College enrollment has maintained a generally upward trend for the past several decades. (Being educated has turned out to have been an excellent idea.) In keeping with the increased enrollment trend, the number of adults pursuing education has been on the rise. According to the N.C.E.S., the adult education numbers for Fall 2007 were 6,956,000 adults aged 25 and over enrolled in college (compared to 10,825,000 18 to 24-year-olds enrolled).

I can’t see that the numbers of adults seeking higher education will diminish any time soon, as we have the Baby Boomers beginning to hit retirement age. As far as generations go, the Boomers are a highly educated group. A lot of them are looking at retirement as the perfect excuse to go back to school.

Being severely technical about it, traditional college students are ages 18 to 24, and nontraditionals are age 25 and up. The ‘traditional’ window is only six years (so you’d better get on with it), and yet those students are the norm and have a smoother college career than most nontraditional students. That may have something to do with the fact that attending college is their main focus. Also, everyone expects them to be there and doing nothing beyond going to school, which simplifies things a bit.

The nontraditionals, however, have a slightly more complicated and less normal postsecondary education process. Things are getting easier as time goes on and the powers that be realize that there’s a decently-sized chunk of the college student population that has different needs, issues, and requirements like childcare, funding, and access to evening, weekend and online courses. Going to school as an eighteen-year-old is different than being a college student with a whole separate non-college life that you can’t disengage from.

Younger students can immerse themselves completely in the college life. Adult nontraditional students can end up having a little bit of a schizophrenic superhero alter ego thing going on. I was a lucky little girl and got to experience college as a traditional and as a nontraditional student. The younger version had a lot more fun and a lot less stress and a somewhat less mature work ethic. The older version had no fun, stupid amounts of stress and had a work ethic capable of turning a lump of coal into a diamond in about two weeks.

I have such fond memories of my first degree—everything is college-campus gorgeous and is rosy-golden and halcyon-hued. My second degree has not one happy moment and is steeped in so much reality it reeks. As such, I would highly recommend not having a newborn in tow when heading back to school. Most adult students head back into the fray when their progeny are at a more independent age and I’m certain this yields better results.

There are more and more adult education-seekers out there these days, which will help their situation considerably. Evening, weekend and online courses are widely available and are usually the best option for adult students who have a career or a family to consider. Not going the traditional daytime college-campus route means missing out on the full college experience, but decreasing the daily commute time or being able to continue working is the most feasible plan for some. Another perk, of course, is that all the other nontraditionals with whom you can commiserate with are more likely to be taking the online, weekend and evening courses.

Adult Education Resources:

AdultStudent.com

Top Ten Adult Student Books

Fun With Statistics:

N.C.E.S.: Participation in Adult Learning

U.S. Census Bureau: 2006 School Enrollment

Posted by Alexa Harrington

High school students are teenagers, and if we were to go strictly along biological lines, teenagers are adult animals. And if we were all still living in caves, teenagers would have moved out of their parents’ cave and found their own well before the modern-day version of adulthood (the 18th birthday).

Modern times and the laws regarding adult status do nothing to curb the biological imperative that makes all teens desperate to move out and escape the parental cave. Higher education is a popular no-parent destination. It has the excellent advantage of being fully approved of by parental units and is lacking in parental supervision.

High school students who are still in the planning phase of their exodus (aren’t graduating in a few weeks) can spend the next several months creating superbly detailed spreadsheets filled with any and all glorious escape possibilities.

College Navigator is a marvelously thorough tool from the U.S. Dept. of Education that allows the user to compare and contrast every public and private college or university in the country. It’s so easy a monkey could figure it out, and it allows the user to compare all the pertinent number-crunched info for any school (too many categories for me to list here). Which means all research will have been done except the fun campus-visit part of the process.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Allie Osmar has a great post up on her blog listing the good and bad bits associated with her first year out of college and in the corporate world. She uses the same pain assessment graphic hospitals use when trying to get a straight answer out of little kids regarding the level of pain they’re experiencing (smiley face = no pain, crying face = lots of pain). Osmar does an excellent job of laying out an honest list of the painful and wonderful parts of that first post-college year.

