Title IX gets a boost.

For her master’s thesis at Brigham Young, Kelly P. Troutman looked at 5,000 high school girls in the National Education Longitudinal Study and found that girls who play interscholastic high school sports are 41 percent more likely to graduate from college than their counterparts. The athletes had the advantage of “social capital,” a network invested in their success, mentor coaches and parents in the stands sharing college information.

I’m interested to know how many of those women had sports and athletic scholarships, which would increase their allegiance to staying in college. I imagine that male athletes might have lower graduation rates due to the call of pro sports.

From the June issue of the journal Youth & Society .

college | sports

The New York Times did a story on the growing trend of public universities charging higher tuition for degrees in lucrative fields such as business and engineering. This practice brings up many issues including price sensitivity for poor students who may stay away from majoring in business. Some worry that students who are charged more for their major will stick to the courses in their field to feel that they are getting their money’s worth. Many are concerned that public universities have disregarded the premise that a well-rounded higher education is for the common good of society. Private universities who are not faced with the same budget constraints are avoiding differential pricing.

Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.

And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say.

“It is something of a trend,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Even as they embrace such pricing, many officials acknowledge they are queasy about a practice that appears to value one discipline over another or that could result in lower-income students clustering in less expensive fields.

“This is not the preferred way to do this,” said Patrick V. Farrell, provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If we were able to raise resources uniformly across the campus, that would be a preferred move. But with our current situation, it doesn’t seem to us that that’s possible.”

It’s not that I’m condoning bank robbery (people tend to get hurt). Plus, you know, it’s wrong. But aside from the danger, the stupidity and the blatant law-breaking, there’s a tiny part of me that’s glad for this excellent illustration of how impossible tuition rates have become. Maybe we’ll all get lucky and the Powers That Be will take note and change their tuition-jacking ways. It’s funny that when schools do it, it’s called “tuition increase”, but when students do it, it’s called “bank robbery”. Perhaps the students lack the requisite authority to rob people blind.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place To Study

Finding your perfect study place is crucial. Richard Klayman has an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor about it. He teaches in Boston and has done informal research over the years, asking his students where they settle in to study and whether that spot is conducive to the learning process. He’s found that college students these days tend to be so over-scheduled with school, jobs and family life, that there’s no room or time to do anything beyond cramming in the necessary information a.s.a.p. wherever they happen to be (car, bus, train, library, coffee shop).

“Nearly 40 years of classroom teaching has provided me a perch from which to appreciate what works – and what does not – in building learning skills.

Continuity is key in mastering a discipline, as is teaching oneself how to learn. The classroom is far from the only place that the process for assessing, attaining, or otherwise synthesizing impressions and information occurs.

A kitchen table, dining room table, a familiar corner of a room, or a few feet of flooring remain essential venues for the repetition needed to master any discipline.”

Klayman refers to modern-day students as “nomads”, studying where and when they can. He’s not at all convinced it’s a good or complete process. Students don’t have the space or the time to fully learn the subject.

He’s right, of course. But what can you do? Unless you’re fully funded (don’t need a job), have a normal course load and don’t yet have a family started, then an insane schedule and studying when and where you can is your only option.

I had two different college lives. Pre-marriage and children and fully funded was hard work and filled every moment, yes. But I was able to completely immerse myself and learn it fully. I was obsessed, but not panicked.

Our language doesn’t possess the words to even begin to describe how much my married-with-children college life sucked. I studied the way soldiers in foxholes sleep: in five or ten-minute chunks, always under extreme stress. Everything I read was absorbed with a huge dose of adrenaline. I was saturated with the stuff. I kept my books open on the dining room table and did drive-by studying whenever my family didn’t require my services.

It was brutal. That I had a 3.9 GPA I chalk up to unadulterated terror. That my marriage survived I chalk up to one of two possibilities: (a) my husband is not human and is actually a robot and cannot be destroyed; or (b) I’m not as bad-ass as I think I am and cannot actually shatter another human using only my eyes and voice. That my relationship with my infant daughter survived (she’s now almost six and miraculously still likes me) I chalk up to her being either a robot like her dad or a badass like her mom.

Here’s what it boils down to: pre-family I worked hard, got the good grades, was fully engaged in my education. I’d label that version of myself Focused. I learned the material, I absorbed it. Post-family me could recite every bone in the human body and knew differential equations backwards and forwards, but I wasn’t learning so much as I was memorizing as a panic reaction to an emergency situation. I had a newborn, I never had time to sit and study for a few hours at a stretch. If I had two minutes between diaper changes I had to take it and cram as much info into my head as possible before the next baby crisis. The word for post-family, second-degree me was Obsessed.

