Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure as I am on vacation.

Duke University grad student Ken Ilgunas wrote a sublime piece in Salon.com about his own grand social experiment: He currently (until someone busts him after reading his article) lives in his van in a campus parking lot. Ilgunas went the standard student-loan route for his undergrad degree and hated the resulting loss of freedom he dealt with while working to pay it all off. For grad school at Duke, he’s decided to borrow nothing and graduate owing no one.

In order to pull that off at Duke, home of the $37,000/year tuition special, it becomes necessary to live a severely frugal existence. Seriously: he’s got a van, a few items of clothing, a single-burner camp stove, a sleeping bag, car insurance, and a lot of powdered milk, oatmeal, spaghetti and peanut butter.

From the article:

The more money I had borrowed, I came to realize, the more freedom I had surrendered. Yet, I still considered my education — as costly as it was — to be priceless. So now, motivated to go back to school yet determined not to go back into debt, I had to think outside the box. Or, as Henry David Thoreau might suggest, inside one.

…And so: I decided to buy a van. Though I had never lived in one, I knew I had the personality for it. I had a penchant for rugged living, a sixth sense for cheapness, and an unequaled tolerance for squalor. More…

Have you ever walked around Duke? I lived in Durham for a short while, and spent some non-academic time wandering the campus. Everyone looks very well taken care of. Stanford kids look good, too, but Duke’s population brings it to a shinier level. Which is to say I doubt Mr. Ilgunas blends.

It would be considered a noble and an excellent statement to live in a van while attending Evergreen. You would be applauded and everyone would bring you food and other special perks. (Except for me; I would bring you bleach and wet wipes.) But van living at Duke University may not go over too well.

Regardless of the outcome, I’m rooting for him. I’m hoping he pulls off graduate school minus the staggering debt, and I hope his article makes the rounds and wakes the powers that be the hell up as to the vile and nonsensical pile of money a human seeking higher education must fork over so as to get through the ivory gates.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure while I’m on vacation.

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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Arjun Muralidharan, aka the Productive Student, has a list of 14 ways college students can strive for greenness on Earth. You’ll want to do them all to slow the destruction of the planet, but you’ll actually do them to save yourself some coinage.

14 Ways to Be a Greener Student (and Save Money Doing It):

-Eat less meat or go vegetarian
-Do more efficient laundry
-Buy groceries with less packaging
-Eat out less
-Buy a greener computer
-Optimize your commute
-Decompose organic waste
-Bring your own bag for shopping
-Recycle paper
-Buy recycled notepads and textbooks
-Put old and unwanted textbooks up for sale
-Use a durable water bottle
-Be conscious about lights everywhere
-Reduce and manage electronic devices

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(recycled notebooks)

I don’t care how high your SAT scores are: if you’re planning to attend any institution of higher education that isn’t blatantly obvious in its accreditation (Stanford, Yale, etc.), and you don’t take the so-easy-a-monkey-could-do-it step of checking your intended school’s official accreditation status, then you’re an idiot.

Go here or here and get it done. You’ll spend hours more time texting today than you will ascertaining that your institution will hand you a valid degree after you’ve given said school your blood, sweat, tears, time, and money. Avoid this woman’s mistake.

Accreditation Resources:

Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA)
U.S. Dept. of Edu. Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(graduation joy)

Oh, it’s coming. Denying it won’t help you. Fall Term is starting up soon whether you’re ready or not. When the first week of classes have been attended and while you’re still focusing on first chapters, small quizzes, tolerable assignments, and the finer points on your professors’ syllabi, at the very least please skim this: How to Study: A Brief Guide. Learning how to learn is, how do you say, crucial, of the essence, invaluable, indispensable and totally effing necessary.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(take notes)

Watch it, people. Just because information is second only in volume to pollution on this planet, it does not mean all info is available for you to use and then slap your name on to it like you wrote it or something. Plagiarism, for those of you who missed that day in class, is when you take someone else’s work and falsely claim it as your own. It’s very bad, and it makes you look like an ass@$%*.

The NY Times has an article up about plagiarism and the tech-savvy information generation. The lines are blurry for Gen-Y, apparently.

If you’d like to avoid being an uninformed cheating ass@#$%, the following links are helpful.

