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Showing posts with label Tom Harkin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Harkin. Show all posts

Thursday, June 9, 2011

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."



Wednesday, June 8, 2011

259. 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. Minority kids spend most of their waking hours plugged in, by Mary Brophy Marcus - USATODAY.com: http://usat.ly/k0H7sd - "Among 8- to 18-year-olds, Asian Americans logged the most media use (13 hours, 13 minutes a day), followed by Hispanics (13 hours), blacks (12 hours, 59 minutes), and whites (8 hours, 36 minutes.)"


2. Another Round, by Libby A. Nelson - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/m5ugDp - "This hearing, 'Drowning in Debt: Financial Outcomes of Students at For-Profit Colleges,' the fifth from Senator Tom Harkin’s committee, focused on the debt that students at for-profit colleges accumulate and how frequently they default on loans."


3. School Network Readies Students for College and Career, by Catherine Gewertz - http://t.co/PKBCm7Q via @educationweek - “We want to make sure that everyone is college- and career-ready, that we don’t end up with a blue-collar track and a college-prep track,” says John Snavely, the superintendent of the 13,000-student Porterville Unified School District, which has developed nine career pathways at five of its high schools here."


4. Popularity Offers Challenges for Community Colleges, by Caralee J. Adams - http://t.co/swsIdXa via @educationweek - "More students than ever are going to community colleges—and their numbers account for nearly half of all the college undergraduates in the country."


5. College Bound: Democratic Senators Rail About Debt Load of For-Profit Students, by Caralee Adams - http://t.co/TPtkZkM - "What does it say to you, Madame Secretary, that after the rules were published last week, stock prices of these larger, for-profit schools soared?"


6. At New York’s Private Schools, a Tutor for Every Class, by Jenny Anderson - http://nyti.ms/jUfvFZ - “There’s no family that gets through private school without an SAT tutor,” said Sandy Bass, the mother of two former Riverdale students and the founder of the newsletter Private School Insider. “Increasingly, it’s impossible to get through private school without at least one subject tutor.”






Tuesday, March 29, 2011

222.Unstack the Odds--Cost, Part 4


Unstack the Odds: Help All Kids Access College—and Graduate!

by

Joe Rottenborn

Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

11. Cost, Part 4


When it comes to cost of college, students and their parents must remember the old adage: “Let the buyer beware.” Today, horror stories abound of students who have gone into debt, often failed to earn a degree, and are still unable to find a job. One such student is Becky Loring, who attended Westwood College, a proprietary (for-profit) school in Florida. According to a Tampa newspaper article, “Loring, 32, now owes the government and private lenders more than $100,000. Working in sales, she is far from the graphic design job she studied for, barely able to make her college loan interest payments."When I think about it, I just feel nauseated," she said. "How did I let this happen?" (Lindsay Peterson, “For-profit colleges leave many with debt but no jobs,” The Tampa Tribune, March 27, 2011.) http://www2.tbo.com/content/2011/mar/27/for-profit-colleges-leave-some-with-debt-but-no-jo/news-breaking/

For information on the sector of higher education alternatively referred to as "for-profit/private sector/corporate," you can access data released by the U.S. Education Department on April 6, 2010, at this link from Inside Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/07/enroll

On June 24, 2010, Chairman Tom Harkin opened hearings by the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions regarding for-profit higher education. At the outset, a report was issued, containing the following conclusions:

“The Federal government and taxpayers are making a large and rapidly growing investment in financial aid to for-profit schools, with few tools in place to gauge how well that money is being spent. Available data show that very few students enroll in for-profit schools without taking on debt, while a staggering number of students are leaving the schools, presumably many without completing a degree or certificate. To boost enrollment, some for-profit schools recruit large numbers of new students each year. In some cases, schools enroll more students over the course of the year than were enrolled at the beginning of the year. To ensure these enrollment increases, it is necessary for the schools to devote very large shares of Title IV dollars and other Federal financial aid to marketing activities, not education."

"These schools are increasingly relying on Federal financial aid dollars for revenue. When all Title IV, Department of Defense and Veteran’s Administration funds are included, many of these schools are receiving nearly all of their funds from Federal sources. While increasing their reliance on Federal dollars as a source of revenue, for-profit schools are at best spending only slightly more than half of revenues actually educating students, and in several cases are shrinking the amount spent on instruction. Yet these same schools are reporting profit margins of 20 percent and higher to investors."

"Students at for-profit schools are also taking on higher amounts of debt than their peers at public and nonprofit schools. Nearly half of student loan borrowers who entered repayment in 2007 and defaulted by 2009 attended for-profit schools (44 percent), even though less than 10 percent of students attend these schools.The publicly available data, in tandem with mounting reports of questionable practices and poor student outcome, yields a mixed portrait of the for-profit higher education sector that calls into question the taxpayers return on their multi-billion-dollar investment, and leaves many unanswered questions with regard to whether a sufficient number of students receive an education that provides them with the knowledge and skills they need to obtain jobs to repay their student debt.” (Emerging Risk?: An Overview of Growth, Spending, Student Debt and Unanswered Questions in For-Profit Higher Education, p. 11) http://harkin.senate.gov/documents/pdf/4c23515814dca.pdf

To access the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled "FOR-PROFIT COLLEGES: Undercover Testing Finds Colleges Encouraged Fraud and Engaged in Deceptive and Questionable Marketing Practices," dated August 4, 2010, click the following link:http://pervegalit.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/gaomarketing.pdf

According to that GAO report, you can watch video clips of applications by undercover investigators and listen to voicemail messages from proprietary educational institution recruiters at this link:http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-948T

To see the annual revenue and number of students enrolled by some of the largest for-profit companies/universities, click this link to an article in The Wall Street Journal, dated August 30, 2010:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703418004575455773289209384.html?mod=WSJ_article_related

To read the article by Stephanie Chen, "For-profit college risk: Huge debt, questionable degree," posted on 9/2/10, at CNN online, click this link: http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/09/02/for.profit.college.debt/index.html?hpt=C2