255.Unstack the Odds--GO TO COLLEGE: LINKS

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

by
Joe Rottenborn
Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

20. GO TO COLLEGE: LINKS

Here are some more links to articles of interest, drawn from the Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP) blog, with the original posting number shown.

Miscellaneous (continued):

76. Higher-Education Data
What percentage of various groups in the U.S. graduates from high school? Goes to college? Earns a degree? This article by Erik W. Robelen for Education Week, posted on May 14, 2010, presents these data on higher education, at this link:http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/05/19/32census.h29.html?tkn=RTVF%2B%2BRyRRrQ8MnT0wDe%2F3UOs8Y%2Bn3KgCprJ&cmp=clp-edweek

77. Do You Need to Go to College?
Students sometimes inquire, "Do I need to go to college?" Or, put another way, they ask: "Can I get a good job without a college degree?" Jacques Steinberg, a writer for The New York Times, addresses these questions in his article, dated 5/14/10, at this link:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/weekinreview/16steinberg.html?pagewanted=1

79. Non-traditional College Students
Many college students today are not 18 year-olds, fresh out of high school; they're over 20, work (full- or part-time), and are often parents. For these non-traditional students, earning a college degree can mean overcoming many obstacles to graduate. Read an article from USA Today on non-traditional students at this link:http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/degrees-of-difficulty.htm

82. What to Take to College
Freshmen often wonder what to take to college. Some take too much, while others don't take enough. Like the three bears, aim for just right--because your space will be limited! To see an Off-to-College Checklist of The College Board, click this link:http://www.collegeboard.com/student/plan/college-success/9763.html

And don't forget: you may be able to save money on many items you'll need for your college dorm room by picking them up at yard & garage sales!

87. Retention Rate
According to the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, a college's retention rate is "the percentage of first-time students who are seeking bachelor's degrees who return to the institution to continue their studies the following fall." Retention rate is regarded as an important statistic relating to student success in college. To discover the retention rate of a U.S. college or university, click the link below, then type in the school's name to search for it; finally, click on "retention and graduation rates."http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/

To see the retention rates of students having differing ACT scores and admitted to colleges with varying rates of selectivity, consult the ACT report "National Collegiate Retention and Persistence to Degree Rates" at this link:http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/pdf/retain_2009.pdf

88. Is College the Key to Success?
In America, we hear that getting a good education--particularly, earning a college degree--will lead to career success. Today, more and more people are entering college; they are expecting an economic payoff. But is this expectation realistic? Ann Larson examines "the education gospel" in her post, dated June 3, 2010, for Inside Higher Ed entitled "Higher Education's Big Lie;" you can read her views at this link:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/06/03/larson

89. World's Best Universities?
If you wonder which country has the highest-rated universities in the world, you're not alone. Apparently, others wonder, too. U.S. News & World Report ranked 400 of the "World's Best Universities" in 2010; to see its list, hit this link:http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/worlds-best-universities/2010/02/25/worlds-best-universities-top-400.html?PageNr=1

90. Graduation Rates in U.S.
To find out "Student Success Highlights" (i.e., retention rate, four-year graduation rate, five-year graduation rate, and six-year graduation rate) of any college or university in the United States, check out a website of The Education Trust called "College Results Online." (You can also compare success statistics for various schools.) Access the site at this link:http://www.collegeresults.org/

91. Value in a Liberal Arts Education?
During this challenging economic climate, students and parents expect college to aid one's career. Consequently, they often seek majors, programs, and degrees that will lead directly to a specific job--and a well-paying one, at that. Nonetheless, defenders of a liberal arts education still emphasize its value; to see why, read this post by Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, entitled "Coming to the Defense of Liberal Education," at this link:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-roth/coming-to-the-defense-of_b_605899.html

92. Academic Progress Rate (APR)
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) requires member colleges and universities to submit information on all sports teams competing in Division I. These data indicate student-athletes' eligibility and retention during a previous four-year period; the most recent APR is based on statistics from the 2005-06 through 2008-09 school years. If a team's APR is less than 925 (of 1,000), it can face penalties, including loss of scholarships or limits on practice time. Teams having an APR lower than 900 for several years can be penalized by being banned from postseason play--including bowl games. To search the Academic Progress Rate for schools of interest, click this NCAA link: http://web1.ncaa.org/maps/aprRelease.jsp

