JPMorgan Chase is swooping in to save the student-loan-needing booties of international graduate students at Harvard. Citibank left Harvard and several other schools in the lurch this past fall when they announced they were terminating their arrangements with the schools, “citing the effects of the frozen credit markets.”
Because international students don’t tend to qualify for financial aid, they need to take out loans. And because they’re international students, applying for loans has a whole new level of red tape. The arrangement Citibank made eased that process along for the students by allowing them to apply for student loans without a cosigner (not typical for student loans).
When Harvard found out on October that Citibank was ditching their international grad students, the school had to run around madly trying to stretch financial assistance. The new arrangement they’ve made with JPMorgan Chase will hopefully relieve some of the stress.
It’s better for everyone if international students can find a way to go to school here. Right after 9/11, there was a big halt for student visas (I’m ranting on the inside). The University of Washington was a ghost town while international student were sent back home, waiting to hear whether they’d be able to finish their degrees in Seattle. Everyone benefits financially, culturally, and global-citizen-wise when campus populations are mixed. I know that JPMorgan Chase is pretty much just in it for the money, but they’ve still done a good thing.
Never do I skimp on out-pourings of crankiness regarding the backward and highly ridiculous college ranking “system” (I use the term loosely, and here’s proof of the system’s innate uselessness). It is difficult to write ill-tempered posts of this nature because my eyes keep rolling up in disgust. Plus, I waste an inordinate amount of time deleting foul language and unprofessional remarks about the people responsible for the rankings. I hope your pure souls appreciate how strenuous that last bit was to write, and how much editing was involved. I didn’t even use the word a**, which is practically expected when writing about money-hungry, college-rankings bast**ds. Damn. I was so close.
In the spirit of being more with the optimism and less with the cynical pessimism, here’s a lovely breath of hopeful fresh air (minus the butterflies because I’m not that cheerful): GlobalHigherEd has a guest post about a new and better way to rank colleges and universities. The article was written by Uwe Brandenburg of the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) and CHE Consult, a “think tank and consultancy focusing on higher education reform.”
They’re based in Europe, but I’m hoping that the Europeans will prove the system’s worthiness and the Americans will jump on board. It worked with Vespas.
CertificationMap.com was just launched as a resource for educator-hopefuls. The site is simple and clean of line (I dislike chaotic websites) and conveys the pertinent information in a zippy manner. If I were planning on pursuing a career as a teacher in the State of Washington, for instance, I would click on the Washington blob on the map (I live here, so I totally know what my state looks like) and would be shown a list of all that would be required of me education-, certification-, and red-tape-wise.
It’s a useful list to be sure. However, I can almost guarantee that I, personally, will never be implementing it as a checklist because I will sell snow cones in extremely cold underworldy sorts of places before I would be patient enough to become an educator of humans who haven’t yet reached their full adult status.
I have gallons of respect for the people who can withstand the insanity, the mayhem and the politics such that they can relay information and knowledge to our children. I can handle lots of things, but I have a strict four-kid limit (and two of them have to be my own). I can’t see ever getting a classroom population like that, so no teaching career for me.
Seriously, I don’t know how teachers do it. I dislike pandemonium, interruptions, and people telling me what to do. I would last maybe three hours before I’d launch myself out the first available window. Some people are really good at dealing with multiple crises while imparting knowledge, and always with an audience watching. Those people should teach.
For prospective college students who leave high school fully prepped to jump head-first into college, there’s a new money-saving three-year college degree option. Tennessee Senator, Lamar Alexander, likens it to the fuel-efficient car version of a college education. These days, that does seem tempting.
Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY is one of the first schools to offer a three-year degree option, but Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, is hoping more private schools will follow suit:
“Three-year degrees are a very important option, and I think we’ll be seeing more of them,” she said. “They won’t serve a large proportion of students since a three-year degree requires that you finish high school college-ready, enroll full-time and be focused.”
I’m tempted to scoff at the crazed intensity of cramming a college degree into three years, but I think it might be gauche to deride saving $40,000 in this day and age. My only concern, as per usual, is the thought that after thirteen years of working their booties off to get into college, kids who go the three-year-degree route will have no time to stop until they graduate and will then realize there’s a whole world out there that they haven’t had five minutes to really consider. I concede that it’s possible I’m the only one concerned about the mental and emotional well-being of high school and college students, but I feel it’s worth mentioning.
Scoring some funding or getting a smidgen of a paycheck in academe is hard enough in a stable economy, but it becomes a turnip-squeezing situation when the economy hits the skids. Female Science Professor has two posts up that explain some of the problems academics are facing, and which crises warrant the most panic.
Budget Axe and Bad Economics 101 are both worth reading. They have informative, entertainment, and misery-loves-company value.
I’m a pretty organized, focused little gal. People who know me use less kind terminology, like “intense,” “bordering on obsessive,” and “freaky list-maker and notebook-keeper.” Whatever. They are just jealous of my awesome organizational skills and my ability to get things done.
Although I have a system, don’t lack focus, and I prefer my own way of doing things, I am still drawn to other people’s ideas for organizing and list-making and guides to getting things accomplished. Maybe I just need to be certain that my way still fits my needs. Or maybe it’s the vicarious thrill of reading about someone else getting their life organized, accomplishing tasks and projects, and crossing items off of their lists. Some people watch p*rn or the Food Network, I read about different organizing tactics.
Large projects tend to be the most frequent overwhelmers of humans. Overcoming clutter or the lack of a solid To Do list can be dealt with, but being faced with writing a paper, a thesis, a dissertation or a book can stop most humans in their tracks. There’s so much to do, no one ever knows where to start.
