College Degrees Without Going to Class
The New York Times
March 3, 2010 (The Editors)
Six university experts from a variety of disciplines weigh in on a variety of issues surrounding online courses. As universities look for ways to decrease expenses while increasing student populations, online courses have become more attractive. If you or your child is considering taking a course online, you will find their opinions very helpful.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/college-degrees-without-going-to-class/
To Impress, Tufts Prospects Turn to YouTube
Posted by Jerry in Admissions on February 24th, 2010
The New York Times
February 22, 2010 (Tamar Lewin)
Until recently the college essay was the one chance for the applicant to become more than an application and communicate to admissions officials that they were a real, living, breathing person. Now there is YouTube. More and more universities are receiving short videos of applicants in addition to all the regular application materials. They have been a big hit at Tufts University. Learn more about what may very well be the future of college applications at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/education/23tufts.html?th&emc=th
High Schools to Offer Plan to Graduate 2 Years Early
Posted by Jerry in Admissions on February 18th, 2010
The New York Times
February 17, 2010 (Sam Dillon)
Your high achieving high school student could soon take a series of board examinations and exit high school as early as their sophomore year. If they are not ready as a sophomore the same opportunity will be available as a junior as well as their senior year.
With the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Center on Education and the Economy, eight states are piloting a program designed to decrease the high school drop-out rate and eliminate the need for remedial coursework in colleges. Get more details at http://tinyurl.com/ygmrrw8
Colleges Market Easy, No-Fee Sell to Applicants
Posted by Jerry in Admissions on February 10th, 2010
The New York Times (Jacques Steinberg)
Your Child receives a customized, two-page application that requires little more than their signature to apply to a school you heard of a few years ago at a family reunion. It doesn’t require a fee or an essay so what do you have to lose? What do you think about the practice? Follow the link and see what education officials have to say about the practice. http://tinyurl.com/ydrljb5
The New Math on Campus
The New York Times (Alex Williams)
I have been telling parents for years about preferential treatment given to boys in the college application process. Colleges have many reasons to keep enrollment near a 50/50 split between male and female students. Take a look at what happens when the female population exceeds that of the men on campus. Dads, you may want to check this statistic before sending your little girl off to that “good school”. Follow the link to find out more about the changing face of college campuses. http://tinyurl.com/yctbprx
FAFSA filing deadlines come sooner than you think!
Nancy Griesemer January 11, 1:22 PM
DC College Admissions Examiner
Virtually every college and university in the country has a posted priority financial aid application deadline by which the FAFSA should be filed in order for the student applicant to have the best possible chance of receiving both institutional and federal aid. Because most of these deadlines are either on or before March 1st, students and their parents must act early in the New Year—often before tax returns are filed with the federal government.
To underscore the importance of beginning the FAFSA sooner rather than later, even if it means estimating income and taxes to be paid, the following is a list of local priority financial aid (FA) deadlines:
| Institution | Priority FA Deadline | Institution | Priority FA Deadline |
| American University | 2-15 | Catholic University | 2-15 |
| Georgetown | 2-1 | George Washington | 2-1 |
| Howard University | 2-15 | Christopher Newport | 3-1 |
| William and Mary | 2-15 | George Mason University | 3-1 |
| James Madison | 3-1 | Mary Washington | 3-1 |
| UVA | 3-1 | Virginia Tech | 3-1 |
| Virginia Commonwealth | 3-1 | University of Richmond | 2-15 |
| Goucher College | 2-15 | Johns Hopkins University | 3-1 |
| Loyola of Maryland | 2-1 | Towson University | 3-1 |
| UMD | 2-15 | UMBC | 2-14 |
| Bowie State University | 3-1 | Hood College | 2-15 |
You can research individual deadlines by simply going to a college or university website and entering “FAFSA” or “FAFSA deadline” in the search function. Only the most poorly constructed websites will fail to pop up a link to either an admissions or a financial aid web page that clearly states the priority deadline by which you really should file your FAFSA. Most will even give you a few good reasons why this is so important.
Many states also have FAFSA deadlines that are entirely separate from but usually after institutional dates. A list of state deadlines is included on the FAFSA website. Locally, the State of Maryland has posted March 1st as its deadline, and the District of Columbia uses the federal deadline of June 30th.
