Maryland Equestrian Club puts on a show at Maryland Day while trying to raise money

A Maryland Equestrian Club rider showcases her skills
as a group at Maryland Day watches.

At the University of Maryland, anyone, from a beginner to an experienced rider, can join the equestrian club.

And Saturday at Maryland Day, the equestrian club showcased their skills.

At the campus farm, members of the Maryland Equestrian Club (MEC) competed in good-natured competitions. 

In a showring, a woman announced instructions over a loudspeaker and people crowded into bleachers to watch the performances.

Riders competed in levels ranging from beginner to advanced as they cajoled their horses in a trot, gallop or walk based on the woman's instructions.

The riders had been preparing for this day since August. 

After each competition, the standings were announced. 

But Saturday was about more than competition.

Equestrian Club needs money to keep horses fed and healthy

The Maryland Equestrian Club (MEC), which was created in 1998, was looking to raise money.

There was a box next to the showring asking for donations.

At a table a few hundred feet from the showring and next to the stables where the horses are housed. 

The activities also served as a way to promote the club to current and former students.

At the table, raffle tickets, food and other assorted items were for sale.

All proceeds went to MEC.

"We're raising money to buy supplies to take care of the campus horses," Yant said. "The Maryland Equestrian Club takes care of our campus horses. We ride them. We give their medicine to them."

Yant was one of several people who worked at the table. She had a 10 am-4 pm shift. 

"It's just a really fun way to get involved with animals," said Jill Yant, a sophomore member of the MEC.

The Equestrian Club held other activities, such as stick horse racing to promote interest in horse riding 

After the competition ended, the MEC remained. There were stick horse races in the showring.

Small children with a stick between their legs, meant to represent a horse, galloped from one end of the ring to the other and back again.

The MEC is open to all students at Maryland no matter their skill level or prior history, or lack thereof, or riding horses.

There's even a spot for people who love horses but don't want to ride.

They can help organize clinics and social events, such as the showcase at Maryland Day.

In a five-year span, public universities' athletics departments generated more than $10 billion in student fees and other subsidies

Maryland and Bowling Green football warms up before a game.

In 2014, the University of Maryland used more than $11 million in student fees to help cover the athletic department’s expenditure.

The school charged full-time undergraduate students more than $400.

In return, students could enter lotteries to claim free basketball and football tickets.

Those student fees helped generate revenue for an athletic department that was in dire financial straits two years earlier.

The school cut seven athletic teams in 2012.

The previous fiscal year, the state university had to borrow more than $1 million to cover an athletics department deficit.

Maryland’s story isn’t unique. From 2010-2014, public universities generated more than $10 billion in mandatory student fees, government money, and funds allocated by the school, according to a report from The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post.

Student fees help support lower-profile sports, Diamondback editor says

In 2014, Maryland was one of four schools in the Big Ten to have student fees.

Matt Schnabel, the editor-in-chief of The Diamondback, Maryland’s independent student newspaper, believes the fees help benefit non-revenue sports.

Those sports, which range from women’s tennis to men’s lacrosse, typically don’t bring in enough revenue to cover their costs.

“It’s not ideal, obviously,” Schnabel said. “But none of these programs could fund themselves aside from typically men’s basketball and football and occasionally women’s basketball. That’s just the reality if we want to fund all these programs.”

Maryland isn't the only local school to rely on student fees, either.

James Madison, located in Virginia, generated more than $33 million in student fees in 2014.

That same year, the University of Virginia charged full-time undergrad students $657.

“Colleges spend a lot of money, particularly on new facilities and new lures for the best athletes,” former Washington Post sports editor George Solomon said. “It’s become a huge business.”

Many of these colleges are trying to compete with football powerhouses like Alabama of basketball powerhouses like North Carolina.

Both schools are in one of the Power Five conferences - Big Ten, Pac-12, ACC, SEC and Big 12.

More than 90 percent of the athletic funding for the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2014 came from subsidies 

Schools in those Power Five conferences make millions in television contracts, which are redistributed to the member schools.

For smaller school student fees are a lifeline.

