Michigan bases the state aid it provides to students attending college almost entirely on need, according to recent research published by Brooking grants chingos whitehurst/pdf/michigan.pdf, a research institute based out of Washington D.C. that’s mission is to improve democracy.

About 95 percent of the aid Michigan gives to students is based on financial need, whereas some other states across the country base their aid distribution on merit, hoping that they will be investing in students with a better chance of graduating with a degree, the study said.

The national average for states providing aid on a need-based basis is 73 percent, which is about 20 percent lower than Michigan’s average.

“The group proposes moving away from the dichotomy between ‘need-based’ and ‘merit-based’ aid and instead designing programs that integrate targeting of students with financial need with appropriate expectations and support for college success,” the website said.

Currently, Georgia and South Dakota have some of the lowest financial aid programs based on need, while many of the New England states, such as Maine, Maryland, Connecticut and New York, and West Coast states, such as California, Washington and Oregon have nearly 100 percent need-based aid programs.

Yet, Brooking believes both programs need to be reformed to make sure students receiving aid actually are going to complete their degrees. The website recommends states reward students with aid for completing credits and provide more than one chance for students to receive aid if they do not meet target grades or averages the first time they use the aid, promoting the final success of students who have aid invested in their education.

Students in the supply chain management program at MSU have been working to save nonprofit organizations in Michigan money by finding ways to package products for less.

Assistant professor of supply chain management “Tobias Schoenherr”:http://broad.msu.edu/facultystaff/schoenherr/’s SCM 371 class was the first group of students to volunteer to be business consultants back in 2010, and the class is required for supply chain management students.

It is estimated that through recommendations regarding the market for box suppliers, students have saved Peckham Inc. — a company that works with people who have disabilities and barriers of employment — as much as $160,000 this academic year. In an article from the Broad College of Business website, Shoenherr said he had high hopes for the project, but did not expect the students to provide companies with such tremendous savings.

“It illustrates the future potential that projects like this can have on the community,” he said.

Schoenherr has high hopes that his students will be able to save Hope Network, a Grand Rapids-based nonprofit organization that wants to stock nonperishable items such as cleaning supplies and tissue paper, as much as $250,000 a year on their new project.

“As a nonprofit, savings like this is a big deal for us,” he said.

According to PayScale.com, MSU is ranked 200 out of 1,248 universities in terms of the value of in-state students’ education at those schools. The rankings are based on what it costs to attend versus what alumni make back throughout their lifetime.

Seven Big Ten schools are ranked ahead of MSU, with the University of Michigan ranked highest at No. 71.

The website also records data from alumni from each of the schools in the ranking. More than 4,000 MSU alumni have reported to the website and some of the data is interesting to look at.

Automotive companies take three of the five most popular companies with alumni — Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., and Chrysler. Those numbers make sense considering the website also names Detroit as the most popular city among graduates. The other most popular cities include Chicago, Lansing, Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor.

The most popular jobs for MSU alumni are packaging engineer, veterinarian, construction project manager, human resources manager and mechanical engineer, according to data from the website.

Former Spartans that earn a bachelor’s degree make between $32,703 – $107,490 per year on average according to the website.

How much do professors at MSU make? According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, it’s above average.

The publication recently complied a survey from 1,251 colleges to figure out how much faculty members made across the country during the past academic year.

A full-time professor at MSU made $128,600 on average, ranking in the 64th percentile of institutions.

Although the paycheck is much larger than what most college students would receive every two weeks, there is another gap related to gender.

Male professors at MSU made $129,700 on average, compared to the $124,700 salary of female professors. However, pay has been on the increase since 2000, up from about $81,000, with a period of stagnation between 2010-11.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Harvard University ranked No. 1 in faculty pay at $198,400 during the past academic year.

The student government president at Northern Michigan University has narrowly gotten out of a fowl situation after being ticketed for illegally possessing chickens, according to the Marquette Mining Journal.

Ben Stanley, 23, spent four nights in jail last week for contempt of court beyond even the chicken charges.

The incident coming to light also showed Stanley’s record with the court, with unpaid tickets dating back several years. Records show Stanley had missed previous court hearings and had outstanding fines and community services for other tickets related to animal citations and car fines.

Stanley was supposed to stay in jail for 10 days, but the judge released him early on Friday so he wouldn’t miss exams this week.
Stanley said he was upset about being placed in jail, naturally, but other students found the situation humorous because of the chickens. There is no word on what happened to the chickens.

Lucky for him, school administrators haven’t plucked him from his job, and he will remain the student government’s president. But it looks like the beginning of his term hasn’t been so exemplary.

At Wednesday’s MSU Innovation Celebration, new executive director of MSU Technologies Richard Chylla announced the creation of Spartan Innovations. Chylla said the new enterprise is the third and final leg of what will be known as the MSU Innovation Center.

The other components are MSU Technologies, which opened in 2007 and handles all of the university’s internal technology creations and research. MSU Business-CONNECT is the other body that will complete the center, Chylla said. Launched in 2009, Business-CONNECT aims to bring in outside companies that are willing to work with the university on innovative technology projects.