Filing the FAFSA by the priority deadlines and promptly responding to any requests for additional documentation helps to ensure you will receive your financial aid letters at about the same time you receive admissions decisions. Note that it takes the FAFSA processor 2 to 3 weeks to get information to individual colleges and universities—if the FAFSA is filed electronically. If you use the paper application, the turnaround can take from 4 to 5 weeks. And delays could be longer if your application is randomly selected for a more in depth review.
Remember you do NOT have to be admitted to a college or university before submitting your FAFSA. You CAN file using last year’s tax return to estimate income and taxes. If you have any questions or need additional assistance, contact the FAFSA on the Web Consumer Service either online or by calling 1-800-433-3243 (1-800-4-FED-AID).
For more FAFSA filing tips, read
10 costly FAFSA filing mistakes
NOW is the time to complete the FAFSA
Five easy steps from the FAFSA playbook will maximize scholarship potential
High School’s Last Test
Posted by Jerry in Public Education on January 9th, 2010
By J. B. SCHRAMM and E. KINNEY ZALESNE December 22, 2009
The New York Times
THE federal government is about to make a huge investment in high school. As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Congress has appropriated more than $100 billion to public schools, including a competitive “Race to the Top” fund that encourages innovation.
But the real revolution, tucked away in the Race to the Top guidelines released by the Department of Education last month, is that high school has a new mission. No longer is it enough just to graduate students, or even prepare them for college. Schools must now show how they increase both college enrollment and the number of students who complete at least a year of college. In other words, high schools must now focus on grade 13.
To be sure, this shift is long overdue. It has been a generation since a high school diploma was a ticket to success. Today, the difference in earning power between a high school graduate and someone who’s finished eighth grade has shrunk to nil. And students themselves know, better even than their parents or teachers, according to a recent poll conducted by Deloitte, that the main mission of high school is preparation for college.
Still, this shift will be seismic for our nation’s high schools, because it will require gathering a great deal of information, and using it. And at the moment, high school principals know virtually nothing about what becomes of their graduates. Most don’t even know whether their students make it to college at all.
What data they have is anecdotal. “Once a graduate happened to drop by and tell us she was struggling with college writing,” Linda Calvo, the principal of Arleta High School in Los Angeles, told us. “We changed our writing curriculum based on what she said. But her visit was a totally random occurrence.”
A smattering of states, school districts and nonprofit educational organizations have begun to gather data about how students fare in college during their first year after graduation, but their progress has been slow and haphazard. Florida has one of the best systems, but even it can’t account for a high school graduate who enrolls in college in another state. The nation is asking principals to deliver students who can succeed in college, without ensuring they know whether what they’re doing is working.
The Department of Education has begun to solve this problem by instructing states on how to keep good records of its graduates’ progress in college. This gives high schools the two pieces of information it most needs: its college enrollment rate and its “college proficiency” rate (the speed with which graduates complete a year of college-level coursework).
But what’s critical is that the Education Department also helps high school principals and teachers learn to use their data to improve student achievement — to find out which of their educational strategies actually result in student success after high school. If the department could do this, and also reward those schools that demonstrate increasing postsecondary success, we’d see high schools begin to truly meet their mission.
Race to the Top has finally established a realistic purpose for high school in the 21st century. If principals can now get the support they need to fulfill that purpose, high school can once again be a top-notch producer of American potential.
New Wrinkles in the Financial Aid Process
Mr. Buskirk explains in plain English what is changing and what is remaining the same in college funding for the coming year. He also offers a little good advice in the process.
Blog excerpt from Peter Van Buskirk
Across the country, colleges and universities award billions of dollars in financial aid each year to students whose families could not otherwise afford the cost. In addition, the Federal and state governments provide grants and loans to help families manage college costs.
Unfortunately, the process of finding access to this type of assistance can be very confusing. As a result, many students give up before they can find out how much financial aid they might be able to receive. There are encouraging signs, however, that access to funding is becoming easier and that there will be even more funds available to students.
