Welcome to Clear Admit’s Trivia Tuesday column, in which we take an in-depth look at program elements that differentiate the leading MBA programs from their peers. This week, we’re taking a look into the Clear Admit School Guide to UT Austin / McCombs to share with you an excerpt about the school’s concentrations structure.
“McCombs does not require its students to officially declare a major; instead, it offers 19 optional concentrations, spread across a few larger categories, which allow students to gain a deeper familiarity with their target career path. In addition to completing the core curriculum, interested students must also fulfill requirements specific to each concentration they intend to complete. A student who plans to pursue a concentration in Risk Management, for instance, is required to take at least five courses in that field for a total of 15 credit hours.
“Concentrations range from relatively broad disciplines, such as Management or Accounting, to narrowly defined courses of study designed to position students for employment opportunities within a particular field. For examp
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This hall recalls previous Olympic Games and will include the flag of the 2012 Games in London.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – When officials in Greece began assembling a team to create a museum dedicated to the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, they knew whom they wanted to design the project: Haibo Yu, a professor of theatre at the University of California, Riverside.
Yu, who is known internationally for his theater set designs, was the chief designer of the Olympics museum in Beijing, on which construction began in summer 2011. He spent the summer creating concepts and technical drawings for nine rooms that will comprise the first phase of the Olympic Museum of Athens, which will be housed in the neoclassical Zappeion building in the heart of Athens. The structure currently is used as a national conference center.
Officials at Cleverbank, the Greek strategic consulting company that developed the master plan for the 2004 Olympics Organizing Committee, told Yu it was important that the museum reflect the spirit of Athens as the birthplace of the Olympic spirit, its role as host to the 1896 Games – often described as the first Olympic Games of the modern era – and the “Welcome Home” theme of the 28th Olympiad.
“They gave me a script, a list of what they wanted,” Yu explained. “As a designe Read more…
Health officials are touting a new report that shows a decline in childhood obesity among New York City school children.
A government study released Thursday found obesity dropped from 22 to 21 percent overall among public school students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The report called it the largest documented decline in childhood obesity in a large U.S. city.
The report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relied on body mass index data collected by the Department of Health from the 2006-07 to 2010-11 school years.
It found that while obesity decreased for children in all groups, black and Hispanic children lagged.
The report does not go into detail about what might have led to the decrease, but notes several policy changes that might have contributed.
This morning were releasing a new analysis of NAEP scores by Mark Schneider, former NCES commissioner, with some important implications for both NCLBs legacy and the future of accountability-style education reform. 
Schneider finds that solid gains in math achievement coincided with the advent of consequential accountability, first in the trailblazing Lone Star State and a few other pioneer states, then across the land with the implementation of NCLB. But Schneider also warns that the recent plateau in Texas math scores may foreshadow a coming stagnation in the country’s performance.
Download the paper to learn more and be sure to register for Fordhams January 5 discussion of the paper, and consequential accountability in general, Has the Accountability Movement Run Its Course?
If education is a test, America might want to spend a little more time copying the answers the other countries are writing down on their papers.
Writing in at The Atlantic, Marc Tucker notes that despite spending “more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg” America continues to lag not just developed nations like Japan, Finland, Canada, “but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.”
“You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. But many policymakers, business leaders, educators and advocates are not interested. Instead, they are confidently barreling down a path of American exceptionalism, insisting that America is so different from these other nations that we are better off embracing unique, unproven solutions that our foreign competitors find bizarre.”
Tucker’s list of “unproven solutions” includes charter schools, private school vouchers, entrepreneurial innovations, grade-by-grade testing, diminished teachers unions, and basing teachers pay on how their students do on standardized tests. These strategies
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