377. College Access and Success News

Here are links to recent news on college access and success.
by
Joe Rottenborn

Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. Read The Joe Rottenborn Daily ▸ today's top stories on college access and success via @rottenbornj ▸ http://paper.li/rottenbornj

2. Whatever happened to…Nancy Guarneros, undocumented student, DREAM Act hopeful? By Thelma Gutierrez – http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/25/whatever-happened-to-nancy-guarneros-undocumented-student-dream-act-hopeful/ via CNN - "Currently, undocumented students cannot apply for student financial aid and they can’t legally work – so unless they can come up with tuition on their own, many are forced to give up their academic aspirations."

3. The Fallout Over Syracuse's Abuse Scandal, by Rebecca R. Ruiz: http://nyti.ms/sbL9lV - "The events again raise the question: What should applicants think? Syracuse’s basketball team and its N.C.A.A. tournament record are points of pride for many students. The school’s strong sports culture has surely served as a draw for some applicants. Will some now see it as a liability?"

4. Report suggests approach to improving graduation rates, by Kaustuv Basu Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/rOwyBk via AddThis - "Only 32.9 percent of men earn a degree in four years, while the percentage for women is 43.8. The gap shrinks to 5.5 percentage points at the end of the sixth year. First-generation college students earn a degree at the rate of 27.4 percent after four years, while students whose parents have college degrees have a graduation rate of 42.1 percent. Asian American and white students had the highest four-year graduation rates, at 44.9 percent and 42.6 percent respectively. Degree-attainment rates remain is the highest at private universities; the lowest numbers come from public four-year colleges."

5. 6 reasons to invest in a 529 plan today, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57331762/6-reasons-to-invest-in-a-529-plan-today/?tag=mncol;lst;9 - "Are you wondering whether it's a good time to open up a college 529 savings account? One of the nation's foremost 529 plan experts says the answer is a resounding Y-E-S. Joseph Hurley, the founder of SavingforCollege.com, says there are a number of timely reasons why families shouldn't dawdle in opening a 529 plan. Here are six great reasons to consider acting now."

6. Middle Schoolers Getting Prepped for College, by Nora Fleming - http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/11/29/13middle_ep.h31.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-TW via @educationweek - "ACT researchers found in 2008 that the academic level students achieve by 8th grade has a bigger impact on college and career readiness and success than anything that happens academically in high school."

7. College Bound: Report Sheds Light on Factors Influencing College Graduation, by Caralee Adams - http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/college_bound/2011/11/report_sheds_light_on_who_is_graduating_from_college.html via @educationweek - "There are distinct racial disparities in completion. Asian-Americans had the highest four-year graduation rates at 44.9 percent, followed by whites, 42.6 percent; Latinos, 25.8 percent; African-Americans, 21 percent; and American Indians, 16.8 percent."

8. At Top Colleges, Anti-Wall St. Fervor Complicates Recruiting, by Kevin Roose: http://nyti.ms/tvpf3m - "Banks and hedge funds have long wooed undergraduates from elite colleges with lavish dinners, personalized e-mails and free trips to New York for interviews. It’s all part of an annual courtship ritual known as on-campus recruiting. But this fall, the antibank animus of the Occupy Wall Street movement has seeped onto college campuses. At some schools, anger at big banks has turned the on-campus recruiting process into a crucible of controversy."

9. Secretary of Education Urges Colleges to Rein In Costs, by Kelly Field -http://chronicle.com/article/Secretary-of-Education-Urges/129912/ - "The department is billing the speech as the start of a "national conversation" on college costs."

10. Graduation Rates Can Be Predicted More Precisely by Examining Student Characteristics, Report Says, by Jennifer Gonzalez - http://chronicle.com/article/Graduation-Rates-Can-Be/129914/ - "Many colleges now use basic student information such as race and ethnicity, gender, high-school grade-point average, and SAT and ACT scores to project an expected graduation rate. By considering other, more-personal characteristics, such as how students rate their emotional health, whether they are the first in their family to attend college, and whether they anticipate having to work full time while enrolled, an institution can increase the accuracy of its four-year graduation-rate prediction by 66 percent, its five-year rate by 54 percent, and its six-year rate by 53 percent, says the report."

