286. Summer 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. Column: Combat pay for teachers will help students, DeWayne Wickham - http://usat.ly/oYQfub via @USATODAY - "Those good teachers who take on the job of educating young people in neighborhoods where the body count of underachieving students rivals that of Afghanistan's killing fields deserve combat pay."

2. Frustration with the Feds, by Libby A. Nelson - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/o8eId5 - "Most notable, of course, was the shift from a mix of bank-based and government lending to 100 percent government lending last summer, which changed the way the majority of student loans were issued. But the past year has also brought the end of the summer Pell Grant, the controversial rules on program integrity and the fight over the “gainful employment” regulation. Many new regulations will take effect in the coming months, including new measures of default rates and the hefty disclosure requirements for institutions that sponsor vocational programs subject to the gainful employment regulations."

3. Online and Incomplete, by Scott Jaschik - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/pDffVx - "But a new study urges caution to those who believe that online education is a panacea for educating more community college students. The study finds that students who enrolled in online courses -- controlling for various factors that tend to predict success -- were more likely to fail or drop out of the courses than were those who took the same courses in person. Notably, there was not a gap in completion between those enrolled in hybrid and in-person courses."

4. Bowdoin Says No Need for SAT While Buying College Board Scores, by Janet Lorin - http://t.co/aHSc3Kk via @BloombergNews - "Colleges from Bowdoin in Maine to Pitzer in California dropped the SAT entrance exam as a requirement, saying it favors the affluent, penalizes minorities and doesn’t predict academic success. What they don’t advertise is they find future students by buying names of kids who do well on the test . . . . The company and its competitor, Iowa City, Iowa-based ACT Inc., both nonprofit, sell names for 33 cents apiece."

5. 10 Most Expensive State Universities for Outsiders, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://t.co/1MRTusS via @cbsmoneywatch - "Beware of extremely expensive out-of-state public universities. When you include tuition, fees and room/ board, the most expensive state universities for nonresidents are costing more than $50,000 a year . . . . The University of Michigan happens to be the most expensive public university in the nation for nonresidents, according to US News & World Report. Here are the top 10:"

6. Half of Texas' Students Have Been Suspended, Study Finds, by Nirvi Shah - http://t.co/d94aVpy via @educationweek - "Also, the study raises concerns about how nearly half the students disciplined 11 or more times also were in contact with the Texas juvenile justice system, raising the specter of the so-called “school-to-prison” pipeline . . . . Some groups of students were more vulnerable to suspension or expulsion than others, the study found. For example, 75 percent of African-American students were expelled or suspended, compared to 50 percent of white students.Also, 75 percent of students with disabilities were suspended or expelled, compared with 55 percent of students without a disability."

7. School Discipline Study Raises Fresh Questions, by Alan Schwarz - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/education/19discipline.html?_r=1&hp - "The study linked these disciplinary actions to lower rates of graduation and higher rates of later criminal activity and found that minority students were more likely than whites to face the more severe punishments."

8. A Sociologist Returns to the Mean Streets of His Youth, by Peter Monaghan - http://bit.ly/q4UNeZ - "In the boys' world, he says, "instead of feeling that you can graduate high school and go to college as a coming-of-age ritual, now you might grow up thinking that in order to show your manhood, you have to get locked up."

9. MinnPost - Admission Possible: Closing a disturbing divide in Minnesota's educational landscape, by Sharon Schmickle : http://bit.ly/pQ8t0v - "A disturbing divide cuts through Minnesota’s educational landscape. On one side, middle- and upper-income kids thrive academically in keeping with the state’s longstanding emphasis on quality education. On the other side, low-income minority kids can’t seem to get a toehold on success.Not only is this a breach of social justice. It also is a serious economic problem."

264. 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. Terrelle Pryor apologizes for actions that led him to leave Ohio State, by Erick Smith: http://usat.ly/jCJ5c2 - "Pryor did not take questions after his statement. He did confirm he would enter the NFL's supplemental draft and said he was nine credits short of graduating from Ohio State and hoped to receive his degree from the school."

2. College Bound: Low-Income Students More Likely to Attend For-Profits, by Caralee Adams - http://t.co/xo8pH7s - "Students between ages 18 and 26 whose total household income is near or below the federal poverty level are likely to be overrepresented at for-profit institutions and underrepresented at public and private nonprofit four-year institutions, according to Portraits: Initial College Attendance of Low-Income Young Adults by IHEP, an independent, nonprofit public-policy research organization in Washington."

3. U.S. Students Remain Poor at History, Tests Show, by Sam Dillon - http://nyti.ms/iMj1G1 - "American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test released on Tuesday, with most fourth graders unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War."