President Obama and his administration are taking steps to help students achieve their educational goals by making it easier for them to receive much of the funding they need in order to enroll in college. The following are the steps aimed at reducing cost barriers:
- More money is now available from the government in the form of grants (free money) and low interest loans for students from low-income families.
- The form used to apply for financial aid online, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), has been shortened and simplified.
- Beginning in January 2010, the online FAFSA will automatically access relevant financial information from the tax returns submitted by their families to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
- Students can get instant estimates of their eligibility for Federal Pell Grants and Guaranteed Student Loans by using online FAFSA forecasters.
The Role of the FAFSA
The following are the primary sources of funding, in order of importance, for students as they attempt to pay for college.
- The student’s family is expected to be the first source of funding for college.
- The Federal Government makes funds available on the basis of “need.”
- The college the student will attend may offer need-based and merit-based financial assistance.
- Students attending colleges in the state where they live may also receive funding from their states.
- In addition, some students receive scholarship assistance from places where their parents work or community service organizations.
The FAFSA is used to determine the amount of money your family is expected to contribute to your educational expenses. This amount is known as the “expected family contribution or “EFC.” The FAFSA also determines your eligibility for funding (grants, loans, work study) from the Federal government and, possibly, your state government. Ideally, the EFC and the funding made available by the government would cover the entire cost of attendance for you at the college you choose.
When the money you get from your family and the government adds up to less than the cost of attendance for a college, you have demonstrated a financial “need” that must be met in order for you to be able to attend that college. Most of the time, that “need” is met by the college itself when it makes an offer of financial aid.
While these new developments are very exciting in terms of how you can gain access to money that can help pay for college, there are three things you need to keep in mind.
- Your ability to complete the new FAFSA may depend on the availability of tax (IRS) returns for your custodial parent(s) or guardian for the most recently completed tax year.
- The online FAFSA forecasters will not always tell you how the colleges themselves will assess your expected family contribution (EFC). In particular, many private colleges use the College Scholarship Service (CSS) Profile, a form that often determines a higher EFC.
- Even if a college agrees with the EFC reported by the FAFSA forecasters, it may not provide financial aid to meet your need.
The bottom line: make sure you understand from each college how it will determine your EFC and, subsequently, your financial need. The reality is that colleges and universities fund the vast majority of financial aid that is awarded each year. In doing so, they are not obligated to meet a student’s full need as demonstrated by the FAFSA or the Profile. That’s why you also need to find out from colleges how they will provide financial aid to meet your need. While you are not likely to receive any guarantees of funding, it is certainly worth exploring these questions with each of the schools on your list before you apply for admission. Do not make any commitments to enroll until you are satisfied that you will have the necessary financial support.
Parents, Read This if Your Child Is Applying to College
Posted by Jerry in Good Advice on December 24th, 2009
December 09, 2009 02:33 PM ET | Lynn F. Jacobs, Jeremy S. Hyman P
US News and World Report
Holiday time is family time. And family time, in many families, is apply-to-college time. Many parents, despite their best intentions, do more harm than good to their college bound children during this anxiety-ridden time. So we invited visiting blogger Marilee Jones, former dean of admissions at MIT and coauthor of the book, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond, to offer some advice to parents of children caught up in the college application maze. Here are her eight “guiding principles”:
1. Understand the college admissions process for what it is. Many parents think of college admissions as a competitive battle to be won. But, in truth, it is a key developmental phase to be experienced. This is your child’s initiation into adulthood and, at the same time, an important moment in parenting. Your job now is to become your child’s “grounding cord”—the calm and confident adult who keeps things safe as your child is exposed to the judgment and serendipity of college admissions officers.
[For more on the process, see the Complete Guide to College Admissions.]
2. Realize it isn’t happening to you. We are so connected to our children that we sometimes lose the boundaries between our own issues and theirs. You are not applying to college; your child is. Being clear about this affords you the distance to help him or her calm down when he or she is most scared. When your own anxiety spikes, walk away and firmly remind yourself that the college admission process is not happening to you.
3. Watch those pronouns! Think carefully about the messages you are sending your child. You may think it’s OK to refer to your child’s application as “our application.” But chances are your child will hear something like, “You aren’t mature enough to get into college on your own, so I have to help you.” This is your child’s initiation into adulthood. Your job is to lift your child up, not bring him or her down.
