373. 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. Lee El Diario de Joe Rottenborn ▸ noticias destacadas del dia via @rottenbornj ▸ http://paper.li/rottenbornj

2. Panel's Failure Means Education Cuts in '13, by Rebecca R. Ruiz: http://nyti.ms/tvlcqO -"While the Pell Grant program is exempt from cuts in the first year, the other student-aid programs will lose $134-million, reducing aid to at least 1.3 million students. Career, technical, and adult education will lose $136-million, affecting 1.4 million students, says the committee."

3. More Charges, More Details in SAT Cheating Scandal Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/rwfAXd via AddThis - "Some of those charged allegedly paid others to take the SAT on their behalf. Prosecutors said that they believed that 40 students and former students were involved, but that the statute of limitations prevented charges from being brought against all of them."

4. Poll shows concern over Penn State and other athletic programs, by Allie Grasgreen Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/v5PVRh via AddThis - "A full 72 percent of respondents said Division I college athletic programs have “too much influence over college life.” Only 3 percent said programs have too little influence; 16 percent said they have “about the right amount” and 9 percent were unsure."

5. GAO releases new investigation of for-profit colleges, by Paul Fain Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/tXujkA via AddThis - "The U.S. Government Accountability Office has released results from a second undercover “secret shopper” investigation of for-profit colleges, this time attempting to enroll a fictitious student online at 15 unnamed institutions. The findings were mixed, but investigators uncovered problems with how seven of the colleges handled online course grading, academic dishonesty, or students’ exit counseling."

6. Finding Common Ground: Why Educators Should Join Twitter, by Peter DeWitt - http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2011/11/why_educators_should_join_twitter.html via @educationweek - "We live in the 21st century where our students don't just "do" social networking; it is a part of who they are as digital citizens. To us, it's a big deal to get on Facebook or Twitter, and to our students it is something they cannot fathom living without. Understanding their connection with those sites will increase an educator's connection with their students. Being able to talk their language may even provide an opportunity to breakthrough to a hard to reach student."

7. More Students Charged in Long Island SAT Cheating Case, By JENNY ANDERSON and WINNIE HU: http://nyti.ms/uA0Cx7 - "The investigation began when administrators at Great Neck North looked into student rumors. Their focus soon fell on students who had registered to take the tests outside the district, and those whose scores and grades showed a disparity. They turned over the details to prosecutors, who opened a broad examination."

8. How the Future Looks From High School http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/11/22/how-the-future-looks-from-high-school via @roomfordebate - "How does the future look to a high school senior? We checked in with 15 of them, at four American high schools."

9. Undercover Probe Finds Lax Academic Standards at Some For-Profit Colleges, by Kelly Field - http://chronicle.com/article/Undercover-Probe-Finds-Lax/129881/ - "The probe, which is described in a report made public Tuesday, found that staff at six of the 12 colleges that enrolled the investigators tolerated plagiarism or awarded credit for incomplete or shoddy work."

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

2. Why you want to go to college: In 140 characters or less, by Luke Kerr-Dineen and Natalie DiBlasio - http://usat.ly/qOERgx via @USATODAY - "At the University of Iowa, a good tweet is worth $37,000. That's the price of a full scholarship, and that's exactly what a student hopeful can win in a contest the university has dreamed up that takes electronic communication to a new level. The university is asking prospective students to submit a 140-character tweet in place of a second essay."

3. AFT teachers union to defend educators in cheating scandals, by Greg Toppo - http://usat.ly/nyANPN via @USATODAY - "Weingarten noted that local union affiliates in Atlanta and elsewhere have been among the first to ferret out cheating among their ranks.In Atlanta, the union in 2005 "blew the whistle on this, and it was ignored because there was this enormous pressure to meet (testing) targets," she said. "Targets became more important than learning and a climate, as the governor said, that was intimidating and that was fearful and that was retailiating against anyone who came forward."

4. Colleges replacing loans with no-pay grants for their neediest students, by Daniel de Vise - http://t.co/vqM8MXh via @washingtonpost - “They’re essentially chasing after the same group of low-income students who are academically talented,” said Mark Kantrowitz, an industry expert who is tracking 73 colleges that have eliminated or capped student loans. “If you get in, these schools are a great deal.”

