Manipal University, the leading higher education provider in India, announced that it has introduced new courses and allocate more scholarships for the year 2010 along with additional infrastructures and facilities to its students. The university has also tied up with many new foreign universities for better teaching and learning atmosphere on the campus.

Since establishing Kasturba Medical College in 1953, nineteen other institutions have been set up, and the excellence in higher education that began in Manipal 56 years ago, continues even today with a fresh look each year. 

NEW COURSES:

The university has added ten new courses taking the total number of courses in the University to 264. Registrar, Dr G.K. Prabhu, giving details of the new courses, admission details, scholarships and other activities of the university told reporters that by starting Manipal Centre for European Studies the University took the first big step in the direction of humanities. The university catered to higher education in medicine, engineering and management. So a Masters course in European Studies and Management adds more variety for students to choose from. “Diploma in Gandhian and Peace Studies, and also Certificate courses in Public Health and Global Health have already started,” he said.  “The other new courses introduced for 2010 include MS Wireless Embedded Systems, MS IT Management, MTech Chemical Engineering, MTech Environmental Engineering, MSc Pharmacoeconomics, and MSc Clinical Research management”.

SCHOLARSHIPS:

Manipal University has always encouraged students to perform to their full potential by providing them with scholarships. Meritorious and deserving candidates are given one of the several freeships and scholarships that exist in the university. “The allocation for the year 2010 is Rs 12.23 crores. It was Rs 7.93 crores in 2009 and Rs 6.83 crores prior to that,” Dr Prabhu said.

Freeship – Candidates admitted to MBBS course within the first 500 ranks and BDS, BE, BPharm courses within the first 1000 ranks of the respective merit list are offered 100% freeship.

AICTE Scholarship– AICTE has introduced the scheme on tuition fee waiver for women, economically backward and physically handicapped meritorious students joining BE, BPharm and BHM courses.

AGE students scholarships – There is a 10 per cent tuition fee waiver for students of schools and colleges of Academy of General Education (AGE) joining any course at Manipal University. However, the waiver will be 25 per cent for those students joining Allied Health Sciences or Nursing courses.

Scholarships for Konkani Students – A similar waiver of tuition fees, 10 per cent and 25 per cent respectively, is applicable for Konkani students also.

Other Scholarships are: GE Scholarship, Harish B Fund Scholarship, ISLE Scholarship, ITC Scholarship, Maulana Azad National Scholarship and Philips Scholarships.

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION:

Manipal University has robust relationships with several US, European and Australian Universities regarding student and faculty exchange and collaborative research. 14 best students of KMC Manipal and Mangalore get to do their one month elective clinical training in Utrecht University and Groningen University in the Netherlands. Similar scholarships are available to students of Media & Communication in
University of Queensland, Australia and Hochschule Bremen, Germany. Students of MIT get opportunities to do their internships in various Universities and industries across the world by being members of IAESTE.

ADMISSIONS:

Admissions for all these courses and for the existing under graduate and post graduate courses have already begun. Prospectus and forms are available across the country at selected post offices and State Bank of India branches. Candidates can also visit www.manipal.edu and download the digital prospectus and application or apply online by paying the application fees through Credit Card or Net Banking or Demand Draft.

ONLINE ENTRANCE TEST:

Talking about the online entrance test Dr Prahbu said; “Manipal University is known for its online entrance tests. Considering it to be quite popular and student friendly, the university has decided to start more centers where students can take their test online”. The final score are displayed on the test screen soon after the completion of the test. The admissions are therefore, merit based and transparent. Candidates can choose the date, time and location depending on their own convenience.

Presently there are 21 centres and six more are being included this year. They are
Allahabad, Kanpur, Patna, Ranchi, Varanasi and Vijayawada

Last date for receipt of applications:
MBBS, BDS, BE, BPharm, PharmD – 13.03.10
MD, MS, PG Medical Diploma, MDS, PG Diploma in Dental Materials – 31.01.10

About Manipal University

Manipal University is the leading higher education provider in India.  Spread over 600 acres of green expanse, Manipal University is home to 20,000 students pursuing undergraduate and post graduate programs in diverse subjects. The University has a strong alumni network of over 72,000 members.