11. It's time to fight unemployment the old-fashioned way, says Elaine Chao http://ti.me/syS2bn via @TIMEIdeas - "One of the lessons all ages should take away from this era — and one which parents and grandparents should drill into children balking at homework or at going back to school — is that education is the best protection against ruin in hard times. Those with higher educations certainly have not been invulnerable to harm in this recession, many are underemployed and unemployed, but they always have been in the best position to survive and thrive."

12. Common Core standards pose dilemmas for early childhood, by Samuel J. Meisels - The Answer Sheet - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/common-core-standards-pose-dilemmas-for-early-childhood/2011/11/28/gIQAPs1X6N_blog.html?tid=sm_btn_twitter via @washingtonpost - "But early childhood education — concerned with children from birth to the end of third grade — seems nearly an afterthought in the standards. Not only do they end (or begin) at kindergarten, ignoring more than half of the early childhood age range, they simply don’t fit what we know about young children’s learning and development."

342. College Access and Success News

Here are links to recent news on college access and success.
by
Joe Rottenborn
Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. How to avoid defaulting on your student loans, by Sandra Block – http://usat.ly/oBR9h8 via @USATODAY - "Some 8.8% of borrowers whose first payments came due between Oct. 1, 2008, and Sept. 30, 2009, defaulted on their loans, according to a recent report from the Department of Education. For every student loan borrower who defaults, two others are delinquent, according to a study by the Institute for Higher Education Policy."

2. Dream Act Becomes Law in California, by Rebecca R. Ruiz - http://nyti.ms/q66LLA - "The legislation allows illegal immigrants who graduate from high schools in California to apply to the state’s public universities as residents, granting them a reduced tuition rate. (Students must prove themselves to be “on the path to legalization,” meaning that if they are undocumented, they must apply for lawful immigration status or swear to do so.) The law also affords such students the right to both private loans and public aid to help in paying for their education."

3. Moneycollege, by Ryan Craig - Inside Higher Ed - http://bit.ly/nM2IfM via AddThis - "With the right data, dozens of would-be Billy Beanes will spring up across the country arguing what the on-base percentage equivalent for higher education is, coalescing on persistence and completion metrics that are meaningful for all students (i.e., traditional/adult, full-time/part-time, on-ground/online) and helping their institutions reform and restructure to increase “wins.”

4. 25 Colleges With the Happiest Freshmen, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://moneywatch.bnet.com/spending/blog/college-solution/25-colleges-with-the-happiest-freshmen/6873/ via @cbsmoneywatch - "What you’ll find here is the list of the 25 colleges and universities with arguably the happiest freshmen. These schools enjoy the highest freshmen retention rates, according to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, an education think tank, which collected the figures when compiling the college rankings for Forbes Magazine."

5. Ohio universities to drop most remedial classes, by Christopher Magan - http://www.middletownjournal.com/news/middletown-news/ohio-universities-to-drop-most-remedial-classes-1266589.html?cxtype=ynews_rss via @middjournal - "The nearly 40 percent of college freshmen in Ohio who are not ready for college-level work will take most of their remedial courses at community colleges under a statewide plan that dramatically changes how four-year schools provide instruction to those needing extra help."

6. Advocates Worry ESEA Rewrite May Weaken Law, by Alyson Klein - http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/04/01/27esea.h30.html via @educationweek - "Subgroup accountability is an especially complicated piece of the already very complicated NCLB law, which requires that public schools test their students in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school. Schools first are required to break out student-achievement data to show how racial and ethnic minorities, students from low-income families, English-language learners, and students in special education are doing relative to their peers."

