According to new data released by the U.S. Census Bureau, college graduates with a bachelor’s degree earned an average of $51,554 in 2004. These numbers hold true for men and women in every racial and ethnic group.

Graduate School: Adults with advanced college degrees earned an average of $78,093. Check out the salary facts of earning your MBA degree or attending a psychology graduate school.

High School: High school graduates with a diploma earned $28,645 on average. Those without a high school diploma earned an average of $19,169. 85% of people 25 and older had at least a high school diploma or the equivalent in 2005, up 5% from 2000.

Bachelor’s Degree: 28% of the U.S. adult population had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with about 24% in 2000 and 11% in 1970.

States With Highest Number of High School Graduates: Minnesota, Utah, Montana, New Hampshire and Alaska had the highest proportions of adults with at least a high school diploma — all at about 92%.

States With Lowest Number of High School Graduates:Texas had the lowest proportion of adults with at least a high school diploma, about 78%. Followed closely by Kentucky and Mississippi.

States With Highest Number of College Graduates:
47% of adults in Washington, D.C., had at least a bachelor’s degree. Connecticut had 37% of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree. Followed closely by Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey.

States With Lowest Number of College Graduates:
West Virginia had the lowest proportion of college graduates, at 15%. It was followed at the bottom by Arkansas, Kentucky and Louisiana.

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College | College Education

According to the College Board’s recently released 2006 reports on college pricing and financial aid, tuition increases at 4-year public colleges have slowed for the third year in a row, but prices are still up 35 percent from 5 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.

2006-07 Average Tution and Fee Charges by College Type

4-year private colleges average $22,218

4-year public colleges average $5,836

2-year public colleges average $2,272

Posted by Nien Liu
College | Tuition | Financial Aid

There’s an article in the NY Times about the increasing numbers of small liberal arts colleges dropping the SAT from their admissions requirements: Students’ Paths To Small Colleges Can Bypass SAT. Call it what you will (I like to call it WASP Guilt), but it’s moving me to confess: in high school I was an under-achieving slacker who got into college because I look good on paper. Many a kid smarter than I am (and possessing both an excellent work ethic and academic drive) didn’t end up in college because the realities of their lives made it hard for them to look as shiny as I did.

I test well. I’m a public school kid, and this theory of mine may be a bunch of crap, but I think 12 years of standardized tests prepared my brain very well for taking the SAT and the ACT. I skated along without having to do much actual work in school because the language spoken in my home was English and my entire family are voracious readers, which meant I was always reading or being read to. So I have that whole “excellent reading comprehension skills” thing going for me. Do you know what your life needs in order for you to be able to read a lot? Time, money, and a fairly low stress level.

Half of the population of the tiny California farming town I grew up in had arrived pretty recently (within a generation) from Mexico. I’m not an idiot, but I’m not a genius either, and I somehow always tested several grades above my actual grade level. Every year at testing time, the adults in charge made a big deal about how damn smart I was. I never corrected them, but I had a sneaking suspicion that I might not be as smart as the tests said I was.

I could see what went down in the classroom: there would be a tiny handful of extremely smart kids in the class. Of that handful, the smart kids who spoke English at home would grasp the material as soon as it was out of the teacher’s mouth. The smart kids who spoke Spanish at home would have the language hurdle to jump over, but then they would be off and running, still faster than the majority of the other students.

By the time I was applying to colleges, I got it that I looked good on paper, but that my test scores weren’t the whole picture. What my 98th percentile test scores didn’t show was that I was a decently (but not supremely) intelligent, English-speaking, total slacker with no work ethic to speak of (proof: my verbal scores rocked through no effort on my part, but my math scores blew hard because math requires studying, which I was too lazy to sit down and do), who came from an educated family which would be funding my college career.

There were several kids who we all knew were not only smarter, they also had more drive, and were generally more interested than I was in expending the energy required to kick some ass in the world. And would they be joining us at university in the fall? Not so much. And why? Because their families had bigger issues than SAT scores and college transcripts to tackle. Those kids didn’t get a lot of recreational reading or SAT prep-course work done because they spent their spare time working to help their parents make ends meet.