“They don’t have the television revenue,” journalist Brad Wolverton said. “You’re going to start to see a lot of the money for conferences outside the Power Five dry up, and where else are these institutions going to turn?”

Wolverton, a writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, co-wrote an article in 2015 titled “The $10-Billion Sports Tab: How College Students are funding the athletics arm race.”

At the bottom of the article was a chart ranking the percent to which subsidies, including student fees, accounted for a school’s total athletic funding.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology was at the top of that chart.

NJIT moved to the top level of college athletics in 2006. In 2014, more than 90 percent of the total athletic funding came from subsidies.

The athletic department generated $1.24 million in 2014 while subsidies accounted for nearly $12, including $2.3 million in student fees.

While Wolverton sees the benefits of student fees for smaller universities, he said schools should be more transparent.

“The schools often don’t have a system that allows the students to have a true democratic voice in the fees levied on them,” Wolverton said.

“The schools certainly don’t often communicate adequately with the students about how the fees are charged and what they are used for.”

Despite high athletic fees, Maryland students struggled to secure tickets for NCAA basketball tournament

This year, Maryland students paid $406 in athletic fees.

Some students don’t have a problem with the fees. Maryland senior journalism major Dan Russo enjoys getting tickets to football and men’s basketball games.

But those tickets don't guarantee access to the biggest games of the year.

For the first time since 2003, the men’s basketball team advanced to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament.

But most students, such as Russo, couldn’t get free tickets to the games in Louisville, Kentucky.

After paying a $406 fee, students had to buy tickets for the basketball team’s most important games of the year.

The Diamondback travels to Louisville, Kentucky to cover the Maryland men's basketball team in the NCAA Tournament

Diamondback Assistant Sports Editor Josh Needelman is a fan of the New York Knicks and New York Giants

UMD professor calls media's coverage of climate change "journalistic malpractice"

From 2009 to 2014, the percentage of Americans who believe human activity caused global warming dropped from 49 percent to 40 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

In that same time frame, the percentage of Americans who believe climate change doesn’t exist rose from 11 percent to 18 percent.

Despite the public’s views, climate change is regarded as fact in the scientific community.

In 2009, 84 percent of scientists surveyed said human activity caused global warming, according to the Pew Research Center.

Today, more scientists, not less, believe in climate change.

“There’s about 95 percent agreement among the best thinkers...that climate change is an issue,” said University of Maryland Professor Dr. Wayne Slater. “It’s not going away.”

(Tweet this)

Slater teaches in the College of Education but works with scientists on a regular basis.

There is obviously a disconnect between what the scientists think and what the general public believes.

Why?

The media treats both sides of the climate change debate equally and creates a false equivalence issue

Part of the problem is the media’s coverage of the issue, Slater said.

In the issue of fairness, journalists devote as much time and space in stories to climate change skeptics despite the lack of evidence in their favor.

This is false equivalence, writes Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine.

Heuvel defined the term in an article for The Washington Post in 2014 as “giving equal weight to unsupported or even discredited claims for the sake of appearing impartial.”

In 2014, the BBC concluded such coverage can create a “false balance” in the public’s mind since both sides are being equally represented in coverage.

“We have this amazing agreement across the science community that’s pretty consistent in relation to findings,” Slater said. “Journalists tend to report almost anything that’s out there and they sort of talk about the notion of equal coverage and fair coverage…

…Well actually those of us outside of journalism might say that’s journalistic malpractice.”

But journalists aren’t the only ones who are to blame, Slater said.

Politicians and scientists fail to properly inform the public on climate change

While Slater said media coverage is one reason why fewer Americans believe human activity caused global warming in 2014 than 2009, he also blamed politicians.

“In certain parts of our country and from certain political philosophies they have in effect come to a belief that the scientists are wrong,” Slater said. “Something else will take care of it.”

Even the scientific community is at fault, Maryland professor Dr. Tim Canty said.

Scientists are struggling to effectively communicate with the public, said Canty, who works in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science.

But even then the media, and organizations like CNN, are part of the problem. 