The University has created an ecosystem of teaching and research excellence making it a universally accepted destination by students.   The breadth of disciplines and collaboration among constituent institutions gives unparalleled opportunity to students to cross departmental boundaries and explore different horizons

Your browser saves browsing histories and stores quite a few temporary files on your computer’s hard drive as you surf the Internet. You should clear your Internet history after each browsing session to safeguard your privacy as well as your Internet browsing habits.

Before we start talking about how to clear Internet history from your computer, you would do well to know about browsing histories and temporary files in brief. Browsing histories are the tracks of those web pages where you have landed during your online session. Temporary files on the other hand consist of cache files.

Though no harm will be done if you don’t clear Internet history, these browsing histories as well as temporary files will make it easy for anyone using the same computer to access your browsing history and know what sites you have visited during your browsing session. Moreover, these browsing histories and files occupy a reasonable amount of space on your computer’s drive. So, it is better to clear Internet history.

If you are wondering how to clear Internet history, the following steps will guide you:

For Internet Explorer:

After selecting “Internet Options” from the Tools menu, click on the “General” tab. You will find that a window marked Internet Options opens up. If you want to clear cached files, choose the Browsing section’s “Delete” button. A window will appear where you will come across quite a few sections like Form Data, Cookies, Temporary Internet Files, Passwords and History. To erase selected files, search for the corresponding buttons in this section and click on them. However, to clear your Internet history entirely by means of a single click, click the “Clear History” or “Delete All” key. You will find this key at the lower segment of your browser window.

For Firefox:

Clearing your Internet history is a walkover if you use Mozilla Firefox. To begin with, click “Tools” to find a drop down box from where you have to select the tab marked “Clear Private Data”. The window that opens next will have different sections that are named as Search History, Cookies, Saved Passwords, Browsing History and Saved Form. Check the matching boxes from this part for deleting selected items. On the other hand, if you desire to clear your entire Internet history, click the button having “Clear Private Data Now” written on it.

For AOL (America Online):

Trace the “Settings” button at first. You will find this button on the top segment of your AOL browser window. Once you find it, click on it and then select the button marked “Preferences”. Your next step is to choose “toolbar and sounds” tab and click the “clear history trail now” button to clear your Internet history.

Apart from the steps that are talked about till now, you also need to erase third party applications (if any) from your computer. If you don’t do this, your job will remain half done as the passwords, text, images and other sensitive statistics stored by these applications in your computer’s hard drive will allow anyone to know what your browsing habits are. You can clear such third party applications by using some software as it is not an easy task to locate and erase these files by hand.

Political leaders, tech executives, and academics often claim that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science education. They cite poor test results, declining international rankings, and decreasing enrollment in the hard sciences. They urge us to improve our education system and to graduate more engineers and scientists to keep pace with countries such as India and China.

Yet a new report by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, tells a different story. The report disproves many confident pronouncements about the alleged weaknesses and failures of the U.S. education system. This data will certainly be examined by both sides in the debate over highly skilled workers and immigration. The argument by Microsoft, Google, Intel, and others is that there are not enough tech workers in the U.S.

The authors of the report, the Urban Institute’s Hal Salzman and Georgetown University professor Lindsay Lowell, show that math, science, and reading test scores at the primary and secondary level have increased over the past two decades, and U.S. students are now close to the top of international rankings. Perhaps just as surprising, the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.

These findings go against what has been the dominant position about our education system and our science and engineering workforce. Consider reports on national competitiveness that policymakers often turn to, such reports as the 2005 “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” by the National Academy of Sciences. This report says the U.S. is in dire straits because of poor math and science preparation.