4. With Perkins Loan Program Set to Expire in 3 Years, College Presidents Work to Preserve It, by Beckie Supiano - http://chronicle.com/article/College-Presidents-Pull/127918/ - "For many low-income students, several panelists noted, a Perkins Loan is all that stands between a student and needing to take out a higher-interest private loan. "In a real sense, the Perkins Loan is the last chance not to say 'no' to a student who wants to go to school," said the Rev. Charles L. Currie, president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities."

5. University of the People: Tuition-free higher education, by Daniel de Vise - http://wapo.st/j3yc9P - "The biggest drawback to Reshef’s school is that it lacks accreditation. There’s little hope for his students to transfer their credits to any other university until it gains accreditation. Reshef says he’s working with an as-yet-unnamed accreditor."

6. Reviewing education reform in the 2010-11 school year, by Valerie Strauss - http://t.co/Ce7fjg1 via @washingtonpost - "That contest, plus a controversial film about charter schools called “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” propelled a reform movement that stresses choice and incentives rather than equity and funding."

7. The MOST Expensive Private Colleges - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/13/the-most-expensive-privat_n_876440.html#s291540&title=Connecticut_College_43990 - "Although it overall nabbed 41st place in a ranking of liberal arts schools, Connecticut College tops the list of the most expensive colleges in the nation, according to a new study by US News and World Report. 7 of the colleges listed are liberal arts colleges, and two are national universities. One is a regional college."

8. Slowing the summer slide to lower academic achievement: Making summer school cool, by Maureen Downey - http://bit.ly/leRksA - “While all students lose some ground in mathematics over the summer, low-income students lose more ground in reading, while their higher-income peers may even gain,” states the RAND study.“Most disturbing is that summer learning loss is cumulative; over time, the difference between the summer learning rates of low-income and higher-income students contributes substantially to the achievement gap,” the study warns."

9. Symposium Focuses on Positioning Young Black Boys for Educational Success - http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/symposium-focuses-on-positioning-young-black-boys-for-educational-success-123831924.html - "The toxic cocktail of poverty, illiteracy, racial disparities, violence, massive incarceration and family breakdown is sentencing millions of children to dead end and hopeless lives and threatens to undermine the past half century of racial and social progress," says Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children's Defense Fund. "These ingredients ultimately combine to produce striking gaps in educational success, life expectancy and other important outcomes. We believe there are ways to avoid these outcomes."

10. Separate and unequal, by Karen Finney - TheHill.com: http://bit.ly/k5pWjp - "McKinsey analyzed data that suggest America’s academic achievement gap “imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.” The study suggests that closing the gap between black and Latino students and white students between 1983 and 1998 would have raised the GDP between $310 billion and $525 billion by 2008."

11. We Must Help Students Reach College, by Yash Gupta - http://t.co/5vUumzq via @educationweek"We should all be terrified. The young people moving through our education system, particularly at public schools in low-income areas, are lamentably unprepared for the challenges that await them in their post-academic lives."

121. MVCAP fyi

See free MVCAP e-books on college admissions and financial aid for sharing, printing, and downloading at our online resource library: http://issuu.com/mvcap

1. Not the ‘Hook’ the Admissions Office Had in Mind, by Dave Marcus - http://nyti.ms/aH72IT

"Mark Hatch was reading applications for Bates College in Maine one weekend a few years ago when he became intrigued by a student’s essay about fishing. Turning the page, Mr. Hatch felt a sharp pain — and realized that the student had attached an actual hook. After a trip to the emergency room and several stitches, Mr. Hatch finished reading the essay. Now a vice president at Colorado College, Mr. Hatch has the scar to prove that he did, in fact, admit a student with a hook."

2. No Excuses, Mr. President, by Marc Bousquet - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/99V2gr

"President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's plans for higher education are evident in their attraction to community colleges. All of the features that most educators deplore about community colleges are what the current administration likes about them: top-down control of curriculum, disposable instructors, automated courseware, a training model of education, and management highly responsive to local employers. Their ambitions for publicly-funded higher education are closely parallel to their commitments in the schools: more automation, a standardized national curriculum, and centralization of control with an intensified assessment regime. Higher education has been slow to pick up on these threats, but national polls show that most Americans already clearly understand the difference between raising test scores and actually improving education."

3. For-Profit Schools, Tested Again, by Gretchen Morgenson - http://nyti.ms/9adClc

"Apollo’s facilities offer flexible-degree programs for people (“working learners,” it calls them) who have jobs or other obligations that keep them from attending school full-time. The University of Phoenix, by far the largest of the company’s institutions, offers both online and on-campus classes. It operates in 39 states. A majority of Apollo’s revenue comes from federal student aid. The University of Phoenix, which accounted for 91 percent of Apollo’s net revenue this year, gets the bulk of its own revenue from Title IV programs. Just 1 percent of cash revenue at the University of Phoenix comes from student loans that aren’t channeled through the federal government. Top for-profit colleges like Apollo’s received $26.5 billion in government-funded student aid in 2009, the Department of Education says. Because taxpayers are on the hook if these loans go bad, it is high time that regulators increased their scrutiny of practices at Apollo and other for-profit education companies."

