Top Rank Schools

Data breaches are going to happen, regardless of what an institution does. How effectively a school responds may be a more telling indicator of its preparedness. If you think your institution is immune to a security breach, perhaps you should have a chat with Brian Rust at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When asked about data breaches on his campus, the communications director in the Office of the Chief Information Officer answers with the hint of a sigh: Let me tell you about the most recent one. This particular breach involved the Wiscard, a student ID that doubles as a debit card. There were records kept on a server that wasnt as secure as it should have been, Rust explains. But hes quick to point out UW-Madison is no more or less vulnerable than any other university. In fact, he believes that almost every school has suffered a breach or an exposure at some point.

When you think “skiing,” you probably think of the Alps or the Rockies. We are guessing that you don’t think of Evanston, Illinois, home of the Kellogg School of Management. Well, students may not do their skiing in Evanston proper, but a remarkable 700+ first- and second-year students participate in Kelloggs annual ski trip, which, according to students, is “the largest group ski booking in the country.” This student-run trip, organized by the Ski and Snowboard Club, has been held at Steamboat in Colorado, Whistler in British Columbia, Canada, and other top skiing locales. This years trip will be held December 10-16 at the Telluride Ski Resort in Telluride, Colorado, and one student even made a movie trailer for the trip, calling it a week not to be missed and showing clips from past trips. Indeed, sk

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It’s official: Federal policymakers across the political spectrum are finally willing to admit that Congress overreached when it passed No Child Left Behind and put Uncle Sam in the driver’s seat on education accountability. First there was (Republican) Senator Lamar Alexander’s proposal to get the feds out of the business entirely, save for requirements around the worst five percent of schools. Then there was (Democratic) President Obama’s waiver package, which allows states to make a pitch for their own approach to accountability. And, this week, there’s the (bipartisan) Harkin-Enzi bill, authored by the chairman and ranking member (respectively) of the Senate education committee, which, well, it’s hard to tell exactly what it does, but it surely reduces the federal footprint around accountability. (Try making sense of the convoluted bill yourself. And quick—the mark-up is next week.)

Could we be watching the beginning of the end for the accountability movement in toto?

But if the

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In 2006, MIT President Susan Hockfield announced a major campus development program that would invest approximately three-quarters of a billion dollars in new and renovated facilities on the school’s 154-acre Cambridge campus, and which included the Sloan School Expansion. This expansion added a new classroom building, E62 (address: 100 Main St.), with approximately 210,000 square feet of space that houses 205 offices, 6 classrooms, more than 30 group study rooms, a dining area, an Executive Education suite, lounge areas, and new, usable outdoor spaces. It was completed in time for the start of classes in fall 2010 and dedicated in May 2011, to coincide with MIT’s 150th anniversary.

The new classroom building is described on the MIT Web site as “the ‘greenest’ building on the entire MIT campus. One recent Sloan alumna we interviewed who works in a building near the MIT campus and has been watching the new building gradually go up reflected, “It’s going to make such a big difference to student life. The building we used was fine but didn’t really encourage congregating. The new buildin

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Under government rules designed to protect local TV stations from harmful interference, high-power Super Wi-Fi signals (up to 4 watts), which can travel for miles, must give TV channels a wide berth. Low-power Super Wi-Fi signals (less than 40 milliwatts) face fewer restrictions. The result is that while there are 48 channels potentially available for long-range Super Wi-Fi, zero or one channel will be available for long-range use in the places most Americans live—so Super Wi-Fi networks significantly bigger than todays home Wi-Fi networks wont be practical. In rural areas, the longer-range systems could prove a boon, although even there, most of the spectrum will still be off-limits. The short-range devices will supplement existing Wi-Fi systems, which can sometimes run out of capacity when lots of people in one vicinity try to use them. Super Wi-Fi will benefit from using lower-frequency waves that travel farther and penetrate walls more easily, but those advantages will be reduced, if not completely offset, by the 40 milliwatt power limit. (

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