Purdue Online Writing Lab: Avoiding Plagiarism
Plagiarism.org

I must go. The line above regarding information and the volume of it is freaking me out. Can digital information have volume at all? And is it possible to measure the volume of every printed word on the planet? What about all the still-intact newspapers in old landfills? Do those count as existing information? Crap!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Want to be a lawyer but you have a conscience? Do you find yourself sympathizing more with the planet than with your fellow humans? Angry with mankind for hosing the planet utterly? Do I have the career for you! Environmental law is the perfect way for smarty-pants lawyer types who want to use their fighting powers for good to stick it to the man while saving the world.

The law firm Shems Dunkiel Raubvogel & Saunders PLLC has two environmental law blogs to peruse: The Renewable Energy Law Blog and the Vermont Environmental and Land Use Law Blog.

I would also recommend looking into the law schools below as they all offer environmental law in one form or another. Some schools offer only graduate degrees in environmental law, while others offer environmental law coursework as part of another law degree. Georgetown University, for example, includes environmental law as part of its Masters of Studies in Law (MSL) Degree for Journalists.

Environmental Law Programs:

Lewis and Clark Law School
Vermont Law School
Pace Law School
The University of Maryland School of Law
NYU Law
Berkeley Law
Stanford Law School
Georgetown Law
GW Law
Yale Law School
Columbia Law School
Colorado Law
Tulane Law School
UT Austin School of Law
University of Oregon School of Law
University of Washington School of Law
Harvard Law School
Duke Univ. Environmental Law and Policy Clinic
Boston College Law
University of Utah College of Law
Florida State Univ. College of Law

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Any current or prospective MBA students out there looking for advice? Aswini Anburajan is currently working on her MBA at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge in the UK. In her post she explains what she’d been hoping for when she embarked on her current education adventure, and what she’s figured out along the way.

It’s not what she thought it would be; some bits are better, some aren’t, but all of it has helped her make solid realizations about the business world, the real world, and the interactions among humans that thread through everything.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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*Author’s Note and Update: I recently received a very nice letter from Educaedu.com’s PR person, explaining that because their U.S. site is new, it is still incomplete. However, as she pointed out, they do not charge schools a fee to be listed on the site, and as the information regarding schools, programs, degrees offered is updated manually, it’s understandable that important programs, like UC Davis’s Veterinary School was not listed at the time I wrote this post. UCD’s Vet School is on their site now, though, which I find relieving.

I would also like to point out how polite and calm the PR person is down there in the Comments. I think it’s clear why she’s in Public Relations and I am not. I would be a disaster at that job. I am impressed with her ability to keep it holstered.

The best way to test a website that claims to be an excellent searching tool is to use it to locate something you already know exists. Educaedu.com is an international search engine for locating the perfect degree/course/program for a given student based on what they want to study and where they want to study it. The section of the site for the United States is fairly new, so perhaps we can chalk up its incompleteness to the fact that it lacks maturity. Or maybe (I’m being cynical), schools have to pay up to be included on the site.

Here’s what Educaedu has to say about its many global sites:

Educaedu, the leading online educational directory, has recently released a website exclusively for the United States with more than 1,000 courses and programs. Those who are looking for a specific course or program can search the Educaedu website and can directly connect with institutions of interest. Universities, colleges, and smaller institutes find this website useful to promote their courses and programs with the objective to attract potential students.

One of the advantages of Educaedu is the advanced search engine system, which can filter courses and programs by state, city, mode of study and area of study. Another benefit Educaedu offers is its ability to directly connect students with schools and programs of interest by directing them to the specific program coordinator or admissions officer using advanced and efficient enquiry forms. By continuously updating its database,
The website provides all the necessary elements for the quick and easy selection of a course most suited to ones profile.

I don’t know what’s going on behind the curtain, but I do know that at UC Davis one can acquire a degree in Materials Science and Engineering, and when I searched for a program I knew to be in existence, it was nowhere to be found on Educaedu.org’s list of California schools offering degrees and courses in Materials Science. I’m just saying.

Has anyone counted the plethora of higher education institutions in the State of California lately? Not including the large number of private schools (Stanford, Mills, USC, etc.), there are 23 California State University schools and 10 University of California schools. The total of Educaedu’s list of California colleges is 33, which is purely coincidental, I assure you. Only two of the 33 are UCs and four are Heald colleges. None are Cal State Universities. I call foul. (I call the more appropriate eight-letter word, but I’m working on being classy this week.)