The report points to declining test scores, fewer students taking math and science courses, and low-quality curriculums and teacher preparation in K-12 education compared to other countries.

The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.” President George W. Bush addressed the issue in his 2006 State of the Union address. “We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations,” he said.

Salzman and Lowell found the reverse was true. Their report shows U.S. student performance has steadily improved over time in math, science, and reading. It also found enrollment in math and science courses is actually up. For example, in 1982 high school graduates earned 2.6 math credits and 2.2 science credits on average.

By 1998, the average number of credits increased to 3.5 math and 3.2 science credits. The percent of students taking chemistry increased from 45% in 1990 to 55% in 1996 and 60% in 2004. Scores in national tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the SAT, and the ACT have also shown increases in math scores over the past two decades.

And the new report again went against the grain when it compared the U.S. to other countries. It found that over the past decade the U.S. has ranked a consistent second place in science. It also was far ahead of other nations in reading and literacy and other academic areas. In fact, the report found that the U.S. is one of only a few nations that has consistently shown improvement over time.

Why the sharp discrepancy? Salzman says that reports citing low U.S. international rankings often misinterpret the data. Review of the international rankings, which he says are all based on one of two tests, the Trends in International Mathematics & Science Study (TIMMS) or the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), show the U.S. is in a second-ranked group, not trailing the leading economies of the world as is commonly reported.

In fact, the few countries that place higher than the U.S. are generally small nations, and few of these rank consistently high across all grades, subjects, and years tested. Moreover, he says, serious methodological flaws, such as different test populations, and other limitations preclude drawing any meaningful comparison of school systems between countries.

As far as our workforce is concerned, the new report showed that from 1985 to 2000 about 435,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents a year graduated with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in science and engineering. Over the same period, there were about 150,000 jobs added annually to the science and engineering workforce.

These numbers don’t include those retiring or leaving a profession but do indicate the size of the available talent pool. It seems that nearly two-thirds of bachelor’s graduates and about a third of master’s graduates take jobs in fields other than science and engineering.

Michael Teitelbaum, vice-president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which, among other things, works to improve science education, says this research highlights the troubling weaknesses in many conventional policy prescriptions.

Proposals to increase the supply of scientists and engineers rapidly, without any objective evidence of comparably rapid growth in attractive career opportunities for such professionals, might actually be doing harm.

In previous columns, I have written about research my team at Duke University completed that shattered common myths about India and China graduating 12 times as many engineers as the U.S. We found that the U.S. graduated comparable numbers and was far ahead in quality. Our research also showed there were no engineer shortages in the U.S., and companies weren’t going offshore because of any deficiencies in U.S. workers.

So, there isn’t a lack of interest in science and engineering in the U.S., or a deficiency in the supply of engineers. However, there may sometimes be short-term shortages of engineers with specific technical skills in certain industry segments or in various parts of the country.

The National Science Foundation data show that of the students who graduated from 1993 to 2001, 20% of the bachelor’s holders went on to complete master’s degrees in fields other than science and engineering and an additional 45% were working in other fields. Of those who completed master’s degrees, 7% continued their education and 31% were working in fields other than science and engineering.

There isn’t a problem with the capability of U.S. children. Even if there were a deficiency in math and science education, there are so many graduates today that there would be enough who are above average and fully qualified for the relatively small number of science and engineering jobs. Science and engineering graduates just don’t see enough opportunity in these professions to continue further study or to take employment.

With U.S. competitiveness at stake, we need to get our priorities straight. Education is really important, and a well-educated workforce is what will help the U.S. keep its global edge. But emphasizing math and science education over humanities and social sciences may not be the best prescription for the U.S. We need our children to receive a balanced and broad education.

Perhaps we should focus on creating demand for the many scientists and engineers we graduate. There are many problems, from global warming to the development of alternative fuels to cures for infectious diseases, that need to be solved. Rather than blaming our schools, let’s create exciting national programs that motivate our children to help solve these problems.