4. Keep your anxiety to yourself. Parents of college applicants have much to worry about, such as, “How can we afford this?” “What if my son or daughter gets rejected?” “How can I be old enough to have a child going to college?” While your worries are real, it’s important that you do not share them with your child. Your fears will only amplify his or her own. Keeping a peaceful household is the goal now, so share your feelings with a trusted friend or peer. And if you’re really at your wits’ end and have no trusted friend, buy one: Now could be the perfect time to get professional short-term counseling.
5. Work with your team. Never act as your child’s one and only adviser. The most effective parents team up with their child’s guidance counselor and follow his or her lead. Even if that counselor is a 20- or 30-something, he or she still knows more about college admissions than you do.
6. Teach self-soothing. Sometimes we collect information because it helps us feel more in control. We ask our child such questions as “What did you get on that test last week?” or “How do your SAT scores compare with your classmates’?” These questions imply judgment to our child, something that teachers, school administrators, college admissions officers, and peers might already be offering in large amounts. When your child is expressing anxiety, offer reassuring responses—”Don’t worry, things always work out for you,” “Everything is going to be OK,” “It seems scary now, but better days are ahead.”
7. Look for the grief—yours. It may surprise you to know that some of the upset you feel about the college application experience may actually be grief over your child’s leaving home soon. Because grief is about loss, it’s more comfortable for many people to turn it into another emotion that’s easier to feel, such as anger. Rather than create more turmoil for you and your family, it is best to recognize the grief for what it is, feel it, and then move on.
8. Develop Plan B. It’s not surprising that the main source of anxiety in the college admissions process comes from being unable to control the result. So here’s a secret: In order to maintain an inner sense of calm, prepare yourself in advance for your worst case scenario—e.g., your child gets rejected or wait-listed everywhere—and work out a plan to deal with that. Then file the plan away somewhere and get back to focusing on success. Knowing that you have a backup plan in place will keep you more relaxed throughout the process so you can be that positive, steady influence for your child during the anxious moments ahead.
© Copyright 2009, Professors’ Guide LLC. All rights reserved
The best and brightest take a detour
Posted by Jerry in Public Education on December 22nd, 2009
Recession-wary honor students are using community college as door to elite schools
By Daniel de Vise November 30, 2009
The Washington Post
Kira Cassels applied to 11 colleges and got in to every one. The kitchen of her Laurel home came to resemble a high school guidance office, the breakfast table buried beneath brochures and financial aid forms from destinations such as the University of Virginia and Franklin & Marshall College.
Over two arduous weeks last spring, Cassels sat with her parents and weighed the costs and benefits of each program until the list was narrowed to one: an honors track at the local community college.
Cassels, 18, is one of an increasing number of high school graduates who pass over top-drawer public and private universities to become honor students at community colleges. Recession-wary students are flocking to selective two-year programs, which allow students to complete half of their college education for about $8,000, then transfer to a more prestigious four-year institution.
Cassels attended Atholton High School in the Howard County school system, one of the region’s top college-prep engines. She took Advanced Placement courses, earned mostly A’s, scored more than 600 on each 800-point section of the SAT and found time to start a nonprofit organization that delivers comfort baskets to infants in intensive care.
She learned to expect a certain reaction — surprise and dismay — when telling classmates and family friends that her university admissions journey had ended at a community college.
“You say Howard Community College, and people are like, ‘Oh, community college,’ ” said Cassels, who lives with a younger brother and parents who both work. “But it’s really a lot more than it sounds.”
Honors enrollment at Howard Community College, a 9,000-student campus in Columbia, has risen from 123 to 185 in the past two years. Cassels enrolled in the signature program, Rouse Scholars, which takes 45 high school graduates each year and offers a proven pipeline to four-year schools. The average Rouse scholar has a 3.7 grade-point average and a combined SAT score of 1596 out of a possible 2400 points.
Over the past two decades, community college honors programs have found a niche among students who were turned down by increasingly selective state universities and didn’t want to pay private-college tuition. Enrollment grew steadily until the recession. Then, it exploded.