It seems ridiculous to start anywhere, because none of the places small enough to finish in a day seem consequential enough to make any sort of dent in the project. The little stuff seems as pointless as carrying the beach back to the ocean one spoonful at a time, and the big stuff seems impossible.
Humans think too much; ants just start building the anthill. Although, ants don’t have roller coasters or cotton candy. We have angst and teeth-gnashing, but we get the fun. My daughter has an ant farm, and I have seen no evidence of any fun being had on (in) the ant farm.
Pamela Slim wrote a post explaining how she dealt with “hitting a wall” while writing her book Escape From Cubicle Nation. She got to a point where she was inundated with accumulated information and work still to be done. In the article she outlines the plan she came up with that enabled her to keep going and finish the book. It’s simple and practical and would be of use to any poor bastard at the overwhelming beginning or the inundated middle of a huge project.
I read a History is Elementary post a few weeks ago, and it’s still running through my head. Darwin’s birthday last week reminded me of what is taught in schools (evolution vs. intelligent design, etc.) and how parental beliefs can sometimes differ from what the educators are teaching the students.
In her post, Elementary Historyteacher writes about being a history teacher in Georgia, and how every school year she comes up against the fact that the black parents and the white parents have very different perspectives on the Civil War, and both groups are very clear about the fact that they want her to teach the Civil War curriculum according to their own beliefs.
I’ve written here before regarding the yearly pattern of Open House at the beginning of the year when I inevitably have white parents wanting to know if I teach the truth about the Civil War, and I have just as many black parents wanting to know the same thing.
Basically they want to know if I’m going to teach their children whatever it is that they believe regardless of the truth.
How do teachers deal with finding the middle line of truth that’s running through fomenting topics like evolution or the Civil War? Each side believes that their version is the real and true one. I was already in awe of people who choose to spend their days explaining the world to kids for meager monetary compensation, but pondering impossible tasks like teaching inflammatory subject matter has brought my respect and appreciation to a whole new level.
Nature Education has launched a free online resource for undergraduate science students. The idea behind Scitable is to offer students “evidence-based” articles about the subject matter they’re studying that are informative and accurate (because it is not useful to learn faulty facts).
“Research supports the fact that while science students are still using textbooks and library resources for their science classes, they are now depending increasingly on the internet. However, reliability of information is a concern,” says Vikram Savkar, publishing director of Nature Education. “Our goal is to provide an authoritative and compelling science resource on the internet for students and faculty anywhere in the world.”
Scitable provides students with free online access to more than 180 overviews of key genetics concepts. The overviews are evidence-based and have been vetted by Nature Publishing Group staff. By connecting with other Scitable users via groups, chat functionality and other social media features, students can collaborate online with classmates, or with a wider community of experts, researchers and fellow students.
The site is new and is currently focused mostly on genetics. There’s a lot of information, and some of it’s nicely nitpicky and precise and makes sense only to someone in the throes of a biology course. Which is actually quite helpful when you’re trying to finish a genetics lab in the middle of the night and you’d like some “evidence-based” information to help you through it.
Seth Allen, the Dean of Admission and Financial Aid at Grinnell College, has answered some relevant questions regarding financial aid and the economy. If a college student’s family has experienced loss of income or assets, what does that mean for his/her financial aid package, and what needs to be done to fill in the new cracks in the levee? In the article, Allen lists possible problems and how best to address them.
It’s all very practical, which always reassures me, and he makes a point of noting that the media has painted a much bleaker picture of how adversely the economic downturn is affecting college students and their ‘rents. The situations still sucks, but it might not actually be the end of the world. Not yet, anyway.
According to the ColoradoLearns site, the 21st century learners need to have the following characteristics and capabilities:
The best way to teach kids how to embody the traits illustrated above is to teach them differently than the Baby Boomers, the Gen-Xers, and even the Gen-Yers were taught. I’m a Gen-Xer, my parents are Baby Boomers, and my grandparents were the generation responsible for bringing forth the Boomers.
My parents were taught differently than my grandparents were, and I was part of the late seventies/early eighties wave of teaching methodologies that considered nitpicky details like grammar, punctuation and an in-depth knowledge of geography to be the main stiflers of creativity. Hence, I had lots of creative writing, but I’m still not clear on correct grammar and punctuation. (Hyphenating confuses the hell out of me).
Whenever a new approach to teaching is implemented, the previous generations get all squidgy and start to panic. I only enjoy change when I’m traveling. Otherwise, I fear it, especially when it comes attached to a bunch of technology.
So you can imagine my fluster level when I watched the following video and it finally sank in that the digital world is here to stay, and that my offspring will be attached (how literally is yet to be seen) to their wireless bits and pieces, never to be out of communication or away from information again.
After I watched the above video and was teetering between accepting the digital fate of humanity, or total, head-burying denial, I watched the video below and realized how ass-backwards I was being.
Early in the 20th century, William Heard Kilpatrick, John Dewey, and the Progressive Education Association were trying to convince America that kids needed to learn, not just memorize. Thanks to those freaky, futuristic thinkers and their “revolutionary teaching ideas,” education changed for the better. Sixty years later, I had the benefit of learning to think for myself and didn’t have to sit in my classroom being drilled on the multiplication tables.
It’s hard to accept change, but I see that it’s entirely necessary or we’ll never move forward. Ruts are bad, progress is good. Watch this if you weren’t convinced by the first video that kids today need to learn about, and express themselves with, digital media.
