I was never concerned as to whether or not today’s school-age kids were going to be considered fully functioning adults someday; anyone who can seemingly mind-meld with a computer (or a cell phone or anything gizmo-ish), understand it, and make it work is probably going to do just fine once they’re let loose on the world.

Despite feeling that kids these days were good to go on the technology front, I was a wee bit worried that the whole writing portion of their lives was headed for much suckage. I was caught in the admittedly old-fashioned (lame!) idea that all forward progress in the land of tech can only lead to less and less well-rounded humans. The telephone, for instance, led to a severe decline in letter-writing. (Of course, the electric light bulb led to everyone staying up later and getting more work done, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

Clive Thompson’s article in Wired has calmed me down. Thanks to all the e-mail and texting that goes on these days, kids are doing more writing than anyone has since correct cursive and perfect penmanship were qualities to strive for. Now we’ve got technologically savvy kids who can express themselves with the written/typed word like nobody’s business. I’m stoked that society will not be taking one-way trips in any hand baskets.

From the article:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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College Scholarships.org has the bad financial news for college students explained simply and graphically below. The immediate effects of student loans are explained, as well as the long-term effects (the ones you thought you’d be done thinking about that many years down the line). I’m hoping that the nationwide foreclosure situation has educated everyone as to what happens when people are allowed to borrow beyond their means.

I get it that paying for college so you can have some decently-paying career options is a big fat Catch-22 as well as a vicious circle. It also just plain sucks a real lot. However, it’s still better to have the information prior to heading into the jungle. No one’s going to make you use the info, but it’s good to at least have it back there in your grey-matter archives, just in case.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(hat tip to jennifer)

I love it when highly educated, intelligent, and knowledgeable scientists find something new that’s so damn cool, the only thing they can come up with to say is, “It’s a big weird looking freaky thing.” Ichthyologist Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences came up with that one in an interview with Wired Science.

He’s right. I mean, look at that thing. It’s fascinating, but it’s a tad bizarre. I don’t care how many degrees that guy has, even I would be too giddy to remember my super science-y vocabulary words if someone had just discovered some crazy new organism that I was going to get to play with.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

In an effort to reduce waste and do their part to save the planet, college dining halls have begun to go trayless. Plates are still available (they’re not barbarians), as are eating utensils.

It turns out that the trayless policy has reduced water and energy use, and because the students can only gracefully carry so many plates and bowls in their arms, they’ve been wasting 30% less food due to the decrease in my-eyes-were-bigger-than-my-stomach syndrome.

The traditional using of the dining tray as a sled during Winter Term will be much reduced as well, about which the schools are stoked and the students are understandably pi**ed. Times change, people.

You’ll have to stick with surfing down the dorm hallway on bathmats (rubber side up, yarn side down) and baby powder. My dorm had carpeting, which sucked until we invented Flame Ball (it involves a fuzzy tennis ball, hairspray, lights off, and no one getting their deposit back).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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This is a ponderable piece on the current financial situation colleges and universities have found themselves in. Who benefits from the money coming into a school? Hint: It’s probably not the faculty or the students.

Here’s an excerpt:

An interesting point to consider comes from the U.S. Department of Education, which surveyed nearly 3,000 colleges and reported, “Colleges have added managers and support personnel at a steady, vigorous clip over the past 20 years, new research shows, far outpacing the growth in student enrollment and instructors.”



Not only are the numbers of administrative personnel growing rapidly, the salaries and benefits they command are taking a large amount out of the universities’ revenues. The same cannot be said of faculty members. As an example, at Eastern Michigan University, our faculty salaries and benefits are less than 25% of the total expenses. The school has experienced a decline in instruction expenses in recent years, meaning that the core academic operations – teaching and research – are now a smaller piece of the pie. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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If you’re paying you way through college, or your parents are helping you pay for school, you should know about some tax credits and deductions that are available.

If you’re a dependent on your parents’ tax return, they may qualify for the Hope Scholarship. The Hope Scholarship is only available for students in their first or second years of college or vocational schooling. It is a tax credit of up to $1,800 per year per student.

The Lifelong Learning Credit is more flexible and applies to any student in an undergraduate, graduate or professional program. There is no limit to the number of years in which the credit can be claimed, but the credit is limited to $2,000 per return.  If Mom and Dad are claiming the Hope Scholarship credit in your first two years of college, they cannot also claim the Lifelong Learning Credit for you in those years. Once your Hope eligibility is passed, they can start claiming your LLC.  Likewise, if your parents use the tax-free distributions from an Education IRA (Coverdell Account), they cannot also claim Hope Scholarship Credits for you.

Student loan interest deductions are available for use while you’re still in school, provided that you’re actually paying on your student loans. For most loans, the payments are deferred until after graduation, but private loans and PLUS loans may qualify for this favorable tax treatment. New PLUS loans issued after July 1, 2008 can be deferred – like regular student loans – until after the beneficiary graduates or leaves school. If your parents defer the payments, they’ll also defer the student loan interest credit. Check with the IRS for income-based limits on this deduction. Once you graduate and file your own tax returns, you can claim the student loan interest deductions on your own return.

Some government-issued savings bonds are eligible for favorable tax treatment if used to pay qualified higher education expenses.  Federal savings bonds are already exempt from municipal and state income taxes, but are normally subject to Federal income tax. If used for higher education expenses, the bonds may be tax-exempt. The bonds must be E, EE or I Series bonds issued after December 31, 1989. The bonds must be issued to the person claiming the deduction, and the bond owner must have been at least age 24 when the bond was issued to claim the break.  Bonds bought by parents and issued in a child’s name don’t qualify for the exclusion.