4. Most expensive colleges money.cnn.com/galleries/2010…

‎"1. Connecticut College

New London, Conn.

Tuition & fees (2010-2011): $43,990

Increase from previous year: 3.9%

Total cost including room & board: $53,110"

5. The For-Profit LMS Market - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/byaSqP

"Mining learning-management systems for data has come into fashion among nonprofit colleges relatively recently, but for-profits have been doing it for much longer, says David Harpool, provost and chief academic officer at the for-profit Westwood College. Accrediting bodies and other regulators have always scrutinized for-profits extra closely, Harpool says, so there was a high demand for tools that would log data on student attendance and the degree of activity by students and instructors in the online learning environment — and make the data easy for for-profits to organize and show to accreditors and others by way of proving their legitimacy. For-profits also have a unique interest in by-the-numbers scrutiny of both students and faculty: faculty because the institutions have greater power to fire them based on classroom performance, and students because, as Harpool puts it: “When an average school in the for-profit sector spends between $4,000 and $8,000 to attract each student, . . . ."

6. Kaplan & U.S. Vet - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-01/kaplan-quest-for-profit-at-taxpayer-expense-ensnares-disabled-u-s-veteran.html

"Melvin is among thousands of returning veterans enticed by for-profit colleges through repeated phone calls and e-mails, advertising in military-oriented publications, and alliances with veterans’ organizations eager for corporate contributions. Admissions advisers woo veterans with visions of high-paying jobs and easy access to federal grants. While some veterans succeed at these colleges, others are hindered by red tape in getting federal funding and the inability to complete degrees and find well-paying jobs after graduation. Aggressive recruiting by for-profit colleges leads to low graduation rates, said Donald Overton, executive director of Veterans of Modern Warfare, a service organization in Silver Spring, Maryland, which has 5,000 post-1990 veterans as members. “As long as the recruiters meet their quotas and bring in veterans, their job is done,” Overton said in a telephone interview. “The colleges are lacking support services, and their programs are fast-paced.”

7. For Exposure, Universities Put Courses on Web, by D.D. Guttenplan -http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/world/europe/01iht-educLede01.html?hpw

"M.I.T.’s announcement in 2001 that it was going to put its entire course catalog online gave a jump-start to what has now become a global Open Educational Resources Movement whose goal, said Susan D’Antoni of Athabasca University, in Canada, is “to try to share the world’s knowledge.” Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of Michigan all now offer substantial portions of their courses online. In Britain, the Open University, which has been delivering distance learning for over 40 years, offers free online courses in every discipline on the OpenLearn Web site; the Open University also maintains a dedicated YouTube channel and has often had courses listed on the top 10 downloads at iTunes University. There, students can gain access to beginner courses in French, Spanish and German as well as courses in history, philosophy and astronomy — all free."

8. Tomorrow's College: The classroom of the future. . . , by Marc Parry http://chronicle.com/article/Tomorrows-College/125120/

"As online education goes mainstream, it's no longer just about access for distant learners who never set foot in the student union. Web courses are rewiring what it means to be a "traditional" student at places like Central Florida, one of the country's largest public universities. And UCF's story raises a question for other colleges: Will this mash-up of online and offline learning become the new normal elsewhere, too?Signs suggest yes. The University System of Maryland now requires undergraduates to take 12 credits in alternative learning modes, including online. Texas has proposed a similar rule. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system is pushing to have 25 percent of credits earned online by 2015. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, pointing to UCF as a model, has made blended learning a cornerstone of its new $20-million education-technology grant program. These players pin their hopes on Web classes as a panacea that will expand access, speed up the time spent ...."

9. Mastering the Admissions Essay, by Ellen Gamerman Getting In Unigo unigo.com/articles/maste…

"The Wall Street Journal turned the tables on the presidents of 10 top colleges and universities with an unusual assignment: answer an essay question from their own school’s application."

10. The Case Against College Athletic Recruiting http://bit.ly/bTacyb

"Equally strange, you would discover that some academically elite schools that do not give athletic scholarships—because they are nominally committed to academics over athletics—give away a large portion of their highly competitive admissions slots to athletes, even in the most obscure sports, such as squash. For instance, Williams College, which admits only 17 percent of applicants, recruits 66 athletes per year. That’s 13 percent of the incoming freshman class that is dedicated to third-rate (literally, as Williams plays Division III sports) athletes over first-rate students. Take a look at the NEWSWEEK College Guide and you will find Williams, along with its small-school rivals Middlebury and Bowdoin, and Ivy League members Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Cornell, on our list of the top 25 schools that are “Stocked With Jocks.” You probably would conclude that these American institutions of higher learning have their priorities weirdly out of whack. And you would be right."

