It is home to more than 100 working journalists for NPR, Public Broadcasting Service and ESPN affiliates in Web, radio and television.

This space is tightly integrated with the college’s core curriculum in both journalism and telecommunication to make sure every student in the program is fully immersed in a professional news environment. See what the Innovation News Center can do at www.wuft.org.

The $75 million expansion and renovation project will include offices and support space for student clubs and organizations including Student Government, offices and program space for the Center for Leadership and Service, the Department of Student Activities and Involvement, the Office of Multicultural and Diversity Affairs, and GatorWell Health Promotion Services. The new construction will also include lounges and study spaces, meeting rooms, dance rehearsal studios and a “new” Orange & Brew.

Project completion is expected in the fall of 2015.

“Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature are supporting our effort to be among the nation’s top public universities, and we expect to continue our climb in future years. This will benefit all students in Florida who deserve an opportunity to attend a top-ranked university in their home state,” UF President Bernie Machen said.

Machen postponed his retirement early this year at Scott’s request to renew his commitment to lead UF to top-10 status.

Today’s ranking is the latest indicator of the UF’s increasingly competitive national standing. The University of Florida also:

• ranked fourth nationally last year among universities in launching startup companies from their own technologies.
• offers students and their families the second-highest return on investment of any university in the nation, according to the Wall Street Journal’s SmartMoney magazine.
• had the nation’s best career services as ranked by the Princeton Review in 2010 and 2012. UF’s Career Resource Center currently ranks No. 5.

In the new U.S. News & World Report results, UF improved its performance in several areas: graduation and retention rank, expected graduation rate, selectivity, alumni giving rank and faculty resources – particularly percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students.

UF passed the University of Washington and the University of Texas at Austin to tie with the University of California Irvine in rankings of public universities. UF ranks 49th among all universities nationally in the new U.S. News & World Report rankings, up from 54th last year.

“University faculty, staff, students and supporters helped pull UF through five difficult years of a down national economy and state budget cuts,” Provost Joseph Glover said. “UF’s national ranking is in large part due to their efforts and reflects our continued quest to increase our standing among the nation’s top public universities.  With the full participation of the UF community, we look forward to the opportunity this year to build on this excellence.”

News of UF’s improved ranking arrives even before an infusion of new state resources to back the push for top-10 status. The Florida Legislature’s designation of UF as a preeminent state research university this year is accompanied by $15 million annually for five years to elevate its academic and research standing. UF has pledged to match that money with donations.

UF plans to invest the money in new faculty. The new hires could improve UF’s scores on some ranking criteria used by U.S. News & World Report. More important, attracting more top-notch educators and researchers helps students and all Floridians who benefit from the breakthroughs that come out of University of Florida laboratories in the areas of medicine, engineering, agriculture and more.

Even as it pushes to join the ranks of the nation’s elite colleges and universities, UF remains committed to offering opportunity for all Floridians. Next year, it will be among the first universities in the nation to offer an entire undergraduate education online. UF Online will make a UF education available to far more incoming students than this year’s 6,375 on-campus freshmen from an applicant pool of more than 29,000.

In addition, in January UF launched the Innovation Academy to give hundreds more students classroom seats in the spring and summer that open up after mid-year graduations and withdrawals. The program offers a minor in innovation through courses in entrepreneurship, creativity, ethics and leadership on a January-through-August academic calendar.

The size of the University of Florida’s freshman class has always been limited – until now.

UF begins accepting applications Sept. 3 for its online institute, among the first in the nation to provide fully online four-year bachelor’s degrees at a public university. The first online classes for freshmen start next summer for anyone anywhere who has what it takes to be a Gator.

Each year UF turns away thousands of applicants who meet the university’s rigorous admissions standards because there’s no place to put them, even on a 2,000-acre campus, without sacrificing the quality of the educational experience.

It doesn’t have to be that way, said Provost Joseph Glover.

“If you believe you can succeed at the University of Florida, we want you to apply,” said Glover, whose office oversees the online institute. “We’re in the opportunity business, and the online institute is an unprecedented expansion of opportunity for high school graduates to gain access to a UF education.”

The online institute will start with five baccalaureate majors: business administration, criminology and law, environmental management, health education and behavior, and sport management.  Each year, UF will add additional majors to the online institute.

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The idea is to give access to a four-year UF education to students like Tanya Gorniewicz, who graduated from high school two years ago, before the online institute began.

Gorniewicz, 20, had wanted to be a Gator, just like her mother; she just didn’t want to be one in Gainesville. A self-described introvert, Gorniewicz preferred her home in Port St. Lucie to the throngs and the bustle of the state’s flagship public university. So she went to two years of state college. Then she transferred to UF’s online microbiology program, and she does her lab lessons at a UF research center in her community.

UF began breaking down the barrier of geography decades ago with distance education programs, starting with the correspondence course that evolved into the modern Web-based class.

Yet ZIP code still mattered when Gorniewicz started college two years ago. To start a bachelor’s degree program at UF, you had to be at UF. The new online degree programs make it possible for any high school graduate to start university studies from anywhere without waiting until he or she gets an associate of arts degree.

Applicants for online programs must meet rigorous admissions standards, and access to a UF education is still conditioned on ambition and achievement. But the online opportunity means applicants won’t be limited by address – or financial assets.

The Florida Legislature capped tuition for the online institute at 75 percent of the cost of residential programs.

Gorniewicz achieves her biggest savings, though, by living at home. Not moving to Gainesville saves her an estimated $9,500 a year in room and board. She’ll graduate with no student debt.

Cost aside, she would have gone online for her UF degree anyway.

“I don’t mind talking to people one-to-one, but I don’t like huge crowds,” she said. “I get really drowned out in big classes. When these big classes are online, my option of direct contact is via email, so that helps a lot. I would probably have to do the same thing if I were a student on the main campus.”

UF isn’t just putting classes online. It’s developing a Gator experience that creates community through technology, and it’s striving to set new standards in online student life.

The university has a special orientation for new online students, fitness videos, a transition success course specifically for distance students and even a pilot program that offers online therapy for anxiety.

Combined with the quality of the teaching, it may be this type of student support that helps set UF online apart.

“We value the social and emotional life of Gators as much as we do their academics,” Glover said. “We really think we’re going to be a groundbreaking university on this front.”

http://www.registrar.ufl.edu/commencement/.

Susan Spencer-Wendel, MAMC 1991, covered the murderous grit and grime of Palm Beach County’s criminal courts for more than a decade, but her spirited account of her own face-off with death is what’s now making her known around the world.

“Until I Say Goodbye, My Year of Living with Joy” lays bare Susan’s life, travels and relationships after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The disease gradually causes nerves throughout the body to die, leading to total paralysis and usually within a few years, death. Susan tapped out all 357 pages of the book on her iPhone using her right thumb, the only digit that remained functioning.

Determined to salvage as much happiness as possible from what she estimated to be her one remaining year of reasonably good health, Susan embarked on a series of trips with family and friends. Some of her UF College of Journalism and Communications classmates are central characters in the book. One of them, Nancy Maass Kinnally, MALAS 1991, MAMC 1995, Susan’s lifelong best friend, shares their story here. http://www.jou.ufl.edu/communigator/living-with-joy/

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