Does anyone else adore the Catch-22 of needing a college education in order to be more marketable in a crappy economy, but more and more people aren’t able to afford said education because the economy is crappy and budget cuts are rampant and it’s more difficult to get a good student loan? Perhaps we could all off-ramp to our own little islands for a while and just eat mangoes and weave hammocks and increase our sunlight-sourced vitamin D intake.

Here’s the shiny chart and the happy article that goes with it:

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Ah, the economy. I’ve always assumed that most humans of legal money-earning age have three thought-topics on more or less constant rotation through their minds: food, sex, and money. Those are all directly related to survival, so it makes sense that we’d be hyper-focused on them. And yet, when the media and the government types yell “The economy is tanking!” in a crowded theatre (or country, as it were), everyone comes unglued. All wage-earning adults are suddenly on a mission to make themselves Super-Duper Employable. Were they not toiling to that end before?

There’s nothing wrong with a strong work ethic and a good solid employability mindset. I’m all for being a productive citizen. It’s just odd to watch everyone suddenly scramble around in panicked circles and then run off in an Extra Hireable direction. What was everyone doing before, lolling around eating bonbons and archiving earwax chunks?

Sometimes it’s just bad luck: anyone who was kicking ass in the real estate business a few years ago is having a tough time these days. A lot of adults who had been, until recently, firmly ensconced in their careers are finding themselves less than necessary. Instead of wallowing in self-pity and praying for a miracle, a lot of adults are using the forced downtime to their advantage and are heading back to school.

For anyone who’s concerned that they haven’t been productive enough to survive in the current and near-future economy, here’s some further reading and resources:

Career Schools List
Weighing a New Industry For a New Job Outlook
More Students Spring From Tough Times
The Way To Go When the Economy Slows…Trade Schools
Certificate Programs Can Lead To Good Jobs

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image: Emil Rothengatter

Here’s another you’d-best-take-note list of screw-ups high school students make when filling out their college applications. There are thirty-six ways to put a dent in your future on this one. Let’s be careful out there, kiddos.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The economy is tanking (or so they keep telling us), and that’s starting to make the the lives of college students everywhere more pinched and frowny and less chipper and skippy. Working while taking a full course load just sucks, even on a good day.

Alan Bradford at Geek Stew has some excellent pointers for anyone requiring a sure fire money-making project. It didn’t work all that well for the Germans during the Weimar Republic, but you could get lucky.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

According to this article in the CS Monitor, freaking out about the economy is causing prospective college students (and their bill-footing parents) to reconsider where (and if) they should do their matriculating. Out of 2,500 high school seniors surveyed by MeritAid.com, almost 60 percent were planning on less prestigious higher education venues for purely frugal reasons. 14 percent switched from plans to attend a four-year college and are heading to two-year colleges instead. 16 percent of the kids surveyed are halting all higher education plans for the time being.

College students currently attending private schools are considering the very tempting transfer to in-state public schools. And schools closer to home are a much more viable option for most families.

Admissions staffs see nervousness about not just tuition but also tangential costs. At a recent college fair in Greenwich, Conn., a mother and daughter approached the table for Claremont McKenna College. When the mom realized it was in California, “she said, ‘We’re having enough trouble financing the education these days, I don’t think we really want to worry about all the plane tickets,’ ” says associate dean of admission Adam Sapp. “I definitely didn’t hear that last year.”

The NY Times has an even cheerier article about families struggling to pay for college and the added challenge of loans being harder to come by these days.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

photo: China Daily News

To state the obvious: Education is not just the formal classroom/teacher/textbook parts of one’s life. There’s also the being out in the world part, away from homework and exams, and continuing to deposit new information and ideas in one’s head. That’s an important phase, because unless you’ve managed to figure out how to get paid to go to school, at some point your formal education will com to an end, they will ask you to leave, and someone chucklehead will tell you to get a job and stop with the learning already. Which means that the majority of your life will be spent in the less formal, self-educating phase.

There are several ways to accomplish this independent knowledge absorption. Taking an interesting class or two is great if you have some extra time and superfluous cash. A cheaper option is removing yourself from your standard routine and spending a Saturday afternoon in a new place. Unfamiliar terrain and new input is good for the brain and you’re bound to learn something. And there’s my other favorite informal education option: books, which are free if you go to the library.