93. Proportion of Adults, 25-34, with College Degrees
The U.S. national average for the proportion of adults (ages 25-34) holding college degrees is 37.8%; in Ohio, however, the figure is below that--at 36.4%. To see the percentage for any state, you can access an interactive map from The Chronicle of Higher Education at this link:http://chronicle.com/article/Interactive-Map-Proportion-of/65009/

94. U.S. Senate Hearings on For-Profit Higher Education
On June 24, 2010, Chairman Tom Harkin opened hearings by the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on for-profit higher education. At the outset, a report was issued; to read this document, "Emerging Risk?: An Overview of Growth, Spending, Student Debt and Unanswered Questions in For-Profit Higher Education," copy and paste this link:http://harkin.senate.gov/documents/pdf/4c23515814dca.pdf

96. College Return on Investment (ROI)
With tuitions up and jobs scarce, it is understandable to question whether college is really worth it. To help quantify this decision, some have applied the concept of return on investment (ROI). According to The Huffington Post, "ROI takes the price of a school's degree and compares it to how much that school's graduates earn on average, producing perhaps the truest measure of a school's value." To see which U.S. colleges have the highest ROI, click this link:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/28/college-biggest-payoff_n_628127.html

To find out which college in each state has the highest ROI, click this link to Business Week:http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/06/0628_payscale1/index.htm

99. From Access to Success
Providing students access to higher education used to be the goal of many organizations. Today, however, emphasis is being placed on student success in college--that is, graduating. To read the report "From Access to Success," released by Grantmakers for Education on July 22, 2010, click this link:http://edfunders.org/downloads/GFEReports/GFE_FromAccessToSuccess_FundersGuide.pdf

192. 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. Too many hours on the job could put high school teens at risk, by Sophie Terbush - USATODAY.com: http://t.co/Z6JboyT

‎"According to the study, students who worked more than 20 hours a week had lower expectations for educational attainment, lower school engagement, higher levels of substance abuse, and other problem behavior. However, these same students also showed more autonomous decision-making and had slightly higher grade point averages than teens without jobs."

2. A College Opts Out of the Admissions Arms Race, by Jacques Steinberg - http://nyti.ms/fXDWPs

“You know as well as I that those numbers aren’t real,” Mr. DiFeliciantonio said by phone from the school’s campus in Collegeville, Pa. “People count anything that moves as an application. Everyone is going up 10 percent every year for 20 years. It’s absurd.” “At some point,” he added, “the credibility of those numbers is questionable.”

3. Maximum Pell, at All Costs, by Doug Lederman - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/eFSFu2

‎"While the GOP measure would slash the maximum Pell Grant by $845, end funding for several other student aid programs (as well as the AmeriCorps national service program), and slice billions of dollars from agencies that support academic research, the Obama budget for 2012 keeps those and other programs largely intact."

4. Where Are the Student Voices? by Tara Watford, Vicki Park, and Mike Rose - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/fwG6QQ

‎"A recent study from the Institute for Higher Education Policy found that about half of low-income young adults in the United States enroll in higher education, but only 11 percent of them earn a postsecondary degree. . . . Low-income students, compared to their middle-class peers, tend to have longer transitions between high school and college and, once there, lower retention."

5. ‘Tiger Mother’ meets reality: Asian-American students struggle, too, by Jennifer Oldham - Hechinger Report: http://t.co/KBMPjh1

‎"Like Lo, about half of the nation’s Asian-American students enroll in community college, where they often struggle to pay for classes and scramble to find room in remedial courses. They get far less attention than overachievers like Chua’s highly micromanaged daughters, whose rigid childhood is described in a book that’s sparking debates about Asian-American student success. . . ."

6. Obama Budget Proposes Significant Increase for Schools, by Sam Dillon and Tamar Lewin - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/us/15education.html?_r=1&hpw

"Last year, the president said that, to remain competitive, the nation must increase the number of college graduates. But forced to make deep cuts in many areas of government, the president now proposes to eliminate some provisions of the Pell program, which has doubled in size over five years, and serves nine million low-income students."

