Daily Debriefing
By Nathan Swire And Rebecca Cress
Published on Monday, January 28, 2008
At a time when top universities are making headlines for expanding their financial aid packages, elite college preparatory schools are spending their endowments to cut tuition as well. Endowments at independent private high schools have soared in recent years -- the average endowment per student rose 93.5 percent, according to the National Association of Independent Schools. Many schools have used this windfall to attract lower-income students. The percentage of students at boarding schools receiving financial aid nearly doubled from 22.5 percent in 2000 to 40.9 percent in 2007. Private high schools have also used their endowments to build new athletic facilities and amenities that rival those provided at many colleges.
A professor at the University of California at San Diego is uploading his new book to a blog for online review, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. In addition to submitting his latest scholarly novel for traditional peer review, on Jan. 22, Noah Wardrip-Fruin began posting installments of "Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies," to his blog, "Grand Text Auto." Wardrip-Fruin posted on the blog that he was inspired to try this "blog-based peer review" because it is accessible to people from a variety of backgrounds and can foster interdisciplinary dialogue. Responding to Wardrip-Fruin's proposal, one reviewer, Adam Chapman, said, "Like many great ideas, now that you've done it, it seems like such a natural step. I'm excited to see what happens."