State money is tight, so education funding – despite the oft-voiced “top priority” status of education itself – is in jeopardy.  The latest threat is to student financial aid.  At risk are the 20,000+ full-time students with at least a 2.5 GPA who are getting a Mississippi Tuition Assistance Grant of $500 or $1000.

Gov. Bryant wants to hold funding for MTAG level, at just under $27 million, but IHL Commissioner Hank Bounds says that’ll leave us $4 million short of covering the legislative mandate.  Bounds says that without more money, IHL would have no choice but to make across-the-board cuts zapping all MTAG recipients at all colleges across the state.

There’s no getting around it.  State financial aid cuts combined with changes (and possible new cuts) to the federal Pell Grant program spell reduced access for low-income Mississippi residents – at just the time that college enrollment is exploding, and a key state goal (see “Blueprint Mississippi”) is to expand the size of our college-educated work force. 

Is this the way forward?

With the semester several weeks in progress, we’re in the middle of a flurry of activity in the Honors College.

Most importantly, our deadline for fall admissions was on Feb. 1, and we’re gearing up to review applications for the freshman class of Fall 2012. All indications are that we’ll have a bumper crop of applications, and we couldn’t be more pleased. The number of applications has been trending upward in recent years, so it’s no surprise to us that this will be a strong year. Still, it’s a good sign that word is continuing to spread among area and regional high school students about the quality of our programs.

Students who’ve applied to the Honors College should expect to get word back from us regarding admissions in about a month.

Every year, the nation celebrates heritage months.  The Smithsonian Institution celebrates February of 2012, along with the rest of the country celebrating Black History Month, by recognizing African American inventors.

The Smithsonian Institution prepared a bibliography of African American Inventors.  Click here to visit their site.  

• Click here to visit their virtual African American Cultural Heritage Tour. 

The Smithsonian, founded in 1846, is the world’s largest museum and research complex, consisting of 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park, and nine research facilities.

• To see a complete listing of the heritage months, visit their page Celebrate History and Heritage with the Smithsonian. 

Thinking big…

“There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior. There’s almost nothing that you can’t do,” Benjamin Carson. M.D.

Benjamin Carson succeeded where all predecessors had failed, in separating twins joined at the head, the Binder Siamese twins, in 1987.

He graduated from high school with honors, after having a rough time in school.  He then went on to Yale University and to medical school.

Carson’s successes include:

• At age 32, he became Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
• He is internationally recognized as a pioneer in his field.

Dr. Carson shares the story of his success with young people saying, 

“You do have the possibility of controlling your own destiny if you are willing to put in the appropriate amount of time and effort.” Or, as he tells young people everywhere, “Think Big.”

• Learn more about Dr. Carson from the Academy of Achievement.   
• Learn more from The History Makers in their feature ScienceMakers. 

The University of Southern Mississippi also celebrates Black History Month by hosting several events and programs on the Hattiesburg campus through February. The national theme for Black History Month is “Black Women in American Culture and History,” established by the Association of the Study of African American Life and History.

• Click here to see a listing of Southern Miss events. 

This Sunday the biggest football game of the year, the Super Bowl, has the New York Giants in a famous rematch with the New England Patriots.

Science is all around us and sports is no different.

Think about a field goal kick, everything matters.   Range of the kicker, depth of the kick on the field, height of the goal post, and many more complex calculations go into kicking the perfect field goal.

NBC and the National Science Foundation teamed up to “unravel the science” behind professional football.

Visit their site, NBCLearn.com/nfl, to learn more.  And remember next time you are watching a sporting event, successful athletics endeavors often depend on calculations for success.

State Senator John Polk of Hattiesburg would like to raise expectations for anyone receiving public assistance of any kind.  Specifically, he’s proposing stiff requirements for random drug testing and mandatory community service for people on the dole.

The senator deserves the benefit of doubt regarding his intentions to help, not hurt, public assistance recipients, so let’s give it to him.  At the same time, I would urge Mr. Polk to pay close attention to the possible, indeed likely, unintended negative consequences of his proposed policies.  There are at least three:

• Cost to taxpayers – Drug testing in particular is an expensive proposition.  Is self-funding of a testing program through public assistance savings realistic?
• Regulatory expansion – The new requirements wouldn’t execute themselves.  In addition to oversight of a testing program, who will manage referrals of recipients to community service agencies?   And what happens when problems develop, disputes and appeals need to be resolved, and so on?  Making it all work means government growth, something Republicans generally abhor.
• Misplaced blame – Programs like drug-testing and mandatory work typically lump together “worthy” and “unworthy” poor, and skate dangerously close to the thin ice of “blaming the victim.”  Are people on assistance because they want to be, or because high unemployment rates, poor health, mental illness, or some other damaging life circumstance makes subsistence living their only option?

A far better investment of scarce state resources, it seems, would be enhanced case management services by professional social workers that could weed out malingerers and the “professionally poor” who defraud the system, while providing skilled support to those who genuinely need (and deserve, I would argue) a “hand up,” as well as a “handout.”