Mary Anderson survived breast cancer whilst she was earning a master’s degree in nursing leadership online from St. Joseph’s College in North Windham.

She in addition was holding down a top-level job as supporter chief nurse at the hospital at VA Maine Healthcare System-Togus.

“It certainly made me more driven to reach my goals in life,” Anderson, 53, of Richmond, said of her bout with cancer. “I love my job; I love where I work. I was very fortunate that the VA offers this program.”

Anderson was referring to a program in which the VA continues to pay its employees’ salaries as well as their education outlay while they are pursuing college degrees. In switch over, employee-students agree to carry on functioning for the VA for at least three years after they graduate.

She earned her master’s degree last December, but sought to hold off on compliant it until spring so her 88-year-old father and her mother could watch her march in cap and gown with the May 12 graduation procession at St. Joseph’s.

Also earning a master’s degree Anderson was her friend Tiffany Rooney, of Vassalboro, who has worked with Anderson at different locations over the past 18 years. They were able to study as one in some courses.

Rooney, a nurse manager for home-based primary care at Togus, is a survivor of thyroid cancer and lung cancer.

Anderson was born in Germany, where her father was stationed with the U.S. Army. When he retired, he moved back to his hometown of Bath, and Anderson graduated in 1976 from Morse High School in Bath. She received an associate degree in nursing in 1978 from Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston and a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1984 from the University of Southern Maine.

Anderson was head nurse in the emergency department of Bath Memorial Hospital and in the intensive care unit at Maine Medical Center in Portland. And she was director of the Gardiner unit of Healthreach Home Care and Hospice, where Rooney was a supervisor.

Sarah copper was stunned when she was collecting her degree to see her boy friend Sam Miller on the stage on his knee whit a ring in his hands.
Sarah was in university for four years working for her justice, law, and society degree, the video was captured on the moment. Sam’s voice could not me heard from the screaming audience.

Sam Miller said that his family said that he should wait until we graduated we got engaged but I didn’t want to spend any more time waiting for her to be my fiancée.

Sam has now got a job with relations firm as a communications assistant, and Sarah is still looking to be a teacher.

The University of Texas of the Permian Basin will be the first university in Texas to offer a $10,000 four-year degree program.

The Texas Science Scholar Program was approved at the University of Texas System Board of Regents meeting in Austin on Wednesday. The program will offer a four-year degree program costing $10,000 in the areas of geology, chemistry, computer science, information systems and math. The reduced price in tuition would save future students an annual amount of almost $4,000 per year.

Paul Feit, department chair and mathematics program coordinator at UTPB, said he sees the program as an experiment. He said he expects the first year to primarily impact local students and possibly in future years could bring in students from other areas in the state.

“At my end it’s getting new faces in the classroom,” Feit said. “If it works, it will be a tremendous shot in the arm in many ways.”

The new program could go into effect in the fall, with criteria of maintaining full-time status and a minimum of a 3.0 grade point average. Students have to apply for the program through the university and will receive the discounted tuition cost only if accepted.

And while one plan approved a lower tuition cost for students, UTPB officials have also proposed a tuition increase, which could increase undergraduate tuition 2.57 percent annually for the 2012 school year and another 2.6 percent in the 2013 school year.
The reason UTPB is able to offer the program lies mainly in the recent addition of the university’s $54 million Science and Technology building.

Fannin said that since the completion of the math and science building in the fall, UTPB has a higher capacity for students. He said the campus has a capacity for 5,000 to 6,000 students but there are currently about 4,000 students and a lot of empty seats in classrooms, which could be filled without a major expense to UTPB.

“The opportunity has opened up. Why wait four or five years?” Fannin said.

And while the university does not have a set goal of added enrollment in mind, Fannin said, there could be an instance in the future where classroom capacity is met in certain programs and that would put a limit on the program’s availability.

This autumn, many English students will get some form of means-tested support through bursaries or fee reduction depending on their parents’ incomes. Each university has designed its own system to soften the rise in fees, which is up to £9,000 in most cases.

In the new system prospective students are supposed to compare what is on offer. But these offers differ in so many ways – such as whether you went to a state school, whether you were on free school meals, where you live, whether the university was your first choice, and whether you are a first-year student – that it is difficult to make any comparisons. Small differences in parents’ incomes – which applicants may not even know about – can make thousands of pounds’ difference in which offer is best.

In the most extreme case, Oxford University offers first-year students fee reductions and bursaries worth £13,050 (with government grants) if their parents earned up to £17,000 in 2010-11, but nothing if they had earned £44,000. But after allowing for differences in tax, tax credits and benefits, the family on £44,000 would only have been £13,250 better off in the first place. The £13,050 difference in student support cuts the gain from £27,000 of extra earnings to only £200. In effect they faced a 99% tax rate.

More generally, the problems show just how hard it can be to protect the poorest when any substantial universal benefits or services are withdrawn and the limits to what can be done through means-testing without painful side-effects.

Universities have tried to open access to poorer students by means-testing, but the cliff-edge grants will catch many out