Suffice it to say, I learned more and I learned it well when I had the time and the space to settle in and study. It wasn’t just the lack of stress or the increased enjoyment (I adore school when ankle-biters aren’t involved). It was the entire learning process, and place plays a large part in that.

If you can possibly swing it (and these days, unless you were born under the Trust Fund Tree you probably can’t) try to just be in school when you’re in school. I’m not saying it isn’t feasible to learn with distractions (like a job or newborn-induced sleep deprivation). I’m just forcefully recommending learning with enough time and space.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Recent graduates who are now job hunting are probably inundated with advice from friends and family. Some of the classic advice: Get a haircut; buy interview clothes; tell everyone you’re looking for a job; get an internship; go on informational interviews. Other advice is geared toward protecting your online reputation: Google yourself to make sure nothing incriminating shows up (e.g. your MySpace page that displays photos of you guzzling beers); consider how professional your email will sound to a prospective employer (fuzzybear @ gmail .com?).

It’s all sound advice, but the good old fashioned résumé is the major cornerstone to getting a job. Even if you’ve never had a “real” job outside serving beer at the student union or being an RA, you can create a résumé that will catch the eye of a prospective employer.

Here are a few of the best résumé advice sites:

The Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal has a whole section of their site devoted to Résumé Advice. Recent articles cover sneaky job hunter tips, tips for writing broad résumés, why lying is hard to cover up, and writing thank you notes.

Purdue University has many résumé writing articles in addition to articles about writing great cover letters, writing a Curriculum Vitae and business writing.

All Career Schools has a section on résumé tips that includes résumé strategies and online networking resources for creating a great résumé.

Career Builder’s resume advice by Robert Half International emphasizes the importance of keywords, concise résumés, and video résumés.

career | work

This may not be earth shattering news, but in a recent article, Slate Magazine answered why alumni of prestigious universities make such large gifts to their already well funded alma maters. A new study by Jonathan Meer of Stanford and Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton shows strong evidence that over half of giving by alumni is self interested in raising the chance of admission for their children. The study also revealed how university presidents fuel the perception that gifts will sway admissions officers. “When asked why Princeton gives preferences to alumni’s kids, President Shirley M. Tilghman replied, ‘We are deeply dependent on the generosity of our alumni each and every year. … They are extremely important to the financial well-being of this university.’” It would be interesting to see if the size of the gift had any impact on admissions rates for alumni children.

The data include annual contributions by more than 32,000 alumni between 1983 and 2006, along with the birthdates of the alumni’s children. This allows them to see how the pattern of giving evolves as kids of alumni approach college-application age. Anon U, as Meer and Rosen call their College That Shall Not Be Named, looks like a pretty elite place: More than 40 percent of the students attended private schools before college, and 40 percent attain an advanced degree afterward. As the authors point out, the “fields of education, finance, health care, and law are highly represented” in alumni careers. More than half of alumni (56 percent) donate in any given year. Their average gift is $466, with distribution heavily skewed by large gifts. In 2006, the top 1 percent of gifts accounted for 69 percent of the total.

Here’s what Meer and Rosen find. Alumni with kids are 13 percentage points more likely than alumni without kids to give in any year. The tendency to give rises slowly—by three more percentage points total—through kids’ early teens. At about age 14, as mom and dad see their kid’s algebra and composition grades, they decide whether he or she will apply to the alma mater. If they decide against, then they need not give extra to grease his way in. But if the kid is legacy material, then the parents might feel a need to show some generosity to Anon U.

And, indeed, while giving declines after age 14 among parents of kids who do not go on to apply, giving rises between about 18 and 25 percentage points (above the level of the childless alums) for those whose kids do apply a few years later. The timing is certainly suggestive. Of course, it’s possible that the kids who apply are from families who are more enthusiastic about the school, which would trigger both application and contributions. But if general enthusiasm for Anon U were the cause of both the decision to apply and contributions, then we’d expect the families with eventual applicants to start outgiving the families of the eventual nonapplicants even earlier, when their kids are young. And they do not.

college

Technology Reverses the Smartness

The Telegraph UK had this article about a study researching the effects of our detrimental reliance on tech gadgets for all the information we feel we need to remember.

