Baylor debate team finishes an Elite Eight team

Baylor's nationally-ranked debate team, The Glenn R. Capp Debate Forum, finished in the Elite Eight of the National Debate Tournament, held in March in Dallas. This is Baylor's strongest finish at the national championships since 1996.

Juniors John Cook and Ashley Morgan competed in a total of 11 debates, each about three hours in length, over a three-day span. Baylor was the last of the seven Texas debate programs left in the tournament. Its only losses came to overall No. 1 and 2 seeds, Emory and Harvard, and eventual national champion Northwestern.

Baylor will return its entire debate team next season, seeking Baylor's fourth national debate championship.

Sport management graduate students win national case study competition

A team from Baylor's Graduate Sport Management Program won the third annual Case Study Competition held during the Scholarly Conference on College Sport April 20-22 at the University of North Carolina.

Team members were Leeann Lower, Meron Tamrat, BBA '10, Kyle Lintelman and Lane Wakefield. An additional Baylor team placed fifth. The students prepared and defended a study on the long-term ramifications of Division I athletics at colleges and universities, applying skills learned in the classroom to a situation facing many institutions today.

Trumpeters blow away national competition

The Baylor University School of Music's Brass Area's Group A, a six-member trumpet ensemble, won first place and was awarded $4,000 at the National Trumpet Competition held in March at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Baylor Group B, a four-member trumpet ensemble, was named a finalist.

The title-winning team -- made up of graduate students Steffen Baral and Beth Peroutka, seniors Simon Bosch, Andy Lott and Chelsea Orr, and sophomore Manny Munoz -- performed "Abstracts No. 2," arranged by Wiff Rudd, BMEd '77, professor of trumpet and brass area chair at Baylor.

Piper Center for Family Studies and Child Development earns place among nation's best

Baylor University's Piper Center for Family Studies and Child Development has earned accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the nation's leading organization of early childhood professionals. More than 7,000 programs are currently accredited by NAEYC (approximately 8 percent of all preschools and other early childhood programs). The Piper Center serves as a lab school for Baylor's Department of Family and Consumer Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. Located in downtown Waco, the center serves 60 children and has 20 staffers, with 16 work-study students each semester.

ExxonMobil's matching gifts program gives $400,000 to Baylor

Baylor and its students are blessed with many friends who generously support the university. A good number of those come through companies which offer matching gift programs for their employees; ExxonMobil is one of those that very generously matches donations to colleges and universities on a 3-to-1 basis. Those numbers add up, and the company recently presented Baylor with a gift totaling over $400,000 for just the past year.

ExxonMobil and its employees and retirees donated to more than 900 educational institutions nationwide last year; Baylor ranked sixth out of all those institutions in gift totals. Over the past five years, ExxonMobil, together with its employees and retirees, has donated almost $2.6 million to Baylor.

Whether you already give to Baylor or are considering giving, you can check to see if your company might help your gift go even further at matchinggifts.com/baylor. For more information, contact Baylor's University Development office at University_Development@baylor.edu or call 254-710-2561.

Baylor graduate programs ranked in U.S. News survey

Baylor graduate programs in law, business, health disciplines, the sciences and education were among those nationally ranked in the 2012 edition of "America's Best Graduate Schools" as evaluated by U.S.News & World Report. Highlights of the rankings were published in the Best Graduate Schools 2012 edition.

• Baylor Law School moved up eight places to No. 56 out of 190 programs in the magazine's "Top Schools" listing. In the law specialties rankings, Baylor's trial advocacy program rose to third best in the nation.
• The Hankamer School of Business master's program was No. 60 out of 437 programs.
• The Baylor-U.S. Army master's degree program in health administration moved up nine places to No. 11.
• The master's degree program in nursing at Baylor's Louise Herrington School of Nursing in Dallas moved up eight places in the rankings to No. 64.
• Baylor's School of Education ranked No. 78 among the top 279 graduate programs that grant doctoral degrees in education.

Other Baylor programs have previously been cited by U.S. News in areas for which new rankings are not released annually. They include:

• Baylor-U.S. Army master's degree program in physical therapy, No. 5;
• Master's degree program in social work, No. 60;
• Speech-language pathology program, No. 60;
• Statistics doctoral program, No. 64;
• Sociology doctoral program, No. 77;
• Biological sciences doctoral program, No. 82;
• Doctoral program in clinical psychology, No. 83;
• Chemistry doctoral program, No. 94;
• Earth sciences doctoral program, No. 108;
• Physics doctoral program, No. 113;
• Psychology doctoral program, No. 117; and
• English graduate program, No. 125.