7. President's Budget Protects Pell Grants, but Makes Cuts to Career and Technical Education, by Kelly Field - http://chronicle.com/article/Presidents-Budget-Protects/126370/

‎"To maintain a maximum Pell award of $5,550, the president's fiscal 2012 budget would eliminate the in-school interest subsidy on loans to graduate students and end a policy that allows students to receive two Pell Grants in a single year. It would provide level support for most other student-aid programs, including Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants and Federal Work-Study, while making deep cuts to career and technical education. . . ."

8. Colleges embrace older students, part-timers, by Sandra Block - http://usat.ly/fUa604 via @USATODAY

‎"That means many non-traditional students must pay the entire cost of their education, which is why it often takes them several years to earn their degrees, O'Riley says. That's how Conlan handled her tuition bills. She and her husband took out a home-equity line of credit to help pay for their children's college education, and she didn't want to take on any more debt."

9. How to avoid college scholarship and aid scams - http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/college-life/how-to-avoid-scholarship-scams.html

‎"There is no fee to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). But there are a number of websites that charge you money to do it. Many people try to find application on-line with the wrong terms: fasfa com, fasfa edu, fasfa gov, fasfa gov edu, FASA, fasa com, fasa edu, fasa gov, fasa gov edu. They can wind up on a website that asks you to pay a fee to file the form, and sometimes, to file the wrong form. The correct website is http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/#. If you need help, talk to your school’s financial aid officer or call 1-800-433-3243."

10. Why Obama’s 2020 graduation goal isn’t attainable - http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/high-school/why-obamas-2020-graduation-goa.html

‎"A 2010 study of Chicago students found that fewer than 20 percent of students who were below grade level in third grade attended college, compared to about a third of students who were at grade level, and nearly 60 percent of students who were reading above grade level. It would take some sort of miracle to turn around that cohort of kids. Don’t count on it."

11. Bar education consultants' race to the cash: editorial cleveland.com: http://t.co/AQr5XxK

"Now that the Ohio Department of Education has been promised $194 million and 487 school districts and charter schools are getting $206 million from Race to the Top, contractors and vendors are swarming like bees to honey. And the consultants' cut -- in fees, conference costs, overhead and salary -- could be hefty, Plain Dealer reporter Edith Starzyk found in a special report in collaboration with Andrew Brownstein, a freelance writer with Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet, and the Education Writers Association."

12. Ohio State, Miami universities accused of racial bias in admissions, by Encarnacion Pyle - http://t.co/jZ1PyxA

"The Center for Equal Opportunity released a study this morning that it says shows that the schools treat undergraduate students with similar academic records differently. It says black students were favored at Miami by a ratio of 10-1 over white students with similar ACT scores, and that the ratio at Ohio State was 8-to-1. When comparing students with similar SAT scores, the group found a ratio of 8-1 ratio at Miami and 3-to-1 at Ohio State."

• Follow the most important stories on college admissions and financial aid on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rottenbornj


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• "Like" the MVCAP fan page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=23325544#!/pages/Mahoning-Valley-College-Access-Program-MVCAP/284002915922


• You can join the group MVCAP Financial-Aid Friends at this page: http://www.facebook.com/?sk=2361831622#!/group.php?gid=126580419181


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

168. 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. EGCC chief: School committed to serving Warren, by V. Shank - http://t.co/LIgx1dY - TribToday.com - Warren, OH

"Eastern Gateway Community College president Laura Meeks said the institution is committed to developing a strong presence in downtown Warren, even without the $1.3 million in federal funding U.S. Rep. Timothy Ryan was hoping to secure for the college's expansion and other projects. The college will start classes as planned Tuesday at its new Warren site."

2. Part 1: Answers to Readers’ Questions on Financial Aid, by Mark Kantrowitz - http://nyti.ms/f6v4bK

"To help navigate that process, Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert and founder of the Web sites finaid.org and fastweb.com, is answering questions from readers of The Choice this week."

