Obama is upgrading the higher education system in this country (we hope), starting with an increase in Pell Grant award amounts. What does that mean for Pell Grant applicants? Who qualifies and for how much? Basically, the results of the FAFSA number-crunching are what determine a student’s eligibility.

Sandra Proulx lays it all out and takes a closer look at Pell Grant qualifications:

…there is no “one size fits all” recipient.
Keep in mind, the Pell Grant is awarded to undergraduates with a high degree of unmet financial need; most Pell money goes to students with a total family income around or below $20,000. But, students whose families have a total income of up to $50,000 may be eligible too. In 2005-2006, students with family incomes of less than $20,000 accounted for 57% of Pell Grant recipients.

…Pell Grant qualifications can be affected by a student’s enrollment status as well as income earned through employment, too. Think about it – if you are enrolled half-time, your tuition is less and therefore you will require less aid. Undergraduates who work while they are enrolled are more likely to have incomes that decrease their eligibility for federal need-based aid (ahh, didn’t think of that, did you?). Some low-income students may even find themselves ineligible for Pell Grants because they are enrolled part time at very low cost colleges, or they work while they are enrolled, or do both. More…

Further Reading:

Excellent FAFSA Resources

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Studying for the California Bar exam? Have an extra $1000 burning a hole in your freshly-law-degreed butt-pocket? Then by all means check out BarMax: California Edition. One of the only iPhone apps to cost that much money, its creator, Mike Ghaffary, a JD/MBA ‘06 Harvard grad, says it has everything one might require to study up for the bar.

Ghaffary has an MBA and as of December 2009, is a member of the California Bar; so he’s got that whole I’m business savvy and I studied for and conquered the bar exam thing going for him.

As with all things iPhone, it’s portable and weighs a lot less than the fifty pounds of books you’d be buying and dragging around town if you were to go the dead-tree route. So handy! Also, if you contact BarMax, they’ll send you a free trial version so you can evaluate the materials before forking over a decade’s worth of ramen money.

BarMax: California Edition, available now in the iPhone’s App Store for $999.99, is a study guide for the California Bar Exam. Harvard lawyers oversaw development of the app, which weighs in at 1 GB and includes outlines, lectures, a study calendar, and real questions and essays from previous exams. The only comparable app available now is from BarBri, but you must be enrolled in the company’s $3000 to $4000 classes to use most of the features.

TechCrunch reports that Mike Ghaffary, a former law student and current director of business development at TrialPay, envisioned BarMax as an alternative to BarBri’s pricey classes and digital offerings. Ghaffary partnered with successful app developers in Los Angeles, and enlisted some fellow Harvard Law alumni to guide development. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Here’s a quick video showcasing the college student experience with eTextbooks on tablet devices. It’s cool. (If you’re into that sort of thing.)

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Have I mentioned the awesomeness that is Flat World Knowledge? I’m fairly certain that I have. They were doing good things in the textbook world back in September of 2008, and now they’re teaming up with Bookshare to provide alternative textbook options to students requiring non-traditional textbook modalities.

Students who are blind, have low vision, or have a learning disability that requires computer-generated speech and highlighted text soon will have more resources after publisher Flat World Knowledge announced Dec. 14 that it will make its content available to Bookshare, the largest web-based library for people with print disabilities.

Bookshare, which has 75,000 members worldwide, will add 11 new digital textbooks to its online library, which has been bolstered in the past year by contributions from colleges and universities hoping to bring reading material to students who can’t see standard print or can’t turn a page. More…

Further Reading:

Partnership a Boon for Alternative Textbooks
Bookshare.org: Books Without Barriers
FlatWorldKnowledge.com
Flat World Knowledge
Buying Textbooks: New, Used, Rented or Digital
Custom: Cool for Sneakers, Not for Textbooks

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Kay M. McClenney, whose day job involves being the director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, is a contributing writer for the NY Times blog, The Choice, which focuses on college admissions advice. Dr. McClenney just posted part 5 of a week-long series answering readers’ questions about community college.

Guidance Office Posts:

Answers About Community Colleges, Part 1
Answers About Community Colleges, Part 2
Answers on Community Colleges, Part 3
Answers on Community Colleges, Part 4
Answers on Community College, Part 5

Further Reading:

Too Much Enrollment, Not Enough Funding
The Community College Guide
Community College Before the Four-Year School
Community College vs. University

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Again with the slapping. This time it’s for the jackasses in charge of higher education in this country. If you still feel they (the schools, the loan people, and the government) aren’t lacking in smarts and high-moral-ground-standing cojones, then please read this excerpt from WSJ’s Journal Editorial Report.