7. Jobs's Wife Backs Education Causes, by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Jessica E. Vascellaro - http://on.wsj.com/oMmn8U via Wsj - "Ms. Powell Jobs's charitable activities date back at least to the mid-1990s, when she mentored high-school students in East Palo Alto, Calif. In 1997, she co-founded the nonprofit College Track, which helps low-income students prepare for college through intensive academic and extra-curricular programs. Founding and running College Track involved "significant" financial donations from the Jobs family, according to a person familiar with the organization. Ms. Powell Jobs thought "this is important enough that I am not going to just write a check—I am going to build with my own hands an infrastructure that can help students go to college," Mr. Watson says. The program has trained more than 1,000 students, he says, 90% of whom went on to a four-year college."

8. The Spillover Effect: Beware the Explosive Teen, by Jeffrey Kluger - http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/10/the-spillover-effect-beware-the-explosive-teen/ -"The researchers' findings, which were published in the September-October edition of the journal Child Development, showed that fights or other conflicts with peers raised the risk of similar outbreaks of hostility in the home for at least a full day after. Conflicts inside the home had an even more persistent spillover effect, increasing the odds of fights with friends for an average of two full days. The effect was evident in both genders, though for girls it was more pronounced than it was for boys. Regardless of the sex of the teen, the phenomenon may also have a spiraling effect, with a fight in the living room leading to a fight in the schoolyard, which leads to another fight in the home and so on."

9. College sticker shock: Is $55,000 the new $50,000? by Daniel de Vise - College, Inc. - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/college-sticker-shock-is-55000-the-new-50000/2011/10/10/gIQAw10zaL_blog.html?tid=sm_btn_twitter via @washingtonpost - "Nineteen colleges now charge $55,000 or more in annual tuition, fees and living expenses, according to the latest survey of most expensive colleges from CampusGrotto. Back in 2007, by contrast, $50,000 was the upper limit of college sticker price and only one university — our own George Washington University — had reached it."

10. When the Best is Mediocre, by Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee: Education Next - http://bit.ly/rd1zVQ via @AddThis - "Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compared with those of our international peers. Our best school districts may look excellent alongside large urban districts, the comparison state accountability systems encourage, but that measure provides false comfort. America’s elite suburban students are increasingly competing with students outside the United States for economic opportunities, and a meaningful assessment of student achievement requires a global, not a local, comparison."

335. College Access and Success News

Here are links to recent news on college access and success.
by
Joe Rottenborn
Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. Read The Joe Rottenborn Daily ▸ today's top stories on college access and success via @rottenbornj ▸ http://paper.li/rottenbornj

2. Educators, Financial Literacy Advocates Respond to Growing Student Debt - Southern Maryland Headline News: http://t.co/OxtpdgLD via @AddThis

3. Dream Act: Brown's Nightmare? NBC Los Angeles - http://t.co/sxRw2Zkz via @propzero

4. Test scores reveal Ky. educational challenges - http://www.kentucky.com/2011/09/29/1901496/test-scores-reveal-ky-educational.html

5. Why Achievement Gap Mania Isn’t Cost-Free - http://bit.ly/oR1O90

6. Better Literacy Will Close the Achievement Gap @PolicyMic Matthew Clair - http://www.policymic.com/articles/better-literacy-will-close-the-achievement-gap

7. Dispelling myths about college admissions - NeXt - The Buffalo News - http://t.co/b3KUfGi2 via @TheBuffaloNews

8. SAT Cheaters: College Admissions Exam Has History of Fraud - http://t.co/1toTvo1O via @thedailybeast

9. SAT cheating scandal: Are stakes getting too high for college admission? - Yahoo! News - http://t.co/Oq3XxVzr via @YahooNews

273. Review of College News

Here are some links to today's stories
about college access and success.
by
Joe Rottenborn
Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. Read The Joe Rottenborn Daily ▸ today's top stories via @rottenbornj ▸ http://t.co/UftEiOc

2. Column: Why DREAM Act is right for U.S., young people, by Arne Duncan - http://usat.ly/knc93Z via @USATODAY - "Leaders in Congress have introduced the DREAM Act to create opportunities for patriotic young people to attend college even though they don't have documentation. They will have to go through a rigorous process to qualify for the DREAM Act. They must prove that they came to the United States before the age of 16, have lived here for at least five years, do not have a criminal record, are not removable from the country and possess good moral character. They will also need to earn a diploma or a GED certificate, and they must have earned admission to an institution of higher education or serve in the military. Once they're in college or serving in the armed forces, they will have the chance to earn legal status."

