Warren administrators to hold candlelight memorial

Earl Warren College will host a candlelight memorial service for junior Kunal Patel at 9 p.m. on Oct. 16.

Friends found Patel’s body on the night of Oct. 4 in his Mira Mesa home. Police officers believe he committed suicide, San Diego Police Department spokesman Dave Cohen said.

Students, staff and faculty members from the entire campus are invited to attend the memorial, which will be held in the college’s amphitheater.

Although the service was originally planned for Oct. 17, student and administration planners changed the date to allow Patel’s family to attend.

Millions miss out on financial aid, ACE analysis finds

Half of all eligible undergraduate college students failed to apply for financial aid, according to the American Council on Education.

Based on the most recent available data from the 1999-2000 school year, approximately 8 million students did not complete the federal financial aid application needed to qualify for aid, the analysis found.

Of those who did not file, approximately 20 percent came from low- and moderate-income families and half of those would have been likely to receive Pell Grants, the report stated.

In addition, more than half of those who did file an aid application did so after important deadlines had passed, hurting their chances of receiving aid from state agencies and individual campuses.

Two-thirds of community college students did not apply for aid, compared to 42 percent of students at public universities. At private colleges, only 13 percent of eligible students failed to fill out the form.

Universities, policy-makers and opinion leaders “must redouble [their] efforts to educate students and their families about this process and simplify what increasingly seems to be a Byzantine system,” ACE President David Ward said.

UC professor named third Nobel Laureate

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded its Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to UC Santa Barbara economics professor Finn E. Kydland. Kydland will share the $1.3 million prize with a colleague for their research into the driving forces behind business cycles.

Kydland is the third UC researcher — and the second from Santa Barbara — to be named Nobel Laureate in 2004.

Kydland’s research “has made a fundamental contribution to the practice of monetary and fiscal policy, which other researchers have used as a foundation for their own work,” UC President Robert C. Dynes stated in a university release.

In 2003, two UCSD researchers won the prize in economics.

House closes federal student loan loophole

The House of Representatives unanimously voted on Oct. 7 to close a loophole that critics said has allowed student loan companies to collect more than a billion dollars in federal subsidies over the course of a decade.

A September article in the New York Times first publicized the loophole and led to calls for action from members of Congress.

The bill temporarily eliminates a provision of the Higher Education Act that guarantees states and nonprofit lending organizations a fixed 9.5- percent interest rate on student loans.

With students paying the current low market rates on their loans, the government has been forced to subsidize lending organizations for the difference between the market interest rate and the guaranteed 9.5-percent level.

Congress originally removed the 9.5-percent rate guarantee in 1993 but allowed lenders to keep collecting the higher interest rates on money raised prior to that time. Recent mergers between nonprofit groups and commercial organizations have made the issue a point of criticism for education groups and politicians.

The bill provides for the resulting savings to be used for increased loan forgiveness for borrowers who go on to teach math, science or special education in schools. The current debt-forgiveness maximum of $5,000 will be raised to $17,500.

A permanent solution for the loophole is expected to be included in the new reauthorization of the Higher Education Act planned for early 2005.

Libraries acquire Chicano-rights activist’s collection

UCSD Libraries administrators announced that they have acquired the archives of Herman Baca, a prominent Chicano-rights activist commonly known as Dia de la Raza. The acquisition represents UCSD’s first major Chicano collection.

Baca is the founder of California’s Committee on Chicano Rights and has worked closely with leading Chicano figures such as Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

The archives contain numerous historical documents, photographs and original graphics.a