381. 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. Private Colleges That Keep the Average Student Debt Low, by Rebecca R. Ruiz: http://nyti.ms/uXMfI9 - "While the average college student graduates with about $28,000 in personal debt and two out of every three students borrow money for school, according to the College Board, the extent to which a student is in the red at graduation can vary dramatically by institution."

3. Protecting Friendships During the College Admissions Process, by Susannah L. Griffee: http://nyti.ms/vvNeMx - "Looking back, I wish I had kept my college list completely private. It may have made me feel proud to publicly post my acceptances, but I know it made the people who didn’t get into those colleges upset and resentful. The trade-off wasn’t worth it."

4. Obama administration issues affirmative action guidance for colleges, by Scott Jaschik Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/vdliEY via AddThis - "Guidance issued jointly Friday afternoon by the Departments of Education and Justice states that diversity is an important educational goal, and that colleges should be able to use a variety of methods (including the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions) to achieve diversity."

5. Employers' 11 favorite recruiting strategies for hiring new college grads, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57332235/employers-11-favorite-recruiting-strategies-for-hiring-new-college-grads/?tag=mncol;lst;10 - "While most employers use eight to 10 recruiting methods when searching for new talent, internship programs were favored by 66% of workplaces, while career fairs came in second among job recruiters looking for new hires."

6. What employers are paying new college grads, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57332487/what-employers-are-paying-new-college-grads/?tag=mncol;lst;9 - "The survey included salaries for selected bachelor's degrees and the results clearly show that graduates with advanced math skills are at the top of the salary heap."

7. Hechinger Report For millions of college dropouts, second chances prove difficult, by Emily Hanford: http://hechingerreport.org/content/for-millions-of-college-dropouts-second-chances-prove-difficult_7065/#.TtzZdMlu4i4.twitter via AddThis - "Capece finally gave up and dropped out, becoming one of 37 million Americans who have some college credits but no degree. That’s more than 20 percent of the working-age population. At a time when there’s more of a push than ever to increase the number of Americans with college degrees, close to half of the people who start college, like Capece, end up walking away, many of them saddled with debt. College dropouts who took out loans leave with a median debt of $7,000. Some give up only a few credits away from graduation."

8. Why Does the SAT Endure? - http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-sats-matter via @roomfordebate - "If, as critics claim, the test can be gamed, why are the scores still so meaningful to college admissions officials, and does the SAT put students who can’t afford to take prep classes at a disadvantage?"

9. A Good Intelligence Test, by David Z. Hambrick - http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-sats-matter/the-sat-is-a-good-intelligence-test via @roomfordebate - "Large-scale meta-analyses by researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that SAT performance is as good of a predictor of overall college grade point average as it is of freshman grade point average, and Vanderbilt researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow have documented that the SAT predicts life outcomes well beyond the college years, including income and occupational achievements."

10. Khan Academy Blends Its YouTube Approach With Classrooms, by SOMINI SENGUPTA: http://nyti.ms/s840SN - "Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month. Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum — a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition. This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan’s experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises."

11. Why School Choice Fails, by NATALIE HOPKINSON: http://nyti.ms/vO0FWI - "Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions."

12. White House Invites College Leaders to Closed-Door Meeting on Affordability, by Collin Eaton - http://chronicle.com/article/White-House-Invites-College/130007/ - "The discussion will be a candid conversation about how higher education can remove barriers "to college access, affordability, and success for students," according to a letter of invitation, from the White House to the higher-education leaders, that was obtained by The Chronicle."

13. Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check box – http://usat.ly/sKy4Dq via @USATODAY - "For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it's harder for them to gain admission to the nation's top colleges. Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges' admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission."

349. 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 colleges use, misuse social media to reach students, by Umika Pidaparthy - #cnn - http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/20/tech/social-media/universities-social-media/index.html -"For universities competing to attract top students, it's no longer enough to have a glossy brochure and a sleek website. Schools like Johns Hopkins are reaching out to engage with applicants on Facebook and Twitter. They're also finding that a robust social media campaign, along with such creative features as student-run blogs, can lure prospective students while a stale online presence can turn them off. College admissions officers are indeed learning to interact with students where they hang out: online. According to a recent study by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, 100% of universities surveyed use social media to communicate with students, up from 61% in 2007-08. The study found that 98% of the responding colleges have a Facebook page and 84% have a Twitter account."

2. Law aims to give more accurate tally of college costs, by Brandon James Smith – http://usat.ly/plFaea via @USATODAY - "Now, due to a federal law that kicks in on Oct. 29, there's an online tool required on college websites — a net price calculator — intended to to help give students and families a more accurate estimate of real costs."Universities all cost different amounts, so it's hard to know what the family might be responsible for until much later in the process and after they've applied for financial aid. This helps them to find what the real final cost will be early in the process," said Nanci Tessier, vice president of enrollment management of the University of Richmond."

3. Are Too Many Americans Earning Four-Year Degrees? by Rebecca R. Ruiz - http://nyti.ms/pDUsO7 - "The debate, held by Intelligence Squared in Chicago as part of that city’s Ideas Week, featured Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and entrepreneur, and Charles Murray, a political scientist, arguing that the college market is flooded with too many students. Arguing against them were Henry S. Bienen, president emeritus of Northwestern University, and Vivek Wadhwa, a director of research at Duke University."

4. Questions for The Times's Adam Liptak on the Future of Affirmative Action, by Jacques Steinberg and Adam Liptak - http://nyti.ms/oQmbUD - "As things stand now, under the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, admissions officers may take account of race and ethnicity as one factor among many in a “holistic review” of applications. A hypothetical decision overturning Grutter might forbid direct consideration of those factors but continue to allow consideration of, say, economic hardship or knowledge of a second language."

