miscellaneous23

(August 6, 2008) Breaking News USM to Offer On-Site Instruction at Pearl River -- POPLARVILLE -- On 6-August-08, USM announced a new partnership with Pearl River Community College in Poplarville. In her 6-August-08 press release entitled "Southern Miss Teams with PRCC to Offer Courses in Poplarville," USM PR official Jana Bryant reports that USM will begin bringing its courses to the PRCC campus this fall (2008). The initial course offerings include only business ethics, organizational communications and cultural systems, though USM Associate Provost Cynthia Easterling Moore told May that USM expects to expand the course menu by spring of 2009.

(August 10, 2008) Textbook Bad Press CoB Once Again Finds Itself in Middle of an Ill-Timed Controversy "Outraged yet resigned to the inevitable, [USM] students will shell out big bucks this week for textbooks that they probably can't sell back." With this quote, the higher education reporter for The Hattiesburg American, Valerie Wells, began her 10-Aug-08 article entitled, "Fingers pointed as price of books continues to rise." According to Wells' article, textbook prices have risen "an average of 6 percent per year," and they "nearly tripled from December 1986 to December 2004."

(August 27, 2008) CoB News, 27 August 2008 USM Back to Tier III The USM family is buzzing about the fact that the university has once again risen to Tier III in the 2009 iteration of U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Colleges. In the 2009 edition, USM is ranked 180th in the U.S., placing it near the bottom of Tier III, a place it occupied before the administration of former USM president, Shelby Thames.

(August 26, 2008) Who is Tier-ing Up? The source of terminal degrees in USM's College of Business is a subject that reporters at USMNEWS.net turn to on occasion. With news of the new faculty to be joining the CoB in the next month, it's time again to take a look at the quality of the terminal degrees in the CoB. Table 1 below presents the average Tier by academic department, using U.S. News & World Report's 2009 college/university rankings, of the terminal degrees of CoB faculty, old and new.

(September 5, 2008) Stepping Stoned A Look at the CoB’s Degrees-to-USM Data One of the facets of higher education is that professors generally take jobs at institutions that rank below the level of the institutional affiliations of their terminal degrees. From there, they generally have to publish in order to move up the ranks of academia. Long-time readers of USMNEWS.net, however, are accustomed to reading news stories about the CoB making hires from institutions ranked well beneath it, thus cutting against the academia grain. On some occasions, however, the opposite happens, and the CoB catches a new hire from further up the academic food chain than one would expect. And as this report shows, there may be an inherent danger in that occurrence as well.