Bruce Springsteen Finds an Academic Home; Cornell and Stanford Duel

Today in Academia: Monmouth University will be a Boss mecca, double-checking college cost calculators, M.B.A. applicants keep dwindling, Cornell and Stanford duel in New York, and Princeton names Steve Carell as its commencement speaker. 

• Springsteen scholars across the U.S. will soon have a college campus to convene. Monmouth University announced via press release that it will soon be home to what seems like a authoritative collection of Bruce Springsteen memorabilia, which comprises "nearly 14,900 documents from 44 countries, reflecting the enduring international interest in Springsteen’s music and career." The Special Collection website says it includes "books, song books, tourbooks, magazines, fanzines, Internet articles, academic journals and papers, comic books, selected printed items, and newspaper articles." Academic journals? [Monmouth University, New York Times, Springsteen Special Collection]
• M.B.A. applications are down, down, down. "This year, application volume was down at 21 of the top 30 full-time MBA programs, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. The decline in applications is a trend that appears to be accelerating, with eight additional schools reporting declines in application volume this year over 2010." This is less surprising after considering this trend: a lot of companies that used to hire M.B.A. graduates are now settling for just-as-smart candidates with bachelors degrees because they're cheaper. [Bloomberg Businessweek via Inside Higher Ed]
• It can never hurt to double-check your college cost calculator results.  This summer, the Department of Education debuted what appeared to be a sensible website that allowed users to easily calculate the cost of the more and less expensive Universities by type. The site is now being questioned for its accuracy, albeit by a firm, Student Aid Services, that also build college calculating devices. Which, as Daily Finance notes in their reporting, is a "direct competitor" to the government's site. That big caveat aside, this is what a Student Aid Services spokesperson told the AOL media brand: "Colleges enter all the data to make the calculator work, but it operates with very few questions and there is no algorithm behind the federal template -- it's simple spreadsheets," says Mary Fallon, spokesperson for Student Aid Services to Daily Finance. "And the data is two years old." [Daily Finance]
• Stanford and Cornell are vying to nab a New York campus site.  Today, Cornell announced that it had joined up with Technion-Israel Institute in a bid to build a technology campus on Roosevelt island. The move, as Crain's New York Business notes, ups the ante in the battle to nab the campus location. Stanford also has designs on building a tech campus there. But, maybe it'll be a tie after all: "With both Cornell and Stanford clamoring to spend more than $1 billion to build a campus in the city, insiders say the Bloomberg administration may have to look for a way to accommodate both bids." [Cornell Daily Sun, Crain's New York Business]
• Princeton's 2012 commencement speaker will be funny: it's Steve Carell. Is it just us, or are commencement speakers being announced a bit earlier this year? Days after Harvard went the serious route by choosing Time's editor-at-large Fareed Zakaria as its commencement speaker, Princeton snagged what could be a crowd-pleasing choice in The Office star Steve Carell. As one of the Class of 2012 officers explained to The Daily Princetonian, it looks like persistance paid off: "There is very little incentive [for Hollywood celebrities to speak] because there’s no monetary compensation ... They had asked him the past three years and were immediately declined." [The Daily Princetonian via Ivy Gate blog]