11. Read The Joe Rottenborn Daily for today's top stories on college admissions & financial aid in newsletter form - http://paper.li/rottenbornj

102. MVCAP fyi

See free MVCAP e-books on college admissions and financial aid for sharing, printing, and downloading at our online resource library: http://fb.me/HOUIYNqq

1. Community colleges are focus of White House summit - http://bit.ly/bR60I3 #cnn

‎"The goal is to ensure there are strong partnerships between growing industries and community college or training programs in every state in the country," Obama said. He called community colleges one of the nation's most under-valued assets, and repeated his goal of increasing the number of community college degrees and certificates by 5 million by the year 2020."

2. Retirement funds tapped for kids' tuition http://t.co/Qvf7UON

"The main problem with raiding retirement accounts for college is that it triggers big tax penalties compared to other types of investment plans. Even taking a loan out against a 401(k) can be dangerous, because it has to be paid back within 5 years, or immediately when the borrower changes jobs.Also, when retirement accounts are tapped for college, that money counts as adjusted gross income and will reduce the amount of financial aid a family qualifies for the following year by as much as 47%, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Fastweb.com and FinAid.org."

3. RT @USATODAY Obama seeks to partner businesses, 2-year colleges http://usat.me/40462546

"Over the next decade, nearly eight in 10 new jobs will require higher education and workforce training, economists project. As part of his goal for the USA to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, Obama last year challenged the nation's 1,200 community colleges to produce an additional 5 million graduates. He also has acknowledged that many community colleges — and the more than 8 million students enrolled in them — face significant challenges. Just 25% of students at two-year schools earn a credential or transfer to a four-year college within three years."

4. RT @USATODAY Families can better afford college if they strategize early http://usat.me/40460924

"One key is applying to a variety of schools — public, private, in-state, and a local community college as a backup plan, recommends admissions consultant Katherine Cohen of ApplyWise.com. In an online survey of 137 families with college-bound students, ApplyWise and media partner NextStepU found that more than a third said it was likely that their child would go to community college for two years, then transfer to a four-year school. In 2008, only 13% said that was likely. Make sure every school you apply to is one you would be happy to attend, but also make sure you have one you can get into and afford, Cohen says. "You have to think about fit in so many ways."

5. Raining on the Parade - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/bQX7MQ

"In a report released Monday, a marketing firm working for the Coalition for Educational Success, an advocacy group for several privately held for-profit companies, argues that community colleges engage in “unsavory recruitment practices” and offer students “poorer-than-expected academic quality, course availability, class scheduling, job placement and personal attention.”

6. Support All College Options - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/c6berB

‎"These diverse options are unlike those offered by any other nation and include small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, large public universities, online universities, for-profit schools and research institutions. Each sector serves a slightly different niche of students and provides quality programs leading to degrees ranging from an associate to a doctorate. And each will contribute significantly to achieving President Obama’s goal."

7. Americans Support Community Colleges: AP Poll http://huff.to/cmoHi1 Huffpost

"Obama wants the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. He's got his work cut out for him: Just 35 percent of community college students and 60 percent of students at four-year institutions graduate with diplomas each year."

8. Families are trimming plans to pay for college, survey finds: http://wapo.st/btrW5s

"On average, families have saved about $28,000 to pay for college. About 12 percent of that money is in 529 plans, while 14 percent comes from general savings accounts or certificates of deposit. Another 21 percent comes from investments, but the largest portion of that money - 23 percent - is in retirement savings."

9. The Most Expensive Colleges: Forbes List (PHOTOS) http://huff.to/9YgRyc Huffpost

‎"In compiling their list, Forbes evaluated the schools according to highest tuition, fees and room and board costs, using data collected by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Campus Grotto. This year, Sarah Lawrence College -- alma mater of newly-announced Chicago mayoral hopeful Rahm Emmanuel -- takes the first slot, at $57,556 per year."

10. 7 Ways to Succeed in Community College http://t.co/zH9zKe7

‎"Before selecting a community college, review how it fared in the Community College Survey of Student Engagement. The CCSSE, which is based at a nonprofit on the University of Texas, Austin campus, attempts to measure the academic excellence at community colleges. Students at participating community colleges fill out questionnaires on such topics as student and faculty interactions and academic rigor. You can find scores for individual schools at the CCSSE website."

22. "College: More Expensive than Ever"

Read the article from Money at this link:

http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/19/pf/college_costs/index.htm