Perhaps one would have better luck finding complete lists of actual four-year colleges and universities on one of Educaedu’s original sites for Spain. Good luck avoiding matriculation through Spain’s version of Heald Technical College.

Author’s note: I couldn’t just write this post and walk away. Nope. I had to check one more thing: Unforgivable! I clicked Educaedu’s own damn link to Veterinary Medicine Schools in California and they have three schools listed. Not one is the University of California at Davis, one of the most respected and well-known vet schools in the f-ing world. I’m not exaggerating. Now I’m calling bullshit and I’m writing it without the asterisks.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Prior to reading the article below, I had my own theory as to why it takes more than four years for students to earn a bachelor’s degree. It all comes down to money. I included a few more factors in my theory, but I was mostly right in line with the study. Basically, higher tuition, decreased school budgets, a depressed economy, an increased population of young adults hell bent on pursuing a college education (because they’ve been told since birth that only educated humans will ever make enough money) mean more time spent earning a degree.

I was scared like a little girl to look up tuition rates for 1972 and present day, so I don’t have that information for you. My cojones are a force to be reckoned with, but I do have my limits. Eviscerating tuition hikes are one of them. But I think it’s common knowledge that tuition rates have increased since 1972, the economy is less than healthy, more kids head for college these days, and school budgets have been cut many, many times.

The crappier the economy is, the more the school budgets are cut, which leads to increased tuition and fewer faculty and staff. Higher tuition means more working for students and a decreased course load, leading to a longer stay in college. Less budget money means fewer instructors, fewer courses offered, and a more difficult time for the students to get into the classes they need in order to graduate, leading again to more time spent earning that bachelor’s degree.

According to the study, the fact that bachelor’s degree acquisition takes longer than four years is due to the type of institution a student attends; higher tier state schools and private schools vs. community colleges and lower tier state schools. Institution type and how a given school is affected by, and subsequently deals with, decreased funding is what it all comes down to.

Top-level schools with better faculty-to-student ratios offer an improved learning experience for the students. This gets them in and out in a more four-year manner. Public schools, like community colleges and state schools, cram a few more kids into every classroom, which decreases the learning experience and mucks up the four-year works. Hence, four years to complete an undergraduate degree at a top-tier school and closer to six years at a lower-tier school.

Interesting. And I don’t totally buy it. I mean, I understand what the study is saying and how a decrease in funding can affect the learning experience. But I think there are more factors involved. A students-per-faculty ratio of 25.5 to 1 vs. 29.8 to 1 is enough to cause the learning experience to suffer so much that two more years are tacked onto the end of the original four-year bachelor’s degree plan? Really? Or, you know, maybe, the less-than top tier schools are more selective when choosing faculty, staff, and students, and have a lot more private financial backing than do the community colleges and state schools. Less crowding, supah-focused students, publish-or-perish faculty, and enough cash to be able to keep both the crowding and the lay-offs down to a minimum.

Any institution relying on public funding has historically been screwed when the economy hits the crapper. And may I remind everyone that in 1972, the helicopter parent insanity hadn’t quite begun. Although parents were starting to push the importance of a college education, it was nowhere near the life-or-death situation that it is today: College or sweatshop-work, kiddo. You pick!

These days, there are more college students in the system and no one has money to pay for all that education, not the parents, not the kids, and certainly not the schools. Loans and financial aid are harder to nail down as well. I really don’t think it has only to do with a few more students per classroom and whether or not a student hits the higher education jackpot and manages to attend a top-tier school.

Here’s the summary from the study:

Time to completion of the baccalaureate degree has increased markedly in the United States over the last three decades, even as the wage premium for college graduates has continued to rise. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 and the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, we show that the increase in time to degree is localized among those who begin their postsecondary education at public colleges outside the most selective universities. In addition, we find evidence that the increases in time to degree were more marked amongst low income students. We consider several potential explanations for these trends. First, we find no evidence that changes in the college preparedness or the demographic composition of degree recipients can account for the observed increases. Instead, our results suggest that declines in collegiate resources in the less-selective public sector increased time to degree. Furthermore, we present evidence of increased hours of employment among students, which is consistent with students working more to meet rising college costs and likely increases time to degree by crowding out time spent on academic pursuits.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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