To attract outstanding students to the teaching profession, Trinity University in San Antonio has launched a forgivable-loan program that subsidizes both the education costs and the starting salaries of young teachers.
The university’s education department, with the support of a $290,000 grant from the George W. Brackenridge Foundation, will provide up to $26,000 in college loans to selected San Antonio high-school students. The students must be in the top 10 percent of their graduating class.
The loans include $5,000 for each of the first two years of undergraduate work, $6,000 for each of the next two years, and a $2,000 salary supplement for the two years that students are required to work in local schools.
The U.S. Education Department has announced that it has awarded its $29-million contract to process Pell Grants to the information-services division of National Computer Systems, an Iowa City-based firm.
The grant program handles 6 million applications annually; it provided about $2.8 billion in aid to some 2.6 million students in 1983-84, according to ed officials.
“We will get aid out faster with less paperwork burden on the students and institutions, and we will do all this at a cost savings of from $9 million to $12 million,” said Edward M. Elmendorf, Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education.
Under the new three-year contract, the computer firm will begin processing the 1984-85 applications earlier in the year so that students will know the amount of their grant award long before the school year begins, according to ed officials.
William J. Bennett, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities told faculty members and students at the University of Chicago last week that graduate humanities programs are “insignificant, lifeless, and pointless.”
“What we have is history without the story, ‘literature studies’ without literature, philosophy without love or wisdom--a humanities too often foreign to man,” Mr. Bennett said.
“Moving from undergraduate to graduate study should be like moving from being a college athlete to a professional athlete,” he said. “Instead, it frequently is like being transformed from a college athlete into a sports statistician, if not a distant and demoralized spectator.”
This summer, the University of Texas at Austin will sponsor an intensive six-week program for high-school juniors interested in examining careers in architecture and in learning the basic architectural skills.
The program--which runs from July 8 through Aug. 18--offers design studios, lectures, classwork, discussions, and field trips.
For more information, call (512) 471-1922 or write to Summer Academy, School of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin, Tex. 78712.--sr
