NOTEBOOK

Assembly Bill 591 Becomes Law

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently signed Assembly Bill 591, which allows the California Community Colleges (CCC) to hire temporary part-time employees to teach up to 67 percent, rather than 60 percent, of the hours per week that constitute a regular full-time faculty assignment.

The initiative was sponsored by Assemblyman Mervyn M. Dymally, in conjunction with the California Part-Time Faculty Association.

Increasing the threshold to 67 percent will enable part-time faculty who teach four- and five-unit classes, for example, science, mathematics and language, to teach an additional class in one particular community college, eliminating the need to teach in multiple CCC districts to piece together a full-time schedule and limiting their ability to participate in the campus community and be a resource to students, said Dymally.

According to the CCC Chancellor’s office, of the 41,625 academic temporaries, 3,393 presently work at multiple districts.

Information: (310) 600-8604.

El Camino College Compton Center’s Students Transfer to Continue Their Education

El Camino College Compton Center recently announced that nearly 200 students transferred for the 2006-07 academic year to a four-year institution to continue their studies.

The top transfer school was California State University, Dominguez Hills with California State University, Los Angeles and California State University, Long Beach second and third, respectively. A number of students selected private institutions as well as other local colleges. Other top colleges students chose to transfer to include: Charles R. Drew University; California State University, Fullerton; California State Polytechnic University in Pomona; National University; University of California, San Bernardino; University of La Verne and Humbolt State University.

Students can apply and register now for the fall semester at the El Camino College Compton Center, which begins on Aug. 23, at www. compton.edu .

Information: (310) 900-1600, ext. 2760 or www.compton.edu.

eLearning Center Web Site Unveiled

Gatlin Learning, Inc. has partnered with American Heritage University to host a Web site for The eLearning Center, a comprehensive resource of online workforce training and continuing education courses. American Heritage University’s portal is available at http://ahu.theelearningcenter.com/.

With The eLearning Center, colleges and universities create unique, co-branded sites from which they can offer courses from leading online content providers for direct sale to students and corporate training customers.

The eLearning Center contains courses from many of the country’s top online education content providers such as Element K, Webucator, GlobalEnglish, 360 Training, CEU4U and Coastal Training Technologies.

The self-study courses are available in a broad range of subject areas, including business, medical training, continuing education courses, design, information technology (IT) and motivation.

Information: http://ahu.thee learningcenter.com/ or (817) 870-2870.

Report Documents Trends in Black/Latino Higher Education

The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI) has released a report titled “African American and Latino Enrollment Trends among Medicine, Law, Business, and Public Affairs Graduate Programs.” The purpose of the report is to provide an analysis of the fields of medicine, business, law, and public affairs, and to present other relevant data pertaining to African American and Latino students in graduate education.

The first section provides an overview of action policy and court cases. The second analyzes the relationship between affirmative action and nationwide enrollment trends of African American and Latino students in the four selected professional programs indicated.

According to the report, there have been significant improvements since the 1970s in high school graduation rates of African American and Latino students. Despite this, a low rate of African American and Latino high school alumni restricts the pool for medicine, business, law and public affairs students, because these disciplines require a bachelor’s degree.

The report also revealed that the elimination of affirmative action has sharply decreased the number of underrepresented students enrolling in medical schools. African American applicants who applied to the top 10 public and private medical schools declined by 25 percent, from 5,379 in 1995 to 4,033 in 2001. Latino applicants to the same schools decreased 38.6 percent, from 2,769 in 1995 to 1,700 in 2001. Together, African American and Latino enrollment in the nation’s top 10 public and private medical schools declined by 11.2 percent and 27.2 percent respectively.

The report was prepared by Rodolfo de la Garza, and Sepehr Hejazi Moghadam, from the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute office at Columbia University. It can be downloaded in its entirety at www. TRPI.org.