The Institute of International Education just released the results of its annual survey on study abroad participation, and the findings show that for the 2007-08 school year Georgetown had the 8th highest percentage of undergraduate students studying abroad.

Out of a graduating class of 1,730 students, 989— or 57.2 percent—had gone abroad last year.  That’s an increase over the 2006-07 percentage of students studying abroad, 52.3 percent.  The 2006-07 seems to have been a bit of an anomaly, though: in 2005-07, the rate was 55 percent, in 2004-05 it was 58.7 percent, and in 2003-04 it was 58.9 percent.

Other D.C. schools also had high rates of study abroad participation.  American University had the 7th highest percentage nationwide, with 59.5 percent of its students studying abroad.  George Washington University came in 18th with 45.9 percent studying abroad.

Overall, 262,416 American students studied abroad during the 2007-08 school year, an increase of 8.5 percent from the previous year.

The survey also looks at the most popular study abroad destinations.  The top five destination countries were the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, France and China.  While the majority of students (56.3 percent) went to Europe, there were slight gains in the percentage of students going to Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The regional trends nation-wide are largely in line with what Vox found when it looked at the top study abroad destinations for Georgetown students, except for the Middle East.  While only 1.3 percent of all students who went abroad in 2007-08 chose to go to the Middle East, at Georgetown, 5.5 percent of students who went abroad during the 2008-09 school year studied in the Middle East.

It’s never too early to invest in your dream house!

If dorm living’s got you down and you’ve heard the horror stories about local landlords, the Washington Times has a new solution for you: go buy a house (or, more precisely, go get your parents to buy one for you).

The Times ran a whole feature story on the new trend of parents buying homes for their college-age kids to live in while they’re at school.  While buying a house seems like a drastic step, the article explains that with the rent and dorm prices rising and the housing market in shambles, buying a house and selling it off or renting it out to other students after graduation often makes financial sense.

While the phenomenon is most widespread in the Midwest where real estate is the cheapest, but it’s also gaining ground here in D.C.  The article features one real estate agent who sells as many as eight houses per year to Georgetown and GW students.  The piece also profiles recent Georgetown Law grad Jim Pyle, whose mother bought him a house on Capitol Hill which they sold for about $200,000 more than they paid.

While receiving your college e-mail address has long been a milestone for pre-frosh everywhere, a new study from Educuse suggests that college e-mail accounts may be on the way out.

Educuse’s “Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report” surveyed 930 colleges and universities about their IT practices and policies and found that about 10 percent of institutions are considering eliminating school-run e-mail accounts because so many students already have outside e-mail addresses.

That figure is significant increase from the findings of the 2004 version of the survey, in which only one to two percent of schools were thinking about doing away with e-mail accounts.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The National Association of College and University Business Officers recently crunched the numbers to come up with a complete ranking of U.S. college and university endowments for fiscal year 2008.

Granted a lot has changed since then, but with an endowment of $1,059,075,000 at the end of fiscal year 2008, Georgetown was ranked 71st.  That figure represents a very slight decrease from the end of fiscal year 2007 endowment, when the endowment stood at about $1.06 billion.

Harvard had the largest endowment nationwide with a total of $36.5 billion.  Yale, Stanford, Princeton and the University of Texas system rounded out the top five.

As Campus Grotto noted, Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon are the only two schools in U.S. News and World Report’s Top 25 Universities that aren’t in the top 33 in terms of endowment size.

Makin’ bank

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently released its database of executive compensation at colleges and universities for the 2007-08 school year and Georgetown’s own John DeGioia isn’t doing too poorly for himself.

With a total compensation of $642,582 (that’s $607,939 in pay and 34,643 in benefits), DeGioia was the 63rd highest paid private university president in the country in 2007-08, according to the Chronicle‘s data.  That salary was a $50,965 upgrade from what he received during the 2006-07 school year.

But DeGioia was outdone in the District by the president of American University, Cornelius Kerwin, who was the fifth highest paid private university president with $1,419,339 in total compensation.  The real record-holder, though, was George Washington University’s former president, Stephen J. Trachtenberg.  With a total compensation of $3.7 million, Trachtenberg was the high paid current or former university president by a margin of $2 million.

Photo by Lexie Herman.