5. The 12 best college financial aid policies - College, Inc., by Daniel de Vise - http://t.co/66dHIwK via @washingtonpost - "In today’s paper, I write about the trend toward “no-loan” financial aid pledges at some of the nation’s top universities. More than 70 schools have replaced loans with grants in at least some of their aid awards, focusing on the neediest students.I resisted the temptation, in that story, to rattle off a list of the schools with the best aid policies. So, why not do it here?"

6. Financial Aid Pledges to Reduce Student Debt (2009-10), The Project on Student Debt - http://projectonstudentdebt.org/pc_institution.php - "A number of colleges have developed financial aid policies that limit or eliminate student loans from financial aid packages, reducing costs for students and families. We have analyzed each of these programs and include information here for the programs that meet our guidelines."

7. Preparing for college with a learning disability - Campus Overload, by Meghan Benzel - http://t.co/VUpOrWy via @washingtonpost - "I am a non-visual learner, and I have AD/HD and components of Asperger’s Syndrome. For those of you preparing for college with a learning disability: I understand. I’ve been there."

8. The PREPPIEST Schools Of 2011, by Lindsay Dittman - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/the-preppiest-schools-of-_n_894320.html#s305674&title=University_Of_Virginia - Which university in Ohio made this list?

9. Education Needs to Break With Tradition - Room for Debate: How to Improve Summer School - http://nyti.ms/nMFuzw - ". . . Is there a way to make summer school more cost effective or, with tight budgets, does it make sense to cut them? What are the best methods for making sure students are learning what they need to learn in the summer and not losing ground?"

10. How to Save on College Tuition, by Princess Clark-Wendel -http://t.co/dgO4nrq via @foxbusiness - "At a time when many families are strapped for cash, the cost of college tuition is steadily climbing. New research shows that the median income in the United States has held steady around $33,000 since 1998 while college tuition has more than doubled.Here are nine ways to help cover the cost of tuition."

11. Hechinger Report Two years after Obama’s college graduation initiative, major obstacles remain, by Jon Marcus: http://bit.ly/pbgf3C - "Only one in five of those who enroll in community colleges—and, in some states, barely one in 10—graduates in three years, while only about half of students who go to universities get their bachelor’s degrees within six. That has helped to push the United States from first to 10th in the world in the proportion of the population that has graduated from college, threatening to make this generation of college-age Americans the first to be less well-educated than their parents."

260. 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. Reformers, please listen to what parents want for schools, by Helen Gym - #cnn http://t.co/BiQ76Z2 - "I can tell you all of these things because as a parent, the true meaning of a quality school lies in a strong child- and family-centered educational mission that recognizes education as a "process of living" and school life as "real and vital" to our children and families, as American philosopher John Dewey wrote more than half a century ago."

2. Twitter finds a place in the classroom, by Dan Simon - #cnn http://t.co/ajdSMRx - "A technology enthusiast, Legaspi learned how to incorporate the social network into his 8th-grade curriculum while attending the annual Macworld convention in San Francisco earlier this year."I had an aha moment there," he said. "I said to myself, 'This is going to really engage my students.'"

3. An Overnight Train Ride to a Final Destination: by Sophia Gimenez - http://nyti.ms/kBrHkR - "No matter whom I talked to at Knox, I distinctly remember the sincerity and zeal that radiated from their character as well as an insatiable inquisitiveness that ignited inspiration with every word."

4. Car Sales and College Graduation, by Nate Johnson - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/mraaEu - "The timely national release of top-line completion numbers would put a day on the calendar to spark a recurring national discussion about how we’re doing across state lines and relative to one another and to our ambitious goals. We can imagine states and colleges themselves vying to be among the top-performing institutions and using it in their marketing and recruitment efforts."

5. Hechinger Report Skip senior year and go straight to college?, by Scott Elliott and Sarah Butrymowicz: http://bit.ly/iTPYBc - "When the Indiana legislature passed the budget at the end of April, it also launched Daniels’ plan, which allows high school students who complete their core requirements by the end of their junior year to skip senior year and go straight to college.Money the state would have spent on senior year will become scholarship money — $6,000 to $8,000 for most students, depending on their school district."

