Last Saturday, the name of Georgetown’s career center officially changed to the Charles M. Cawley Career Education Center. Who the franc is that, you ask? Well just you wait, dear readers, because you’re about to find out!

Cawley (COL ’62) is a longtime (50 years longtime) donor to the University who also funds and supports several scholarship programs, including the Baker Scholars Program. He co-founded MBNA, which provided the funds to create the career center in 1994 as well as Sellinger Lounge in the Leavey Center.

I know what you’re thinking, but MBNA is not the Monument Builders of North America.

MBNA Corporation is a bank holding company (acquired by Bank of America in 2006) that became the third largest independent issuer of credit cards as well as the number one issuer of affinity cards, which donate a small percentage of the money spent on a credit card to a charity organization. MBNA was also the largest political donor to the George W. Bush 2000 campaign, after Enron.

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Earlier this week, the Student Life Report committee released their finalized 50-something page document about student life. The report primarily focuses on the advisory boards and GPB, but does summarize intellectual life and administrative accountability too. You can find the entire report at the end of this post, but in case you don’t want to read the entire thing, Vox has pulled out the interesting bits for you.

Space

A big ticket issue on campus is centralized space booking: everyone wants to put all space booking under one office. In addition to that SLR2012 recommends that the university renegotiate with Aramark to give better (and cheaper) access to the ballrooms.

On that note, SLR2012 also recommends reducing or eliminating the fees performing arts groups must pay for space.

In many respects, it seems that Georgetown’s issues may be easily solved by simply making [performance] spaces more readily available and less expensive to use. Almost all groups see the requirement to pay for performance space as a hindrance to their ability to regularly perform or attract large audiences. No other surveyed schools required their student groups to pay for use of performance spaces. (p. 40)

For club sports, SLR2012 mainly wants bureaucratic reform so club sports stops getting the short end of the stick in athletic facilities. Specifically, the reports suggests that club sports be allows to use McDonough after the new athletic center is built and that the hospital not expand onto North Kehoe.

Money

The big ticket item in the SLR1999 was the complete dearth of funding for student organizations on campus. Thus was created the student activities fee. Thirteen years, six points of reform, and a couple referenda later, the amount of money for student organizations isn’t as much of a problem as how it is allocated. One suggestion SLR2012 makes is putting the gift account under GUSA control. Currently donors can give money to “student activities” broadly defined, and the money goes to SAC. SLR2012 says the money should be allocated at the budget summit so more groups have access to the funds.

Also, SLR2012 says student groups should be able to audit themselves, but in order to do this, they need online access to their cost centers and timely charges by for space and such by other campus offices.

Finally on money, the SLR2012 suggests a referendum on whether or not students want to create a separate fee for the Spring Concert. It doesn’t actually call for the creation of the fee, but the report does throw the idea out there.

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After yet another disappointing failure to break the top 20 universities in the country and an international ranking that we really don’t want to talk about, Georgetown was hit with yet another blow with the most recent list of college rankings to hit the Internet. Campus Grotto released their annual list of the most expensive colleges in the U.S. earlier this week, and after snagging the #15 spot last year, Georgetown has fallen to #40.

That’s right—there are now students at 39 schools who can’t make any snide comments to you about Georgetown being expensive.

This does not mean that our total cost has decreased. In fact, we’re up from $52,526 last year to $54,423. But apparently, the 2011 school year has hit a lot of the country’s other universities pretty hard, and their combined tuition, room and board, and mandatory fees have skyrocketed past those that we at Georgetown have to pay.

Once again, Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, took the top spot, with their total cost edging nearer and nearer to $60k per year. The two schools taking the second and third spots, New York University and Columbia University, are the only other two on the list to break the $56,000 mark, with #4 Harvey Mudd College staying below that line by a whole two bucks. If you scroll way down on that list, you get to Georgetown, which sits just ahead of Tulane University, but manages to stay cheaper than #39, our notoriously pricey neighbor George Washington University, by $30/year. Take that, GW.

Campus Grotto also offers a list based on tuition alone, where Georgetown’s rankings drops even lower to #58, with a total tuition bill of $40,920, sandwiched between Notre Dame at #59 and Washington University in St. Louis at #57. We’re sure if they did a ranking based solely on room and board, Georgetown would find itself significantly closer to the top. Something to ponder about while you stay awake at night listening to the mice scurry around your room.

Before we all get too excited about these rankings, though, remember one thing—you (or, more likely, your parents) are still paying over $54 thousand this year alone to go to school. Think about all the swimming pools full of gold coins that would be.

Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia handed down a 63-month prison sentence [PDF] to Reginald A. Clark, 42, a former accountant for the Hoya Federal Credit Union, who was convicted in February for embezzling over $200,000 from the institution.

Between 2001 and 2003, Clark exploited weaknesses in the credit union’s computer systems in order to redirect the funds. Police arrested him in 2003 after an internal investigation revealed discrepancies in the credit union’s accounting records.