It’s funny(ish) because it has to be—no one straight out of college is quite yet numb to the state of nature that is Being An Adult (nasty, brutish and not nearly as short or as sweet as your college days were). The real world has the potential to really, really suck. But it is what it is and we can make of it what we will. I think everyone has the capacity to do well and be happy (all at the same time is a nifty trick). Realizing that everyone else is having ten wretchedly real-life moments to every amazing one will really help you get through the day. We’re all in the same boat and it’ll all be okay, I promise. Do what you can do and for god’s sake don’t take everything so seriously.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It’s fascinating to watch a new idea morph over time to become something greater, worse, or completely other than that for which it was first conceived. Einstein’s mind-blowing equations are probably the most obvious and jarring illustration of that. E-mail is another good one; it was initially developed in the 1960’s and was then improved upon in the early 1970’s as a way for the guys who were figuring out that whole Internet thing to be able to communicate with each other more efficiently than by telephone or letter.

E-mail has become an entity unto itself, and while it has not replaced letter writing, memos and phone calling, it has certainly made a significant dent in their usage. Even people who don’t habitually trawl the Internet for the staggering amount of information it has to offer will at least check their e-mail (I know this to be true because I used to be one of those people).

Not quite as tremendous a morphed-idea as Einstein or e-mail (though I’m certain it is to those film school graduates whose careers were launched as a direct result of it) is the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance was developed as a way for unknowns in the film industry to get their work shown. Now, because Sundance was such a great concept and has proved to be a better judge of art and of quality film than the current box office sales standard, having your work stamped with anything related to the Sundance name can pave your way to Hollywood glory. There’s a festival, there’s an institute, there are awards, etc.

There used to be only a teensy handful of film schools in this country; now they’re all over (even in Oklahoma). Using my supreme calculus skills, I did a little math and figured out that the increased number of film schools equals an increase in the number of starving film school grads being turned loose on the planet to fight for some elbow room in Hollywood. Added to that there’s the user-friendly digital video technology that has brought forth a generation that can shoot and edit their own movies before they graduate from high school.

It was already a competitive industry, but now it’s getting to the point where film school graduates might need to start promising their firstborns in order to get a break. So you can see how coming at Hollywood sideways via an independent film festival like Sundance might be considered a swell idea.

Further Reading:

Budding Filmmakers Crave a Break

FSU Film School Grads Garner Accolades, Awards From Sundance Film Festival, Major Industry Awards

23 Facts About 23 (Official) Years of Sundance

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I loathe grocery shopping and therefore make my trips to the market quick, much like the preferred method of Band-Aid removal. As I was walk-running past the “ethnic foods” aisle the other day, I saw ramen noodles on sale 10 for a dollar instead of their normal 5 for a dollar. College student budget instincts die hard, and I almost tripped my daughter when I did a little half-stop turny thing before thinking better of it (I have eaten entirely too much ramen in my life, I don’t care how on sale it is).

Seeing the cheaper-than-the-crap-they’re-made-of noodles made me nostalgic for my college days and how different my relationship with food and the shopping for it was when I was a no-family-having girl. Grocery shopping was irregular, spotty, mismatched (who buys only mangoes, Honey Smacks, coffee and brie?), and rarely represented all the food groups. It was also way more fun.

I only had to shop for me, first of all. I was in class all day and then I’d be studying or procrastinating all evening. Around midnight or two in the morning, after too much thinking and caffeine consumption, I’d be all zippy and sproingy and it would suddenly be the perfect time to go grocery shopping.

Single-girl shopping excursions in the middle of the night are so much more enjoyable than mommy shopping excursions with cranky toddlers half an hour past nap time. In the wee hours of the morning there are only a few other delirious (either chemically-altered, of reclusive tendencies, or hopped-up on caffeine like me) shoppers wandering the aisles along with the employees re-stocking the shelves.

