Princeton Review Names Five SUNY Profs to National “Best 300” List

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Casey Vattimo

The Princeton Review yesterday released its inaugural “The Best 300 Professors” list, including five SUNY faculty after a joint selection process undertaken in partnership with RateMyProfessors.com, the highest-trafficked college professor ratings site in the U.S.

“The State University of New York takes great pride in its faculty and we could not be more pleased that five of our best and brightest have been named to the Princeton Review’s Top 300 list,” said SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher. “Congratulations to Professors Berman, Haupt, Wegmann, Towsley, and Marrone on this much-deserved national distinction.”

The five SUNY professors named to the list are: UAlbany English Professor Jeffrey Berman, Binghamton University Journalism Professor Mary Stillwell Haupt, Binghamton University Health Professor Jennifer Wegmann, SUNY Geneseo Mathematics Professor Gary Towsley, and Stony Brook University Sociology Professor Catherine Marrone.

The list’s roster of top teachers features professors in more than 60 fields ranging from Accounting to Neuroscience to Sport Management. They hail from 122 colleges and universities across the nation. A complete list of the professors in the book is accessible online.

NY, SUNY offer solutions to exploding college costs

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Casey Vattimo

In a commentary for CNN’s schools of thought, Chancellor Zimpher offers New York’s approach to keeping college affordable as a model for the nation:

My View: A model for addressing college costs

College costs are exploding. Last fall, U.S. public four-year colleges increased tuition by more than 7%. Combined with severe cuts in state funding, university systems are scrambling to get a hold of skyrocketing costs. Worse, more than half of students earning bachelor’s degrees at public colleges – 56 percent – are graduating with $22,000 of debt, on average.

The sharpest tuition increase – 21 percent – took place last fall at California’s public colleges and universities, where one in 10 of the country’s four-year public college students are enrolled. Arizona and Washington fell in just behind the Golden State, increasing tuition by 17% and 16%, respectively.

This year, an especially bleak financial outlook in Pennsylvania has spurred talk of privatizing public universities.

This full-blown crisis in higher education is being felt by students in virtually every state in America, except for ours in New York. Here, we’ve solved our revenue problems and kept tuition in check by implementing a five-year rational tuition policy and earning a commitment from Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders to be held immune from state budget cuts. Not bad for world-class colleges and universities located in one of the most expensive areas of the country.

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