6. Mich. Early College Builds Pipeline into Health Careers, by Christina A. Samuels - http://t.co/e9NM6mx via @educationweek - "It joined with the 18,600-student Dearborn school district and Henry Ford Community College to create Henry Ford Early College, a five-year program that allows students from area school districts to graduate with a high school diploma, an associate of science degree, and a certification in one of 12 allied health fields, such as surgery technology, radiology, or biotechnology, at no cost to their families."

7. Sen. Harkin Presses Education Dept. on Effectiveness of 'Gainful Employment' Rule, by Kelly Field - http://chronicle.com/article/Sen-Harkin-Presses-Education/127786/ - "The rule is "a modest first step, but I think its going to take a much more aggressive policy," said Mr. Harkin, who is chairman of the Senate education committee.The regulation, which was released last week, will cut off federal student aid to vocational programs whose students struggle to repay their debts. Under the rule, programs that fail to meet federal benchmarks for loan repayment and debt-to-income ratios in three out of four years will become ineligible to receive federal student aid."

8. Backlash: Are These End Times for Charter Schools? by Andrew J. Rotherham - http://t.co/HyxvUYa via Time - "First created in 1992, charter schools are public schools that are open to all students but are run independently of local school districts. There are now more than 5,000 of them educating more than a million students. Charter schools range in quality from among the absolute best public schools in the country to among the absolute worst. That variance in quality is proving a political Achilles heel for charter schools and is fueling a serious backlash."

9. 10 Least Expensive Private Colleges - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/07/10-least-expensive-privat_n_872917.html#s289000&title=Berea_College_910 - "Private colleges are generally more expensive than public ones. Although, many private colleges defray the cost of tuition with financial aid (on average as much as 50%), sometimes even that kind of discount is not enough to justify attending the school.However, some private colleges are just simply cheaper from the start than others."

10. Eye on Education, Part I: City school students, by Tim Louis Macaluso - http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/news/articles/2011/06/Eye-on-Education-Part-I-City-school-students/ - "During the last 30 years, Rochester's schools have become increasingly segregated, graduation rates have fallen, and the achievement gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers has widened. Nowhere is the achievement gap more evident than with young black male students - something many people are calling a national crisis."

126. 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. A Time of Urgency, by Freeman A. Hrabowski III - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/bNqGXs

"Many might be surprised that underrepresented minorities aspire to earn STEM degrees at roughly the same rate as other groups. However, only about 20 percent of underrepresented minority students complete undergraduate STEM programs within five years. And while white and Asian American students are more successful, their completion rates are also troubling, with only 33 and 42 percent of those students, respectively, finishing STEM degrees in five years. The country is struggling to remain globally competitive in science and technology. Retaining and graduating undergraduates of all races in STEM fields is clearly an American issue."

2. Learning From For-Profits - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/9yF55R

"While panelists at TIAA-CREF mostly dodged or ignored the inner-Beltway debate, a noted news personality gave her two cents. Speaking at a post-conference dinner in the aristocratic confines of the University Club, Cokie Roberts, senior news analyst at NPR, predicted that Democratic lawmakers, in particular, will be reluctant to take on a sector with such clear ties to one of the nation’s most powerful newspapers. The Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper, also owns Kaplan University, among other for-profits. “But I have to tell you, the biggest objection to [regulation] has come from the fact that The Washington Post would go out of business if Kaplan went out of business – yes, I see Peter Smith waiving,” Roberts said with a chuckle. “Because The Washington Post money all comes from Kaplan and the Democrats don’t want The Washington Post to go out of business, so I think there are a lot of forces militating against those rules at the moment.”

3. Wising Up on STEM Completion - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/903NgE

‎"According to NSF statistics cited in the AAUW report, despite the fact that women make up the majority of college students generally, only 88,371 of them graduated in STEM fields in 2007, compared to 138,874 of their male counterparts. In 2007, men outnumbered women in science and engineering careers, 73 percent to 27 percent. Gender biases -- conscious and unconscious -- often hinder women’s progress in these fields, the report says."

