Learning Secrecy 101 on college campuses

An investigative report in the The Columbus Dispatch, "Secrecy 101", has gone beyond Ohio's borders to uncover colleges' public records policies concerning college sports. From Alabama to Oregon, the Dispatch reporters found examples of schools censoring player information, often citing a 35-year-old student privacy law whose author says it was intended to protect student grades, not athletic records.

From the Knoxville News Sentinel to the Wall Street Journal, other media are picking up on the story. "Unfortunately, that's the way secrecy laws work," News Sentinel editor Jack McElroy said. "Governments find it convenient to err on the side of confidentiality. So one result is that the $5 billion college sports establishment operates with little public scrutiny."

So far I haven't seen any follow-up in Virginia papers, although the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech are both mentioned in the Columbus, Ohio, paper.

"Across the country, many major-college athletic departments keep their NCAA troubles secret behind a thick veil of black ink or Wite-Out," the Dispatch reporters said. For example, under its interpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, one university wanted $35,330 to provide documents that were free of charge at more than half the 69 schools who responded to the reporters' record requests.

The Dispatch asked 119 schools for reports of NCAA violations, football players' summer-employment, players' "comp" ticket guests, and flight manifests for team air travel. Fifty schools, including the University of Virginia, either didn't provide information or wanted too much money to comply with the request, the paper said. Virginia Tech received good marks on some, but not all, of the record requests..

Stories:

• The Columbus Dispatch, Secrecy 101 (national schools) and Violations Across the Country, plus a sidebar.
  
• Knoxville News Sentinel: "UT not only school hiding behind FERPA"
  
• Wall Street Journal: FERPA: A Law Grows in Columbus . . . And at a College Town Near You.
  
• AP at First Amendment Center: Report: College sports programs withhold info
• Overview of Freedom of Information on Campus
  

Summer reading: Where the jobs are

Radford and Blacksburg didn't make the list, but Forbes magazine came up with some interesting locations in its compilation of Top College Towns For Jobs. Charlottesville is number 14, but no other Virginia city made the top 20. (New Mexico, Colorado and Alabama were the only states with two locations on the list.)

The article's "in depth" slide show is rather shallow, but does report the percentage of workers in university jobs and the area's job growth since 2008, along with the name of a local university. (Durham, N.C., is listed with Duke, but no mention of the lighter blue institution less than 10 miles down the road in Chapel Hill.)

“Across business cycles, college towns are steady and predictable,” John Stapleford, senior economist at Moody’s Economy.com, told Forbes, although he cautioned that losses in university endowments may soon have a negative effect on the schools' own spending and new-job creation.

When schools DO have money to spend, the effect is magnified, he said, estimating that each new job on-campus creates a need for another half or whole job off-campus to meet the needs of the school, its students, employees and visitors. The Forbes article doesn't discuss any other forces that might be at work on the local economies, such as cuts in state budgets for public universities, or whether last year's employment data could be a one-time-only "bump" in some communities.

While jobs nationwide were down 3.5 percent for the past year, according to Forbes reading of Moody's March to March stats, 62 college towns showed an increase. Forbes' top-20 list -- In Depth: Top College Towns For Jobs -- is presented as a tedious one-at-a-time slide show in countdown order. If you don't have the patience for that, here are the metro areas, starting with No. 1:

1. Provo, Utah
2. Morgantown,W.Va.
3. Durham, N.C.
4. Athens, Ga.
5. Fargo, N.D.
6. Hattiesburg, Miss.
7. Iowa City, Iowa
8. Seattle, Wash.
9. Baton Rouge, La.
10. Las Cruces, N.M.
11. College Station, Texas
12. Charlottesville, Va.
13. Tuscaloosa, Ala.
14. Auburn, Ala.
15. Fort Collins, Colo.
16. Oklahoma City, Okla.
17. Boulder, Colo.
18. Albuquerque, N.M.
19. Jonesboro, Ark.
20. San Jose, Calif.

I wish Forbes also had compiled "job vacancies" data, which might make this a great list of "places to work your way through grad school." I kept looking for a place to click-through to more data. Instead, if you let the slide show keep running, it jumps to a list of "Top 10 Weird Celebrity Family Connections." So much for "news you can use."

Rewriting history at college newspaper sites

Both of Radford's student publications, The Tartan and Whim (TheTartan.com and ruwhim.com), have changed content-management platforms in the past year, complicating the matter of finding things in their archives.

At first I thought that was a shame, because past contributors might have links to online-edition stories in their resumes or on their personal sites, or might want to retrieve stories or artwork to send to prospective employers. With the changes in publishing systems over the years, some links to individual pages still work, while links to "section" or front pages don't. Some stories may be gone because of redirected addresses.

There may be a bright side to missing archives: At least they can't do the student journalist's career any damage in the future, as reflected in this trend-story from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites.

The RU publications have good intentions about preserving their history and resurrecting their archives, but the process hasn't been rapid. Whim has carried a notice that "An archive of previous versions of Whim is forthcoming" since its change to publishing with WordPress last fall. Back then, I tracked down any archives I could.

However, Google was archiving stories from both publications through their homegrown flat-file editions to those done with the Absolut and WordPress php-based systems, which means plenty of old stories still can be found -- something I point out to news writing students as the modern equivalent of the old "check the clips in the morgue" routine and dead-tree newspapers.

While both publications own their own domains (thetartan.com and ruwhim.com), the pages are actually served from the radford.edu domain, usually the PHP server at php.radford.edu. As a result a Google "site:" search of the university domain with the name of the publication or a search keyword can be effective, so I guess student reporters' bylines also could be used by an employer browsing for stories by a job applicant.

For example, a search will produce plenty of stories about past years' editions of the annual off-campus revelry called "Quadfest" (because it was once on-campus). The Google search strings look like this:
site:radford.edu+quadfest+whim or site:radford.edu+quadfest+tartan
(A more refined search might eliminate stories that use "whim" or "tartan" as something other than publication names, but you get the idea.)

Similarly, Google can search the regional daily, The Roanoke Times, whose own search engine has had its problems, although it does a reasonable job "quadfest." Perhaps it has been fixed, even if it doesn't let me save a link to the search results. With Google, it's site:roanoke.com+quadfest Result: What do you know -- the RTimes had an editorial that said the party wasn't all that bad!

(Thanks to Bryan Murley, Steve Yelvington and other folks on Twitter for pointing to the Chronicle of Higher Education story. I really should renew my subscription.)