An over reliance on technology is leading to a dumbing down of the nation’s brain power, according a study published today
Professor Ian Robertson, a neuropsychology expert based at Trinity College Dublin who carried out the study, said: “People have more to remember these days, and they are relying on technology for their memory.

“But the less you use of your memory, the poorer it becomes. This may be reflected in the survey findings which show that the over 50s who grew up committing more to memory report better performance in many areas than those under 30 who are heavily reliant on technology to act as their day to day aide memoir.”

So if I eschew technology but still write everything I need to remember on paper, am I still “dumbing” myself down? And if so, can I reverse it with massive amounts of Sudoku and crossword puzzles? I’ve heard memorizing poetry helps. I don’t engage in any of those inactive activities, and I don’t have time to start now.

I’m too busy to remember that I’ve forgotten anything. By the time things slow down enough for me to look around and notice that my mind is slipping, my kids will be off at college. Which, as fate would have it, will be when I’ll be starting to feel the effects of memory-loss due to years of writing everything down. In 20 years I’ll be an empty-nester with all the time in the world to revamp my neurological pathways with lots of sitting on my ass and filling in the blank squares.

Posted by Alexa Harrington
memory | learning | education

Top Chef and the Food Network have fueled the rise of the celebrity chef and it’s been very good for cooking schools. Students are filling culinary schools are unprecedented rates. Professional training can help cooks move up quickly through the kitchen ranks. And culinary schools have produced many of the nation’s finest chefs.

From All Culinary Schools - Top Chefs Who Attended Cooking School:

Emeril Lagasse – The Food Network personality and owner of many restaurants has made quite a fortune from cooking. He attended cooking school at Johnson and Wales after turning down a full scholarship to study music at the New England Conservatory of Music. Talk about talent! Lagasse also supports a number of charities through the Emeril Lagasse Foundation.

Ann Cooper – She calls herself the “Renegade Lunch Lady.” A former celebrity chef, who once cooked for the Grateful Dead, Chef Ann is now giving public school cafeterias around the country a major facelift. She’s currently Director of Nutrition at Berkeley Public Schools where she has replaced all canned and processed foods with fresh meat and vegetables and baked goods from local bakeries. Cooper studied at the Culinary Institute of America.

Erika Bruce – Bruce is a test cook on America’s Test Kitchen, public television’s most popular cooking show. On the show, test cooks like Bruce experiment with recipes and tinker with cooking tools to find out what works and what doesn’t. Bruce attended the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.

Walter Scheib –As the executive chef at the White House for 11 years, Scheib was in charge of preparing meals for the First Family. Scheib’s book about his experiences White House Chef: Eleven Years, Two Presidents, One Kitchen came out in January, 2007. He graduated with highest honors from the Culinary Institute of America in New York in 1979.

Julia Child – She’s the queen mother of the culinary industry. In 1948, while her husband, an officer for a federal government agency, was posted in Paris, Child enrolled in the world famous Cordon Bleu cooking school. There was no turning back. After just six months of training, Child and two of her classmates opened up a cooking school of their own called L’Ecole de Trois Gourmandes. They also published a book together called Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Child promoted the book in the US and one Boston public broadcasting station found her so charismatic they gave her a cooking show of her own. The show was an immense hit – it was syndicated all over the country and won many awards, including an Emmy.

Although no one disputes that culinary training is essential to become a chef, attending a pricey culinary school can put you in the hole for years. The New York Times reported in May 2007 that culinary school graduates are defaulting on federal student loans at alarmingly high rates. The article advises culinary students to be very careful about how they pay for school and to exhaust federal and state loans before looking for alternative funding.

From the New York Times:

Top Chef Dreams Crushed by Student Debt

But would-be top chefs face a challenge that most lawyers, engineers or nurses do not: few jobs in their chosen field pay enough for them to retire their student loans. As a result, as many as 11 percent of graduates at some culinary schools are defaulting on federal student loans. The national average for all students last year was roughly half that, at 5.1 percent.

“The problem isn’t getting a job, the problem is getting a high-paying job,” said Susan Sykes Hendee, a dean at Baltimore International College and a member of the American Culinary Federation Foundation Accrediting Commission, which accredits many culinary schools.

Many of the schools offer two-year programs where the total tuition and supply costs can reach $48,000. Only a slice of that is covered by low-interest federal loans. For example, the most that students in two-year programs can currently borrow in federal loans is $14,125.

culinary school |
college