A federal jury found Clark guilty of charges of bank fraud, wire fraud, and making false entries in federal credit institution records. The Hon. Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court sentenced Clark on Tuesday to pay back the $219,286.41 he stole, as well as serve 63 months in prison and five years under supervised release.

Hoya Federal Credit Union serves Georgetown University faculty and staff. Deposit insurance spared the bank from any losses as a result of the scheme.

h/t Georgetown Patch

President DeGioia announced today that Michael K. Barry, former chief investment officer of the University of Maryland System Foundation, would become Georgetown University’s CIO.

As the CIO of the UMSF since 2005, Barry managed the investment funds of 21 Maryland state universities and community colleges. Before starting at the foundation in 2003, he was a senior research associate at the Cambridge Associates consulting firm.

Barry also coordinates the investments of Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and serves as and advisor to No Greater Sacrifice, a non-profit that provides scholarships to children of fallen soldiers.

He replaces Larry Kochard, who left in January to serve as UVa’s CIO. Under the last year of Kochard’s tenure, the University’s endowment ranked 61st in the nation in 2010 according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, which was six points higher than the previous year. But the office also faced scrutiny over where it chose to invest.

Barry received his B.A. in Philosophy at Fairfield University.

Yesterday, Georgetown announced that it received $87 million—the largest gift in University history—from the late Virginia Toulmin.

Toulmin, who passed away in June, donated the money to the University’s medical center with instructions that it be used to support medical research. The gift will fund the Warwick Evans and Mary Mason Washington Evans Medical Research Endowment, which is named after her husband’s grandparents.

“I am deeply grateful to Harry and Virginia Toulmin for their generosity and trust in Georgetown’s ability to use these resources to create knowledge that will make a meaningful difference in the lives of others,” President John DeGioia said in a press release.

After Harry Toulmin died in 1965, Virginia managed his $1.2 million charitable trust as it grew to its present-day value. As a longtime volunteer who served of the University’s Board of Regents, Medical Affairs committee, and School of Nursing Board of Visitors, she had always planned to donate the money to Georgetown.

“Harry really worshiped his grandfather, who was this great man—successful physician and prominent Washington figure,” she said in a 1997 interview. “[E]ven though he didn’t graduate from Georgetown, Harry loved his grandfather and his grandfather loved Georgetown.”

Last week, Georgetown University Alumni Student Federal Credit Union crossed the $16 million mark in its managed assets. The milestone is the highest in the credit union’s 27-year history.

GUASFCU, the oldest and largest student-run financial institution in the country, saw its assets grow 37 percent over the last year.

“GUASFCU’s growth has been driven by its competitive rates and the expansion in services designed to make it a competitive, lifelong banking experience,” CEO Arjun Mehta (SFS ’11) wrote in a press release.

Mehta added that GUASFCU manages almost 12,000 accounts and $1.4 million in loans.

Textbooks are perhaps the biggest first-year expense that students can control. Yet at the beginning of every year, a Disneyland-sized queue of freshmen—and upperclassmen—inevitably winds around the upper floor of the bookstore.

After handing over shrink-wrapped copies of Accounting and Econ textbooks, students can find themselves paying well over $1000 dollars for books. When the semester ends, they’ll be lucky to sell those books for a fraction of what they paid.

That’s nonsense.

To help you cut down on books’ costs, we’ve got a list of suggestions after the jump. (Feel free to add your own in the comments!)

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Worried about the high cost of a Georgetown education?  Bloomberg Businessweek’s recent article about the value of college degrees may make you feel a bit better.

Businessweek, in collaboration with PayScale, collected information on the incomes of alumni from over 550 schools, and combined this with the cost of attendance to calculate return on investment (ROI) ratings for each school.

Georgetown just missed making the top twenty, coming in 21^st by just $11,000 in 30-year net ROI rankings.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology came in first with an impressive $1,688,000 30-year net ROI and 12.6% annual ROI.  Georgetown had a 30-year ROI of $1,147,000 and an annual ROI of 11.2%.  This difference may be due to Georgetown not having an engineering program, which is what helped to put MIT at the top.

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Thanks to our grant, everyone at Georgetown will now look like this

Next time there’s a calamity on campus, thank the U.S. Department of Education: they just gave Georgetown a $549,302 grant for emergency preparedness initiatives, according to Blue & Gray.

The money will go towards funding training “evacuation processes, infectious disease outbreaks, threat assessment and business continuity plans.”  It will also be used to bulk up Georgetown’s basic supplies, such as two-way radios and first aid kits.

According to the article, Norovirus and H1N1 have improved Georgetown’s emergency response capabilities, but there’s still work to be done:

“In the past year and a half, we’ve had Norovirus, and we’ve been dealing with H1N1 for six months now,” [Peter Luger, executive director of safety finance and administration,] explained. “While we still want to fill in some blanks in this plan, we’re light years ahead of where we were a year ago.”

The university is also looking to use the money to expand its community emergency response team training.  It will also be used to fund an internship for graduate students interested in security studies or disaster management.