In the News: UCLA Anderson Ends Public Funding, Business Sch

This week's episode of In the News is short and sweet. Because of the long holiday and the whirlwind that is the first month of school, there is limited education news. In fact, the biggest news on our end is a Labor Day birthday. Carolyn is now one year older! Huzzah!

But we digress. Here are the--much less exciting--bits of news from September 2nd to September 8th:

UCLA Anderson School of Management ends public funding for "financial self-sufficiency"

What do you do when you're a state school whose state is almost $20 billion in debt? Go private. The UCLA Anderson School of Management has decided to forgo public funding in order to have more control over their funds. To be fair, the UCLA Anderson won't go completely private; it will still be associated with its parent university, the University of California, Los Angeles, which will remain a public university. UCLA Anderson described its abandonment of public funding as "financial self-sufficiency," and plans to use much of the re-allocated money to build its undergraduate business programs. The business school is following in the footsteps of the UVA Darden School of Business, which abandoned public funding in 2003.

University of Chicago Law School received $10 million donation to create scholarship program

University of Chicago's graduate schools must be doing something right. In the past three years, the (now) Booth School of Business and University of Chicago Law School have received over $310 million in alumni donations in the form of two enormous gifts. That's right. Two. The first, $300 million to the business school from David Booth, came in 2008 and is the largest donation in the university's history. This year, David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, has donated $10 million to the law school to create full scholarships and help the JD program compete with powerhouses Harvard and Yale. As Dean Michael Schill told The Wall Street Journal: "With $46,000 a year for tuition, plus room and board, it's easy to lose students to other schools that can provide these scholarships. Now, 10% of our enrolled class for the next three years will be getting tuition paid for."

Business schools see if the iPad will fare better in the classroom than the Kindle

Studies show that e-readers aren't ready for the classroom yet, but that hasn't stopped business schools like Grenoble's Ecole de Management from giving it a whirl. The MBA program plans to test the iPad out on 40 students, along with a few other recent technological innovations. Will this time be different, or will the iPad fail as the Kindle did?

Expose puts MBA professors' research under the microscope

Charles Ferguson will debut Inside Job, his documentary about the economic crisis and financial meltdown of 2008, in less than a month. The movie will include interviews with professors who churn out "research" papers in exchange for heavy consulting fees, and spends a great deal of time on one professor in particular: Columbia Business School's Frederic Mishkin. The beauty of Mishkin's story is it requires nearly zero commentary: (1) The 2006 paper was titled "Financial Stability in Iceland." (2) The report did not state that its authors were funded by the Iceland Chamber of Commerce. (3) Mishkin was paid $124,000 for his consulting services. (3) A "typo" on Mishkin's resume, which has since been rectified, changed the title to "Financial Instability in Iceland." Yikes. As another financial forecaster announced predictions of massive Wall Street layoffs in late 2010 to early 2011 this week, we have to wonder if anything on the Street is really predictable.