I adore books, and libraries are as close to a Cathedral Moment as I get. I spent my childhood and into my twenties collecting books. Before I hit thirty, I’d used up all the bookshelf space in my house. Because I refuse to end up an old woman surrounded by unsafely leaning stacks of books, that meant no more buying books or asking for books as gifts.

That’s a turn of events which would have sucked a lot more if I hadn’t re-discovered the public library. Now I’m a total library spaz and my husband makes fun of me for having the Seattle Public Library’s Web page as my browser’s homepage. I obsessively check my holds list and my checked-out items. I’m a dork I know, but it’s free books. How can you not love free books?

Penelope Trunk just wrote a post about how to not waste time by making bad book choices. Knowing your book likes and dislikes and what hasn’t worked for you in the past is good information to keep track of. However, I would also like to add a simple piece of wisdom my book-addict stepmother imparted to me.

First let me point out that my stepmother (who is not evil and whom I love very much) reads more books than I do, easily three times as many, possibly even four times as many. When I asked her once, in a cheerful and casual tone, if I could see her life book-list (all the books she’s read thus far) so I could copy it down and get some good book ideas, she laughed at me (not with me) and asked if I really thought I was ready for that. Which scared the crap out of me and I have never laid eyes on her list, nor have I ever asked to see it again. With any luck, she’ll die before I do and I’ll finally get a chance to look at the thing.

Enough with my morbid sense of humor; here’s her wisdom. I told her once that I tended to never give up on a book I’d started—I keep reading even if I’m not enjoying it. Some people can just read a few chapters, decide the book is not for them, and be done with it. Once I start, I feel like I should slog on through in case the wonderful bits are hidden in the last paragraph. My awesome stepmother said that she rarely gives up on a book. She said, “Even a book I really don’t like can teach me something.” My stepmother doesn’t tend to fill a room with words, so there’s not a lot to choose from. But that particular sentence is one of my favorites.

Other Book Lists (Not My Stepmother’s) With Which to Informally Educate Yourself:

Century of Books
The Guardian UK Observer’s 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
The Hugo Awards 1946-2008
The Hungry Mind Review’s 100 Best 20th Century Books
Library Journal’s Most Influential Fiction of the 20th Century
The Man Booker Prize List 1969-2007
Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books
Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels
The National Book Awards 1950-2007
National Book Critics Circle Award 1975-2006
Orange Prize for Fiction 1996-2007
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 1981-1995
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 1996-2007

And here’s the be-all, end-all mother lode of book lists: The Booklist Center. It will overwhelm you in less than five minutes but it’s totally worth it.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Allen Grove, the college admissions blogger at About.com, spoke with Jeremy Spencer, the Director of Admissions at Alfred University about the six most common blunders of college applicants and how not to make those very same mistakes, thereby reducing your future to a smoking pile of wreckage heaped at your sad, not-going-to-college feet.

It’s application season, people. Don’t fill those things out in the middle of the night and don’t wait until the last aneurism-inducing moment to get the essay written and the letters of recommendation collected. Don’t eff it up.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Regardless of what sort of term system your school utilizes, at this point every college student in the land is up to their eyebrows in the hard damn work portion of their college education. Here’s a list of some of the tools that have elicited the most enthusiastic responses from college students around the blogosphere, along with some sites I thought were useful:

Doing the Research

ChunkIt
Google Book Search
Google Reader
Google Scholar
OEDb’s Research Beyond Google
Scholar Search Engines
WorldCat

Collecting the Research

Del.icio.us
Fireshot
PDFCreator

Resources

EnhanceMyWriting
How to Write a Term Paper
Idea Generator
LibrarianChick
Library Research Guide
Research 101

Bibliography

BibMe
EasyBib
EndNote
OttoBib
Zotero

Taking Notes

Evernote
Google Notebook
mynoteIT

Organization (Not Forgetting Stuff)

Google Calendar
Remember the Milk
30 Boxes

Study Tools

Flashcards
How to Study: A Brief Guide
Study Guides and Strategies
Quizlet

Office Suites (the writing, presenting and spreadsheet parts)

Google Docs (free)
Microsoft Office (not as free)
Zoho (free)

Posted by Alexa Harrington

“notebooks” image: presentsandlaw.com

I have a large stack of books with an education bent going right now. Must be the crisp autumn weather that’s triggering my current brain-cravings for non-fiction that’s educational on all levels. They are all interesting (especially to education junkies/geeks like me) and worth reading if you’re into that sort of thing.

Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis

The co-author of Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing writes again about the computer science have-nots. This time it’s students of color in three different Los Angeles high schools. Margolis makes an excellent point regarding the difference between having access to a computer and having access to computer science education.

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. Borgman

How the Internet and access to incredible amounts of information and information-sharing can and will affect academia, and the infrastructure needed to maintain that information, research and knowledge. I like books that make me think a few aisles over from the intended subject matter; this one is making me ponder mankind’s modern day intentions for the pursuit of knowledge.

Research and the accumulation of information used to be (mostly) for the betterment of human existence. Now it seems to be an embarrassing competition for grant money, tenure, and recognition. If everyone’s in it for the money/fame, then I suppose we can just chuck the whole Internet infrastructure improvement idea and it can be every researcher for themselves. No more sharing, no more building on past data, no more standing on the shoulders of giants. If you can’t figure out how to play together, then you’re on your own.

Learn Me Good by John Pearson

A thermal design engineer gets laid off, becomes a teacher, and writes effing hilarious e-mails to his friend about his first year of teaching.

Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade by Linda Perlstein

A well-written account of how the No Child Left Behind Act affects a suburban Maryland elementary school that was already on the edge and falling apart.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I can’t stop re-reading this interview in the NY Times Magazine. Deborah Solomon interviews Charles Murray about his new book, “Real Education,” and it’s like some morbidly funny train wreck and I can’t not look. Some choice excerpts:

Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, “Real Education,” that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. Yes. Let’s stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let’s talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it.

You’re not the first social scientist to knock the liberal arts, but you may be the first to insist that only 20 percent of all college students have the brains and abilities to understand their assigned reading. Eighty percent are not able to deal with college-level material, traditionally understood. Someone can sit down with Paul Samuelson’s textbook and stare at the pages and know what most of the words mean. That does not mean that they walk away from it understanding economics as it is taught in the textbook.

What do you propose that 18-year-olds do instead of trying to learn the difference between macro- and microeconomics? Oh, the world of work out there!

Do you see your new book as an extension of the “The Bell Curve,” which caused an uproar in 1994 by suggesting that people are only as promising as their I.Q. scores? In many ways, it is a distillation of things I’ve been thinking since “The Bell Curve.”

Europeans have historically defined themselves through inherited traits and titles, but isn’t America a country where we are supposed to define ourselves through acts of will? I wonder if there is a single, solitary, real-live public-school teacher who agrees with the proposition that it’s all a matter of will. To me, the fact that ability varies — and varies in ways that are impossible to change — is a fact that we learn in first grade.

I believe that given the opportunity, most people could do most anything. You’re out of touch with reality in that regard. You have not hung around with kids who are well in the lower half of the ability distribution.

Have you? [He has not.]

What do you make of the fact that John McCain was ranked 894 in a class of 899 when he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy? I like to think that the reason he ranked so low is that he was out drinking beer, as opposed to just unable to learn stuff.

What do you think of Sarah Palin? I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.

She attended five colleges in six years. So what?

Pompous a** is all I can come up with. And yet, while I’m shaking my head in disbelief that karma alone hasn’t mowed this guy down, I also can’t stop laughing. He’s such a jacka** and is totally unapologetic about it. Whether you agree with him or not (I don’t) you have to respect the ballsiness of someone who can write a damn book explaining why the smart people should be in charge and the dumb humans should do the work. Nice.

His argument implodes for me as soon as he gets to the nonsensical/illogical portion of the interview where he’s all for McCain and Palin regardless of their questionable intelligence. He just brushes those facts aside because they clearly have no relevance. When research scientists do that, they aren’t allowed to call it science—then it’s just called “making stuff up.”

I’m confused. Is Murray saying that only the smart people should be allowed to go to college and do the super important jobs, but we don’t want any of those smarties running the country? Is running the country not an important job? Maybe he classifies the presidency as one of those below-average-intelligence-havin’ labor jobs. If that’s the case, then I’m an even bigger fan of that smart Obama guy, who, it seems, is too smart to be running the country.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image: alec holst/school of visual arts