Are medical residents students or employees? For tax reasons, universities care — a lot.
By federal statute, no Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) taxes are due for “service performed in the employ of … a school, college, or university,” if the service is “performed by a student who is enrolled and regularly attending classes [at the school].”
A Treasury Department reg says the exemption doesn’t apply to people who normally work at least 40 hours a week for a school — and specifically cites medical residents as an example of a type of employee that is not an exempt student.
The University of Minnesota challenged the reg, seeking a refund of money it had withheld from medical residents’ stipends and paid in FICA taxes.
Medical residents at the university have to read textbooks and journal articles, and they take exams. But they get annual stipends, vacation and health insurance, and much of their time — between 50 and 80 hours a week — is spent caring for patients.
The school said the residents were students who qualified for the statutory exemption. They argued that the reg’s 4o-hour rule goes too far.
The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed.
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If you are a synaesthete or know of someone who is, Dr Patrick Shepherd from the School of Literacies and Arts in Education would love to hear from you. Synaesthesia is a condition whereby people sense their world in different ways, often hearing colours or tasting sounds for example, or attributing colours to words and numbers. It is a condition experienced by many famous creative people such as Kandinsky, Messiaen and Scriabin. Recent studies show that synaesthetes may number as high as 1 in 23 which is significantly higher than the incidence for dyslexia.
This study aims to gather data relating to the personal experiences of synaesthetes in New Zealand to better inform how we teach the Arts in schools. Participants will complete a short questionnaire (approximately 20 minutes in length) and then undertake a semi-structured interview of around 45 minutes.
If you would like to take part in the study please contact Patrick on 345 8119 or email patrick.shepherd@canterbury.ac.nz.
Here’s why an increasing number of public universities are pumping up their international recruitment strategies:
More than 40,000 students in the U.S. are coming from China. While historically, American schools have been popular as a graduate option, it’s the country’s undergraduates that now represent the fastest-growing group of international students.
Enrollment of Chinese students is proving to be a boon for public universities. In addition to their academic preparation and global perspective, most international students aren’t eligible for financial aid – so they can pay full tuition to cash-strapped schools.
A major increase in China’s middle- and upper-class population is a factor. The booming Chinese economy means students can afford to study abroad. Since that boom is tied to international trade, many families want to give their children advantages of English fluency and alumni.
To recruit more Chinese students, colleges like Santa Clara University recommend providing promotional materials (in Chinese, of course) promoting your school’s multidisciplinary study approaches, close faculty relationships and commitment to innovation, all attractive elements of a campus for Chinese students.
What else can schools do to recruit outside the U.S.? Share your effo
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Subtitled Videos for Education of the Hearing Impaired Child
We begin this fifth article in the series about Visual Learning by stating the obvious, that educational videos that have been developed specifically to teach the K12 curriculum, and that purposely provide dedicated subtitles, provide an improved, effective and enjoyable way of delivering learning and education for the hearing impaired student or the child with hearing difficulties, and will encourage self-motivation towards a continuation of that learning experience. Or in simple terms, the hearing impaired student will enjoy this new and more meaningful way of learning, and as a result they are going to want to continue using it.
Children generally benefit greatly from Visual Learning. The use of educational video introduces that important element of fun to the learning process, it delivers the curriculum content in a graphical format that makes learning interesting, it enables and encourages them to learn at their own speed thereby enabling them to achieve their greatest potential, it provides a more compelling alternative to the textbook that often does little to inspire or motivate the student, and it provides them with what can be best described as their own virtual teacher complete with STOP and START buttons.
As the awareness of the effectiveness of Visual Learning has grown, and the significant benefits of online educational video have become more widely accepted and understood, the availability and the amount of online educational video has started to increase.
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Thursday was the second and last day school district officials in Compton were verifying signatures parents collected to radically overhaul a low-performing public school in the district under the state’s new “Parent Trigger” law. The officials’ process has drawn strong criticism by the group that helped parents gather the signatures.
It wasn’t enough for parents to sign a petition that would wipe the slate clean and turn 450-student McKinley Elementary School over to a charter school operator under the new law. Compton Unified is verifying those signatures by compelling parents to show up outside the school’s auditorium on one of two days, says principal Fleming Robinson. “They come over here to a reception area, and in the reception area there’s a place where we’ve already looked through and have a place for all parents who signed the petition have the opportunity to identify themselves,” he said in the school’s auditorium.
Once parents show official identification, they’re given a one-page sheet of paper with their child’s name on it. Parents must sign t
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