletic programs, generally you are talking about football...The University of Wisconsin, one of the biggest athletic programs in the country, ranks 3rd in the conference in terms of operating expenses per player. It ranks second in total expenses and it ranks 7th, surprisingly, in team revenue...

A central Wisconsin college is gearing up to celebrate restoration work on its signature cupola. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point began restoring its 22-foot tall cupola earlier this fall...

Call it Bud Harris' theory of environmental relativity. The professor emeritus of natural and applied sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has found that when people look at the Bergstrom wetland, "They see what they want to see," depending on their perspective. For wetland experts like Harris, the little patch of land less than a mile down the road from the stadium that hosts the world champion Green Bay Packers, is a rare and valuable resource that provides environmental benefits while supporting a rich array of flora and fauna. To others, importantly including members of the state Legislature, it's an obstacle in the way of job creation, a sadly degraded patch of wasted opportunity...

A trio of UW-Madison students took first place in a North Central region computer programming Battle of the Brains last weekend involving 218 teams...

A plan that provides several changes for state workers' benefits and freezes their wages for the next two years was passed by a legislative committee Thursday, potentially weakening the hiring power of University of Wisconsin System schools...

Ben Brancel, secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP), is seeking assistance from UW-Extension and ag departments in UW Colleges in efforts to preserve agricultural land...The panel included Michael Compton, director of the UW-Platteville School of Agriculture, and Dale Gallenberg, UW-River Falls dean...

Alan Fish is leaving the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become the vice president of real estate and campus services at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore...

Alan Fish, the man who shepherded UW-Madison's modern-day building boom, announced he is taking a job at Johns Hopkins University. Fish will become the vice president of real estate and campus services at the Baltimore university...

Rich Low of Madison served as an infantry officer in the Army in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, leading some 280 combat missions. When he came back from the service, he didn't think his experience affected him in any major way. He had nightmares, and he startled easily, but he chalked that up to just something veterans live with. Then he enrolled in a study he initially wrote off as "just some hippie thing," where he learned about yoga breathing and meditation. A year later, Low, 30, sums up his experience with two words: "It works." That's the idea behind the study coming from The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, at the Waisman Center on the UW-Madison campus...

Instead of heading to trial next month, a former UW-Stout hockey recruit  has reached a plea agreement in the death of a fellow student...

When kids trekked from house to house dressed in costumes in pursuit of candy on Halloween, UW-Eau Claire Beta Upsilon Sigma members joined them in pursuit of something just as sweet: community service. Instead of candy, 11 teams of fraternity members assisted United Way of the Greater Chippewa Valley in gathering such items as shampoo, soap, aspirin and socks to donate to area organizations such as Beacon House and Chippewa Valley Free Clinic that help the poor...

Rural doctors are disappearing at alarming rates, but a University of Wisconsin-Madison program is trying to make a dent. "There is an enormous shortage of primary care and, even more specifically, specialty physicians willing to locate in rural areas," said Dr. Paul Summerside, chief medical officer at BayCare Clinic in Green Bay and a director of the Wisconsin Academy of Rural Medicine at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health...

Chilly Thursday weather didn't stop some University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh students from stripping down for a cause. About 130 people ran what the school is calling the Nearly Naked Mile...

Gateway Technical College officials want ideas about the direction the school should take moving forward. To get those ideas, college officials have created a three-question survey that can be taken online until Wednesday by visiting www.gtc.edu...

A report released today finds that colleges are sharing more information with the public about their efforts to measure student learning, but that they are not presenting the information in easy-to-understand ways and are providing little evidence that they are using the results to change their teaching practices...

We like to think of the United States as the type of place where anyone with a strong work ethic and healthy dose of ambition can make it to the top. A better predictor seems to be whether Mom and Dad have a college degree. Researchers from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Pew Economic Mobility Project have found that American kids are much more likely to succeed if their parents are more educated...

...Nathaly's father, a cabdriver, and her mother, a preschool teacher, knew how to start a life here after moving from Colombia 20 years ago, how to raise three children and how to buy a home, but they did not know much about SAT prep. So Nathaly found a free program that helps low-income teenagers throughout the Northeast work the system too, called Let's Get Ready. Students are given help filling out college applications, writing essays, practicing interviews and preparing for the SAT...

...Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England...But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime...

The president of the University of California system said he was "appalled" at images of protesters being doused with pepper spray and plans an assessment of law enforcement procedures on all 10 campuses, as two police officers and the police chief were placed on administrative leave...

The Web site RateMyProfessors evokes skepticism among faculty members. Some view the anonymous evaluation site as a haven for rants and odd remarks ("He will crush you like an academic ninja!"), or a place where students go to grade instructors based on easiness or attractiveness (a chili-pepper icon distinguishes professors that are "hot" over those that are "not"). But new research out of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire suggests the popular service is a more useful barometer of instructor quality than you might think, at least in the aggregate...

Colleges and universities are posting more information on their Web sites about whether their students are learning, but most such data are still available only on internal sites, says a report released on Monday by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment...

Chinese students seeking to study in the United States have the money to do so but may lack the English-language skills, a survey of 18,000 prospective students found...

The University of Saskatchewan has a 40-year history of offering special programs for aboriginal students, but this year it started a new strategy to forge closer ties with native communities...