The tax code changes each year, but students and their parents can expect the favorable tax treatments for college expenses to continue while Congress wrestles with ways to reduce the high cost of higher education.

Ian Ayres is a gentleman and a scholar (and a lawyer and an economist). He’s a professor at Yale, and since 2005 has been handing out cash to his students whenever he assigns one of his own books as a required text. That way, he hopes, people will understand that he wants to use his own material because it’s necessary, not because he wants some royalties action.

In addition to explaining the motivation for royalty “disgorgement,” Ayres points out that any college student who’s assigned a text written by their professor is justified in requesting a rebate on the royalties the prof is generating. One more way to decrease the feelings of impotent rage which textbook purchasing tends to bring forth.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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If you’re planning to apply to grad school someday, please heed Female Science Professor’s words of wisdom. She knows of what she speaks, and her descriptions of two different–and considerately unnamed–graduate-program hopefuls is painful in its education. Student 1 seems capable of dealing with the realities of and the hoop-jumping required for graduate studies. Student 2, not so much.

Seriously, learn as much as you can about the application process prior to actually applying. Don’t waste your professors’ time, especially the ones who might someday write you a letter of recommendation. They are busier than you are and will be pissed if you suck up several perfectly good hours that they will never get back.

From FSP’s post, What to Expect When You’re Clueless:

Student 1 has been talking to graduate students about their research and their general experiences as grad students and has been reading papers in the major journals. Student 1 seeks out professors for scientific and other academic discussions and has been proactive about doing research experiences (for credit) and science-related jobs (for pay). By talking to people and being generally aware, Student 1 knows what steps to take in applying to grad programs. Student 1 probably needs some advice, but overall is pretty savvy about the process.

Student 2 has had a similar number of research experiences and science jobs, but tends to focus on the immediate task at hand. Student 2 does best when told very specifically what to do and doesn’t seem to be able to handle a lot of information at once. If general advice is given to Student 2 in advance of a specific task, it needs to be given again when directly relevant. Imagine that Student 2 (S2) has the following conversation with a Science Professor (SP) who advised one of Student 2’s research projects. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Big dreams and no money. Such is the situation colleges, universities, and the students who attend them are struggling with. The schools want to teach students to think outside the box, to be able to look ahead and improve the future of humanity. The students want to learn how to think wider and deeper and bigger and more. The President wants the schools to kick some researching butt and find ways to get us out of this mess (pick one).

Too bad there’s a global economic crisis, and the recession our country is experiencing is sucking the life and the funding out of everyone’s Big Dreams balloons. Now the schools and the students are walking around carrying sad little limp and deflated aspirations, jettisoning the deeper-thinking, big-picture courses and degrees for the more utilitarian/practical ones.

I won’t bore you with numbers, but there are an astonishing number of folks doing pre-professional undergrad work, and a ridiculous number of business degree holders in this country. I think we’re good on the ‘future of money’ front; someone learn something that’s helpful in a different way. Think outside the box, people. Don’t give up on the idea that knowing how to think in non-linear directions is conducive to the survival of mankind.

Read this piece in the NY Times:

The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change the future of higher education. Even as universities, both public and private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery to climate change to economic recovery.

American universities have long struggled to meet almost irreconcilable demands: to be practical as well as transcendent; to assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own sake; to both add value and question values. And in the past decade and a half, such conflicting and unbounded expectations have yielded a wave of criticism on issues ranging from the cost of college to universities’ intellectual quality to their supposed decline into unthinking political correctness. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Sallie Mae and Gallup recently released a report entitled How America Pays For College. The study gathered data from families and college-bound students related to their plans for paying for higher education for their children. Not surprisingly, parents provided the majority of financial support for their children

According to the study, parents provide about one-third of the funds needed for their children to attend college from their savings or directly from their income. Parents also provided additional cash through borrowing, however, few parents chose to borrow from their home equity to cover the cost of college. Those who did, however, borrowed on average more than $10,000. The combined parent contribution amounted to nearly half of the cost of attending college.

Student borrowing comprised slightly less than one-quarter of the respondents’ college cash. Grants and scholarships were used to pay for about 15 percent of the total cost of attendance. Student income from work covered about 10 percent of the cost and the remaining costs were covered by friends and relatives.

Overall, slightly less than half of all families interviewed borrowed money to pay for a child’s higher education. Twenty-eight percent of families reported borrowing Federal funds, and borrowed on average slightly less than $5,100.

One of the study’s more interesting findings was that nearly half of all parents and more than one-third of college students did not eliminate institutions based on their cost, even though the cost of attending a particular institution is the major determinant in how much money a family needs to borrow.  Additionally, seven of ten parents and students said that the student’s post-graduation income potential did not impact their decision to borrow funds, although the post-graduation income determines how well a student can repay his or her debts.

Borrowing funds for higher education is widely accepted. Seventy-five percent of parents and eighty-seven percent of students say that they would prefer to borrow to attend college rather than not attend college at all.
Most families were worried about the economy’s impact on their ability to pay for higher education. Six of ten families were concerned about the cost of tuition rising beyond their ability to pay, while just over half of respondents thought rising interest rates on private student loans may be problematic.