Montgomery College in Maryland had a record 275 applications this fall for 25 seats in its Montgomery Scholars program, up from 215 last year. Honors enrollment at Prince George’s Community College rose 28 percent this year to 292 students. A new honors program at Anne Arundel Community College grew from 22 students last year to 33 this year. On the Loudoun County campus of Northern Virginia Community College, enrollment in honors English is up by 50 percent.
The influx of students with good test scores and multiple options for higher education is reshaping community colleges, a class of schools that, although open to all, have been stereotyped as a destination of last resort, sweeping up students with the least money and the weakest academic preparation.
Enrollment in honors programs at community colleges seems to be growing faster than overall enrollment at the schools, which surged by about 10 percent this year in the Washington region, as students of various age groups and socioeconomic levels sought affordable higher education.
“We’ve sometimes struggled to get sufficient enrollment in the honors seminars. Well, recently, we’ve been packing them,” said Beverly Blois, dean of humanities at the Loudoun campus of Northern Virginia Community College. “More and more of what I call the best and brightest are turning to us.”
Building connections
Community colleges can’t match the prestige of a selective four-year college, nor the experience of living on campus. But they can offer small classes, attentive professors, intelligent classmates and inventive course work.
Hajirah Ishaq, a sophomore at Northern Virginia Community College, is studying the architecture of Dulles International Airport and Raphaelite paintings at the National Gallery in a humanities honors course.
Ishaq, 19, said she is going to community college because she is the eldest of 12 children. She describes her honors classmates as “overachievers” with ambitious transfer plans. “They talk about George Washington, Georgetown; they talk about Boston,” she said. “They talk about big schools.” Ishaq hopes to attend Georgetown.
In Maryland, the centerpiece of the Montgomery Scholars program is a year-long course called “Perspectives on World Cultures.” Four professors team-teach a syllabus that covers literature, history, philosophy and music from a global perspective.
“We’re seeing connections between different subjects. I really like that,” said Lucy Bauer, 18, a freshman Montgomery Scholar who said she “never, never ever” imagined herself in community college until she took a closer look at her family’s finances and the school’s offerings.
A recruiting meeting in October for next year’s Montgomery Scholars drew 350 people for 25 seats. Graduates have transferred to Smith, Amherst and Cornell.
Montgomery Scholars is 10 years old and is modeled on the Rouse program, which is in its 18th year. Barbara Greenfeld, a Howard Community College administrator who helped establish Rouse, said she thinks it is partly responsible for doubling the share of Howard high school graduates who attend the community college, from 12 percent in the early 1990s to 25 percent today.
Howard Community College offers study abroad and a formal transfer agreement with Dickinson College, a selective liberal arts school in Carlisle, Pa., in a program cited as a national model for collaboration between two- and four-year colleges.
“If you have a strong honors identity, it’s good for everybody,” Greenfeld said.
Thrift before prestige
In front of a classroom at the Howard Community College campus in Columbia on a recent afternoon, a classmate of Cassels’s announced that she was about to “give you guys a little background on the psychedelic experience.”
She and two other students embarked on a multimedia presentation on pop art as part of a course called “20th Century Arts, Culture and Ideas.” An hour later, the class had moved on to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Cassels and her parents chose the community college with the same sense of thrift that guides them these days at the grocery store or the mall. “We’re not hurting for money,” she said. But she and her parents didn’t feel comfortable committing $20,000 to $30,000 a year in tuition and fees, room and board, the amount they would have owed on top of the five-figure scholarships offered by several four-year colleges.
Turning down U-Va. and Franklin & Marshall was a bit of a gamble: There’s no guarantee that Cassels will get into the college of her choice as a transfer student in two years. She hopes to finish her bachelor’s at Barnard College or Cornell University.
Cassels said it was hard to watch classmates leave home this fall while she stayed behind, as if for a fifth year of high school.
“My other friends, they go away to these other schools, and they come back sometimes, weekends and holidays, and I feel like I miss the college life,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s a shallow thing on my part.”
But Cassels said she loves her new classes, the professors and the interdisciplinary projects. She feels challenged. If there is more to college, she’s willing to wait a year or two to find out.
“It’s not like I’m really losing anything,” she said, “except the name of a school.”
For more on Education, please see http://washingtonpost.com/education