4. Harnessing Social Media - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/9bNYwW

"But a new study, scheduled to be released next week by the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, suggests that using Twitter in class might in fact lead to greater engagement and higher grades — as long as professors harness their students’ urges to Tweet for “educationally relevant activities”: class discussions, asking questions, getting reminders from instructors, organizing study groups, and so on. The students in the experiment, first-year pre-health majors (and Twitter novices), varied widely as far as how frequently they tweeted over the course of the 14-week semester — the median was 30 times and the mean was 48 — but overall their GPAs averaged half a point higher than those of the non-tweeting control group. "Using Twitter produced a more rich discussion of students' relationships to themes covered in the book than would have been possible during the limited class time,” write the study’s authors, researchers at Lock Haven University, South Dakota State University, and Penn...."

5. College leaders work to increase interest in humanities, by Tracy Jan - http://b.globe.com/bUXKv2

‎"Today, business is the most popular undergraduate degree in the United States; in 2008, 21 percent of bachelor’s degrees that were awarded were in that field, according to US Department of Education statistics. And many colleges, including Brandeis this year, have responded by expanding their majors in preprofessional fields like business. At Harvard, a liberal arts bastion that does not offer undergraduates a business major, the most popular field of study is economics, with more than 700 students choosing that as a major. That accounts for 11 percent of its undergraduates and more than three times the number of English or history majors. And the number of Harvard students who declare science and engineering majors has jumped 27 percent in the past five years — now making up nearly a third of the university’s undergraduates. “That’s a real shift from seeing an undergraduate education as general preparation in a wide range of fields. . . ."

6. Failure to educate, by Junia Yearwood - http://b.globe.com/dz8Hmo

"I knew that most of my students who walked across the stage, amidst the cheers, whistles, camera flashes, and shout-outs from parents, family, and friends, were not functionally literate. They were unable to perform the minimum skills necessary to negotiate society: reading the local newspapers, filling out a job application, or following basic written instructions; even fewer had achieved empowering literacy enabling them to closely read, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate text.However, they were all college bound — the ultimate goal of our school’s vision statement — clutching knapsacks stuffed with our symbols of academic success: multiple college acceptances, a high school diploma; an official transcript indicating they had passed the MCAS test and had met all graduation requirements; several glowing letters of recommendation from teachers and guidance counselors; and one compelling personal statement, their college essay."

7. 5 Student Loan Repayment Tips, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy http://t.co/JsGd7Tk

"The Project on Student Debt just released a list of ways that borrowers can manage their student loan repayments. Here are five of the nonprofit group’s student debt tips:"

8. The Real Price of College: Looking Beyond the Sticker http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-real-price-of-college-looking-beyond-the-sticker/27769

‎"Over the decade from 2000-01 to 2010-11, average published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges rose 72% after adjusting for inflation. The 35% increase at private four-year colleges and the 31% increase at public two-year colleges seem moderate by comparison. But after subtracting estimated average grant aid and federal tax credits and deductions received by full-time students, the net price actually declined in each of these three postsecondary sectors. In other words, on average the net tuition and fees students are paying are lower in 2010 dollars than they were a decade ago.So it’s not surprising that there are two very different stories out there about the price of college and college affordability. Why is it so hard for people to believe the numbers about declining net prices?"

9. Going SAT- Free - http://bit.ly/cXwO3e

"Not only do all four-year colleges that require a standardized test—including Harvard and Yale—let applicants choose between submitting SAT and ACT scores (the last school made the change in 2007), but a growing number of competitive institutions including Smith College, Wake Forest, American University, Bowdoin College, Bates College, and, most recently, Virginia Wesleyan, have decided to forgo standardized tests altogether. Today, about 830 of the country’s 2,430 accredited four-year colleges do not use the SAT or ACT to admit the majority of applicants. (Some schools require a test if you have a low GPA or class rank.) “Colleges are trying to increase the number of applicants and diversify their population,” says Kristen Campbell, executive director of college-prep programs for Kaplan Test Prep."

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