CNN recently released a ranking of the most expensive colleges and universities (based on data from the Chronicle of Higher Education) and Georgetown is a very high achiever: according to their data, we’re the second most expensive school in the country this year.

With a total cost of $52,161 for the 2009-10 school year, the only school that Georgetown is cheaper than is Sarah Lawrence College, which clocked in with a total cost of $55,788.  According to CNN, Georgetown’s total cost increased by 2.9 percent from the 2008-09 school year.

Perhaps the most tragic thing about this ranking is that we can no longer point at GW for being so outrageously expensive—they’re a whole two spots and $386 below us this year.

While Georgetown is currently tackling the issue of gender neutral bathrooms, Syracuse and Princeton are taking it a step further by beginning to offer gender-neutral housing.

Both universities decided that next fall, they will allow students to room with someone of the opposite sex.  The policies were changed with LGBT students in mind, but will also help other students who want to live with their friends of different genders.

Syracuse will offer seventy-four two-bedroom suites for students that don’t feel comfortable entering the housing lottery with roommates of the same gender. They will also be giving training for potential mixed gender pairings for conflicts that are nonexistent with same gender housing.

Princeton will be allowing Spelman Hall, a residence hall featuring apartment-style suites, to offer gender-neutral housing.

It’s a wonderful day in Georgetown’s neighborhood!

While Georgetown’s town-gown relations can get pretty testy, according to researchers at Westfield State College, GU is actually one of the best neighbors in the country [PDF].  Georgetown made their “Best Neighbor” honor roll in their recent survey of colleges and universities.

The presentation, “Saviors of Our Cities: A Survey of Best College and University Civic Partnerships” emphasizes that the current state of the economy makes the relationships between universities and their surroundings even more important than ever before.

They ranked universities that they felt “demonstrated…long-standing cooperative efforts with community leaders to rehabilitate the cities around them, to influence community revitalization and cultural renewal, and to encourage economic expansion of the local economy, urban development and community service.”

While Georgetown didn’t earn a spot in the top 25, we did make the honor roll.  The honor role highlights over 100 colleges and universities that “figured prominently in lengthy cooperative efforts with community leaders to rehabilitate the cities around them.”

Georgetown’s Vice President of Student Affairs Todd Olson cited programs run through the Center for Social Justice, such as business consulting with non-profits, direct service and tutoring and working with local jails and prisons as evidence of Georgetown’s commitment to the local community.

“Across the city and region there’s a lot that we do really well,” Olson said. “There are a lot of needs in this community. We need to continue looking around and keep building those connections. We haven’t finished that work, but I believe we have a laudable track record.”

Much of Georgetown’s community service is created through student-run initiatives, such as Grassroot Hoyas, a student-founded and run group that goes into D.C. schools to promote AIDS awareness.

“What I admire most about Georgetown is its deep commitment to social justice,” Grassroot Hoyas founder Tyler Spencer said. “While so many students volunteer in amazing ways around the world, Grassroot Hoyas has helped us realize that we can and should work to solve problems that exist right in our backyard.”

Across the country, the number of college students seeking psychiatric help is higher than ever before, according to the recent Healthy Minds Study.

The study reports that 90 percent of college counselors said they have seen a rise in the number of students with mental health problems and the severity of their problems.  In 2007, for example, the 15 percent of college students had been diagnosed with depression, up from 10 percent in 2000.

While the increase in reported mental health problems among college students seems troubling, it may actually be a positive trend.  The authors of the study posit that increase probably doesn’t mean that our generation is more troubled, but rather that we know where to turn for help with mental health issues.

Newfound understanding of psychiatric problems paired with a 50 percent increase in prescribed medications over the past ten years have helped people to know what mental health issues look like and recognize the resource available to address them.

DeGioia’s reaction upon hearing of the hot breakfast outrage

Beyond the significant commitments of the raising money from donors, guiding the university and coping with rogue freshmen, it seems Georgetown President John DeGioia has yet another obligation on his plate: leading the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’ re-accreditation committee for Harvard.

That’s right, we may not be in the Ivy League, but our President gets to judge (or “holistically evaluate”) them!

According the the Harvard Crimson, though, he won’t necessarily get a warm welcome when he goes up on research trips.  DeGioia and the re-accreditation committee held a meeting this Monday to get input from Harvard students.  The student turnout? A grand total of five.