5. More Applications, More Waiting Lists, by Scott Jaschik - Inside Higher Ed - http://bit.ly/qiXSU0 via @AddThis - "Most four-year colleges saw an increase in applications in 2010, and more colleges used waiting lists than they did the year before, with smaller proportions of students admitted off the waiting lists, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. . . . The average selectivity rate (the percentage of applicants who are offered admission) at four-year colleges was 65.5 percent for fall 2010, down about one percentage point from the previous year. So all those reports about the few elite colleges with single-digit selectivity rates (while true) are about as unrepresentative as you could get."

6. Reframing the 'Stem Shortage' Debate, by Doug Lederman - Inside Higher Ed - http://bit.ly/mVCM3B via AddThis - "The country is still producing lots of workers with what the report calls "STEM competencies," including investigative and problem solving tendencies, the authors state. But those skills are increasingly in demand in other non-STEM fields such as health care management and professional and business services, and because those fields typically pay more and often offer some rewards that core science and engineering jobs may not -- such as social or entrepreneurial interests, or a chance to manage other people -- workers with STEM skills are increasingly being "diverted" to non-STEM jobs."

7. STEM full report, by Anthony Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton - http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/stem-complete.pdf - "We find that the disagreement between those who argue thatSTEM workers are undersupplied and those who argue theyare oversupplied can be resolved by the fact that large numbersof people with STEM talent or degrees divert from STEMoccupations either in school or later in their careers."

8. Lastest Trends in College Admissions: 15 Things You Should Know, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://moneywatch.bnet.com/spending/blog/college-solution/lastest-trends-in-college-admissions-15-things-you-should-know/6967/ via @cbsmoneywatch - "14. The average public high school counselors spend just 23% of their time on college counseling, while the average private school counselors devote about 55% of their time to college issues.15. Only 26% of public schools have at least one counselor who works exclusively on college counseling issues. In comparison, 73% of private schools have a dedicated college counselor."

9. New report: Dropout rates five times higher for poor students, by Nick Pandolfo - http://p.ost.im/p/eMn2Hx - "According to the report, the “event dropout rate,” which estimates the percentage of high school students who left school between the beginning of one school year and the beginning of the next, is five times greater for low-income teenagers than it is for those from affluent families. The difference in the dropout rate between white and minority teenagers also remains stark. The rate is twice as high for black teens (4.8 percent) as it is for white teens (2.4 percent). It is even higher for Hispanics, at 5.8 percent."

10. Illinois high school test scores fall to a new low, by Diane Rado and Tara Malone - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-state-test-scores-1020-20111020,0,5375024.story - "About half of Illinois public high school students flunked state exams in reading, math and science this year, the worst performance in the history of the 11th-grade Prairie State Achievement Examination, statewide test results show. The record-low results, scheduled to be released Thursday, come after Illinois closed loopholes that kept academically weak juniors from taking the exams, a practice revealed in a 2009 Tribune analysis. Some local school officials attributed their declines in part to the larger testing pool that included less-prepared students."

276. 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. 10 most affordable colleges http://t.co/kkcuJXB via @CNNMoney"Using a new interactive tool launched by the Department of Education, students and parents can search public and private colleges by not only their published tuition prices, but also by their "net price" -- the average costs after tuition, room and board, book fees and financial aid are all taken into consideration.The tool, called the College Affordability and Transparency Center, was mandated by education reforms passed by Congress in 2008, and is meant to reveal the true costs of going to college."

3. College Affordability and Transparency Center site is at this link: http://collegecost.ed.gov/catc/ "Use the options below to generate a report on the highest (top 5%) and lowest (bottom 10%) academic year charges for each sector. Tuition reports include tuition and required fees. Net price is cost of attendance minus grant and scholarship aid. Data are reported by institutions and are for full-time beginning students."

4. Throwing Out a State Vote, by Scott Jaschik - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/juzDxX - "A federal appeals court on Friday ruled that Michigan voters did not have the right in 2006 to ban public colleges and universities from considering race and ethnicity in admissions.The 2-to-1 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was based on the idea that the referendum that voters approved had the effect of denying political rights to minority citizens in Michigan. State officials immediately announced an appeal, which will have the effect of keeping the Michigan ban on consideration of race in place for now."

5. College Bound: Gaps in Financial Outlook for High School vs. College Grads, by Caralee Adams - http://t.co/SXOwmIW via @educationweek - "A new report shows 36 percent of high school graduates feel it is "very likely" they will be financially secure in their lifetime, while 55 percent of college graduates feet that way. When it comes to the first step to start funding a college education, just three in 10 high school graduates knew about the Free Application for Federal Financial Aid (FAFSA), compared with nearly seven in 10 college grads."

6. A ‘Sea Change’ in Admissions, by John Christensen - http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/a-sea-change-in-admissions/28421"Admissions directors spend so much time grappling with these issues that many of us feel more and more removed from working directly with high school counselors, prospective students, and their families—the work that once made our jobs enjoyable and rewarding. That aspect of the work is the core of admissions and should not change: finding the right match between a student and a college."

7. Federal Data Shed Light on Education Disparities, by Nirvi Shah - http://t.co/tZBzxGZ via @educationweek

8. Civil rights survey: 3,000 US high schools don't have math beyond Algebra I, by Stacy Teicher Khadaroo: http://t.co/aNqdT5Y

9. Some States Still Leave Low-Income Kids Behind;Others Make Gains, by Sharona Coutts & Jennifer LaFleur - http://t.co/K7EnY5K via @propublica

10. The bottom line: which top universities have the highest net price? by Daniel de Vise - College, Inc. - http://t.co/ziq06YM via @washingtonpost