“Why is it that Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye seem to be the people they interview on CNN to get the science perspective," Canty said. "Neil Degrasse Tyson is an astronomer and Bill Nye is a science teacher."

Couples who meet online are more likely to date than marry

More than 60 percent of people who met online are in non-martial relationships, so a minority are married, according to a recent report in Cyberpsychology.

The journal article, published in October 2014, studied couples who met online and offline. Other studies have compared online dating to traditional methods.

The study is titled “Is Online Better than Offline for Meeting Partners? Depends: Are you Looking to Marry or to Date."

It used that previous research and theories drawn from those studies.

Online dating is a big industry. One in ten Americans said they have used online dating or a mobile application on their phones to find partners. 

This study concluded that 49 percent of those people, online daters, were searching for martial relationships.

The majority wanted to date and have a casual companion.

The study pinpointed three main reasons online couple are reluctant to get married.

Online dating provides too many options, so partners often think a better option is available.

Two, online relationships take a longer time to develop. Three, online daters are wary of potential partners.

However, a recent study led by eHarmony.com concluded that one out of three marriages begin online.

Online couples more likely to breakup than the offline counterparts

There are a few advantages to online dating: a wider pool dating poll, the ability to locate people who share similar values and interests and quick intimacy.

But those advantages don’t keep couples who meet online are more likely to stay together.

This study debunked past research. This study concluded couples that meet online are more likely to breakup than people who met offline.

Past studies mistakenly focused almost exclusively on married couples. But many online couples never reached that stage.

Focusing solely on married couples who met online leads to biased results.

This study explicitly acknowledged and studied the breakup rates for non-martial relationships.

Relationship quality and the length of relationship often predict if couples will stay together

The more time couples spend with each other, the more stable the relationship becomes.This leads to more marriages or serious relationships.

Relationship quality is an important factor, as well.

If the relationship was fulfilling and happy couples were more likely to stay together.  

UMD journalism senior doesn't use Safari and instead scrolls through Twitter before class

In America, 10 percent of the population is only able to access the internet at home through smartphones.

With so many Americans smartphone-dependent, they use their phones for important tasks, such as looking up health and job information.

More than half of smartphone users use their phones to do online banking (57 percent) and almost half of users look up real estate listings and places to live on those devices.

They also read the news on their phones.

When Ryan Baillargoen has time to kill before class, he scrolls through Twitter searching for interesting stories.

The senior journalism major at Maryland isn't unique. 

With so many Americans dependent on their smartphone, Twitter is important to news organizations.

Baillargeon prefers Twitter to web browsers, such as Safari.

Baillargoen sometimes finds stories through the Washington Post or New York Times app, too.

Even five years ago, smartphones weren’t as important.

In spring 2011, 35 percent of Americans had a smartphone. Now, 64 percent of Americans have a smartphone.

Many of them get their news through Twitter, like Baillargoen. 

UMD journalism senior prefers Twitter and other mobile apps over web browsers on mobile phone

With smartphones becoming more omnipresent, the public is more reliant than ever on their phones. 

One in ten Americans can only access the internet at home through their smartphones. Even people who do have broadband in their house often use their smartphones for important tasks, such as looking up health and job information. More than half of smartphone users use their phones to do online banking (57 percent) and almost half of users look up real estate listings and places to live on those devices.

With so many Americans smartphone-dependent, mobile apps are important to news organizations. Apps are developed by organizations. When people click on an app they are redirected to an organization’s content. 

Senior journalism major Ryan Baillargoen prefers apps to web browsers, such as Safari, when he’s consuming news on his phone. While he often reads news on his phone before class or when he’s on the go, Baillargeon said he rarely, if ever, goes to Safari and types a news organization’s website url into the browser. Instead, he looks for links on Twitter or interesting stories on the Washington Post or New York Times. Baillargeon, a situational user, will click on a story if he’s intrigued by the headline or tweet.

Even five years ago, smartphones weren’t as important. In spring 2011, 35 percent of Americans had a smartphone. Now, 64 percent of Americans have a smartphone as the younger generation is increasingly reliant on the small devices.