Here’s what my fortunate, English-speaking booty was up to. My habit through school was to complete my homework assignment in the five minutes of paper-shuffling before class started. I rarely studied for exams. I ditched the two SAT prep courses my parents paid good money for and spent those two Saturdays wandering aimlessly in the sunshine while those other suckers sat inside and wrote pages of intensely-scribbled (but probably very organized) notes on how to kick the ass of the kid sitting next to you when you go in to take the SAT’s.

I lacked a good work ethic. I was not the spastic over-achiever I am today. Far from it. How did I manage to get into Cal State? I test well. And I look good on paper because of it. My high school transcripts looked good because, since I didn’t have to work to survive, I had the time after school to do four years of swim team and student government.
Honestly, here’s what I think. If any college admissions person worth their salt had spent a day watching me and one of my Spanish-speaking counterparts, I would not have been chosen. I completely screwed up my first semester away at school. Eventually I gave in and saw that even I was going to have to buckle down and study in college.

That’s not the point. The point is that admissions boards are scanning transcripts and SAT scores to decide which kids should get in. I’m telling you (and hopefully them) that I did no more than I absolutely had to, and I sailed on in to a university. If someone had watched me in action or had interviewed me or had looked at my cush life next to that more-deserving-because-she’s-smarter-and-harder-working girl over there, I would have been passed over. Looking good on paper should get you nowhere. The whole picture, the whole package, that’s what should be scanned and weighed.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Licensed nurses with LPN (Licensed Practical Nurse) degrees can now earn a bachelor’s degree (BSN) with one extra year of school. The academic degree program sounds like a rap lyric: LPN-to-BSN. Okay, maybe not. If it was LPN to the BSN… Anyway, it’s good news that vocational nurses are getting the chance to move up in the world, earn more money and an extra piece of paper to frame and hang on the wall. Because I know you agree that those slacker nurses have -until now- been standing around and letting the doctors do most of the work.

Ah, yes, now nurses can be more with the Big Picture and less with the Bedpan Tunnel Vision. I’m so glad someone finally addressed that issue. I’ve been bothered for, like, decades, with how the nurses lacked focus and depended on the doctors to coordinate everything.

Sarcasm aside, I’m actually really glad that LPNs can spend an extra year and end up with a bachelor’s degree. Nurses must continue their education anyway (as do most medical professionals these days) so it rocks that they can get a solid degree if they so desire.

Posted by Alexa Harrington
Nursing

Seriously, I’m so sleep-deprived right now, I just laughed so hard I cried after typing the title to this. I’m so exhausted I can’t sleep—I have to swim laps in order to reach some point-of-no-return degree of tired so my legs will stop twitching and I can get some z’s. If you know of what I speak, if you’re so out of your head that the little stuff throws you off and causes you to come absolutely unglued, and the big stuff makes you laugh hysterically, you may be dealing with some chronic exhaustion, too. It’s a good time, isn’t it? It took me a good 10 minutes the other day to figure out how to get the raisins onto my peanut butter and celery. I’m irrational, illogical, and just plain stupid with tired. And then I found Pzizz…

Hero of the Insomniacs
If you’re not down with being out of your damn mind (except at parties or in bars) then check out Smooth Talkin’ Dude With the Magic Waves of Wonderfulness. Michael Breen is the dude. He’s a master NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) trainer, whatever that means. He has a smooth voice (and not in a creepy way) and he can talk even me (hyper and having zero tolerance for cheesiness) to sleep. I hate smooth-talking boys, and no one has ever been able to hypnotize me. It’s just calming and relaxing and makes you feel like some caring grown-up is reading you a story and that everything is going to be just fine.

There are some waves involved, which trigger some deep relaxation stuff in your brain. Something called a Biurnal Beat, triggering Theta and Delta brain waves. I’m too tired to care about the science part (which should shock you into understanding that I really am exhausted). All I know is that it works. You can try it for free. I have a few on my iPod and I give Smooth Talkin’ Dude (Michael Breen) two thumbs up.