The whole goal of the Innovation Center is to help improve and streamline the process of creating an innovative piece of technology and getting it into market the best and most efficient way possible. Spartan Innovations will work with faculty members and students to form companies centered around their inventions, Chylla said.

“Sometimes the best way to get a technology into marketplace is to create a company based around that technology,” Chylla said.

The center will be located at 325 E. Grand River Ave., where Business-CONNECT and MSU Technologies are currently housed.

MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon said in a speech at the celebration that MSU has made a conscious effort throughout the past five years to organize the work done involving innovation at MSU. Spartan Innovations and the resulting Innovation Center is a result of that work.

“It also is designed to help us create sort of this entrepreneurial culture within the Greater Lansing that will surround these MSU-oriented companies,” Simon said.

As the MSU Board of Trustees prepares to tackle issues of room and board at its Friday meeting, the University of Michigan Board of Regents might release a report on tuition equality for undocumented students as early as next week, according to the Detroit Free Press.

U-M’s current policy charges out-of-state tuition without citizenship or a green card, but student leaders say a policy change could open the university to many who cannot afford it or lower costs for those current students.

Freshman Daniel Morales said his group, Coalition for Tuition Equality, wants fair tuition for all, but some do not support any change in policy.

According to the MSU Office of the Registrar, a person who does not have documentation as a resident of Michigan will be charged out-of-state tuition and will not be classified as being in state.
Tuition, of course, varies between the two groups. As of the current academic year, an in-state freshman is charged a total of $21,026 for 15 credits for two semesters. For an out-of-state freshman, they are charged $39,896.

While some classes focus on textbooks and test material, one class is going beyond the classroom to look at its community’s needs.
The Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing’s Account Planning class has taken a class assignment as a way to help the community, advertising senior Caroline Zieleniewski said.

Zieleniewski is part of a five-person group within the class that is helping to raise funds for Beekman Therapeutic Riding Center, 2901 Wabash Road, in Lansing.

Zieleniewski said the class receives a client every semester and this semester’s client, Project America, a Texas-based security company, asked them to do a “Pay it Forward” project.

She said the project consists of several groups who choose their own charity, receive $500 to use for the project and raise both money and awareness for them. Her particular group has created a Facebook page for the center and has hosted several fundraisers on campus and at the center.

“I love that we got to pick our own local charities (and) we got to impact our own local community,” Zieleniewski said.

On Tuesday, the class groups will be presenting their work for the class and the charities’ directors.

Zieleniewski said through the original $500 and their fundraisers, they hope to present the riding center with nearly $2,000.

“We felt very blessed that we were chosen,” program manager for Beekman Therapeutic Riding Center Janet Gross said. “The opportunity is just really great because not only do we become acknowledged and useful to the Michigan State students, but … we are also getting exposure to the community.”

Gross said the nonprofit has received a lot of support from similar MSU and Lansing Community College classes during the past few years.
“They send a lot a volunteers our way … without them we wouldn’t be able to survive,” she said.

It’s election time for a lot of colleges and universities across the country, which leads to increased scrutiny of the organizations as they go through a rotation of representatives and leaders.

But a recent poll on the website of the Daily Targum, Rutgers University’s student newspaper, boils the whole election season down into one simple yet problematic question: “Do you think the University’s student government is effective?”

As of Sunday evening, 52 percent of respondents said yes, 38 percent said no and 10 percent were unsure.

On face value, the results indicate that barely half of the student body thinks its government is doing any good. But to ask only one question barely scratches the surface. The question says nothing about how the student government is effective, in what areas is it not — what does it mean to be effective?

ASMSU, MSU’s undergraduate student government, has been conducting surveys of the student body for the past several months, with specific questions ranging from general ASMSU awareness to academic issues the group could address. While results have yet to be made public, it appears the organization is addressing individual concerns from the past year.

The Rutgers poll is done by an outside group and is meant only to publicize the results, while ASMSU is running its own surveys. But The State News also has polled students about ASMSU-related issues with more conclusive results than the Rutgers poll about specific concerns.

To ask if the organization as a whole is effective through only one question doesn’t even answer the question.

The number of people using e-readers to read digital content is increasing in the U.S. according to recently released data from multiple studies conducted by Pew Research Center.

The data shows that as of February 2012, 21 percent of surveyed Americans age 18 or older said they had read an e-book within the last year. That number is a 4 percent increase from December 2011, so the jump can likely be attributed to the holiday gift season.

When the question expanded from reading e-books to having read other digital text such as magazines and news articles, the number of participants increased to 43 percent.

The study also showed that those who own e-readers read more books than those who don’t. E-reader owners read an average of 24 books last year compared to nonowners who read an average of 12 books.

Research also shows that traditional printed books still remain king, even in an increasingly digital era. The December 2011 survey found that 72 percent of participants had read a printed book within the last year.