It was lovely to meander my way through the store, looking at everything and basing my buying decisions solely on (a) what sounded good right then, (b) what fit into my food budget (sort of), and (c) how cringe-y would my mom get if she saw me buying it (my mother’s house was free of sugar, television and any processed or fried foods). After blowing my food money on French cheese and tropical fruit, I’d be down to ramen, tofu and frozen peas for the rest of the month.

I had to aggregate my own ramen recipes, prices and brand comparisons. Nowadays, there are books and blogs devoted to the MSG-laced perfection that is ramen:

Books:

101 Things To Do With Ramen Noodles

The Book of Ramen: Lowcost Gourmet Meals Using Instant Ramen Noodles

The Top Ramen Noodle Cookbook

Everybody Loves Ramen: Recipes, Stories, Games and Fun Facts About the Noodles You Love

Blogs:

The Official Ramen Homepage

The Ramen Blog

Ramen Haiku

Journey Into the World of Ramen

And if you’ve had enough fried noodle bricks to last a lifetime, there’s the twenty-something guide to never having to eat ramen again: No More Ramen.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Have I hidden my intensely negative feelings toward, about, and for the No Child Left Behind Act? I have not. I loathe the NCLB and what it has done to our already shaky education system. As far as I can tell, the only people on board with the NCLB are politicians. Students, parents, and teachers and administrators all despise it. That’s, like, four out of four as far as those who are ultimately affected by it.

April is WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) testing month and all the Seattle school kids are waking up nauseated. My daughter will be safe until she’s in third grade, at which point I’ll suddenly see how genius those home-schooling families are and will seriously consider joining their ranks.

I just showered and now I’m feeling all dirty again just thinking about educators ‘teaching to the test’ and kids being hugely responsible for how much funding their school will qualify for, so I’ll stop with the ranting and segue into the positive and brilliantly ass-kicking reason for this post: a Seattle middle school teacher, Mr. Carl Chew, refused to give his sixth-graders the WASL because he “wanted to take a stand against a test he considers harmful to students, teachers, schools and families.”

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn he did not get a parade in his honor (everyone on his side is busy either taking or giving the test). Instead, the school district is sending him home for two weeks on leave without pay. Nice.

From the Seattle Times article:

The WASL is given each year to students in grades 3-8 and Grade 10, and covers reading, writing, math and science. It is used to determine whether Washington schools are meeting the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. And starting this year, students must have passed reading and writing on the 10th-grade exam to graduate from high school.

Chew may be the first teacher in Washington state to refuse to give the test. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and the Washington Education Association (WEA), the state’s largest teachers union, said they didn’t know of any similar cases.

Juanita Doyon, director of the Parent Empowerment Network, an anti-WASL group, says she’s heard of only one teacher in the nation who has refused to administer a high-stakes test. That teacher works in Colorado.

Chew, she said, “has taken a brave stand.”

Supporters see the WASL as an important way to ensure students gain vital skills they’ll need to succeed in college and the workplace. Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson has long said that the state does students no favors if it doesn’t set high standards and make sure students reach them.

Critics, however, question the WASL’s value as a measure of student learning and as a way to improve instruction.

Chew issued a two-page, single-spaced statement listing all of his concerns about the WASL. It includes his contention that many questions on the test are unclear, notes its costs, and says teachers get little information about how to help students improve. The letter also says the WASL focuses too much attention on just a few subjects.

“I think it’s good for students to have basic skills in reading, writing and math,” he said. “But also to have good skills in P.E. and art and music and public speaking.”

The WASL, he said, needs to be scrapped and replaced with a “gentler, kinder way of finding out what our students know and helping teachers educate them better.”

Chew’s action is “reflective of a general sense of frustration and dismay that our members feel about the WASL,” said Mary Lindquist, president of the WEA.

Further reading:

Will Minnesota Leave ‘No Child’ Behind?

