See free MVCAP e-books on college admissions and financial aid for sharing, printing, and downloading at our online resource library: http://issuu.com/mvcap1. Educate black men now, or we'll all pay later, by DeWayne Wickham - RT @
"Black males continue to perform lower than their peers throughout the country on almost every indicator," the Washington-based Council of the Great Schools, which represents the nation's 66 largest urban public school systems, said in a recent report.While much of the news coverage of the council's gut-wrenching report has focused on the failure of nearly all fourth- and eighth-grade black males to read and do math at proficiency levels, less attention has been paid to its conclusion that educational improvements alone won't fix this problem. What's needed, the council said, is a "concerted national effort to improve the education, social and employment outcomes of African-American males. "If you think that's just a warmed-over pitch for more funding of a liberal agenda, you're being shortsighted. In 13 years, minorities will be a majority of this nation's children younger than 18. In just 29 years, most working-age Americans will be black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American."
2. Survey: More college presidents make millions - RT @
"According to the College Board, average tuition and fees at private colleges and universities have risen almost 35% in the past decade, to $27,290. Many students, though, pay much less because of grants and tax benefits. The average net price at private schools was $11,320 this fall, less than what students paid on average a decade ago.Public college presidents generally earn less than their private counterparts. Only one public university president topped $1 million in 2008-09 —Ohio State University president Gordon Gee brought in $1.5 million. Then there are for-profit colleges, which are under fire for their heavy reliance on federal student aid money and high student loan default rates. Strayer Education Inc. paid chairman and CEO Robert Silberman $41.9 million last year, according to a Bloomberg report last week."
3. Bracing Students, and Parents, to Hear 'No', by Sue Biemeret -
"I often worry about the student who compiles a long list of colleges where admission is iffy for every single school except for the one they have deemed their “safety school.” And I also worry that this same student knows every statistic about those hypercompetitive schools, but nearly nothing about that “safety,” which could very well be home for the next four years. Truly amazing students get rejected from equally amazing colleges every single year through no fault of their own. For some of these young people, it’s the first time they’ve been denied, and that can unearth their stability. All that self-esteem can come crumbling down in April."
4. Headed to College? Be Prepared to 'Click,' by Jacques Steinberg -
"In an article on The Times’s Web site, I write about an undergraduate course on “Organizational Behavior” at Northwestern University where all 70 students have been given clickers by the professor. Multiple choice quizzes are given via the devices, always just a minute into class, and the results count for nearly 20 percent of the students’ grade. The devices also record absences automatically. If readers of The Choice have encountered these devices, we’d like to hear what you thought of them. You can use the comment box below to tell us."
5. Speeding Toward a Slowdown? - Inside Higher Ed:
"Nearly one million more students took an online course in fall 2009 than in the previous year, according to the new survey, which drew responses from 2,583 academic leaders at both nonprofit and for-profit institutions across the country. That is the biggest numerical increase in the eight-year history of the report, and the largest proportional increase (21.1 percent) since 2005. Online enrollments have grown at more than nine times the rate of general enrollment since 2002. Almost a third of all college students in the country take at least one course online."
6. So Far, 12 Schools See Increase In Early Applications
"Among them are the University of Pennsylvania, which experienced a 17 percent increase in early applications. Duke saw a 14 percent increase, and its admissions director Christoph Guttentag told the Duke Chronicle that he had never seen interest so high in his 28 years working in college admissions. Overwhelmingly, schools who have calculated changes have seen an upward trend. This may be because early applicants have a better chance of being admitted than those students who choose to apply regular decision. Deadlines still loom, however -- Nov. 15 for some schools and Dec. 1 for others and early decision/action II. Check out which schools got more early decision (which is binding) and action (which is not) applications this year than last."
7. Highest-Paid College Presidents (PHOTOS)
"The Chronicle evaluated 448 private institutions to determine who were the top earning executives in the 2008-2009 school year. At the head of their list was the late Bernard Lander, founder and president of Touro College, who earned a whopping $4,786,830 in 2008 (including $4.2 million in retroactive pay and retirement benefits). Other top earners who are no longer affiliated with their institutions include Trinity University's John R. Brazil, USC's Steven B. Sample, Drexel University's Constantine Papadakis (deceased), Stevens Institute of Technology's Harold J. Raveche, Baylor University's John M. Lilley and Northwestern University's Henry S. Bienen. The university leaders left for a variety of reasons, including term endings and retirements, which in some cases help to explain their hefty salaries."
8. There Is No College Cost Crisis, by Stanley Fish
"The causes of the increase in college costs (an increase that has not, they contend, put college “out of reach”) are external; colleges are responding, as they must, to changes they cannot ignore and still provide a quality product. Chief among these is the change in the sophistication and cost of the technology that has at once transformed the setting of higher education and become one of the areas of knowledge higher education must impart to students. Students expect to be instructed in the new technologies, and that instruction requires their installation, and then as new refinements emerge, their re-installation. “[A] modern university must provide students with an up-to-date education that familiarizes students with the techniques and associated machinery that are used in the workplace the students must enter.”
9. Graduation Percentages for Basketball Players Trail Those of Students in General -
"The graduation rate for men’s basketball players in the NCAA’s Division I is 20 percentage points lower than the rate for full-time male students in general, according to a new report from the College Sport Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The gap is even greater in the top-ranking conferences—30.8 percentage points. Women’s basketball players fared better in the institute’s report, but their graduation rate still fell below that of their peers. The gap was 6.2 percentage points on average, and 14.6 percentage points in the top-tier conferences."
10. Be careful of 'snap apps' in college admissions -
"Snap apps are applications that colleges and universities send out that invite students to submit without paying a fee or writing an essay. Some of the information is already filled in for the student, just to make things as easy as possible.These applications have different names: Some are called express applications, or they come labeled "VIP applications," but they all are sent with the same end in mind: To get a student to apply. Students are selected by colleges sometimes because they have shown an interest in the school by visiting or seeking information, while some schools target students with high test scores or some other academic honor.These applications can leave a kid who receives one with the the illusion that they have a leg up when it comes to getting admitted. They don't, and some kids are stunned when they get rejected, having assumed they were wanted by the school and had an easy way in."
11. Gregory Kane: Nobody wants to talk about black America's gender crisis Washington Examiner:
"Now that the problem has been defined, we can talk about the particulars. Anybody notice the gender question? We're not talking about black girls underachieving, or black girls having a crisis when it comes to education. We're talking about black boys. That means the girls are achieving, and the boys aren't. That means black America's old, reliable whipping boy -- white racism -- might not be solely to blame for this crisis. And a crisis it is. What we have here is a failure to communicate about the Great African-American gender crisis. (My apologies to Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson, the screenwriters for the film "Cool Hand Luke".) It's our nasty little secret, the dirty laundry we don't want washed in public. If, indeed, white racism, specifically institutional white racism, were the cause of black academic underachievement, we would expect it to affect black girls and black boys in equal, or near equal, measure."
12. Read The Joe Rottenborn Daily for today's top stories on college admissions/financial aid in newsletter form -
