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