3. 'Times' Ticks On, by Steve Kolowich - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/jRX3Uo - "The Times Company, which has seen its annual revenues fall by about 30 percent in the last five years, has waded into the waters of higher education more deliberately than some of its peers -- most notably the Washington Post Company, which now pays for its journalism operations largely off the back of Kaplan Inc., one of the country’s largest degree-granting enterprises."

4. New Voice for Asian Students, by Allie Grasgreen - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/kymGhJ "Yet overall rates of growth do not fairly represent the complexity of Asian demography and educational attainment. The U.S. Census Bureau has identified 48 different ethnic groups within the AAPI racial category, and some fare far less well than others. For example, about half of Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander students (such as Vietnamese and Native Hawaiian) will leave college without earning a degree; they are three to five times more likely to drop out than are East Asian (such as Japanese and Chinese) and South Asian (such as Korean and Indian) students."

5. Do We Need 20 Million More College Grads? by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://t.co/2bvqanB via @cbsmoneywatch - "The report suggests that the country needs far more college graduates than it is currently producing. In fact, the country will require 20 million more college-educated workers by 2025. That’s 12 million more workers than the country is currently on target to produce."

6. Turnaround Schools, Education Week, June 28, 2011- http://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/turnaround-schools/index.html - "In 2009, the federal government overhauled the Title I School Improvement Grant program, increased its value to $3.5 billion with money from the recovery act, and spelled out four turnaround options from which perennially failing schools would have to choose to get a share of the funding. (Roll over the chart at right for descriptions of each model and the breakdown of SIG money-receiving schools that chose to use it)."

7. Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off, by David Leonhardt - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/sunday-review/26leonhardt.html?_r=1&src=rechp -"The evidence is overwhelming that college is a better investment for most graduates than in the past. A new study even shows that a bachelor’s degree pays off for jobs that don’t require one: secretaries, plumbers and cashiers. And, beyond money, education seems to make people happier and healthier. “Sending more young Americans to college is not a panacea,” says David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who studies the labor market. “Not sending them to college would be a disaster.”

8. Teacher Evaluation System Examines Classroom Performance, by Sam Dillon - http://nyti.ms/l1etaX - "For classroom observations, nine criteria — “explain content clearly,” “maximize instructional time” and “check for student understanding,” for example — are used to rate the lesson as highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective. These five observations combine to form 75 percent of these teachers’ overall ratings; the rest is based on achievement data and the teachers’ commitment to their school communities. Ineffective teachers face dismissal. Minimally effective ones get a year to improve."

9. Asian-American and Pacific Islander Students Are Not Monolithically Successful, Report Says, by Jennifer Gonzalez - http://chronicle.com/article/Asian-AmericanPacific/128061/ - "In fact, nearly half of all Asian-American and Pacific Islander students, known as AAPI students, attend community colleges, and many of their ethnic groups have some of the lowest high-school-graduation and college-degree-attainment rates in the United States."

10. Study: California Community College Completion Rate Low http://www.educationnews.org/?p=153831 - "The report shows that 70% of students who enrolled in a California community College still had not completed a degree or a certificate or transferred to a four-year school after 6 years. When the data was broken down by race, it showed that the number of Latino and black students who failed to achieve any of the above objectives was between 75% and 80%."

11. 8 Strategies for Starting Your College Application Process, by Peter Van Buskirk - http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-college-admissions-insider/2011/06/27/8-strategies-for-starting-your-college-application-process - "Over the course of the summer, I will devote this space to providing guidance regarding application preparations. The following are strategies for starting the process. In the coming weeks, I will focus on tips and strategies for refining your presentation."

12. Ask the Financial Expert: "How Does the Federal Financial Aid Process Work?" by Scott Goodman -http://wp.me/p1q4lk-sh - "For the federal government to determine a student’s financial aid eligibility, the student must first complete its aid application known as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The FAFSA requires specific income and asset information from both the parents and student. Independent students do not need to list their parents’ information."