Almanac

How low can they go?
For the second consecutive year, UW–Madison’s Stafford Loan default rate is among the lowest in the Big Ten.

For 2001-02, the most recent year information is available, the default rate was 1.2 percent, compared to a national average of 5.4 percent and a public four-year average of 4.4 percent. The UW–Madison rate was also 1.2 percent in 1999-2000.

The UW–Madison default rate on federal Perkins loans for 2002-03 was 1.85 percent, down from 2.35 percent in 2001-02.

UW men’s basketball tickets sold out for 2003-04
Tickets for the upcoming 2003-04 Wisconsin men’s basketball season are sold out, the first time in Kohl Center history that tickets for all games have been sold out before the season started.

Last year, Wisconsin set a school record, averaging 16,930 fans per game. The Badgers ranked sixth in the country in attendance and led the conference for the first time. Ten of 17 games were sold out.

Library honors Cassidy
Frederic Cassidy, the late editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, was inducted Sept. 25 into the Milwaukee Public Library’s Wisconsin Writers Wall of Fame last month. He began compiling DARE in 1963 as a record of vanishing regional speech idioms. According to Joan Houston Hall, current editor of DARE, some of his favorites were “quill pig,” a Northeastern name for a porcupine; “ragged robin,” or cornflower; and “sirsee,” a hostess gift that remains an etymological puzzle.

UW Hospital named as one of nation’s top 100
UW Hospital and Clinics is listed by Solucient, a health-care information company, as one of the nation’s “100 Top Hospitals” in an independent, quantitative analysis of the clinical and business performance of the nation’s hospitals.

Listed in Modern Healthcare magazine, the Solucient ranking is based on data from more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals. Those in the top 100 outperformed their peers on all measures, providing a demonstrated high quality of care while performing well financially.

“Union Utopia” wins
“Union Utopia” won the 75th Anniversary Ice Cream Jubilee, a contest to create a Babcock ice cream flavor in honor of Memorial Union’s 75th anniversary. Kim Lintner of Madison concocted the blend of vanilla ice cream with a ribbon of peanut butter, fudge and caramel. More than 1,100 creations were entered. Union Utopia will be available through June in Memorial Union and Union South. It will be available as a Babcock featured flavor during January/February and May/June wherever Babcock ice cream is sold.

Backward Glance
From Wisconsin Week, Oct. 13, 1993: For the first time, UW–Madison experiments with interactive video technology that will link the university to UW-Eau Claire, allowing graduate students to take classes and talk to academic advisers. The system will become known as “distance learning.”… The university continues its enrollment management program, decreasing the size of the student body to 40,924, down from 41,948 in 1992. Administrators say the program is designed to help improve the quality of undergraduate education by allowing for better access to classes. … Supermodel Cindy Crawford and then-husband Richard Gere visit the UW Children’s Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center’s 20th-anniversary celebration.