Most Popular Colleges: National Universities
U.S. News and World Report – Jan. 26
…The figures in this table are from the fall 2007 entering class and show the admit yield and overall acceptance rate. If a school has a high yield (a large proportion of those admitted enroll), it means that the school is most likely very popular with a top reputation and that the students are highly motivated to go there…
| U.S. News Rank | Acceptance Rate | Yield | |
| University of Alabama | 83 | 64% | 50% |
Grant helps students get engineering lessons
Tuscaloosa News – Jan. 27
A federal grant of nearly $3 million to the University of Alabama will help Sumter County schools continue and expand an effort to get students interested in engineering.
The grant, awarded to UA by the National Science Foundation, provides $2.98 million over five years primarily to pay for eight graduate students to teach labs and activities to two high schools and four middle schools in Sumter County…Beth Todd, an engineering professor at UA and leader on the grant, said a technologically trained work force is crucial to the state. ‘Whether it’s for future engineers or people at the technician level, as more industry comes to Alabama there is greater and greater need, so it becomes more important for us to help bring the schools along,’ Todd said…
Bill proposed to regulate tax preparation services
Tuscaloosa News – Jan. 27
State Rep. Tammy Irons will sponsor legislation to regulate the commercial income tax preparation industry to require licensing and minimum training. Irons, D-Florence, an estate planning attorney with a degree in accounting, will sponsor the Alabama Taxpayer Protection and Assistant Act on behalf of Impact Alabama, a non-profit group that recently surveyed 13 commercial tax preparers around the state and found that all of them made mistakes on individuals’ income tax returns…Impact Alabama founder Stephen Black, director of the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility at the University of Alabama, said the investigation revealed that some preparers get too much of a taxpayer’s refund by urging them to take out exorbitant loans against their anticipated refund or by charging relatively high fees. The tax preparation fee for a simple tax return can be as much as $250, he said…
Unemployment hits hard in south Alabama rural areas
Mobile Press-Register – Jan. 27
…And until the federal government can get stimulus money pumped into the economy, the situation will continue to worsen, said Samuel Addy, an economist at the University of Alabama. Addy said rural counties are more sensitive to the effect of layoffs because of the relatively small size of their labor force…