FairTest.org

NEA Offers Principles to Improve NCLB

NCLB Lowers the Bar on School Reform

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The Wall Street Journal had an informative article yesterday about the 529 college-savings plans and how best to take advantage of them when saving for the college educations of your progeny. The 529 plans were a bit murky for a few years—confusion as well as unsettling rumors about ‘bad’ 529 plans that would end up being more of a hindrance than a help. Jane J. Kim has written an excellent article about the whole concept of the 529, how they work, why they make economic sense, which states have the better versions and which have the plans to be avoided, and why implementing an out-of-state plan can still work to your advantage (even after taxes). Read up and start saving.

Tax-advantaged 529 plans have exploded in popularity in recent years, becoming the college-savings vehicle of choice for many parents. In a 529 plan, savers put after-tax dollars into an account that typically offers a wide range of mutual funds. Distributions and earnings are tax-free, as long as they’re used for higher education. Investors can invest in any plan, although they may get an additional state tax break if they invest in their own state’s plans.

Below are the best and worst plans as assessed by investment researcher Morningstar Inc.

Best 529 College-Savings Plans:

Colorado Scholars Choice College Savings Program
Illinois Bright Start College Savings Program
Maryland College Investment Plan
Virginia CollegeAmerica
Virginia Education Savings Trust

Worst 529 College-Savings Plans:

Mississippi Affordable College Savings Program
Mississippi Affordable College Savings Advisor Program
Nebraska AIM College Savings Plan
New York 529 College Savings Program
Ohio Putnam CollegeAdvantage Plan

Posted by Alexa Harrington

On a biological level, WiFi is not as necessary as water, but I think it can be argued that having the capability to access the information available on the Internet is conducive to survival in society today. The advent of indoor plumbing was such an improvement for humanity, wouldn’t you agree? Electricity in homes was another bonus. Two developments that improved our lives immensely, were momentous when first implemented, were at first only available to the wealthy, and are now so standard in American society that to lack electricity or running water is a sign of poverty, a natural disaster, or camping.

The concept of Public Internet is following a similar path. It’s quickly becoming necessary (to the point of being taken for granted) that of course everyone in America has access to the Internet and all the knowledge and information contained therein. Online information can be found, maintained, and more inexpensively and instantly updated than its hardcopy counterparts. Much like public utilities, once the infrastructure is in place, WiFi should be available to everyone, regardless of the real estate values in their neighborhood.

I’ve never understood, nor have I agreed with, the idea that knowledge should be accessible only to the dudes with the most cash. The printing press and public library systems are two of my favorite human ideas–they rank right up there with matches, tape, Ziploc bags, wet-wipes and cell phones. I think we’re all familiar with how pissed the powerful religious types and the wealthier citizens were when the printing press fell into the hands of the uneducated masses. Suffice it to say, those in control preferred an uninformed public and the printing press meant newly clued-in hordes of poor people. Historically speaking, that has rarely gone well for those in charge.

I’m not saying The Powers That Be are preventing the spread of public WiFi as a way to control the masses. I’m sure it’s got much more to do with profit than with keeping the little people down. In case there was any confusion, neither of those reasons is valid. Education and information should be available to everyone. If humans have figured something out, we should all get to learn about it. ‘Those With Access to the Most Knowledge Win’ is a dumb game. Doesn’t it seem in our best interest (as humans, I mean) to collectively know more? I’m not a hippie or a communist or a socialist or an ist of any kind. I avoid grouping and clubs and labels. I’m just cranky me with an overly black-and-white view of the rules, and it just seems that keeping information out of someone’s hands for profit or control clearly falls under the ‘Wrong’ category.

If you have Internet access you can read more about those fighting the good fight:

NPR’s On the Media: The Last Shall Be First
The Battle For a Public Internet
Internet Archive Brings Free High-Speed Internet to Public Housing
Muni Wi-Fi Powers Hope at San Francisco Housing Project
Where’s My Free Wi-Fi?
Internet Archive
Low-Income Residents Get High-Speed Access

Posted by Alexa Harrington