290. 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. Separate but Equal? by Scott Jaschik - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/p7xxKG - "But part of Peace College's announcement was quite different from the pattern: the college announced that once it admits men, some courses will remain single sex. The official announcement said that "the new coeducational institution will continue to be student-centered. One way is ... to offer select single-gender courses in targeted disciplines where research shows that women and men learn differently and that each benefit from a single-gender classroom. As a coeducational institution, all classes will be accessible to all students."

2. Does Performance Funding Work? by Doug Lederman - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/qg9Cur - "Based on that premise, several states -- including Ohio and Indiana -- have altered their formulas for allocating state funds in recent years, but those programs are too new to offer any evidence of their efficacy. But several other states have had performance-funding programs in place for much longer, and in a paper released this spring at the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research, two scholars studied Tennessee's -- the country's "oldest and most stable performance funding program" -- for insights into how such programs affect retention and graduation rates. Not very much, the authors report."

3. 20 Things High School Seniors Should Be Doing Now, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://t.co/pogJ1cX via @cbsmoneywatch - "Time is running out for high school seniors, who will soon be overwhelmed with college applications. Teenagers will be less stressed if they take advantage of the last month of summer to get a jump on the college admission process. Here are 20 things they can be doing now:"

4. College Bound: Efforts to Save Pell Grants From Cuts Ramp Up, by Caralee Adams - http://t.co/8L2sC2j via @educationweek - "Advocates have dubbed July 25 "Save Pell Day" to draw attention to potential reductions in the federal program that gives grants to needy students to attend college. A website dedicated to the cause encourages supporters to send elected officials tweets and emails asking them to fund the $5,550 maximum Pell Grant. The site also asks students to use blogs and Facebook to share information on the potential impact of Pell cuts."

5. South Korea to Replace All Paper Textbooks With Digital Content http://t.co/VKOLwHd via @educationweek - "France, Singapore, Japan and others are racing to create classrooms where touch-screens provide instant access to millions of pieces of information. But South Korea—Asia's fourth-largest economy—believes it enjoys an advantage over these countries, with kids who are considered the world's savviest navigators of the digital universe."

6. Amazon to Start Renting Out Electronic College Textbooks, by Christopher F. Schuetze - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/us/25iht-EDUCBRIEFS25.html?src=recg - "The company announced last week that electronic versions of textbooks would be available for rent for periods of between 30 and 360 days. Once books are rented, the lending period can be extended by as little as a day. “Tens of thousands of textbooks are available for the 2011 school year,” according to a press release from Amazon, from publishers including John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis. Amazon claims that rentals can save students up to 80 percent compared with the original price.

7. R.O.I., By Cecilia Capuzzi Simon - http://nyti.ms/pmJSnr - "So as a strictly financial calculation, does the investment pay off? . . . But if schools of applied learning aren’t asking the tough questions about the financials of a degree, potential students should, says Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “No one’s telling them what it’s worth. Certainly the colleges aren’t.”

8. Web restrictions draw ire of some educators, by Greg Toppo - http://usat.ly/olF2kS via @USATODAY - "Filtering software and school rules designed to keep out violence and pornography are also blocking key educational and otherwise useful sites, teachers say, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — not to mention Google and National Geographic."

9. Why ‘no excuses’ makes no sense: Revisiting the Coleman report, by Gary Ravani - The Answer Sheet - http://t.co/07F3tn0 via @washingtonpost - "Perhaps the single best-known piece of social science research ever done in this country is the study produced by sociologist James Coleman in 1966 under the authority of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, commonly called “the Coleman Report.” Coleman’s work is the second largest social science research project in history, covering 600,000 children in 4,000 schools nationally. Coleman concluded that school-based poverty concentrations were negatively impacting school achievement for the minority poor."

10. Action steps can close racial gap, by Donna Y. Ford http://t.co/xeTRwIr via @Tennessean"The pervasive achievement gap is the greatest problem facing schools."

11. Racial gap hinders academic progress, by Dwight Lewis http://t.co/tUiz7Wn via @Tennessean - “Some individuals in this country still believe that the achievement gap exists because children of certain backgrounds — namely, low-income or minority children — are inherently less capable than others,” Jason Kamras, the 2005 National Teacher of the Year, has written. “Nothing could be more false.”

12. Consumer Corner: What's a college degree worth? Plenty. by Marcella S. Kreiter - http://t.co/cjjbQIc via @upi_top - "The bottom line is that getting a degree matters, but what you take matters more," said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce. Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of The Hamilton Project agree. "Higher education is a much better investment than almost any other alternative, even for the 'Class of the Great Recession' (young adults ages 23-24)," they said on the project's Web site. "In today's tough labor market, a college degree dramatically boosts the odds of finding a job and making more money. . . ."

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."