Posted by Alexa Harrington
insomnia | sleep

Estimating the Payoff to Attending A More Selective College

If you’re middle class, it won’t make a difference whether or not you attend a state university or Princeton income-wise. In 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics from MIT Press found that a middle class kid who graduates from an elite college doesn’t make any more money than he would have if he’d gone to a less selective school.

Elite Colleges Do Benefit Low Income Students
Another valuable bit of information from the study is that children from low income families do earn more if they attended selective colleges. It seems reasonable to conclude that we’ll see less movement into the middle class now that the affirmative action era has passed.

Read the full report on future earnings of elite college graduates.

College |Education

The Times Higher Education Supplement has published the 2006 world university rankings. American and British universities made up nearly half of the top 100 universities. The rankings were compiled by asking 3,703 academics worldwide to name the 30 best universities for research in their field of expertise, and also considering responses from 736 graduate employers globally, the ratio of faculty to students, and the university’s ability to draw foreign students and world-renowned academics. The results were then weighted and transformed into a scale giving the top university a score of 100, with all subsequent institutions scoring a proportion of that score.

Below are the top 25 universities:

1) Harvard University (United States)
2) University of Cambridge (Britain)
3) University of Oxford (Britain)
4) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States)
4) Yale University (United States)
6) Stanford University (United States)
7) California Institute of Technology (United States)
University of California at Berkeley (United States)
9) Imperial College London (Britain)
10) Princeton University (United States)
11) University of Chicago (United States)
12) Columbia University (United States)
13) Duke University (United States)
14) Beijing University (China)
15) Cornell University (United States)
16) Australian National University (Australia)
17) London School of Economics (Britain)
18) Ecole Normale Superieure (France)
19) National University of Singapore (Singapore)
19) University of Tokyo (Japan)
21) McGill University (Canada)
22) University of Melbourne (Australia)
23) Johns Hopkins University (United States)
24) Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Switzerland)
25) University College London (United Kingdom)

Examining the Trend of College-Educated Women Leaving the Workforce

I love research done by people who’ve heard a general, society-wide rumor and just have to know whether or not it’s based in fact. Sylvia Ann Hewlett (author of the 2002 book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children) recently researched just how many college-educated women are ditching their careers to be at-home moms for a while. I’m a science girl at heart, so I’m always down with anyone who backs their thoughts up with cold, hard numbers.

Off-Ramping and On-Ramping
Hewlett refers to the leaving and the subsequent return to their careers as “off-ramping” and “on-ramping.” The main issues it brought up in my mind were the still-around, can’t-get-away-from-them discrepancies between what’s expected from a working mom vs. what’s expected from a working dad. Working moms are expected to make money and be stellar in their careers, then come home and be perfect, nurturing mommies with lots of time and energy left at the end of the day for their little ones. Working dads are expected to go to work and make money. Done.

The new trend seemed to be a mass exodus of college-educated, successful women ditching their careers, so they could be home and do the family thing for a while. It’s interesting that not as many women are “off-ramping” as everyone (society in general) had previously thought. (As a funny side note: it’s also hilarious that the career women who were staying in the rat race were irate at the bad rep these off-ramping bi***es were giving career women everywhere.)

Hewlett’s data showed that only 37% of career women are bailing out of the rat race, and then only for a short period of time. The bailing out isn’t ‘cause these ladies can’t hack it. The reasons listed include having kids, caring for aging parents, and “taking care of other life needs.” (Do you think potentially life-threatening illnesses fall into that category? I was just wondering.)

I’m guessing that these women were doing fine and kicking some corporate booty in their fields, obviously able to handle all of the thinking and the work load, the deadlines and the pressure of career plus normal life on top of that. Add in something life-altering, like, say, giving birth or having a new kid to care for 24/7 or perhaps an aging parent around who needs your help, or even maybe battling cancer, might throw a wrench in the ass-kicking works and could conceivably throw the perfectly balanced career / life juggling act off. Something has to give, and apparently 37% of those career gals are willing to give up the careers you know they busted their asses to succeed in. (more…)