3. Ivy Chase, by Kevin A. Hassett - http://www.aei.org/article/102981

"All told, the average annual ROI for the top ten public institutions is 13.4 percent. The average annual ROI for the top ten private institutions is 12.3 percent. . . .The average total cost for a bachelor's degree from a public institution is $83,695; for a private institution it is $171,026. The higher tuition at top schools brings diminishing returns."

4. Trends in College Pricing, by Gaston Caperton - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gaston-caperton/trends-in-college-pricing_b_807469.html

"The reports found that during the past decade, average tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities rose almost twice as fast as those at private colleges. Over the same period, average household incomes have remained stagnant. Making matters worse was the disturbing drop in state spending on higher education -- a decline of 9 percent in 2008-09 and 1.3 percent in 2009-10."

5. Ivies, Extracurriculars, and Exclusion, by Lauren Rivera - http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera_lauren.aspx#research

"Employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top 5) university affiliation and attributed superior cognitive, cultural, and moral qualities to candidates who had been admitted to such an institution, regardless of their actual performance once there."

6. University of California: Another Year of Student Protests? by Lynn O"Shaughnessy - http://t.co/N1yg7gi

"Californians should probably prepare themselves for round II of student protests. Jerry Brown, in one of his first acts as governor in the cash-strapped state, has released proposed budget cutbacks that would slash $500 million from the 10 UC campuses. That would bring state support to the UC campuses back to the level it was in 1999 — and there were tens of thousands of fewer students then."

7. Rigorous, Revelant High School Program Leads Kids to College, by Caralee Adams - http://t.co/eGwT0k0

"The seven-year study found that participation in CART's Linked Learning approach increased the community college entrance rate by 11 percentage points—71 percent for CART students compared with 60 percent for a demographically similar group of non-CART students. About 23 percent of CART students went on to four-year universities compared to 21 percent of their non-CART peers."

8. How Graduation Rates Shape College Choice, by Eric Hoover -

http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/how-graduation-rates-shape-college-choice/27770

"Providing graduation rates, the researchers found, increased the likelihood (by about 15 percentage points) that parents would choose the college with the higher graduation rate. Moreover, such information was most likely to influence the choices of parents who had relatively low incomes and little admissions savvy. More-affluent parents were less likely to change their preferences based on information about graduation rates."

9. The Plight of Nontraditional Students, by Mary Churchill - http://chronicle.com/blogs/old-new/the-plight-of-nontraditional-students/147

‎"Students are married, have children, care for their parents, hold full- and part-time jobs, and drop in and out of school as their lives and finances allow. Increasingly, we are finding older students returning to school after a 10-to-15-year hiatus. They are in their 30s or 40s. Our institutions are not prepared for them and do not welcome them. This needs to change."

10. How Jared Loughner Changed: The View from His Schools, by Mark Thompson - http://bit.ly/ibZ2F3 @time

‎"Loughner's actions unnerved up to a third of McGahee's 15 to 20 students, so much so that they complained to the professor following the opening class in basic algebra. "The students were very concerned after the first day," he says. "I must have had three to five students come up to me after class saying, 'Jared concerns me a lot.' One lady in the back of the classroom said she was scared for her life, literally."

11. A critical shortage of school counselors, by Valerie Strauss - http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/student-life/a-critical-shortage-of-school.html

"Though the recommended number per counselor is 250 students, the American School Counselor Associations shows that the national average is actually one counselor for every 457 students. And those figures were from 2008-09, the latest available, but before many states slashed school budgets last year."

• Follow the most important stories on college admissions and financial aid on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rottenbornj


• For links to articles on college admissions and financial aid, you can "friend" Joe Rottenborn at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=23325544


• "Like" the MVCAP fan page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=23325544#!/pages/Mahoning-Valley-College-Access-Program-MVCAP/284002915922


• You can join the group MVCAP Financial-Aid Friends at this page: http://www.facebook.com/?sk=2361831622#!/group.php?gid=126580419181


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

79. Non-traditional College Students

Many college students today are not 18 year-olds, fresh out of high school; they're over 20, work (full- or part-time), and are often parents. For these non-traditional students, earning a college degree can mean overcoming many obstacles to graduate. Read an article from USA Today on non-traditional students at this link:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/degrees-of-difficulty.htm