It’s a conversation between Paul Gigot, Naomi Schaefer Riley, and Dan Henninger regarding the cost of college, who’s in charge of making it cost so damn much, and the three-year-degree option. It’s buried three conversations down in the transcripts, so I’m posting the conversation in its entirety.

Also, when I tried to narrow it down to just the really good, informative chunks, ninety-nine percent of the conversation made my slapping hand twitch, so I figured it needed to be posted in complete form. Not long, not boring, and full of jaw-clenching tidbits about the Orwellian state of higher education. (Spoiler alert: They’re all bastards.)

Gigot: It’s a trend that most parents are keeping an anxious eye on: the skyrocketing cost of a college education. According to a new report by the College Board, those costs continued to rise last year despite a 2.1% decline in the Consumer Price Index. Hit hard by state budget cuts, four-year public colleges raised tuition and fees by an average of 6.5%, while prices at private colleges rose 4.4%. Add room and board, and the average cost of attendance at a public four-year college is now more than $15,000 a year. At private colleges, the price tag is $35,000. The sticker shock has led some, including Tennessee senator and former education secretary Lamar Alexander, to push for a three-year degree program at the college level.

We’re back with Dan Henninger and Steve Moore. And also joining us, The Wall Street Journal’s deputy Taste Page editor, Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Naomi, why do college costs keep rising even if the price level doesn’t for everyone else?

Ms. Riley: Well, it’s a third-party-payer system. I mean basically what you have is, colleges know they can keep raising the price, and they know that the government, through financial aid programs and various grants that they give to universities, both public and private, is basically going to pick up the difference. Unfortunately, for middle-class parents, it doesn’t always work out that way. They’re not picking up all of the difference for them, but colleges keep raising the sticker price.

Gigot: Because there’s income limits on who gets the subsidies, but the subsidies are vast–I mean, the Pell Grants, direct grants for people. There are basically subsidized loans, and then there are subsidies for saving for school too, which is how a lot of middle-class parents help. Are you saying there’s a kind of chasing-your-tail quality here? The tuition goes up, subsidies follow, and then the people say, tuition can go up again, and then subsidies have to go up again?

Ms. Riley: That’s absolutely true. And then in addition to that, you also get a kind of arms race among the colleges. I mean, you get a situation where, first of all, it turns out that parents think the college is better if they raise a price. So if you see a $50,000 cost on college–which by the way, happened this year.

Gigot: Where is that?

Ms. Riley: Middlebury College. It costs $50,000 for tuition, room and board.

Gigot: In Vermont.

Ms. Riley: Yes, for this year. Vermont, you know, a very high-cost-of-living state. And, you know, but parents see that sticker price, and they assume, “Oh that must be a great college education.” So, you know, it’s–all of the wrong incentives are in place. And then colleges are spending money on things like landscaping and fancy food programs and Wi-Fi in the bathrooms and, you know, it’s really hard to sort of figure out where the quality is.

Gigot: I have a hard time imagining. I barely used a PC, Dan.

Henninger: Well, you know, it’s going to get worse, Paul. The College Board just reported that private loans last year for college dropped by 50%, while the public federally subsidized loans rose 15%. Now, we also know that the Congress has taken–is going to disadvantage the private loan program, which means that the federal program is–

Gigot: They’re going to put it out of business.

Henninger: They’re going to put it out of business, right, which means that basically colleges are going to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government. You will never get countervailing price pressure under those circumstances.

Gigot: All right, Steve, is this going to lead to you want to go send your kids to college for only three years?

Moore: Well, you know, Paul, I have an 18- and 16-year-old. I’m listening to these prices that Naomi’s talking about and I’m going to need a big fat pay raise, or else my kids are going to be with me another four years, which is a nightmare.

But look, this is a real issue. It’s going to cost now $200,000 to put a kid through college. You have to start asking yourself the question, “Look, I’ll give you a $200,000 check. Maybe that’s a better way to start your life than going to college.” But Naomi put her finger on the problem. The two areas–I was looking at the inflation rates in health care and education–both of those have booming costs. Education costs have gone triple the rate of inflation over the last decade. And it’s because the people who are getting the service aren’t the ones who are paying for it, and that leads to exploding costs.

Gigot: Naomi?

Ms. Riley: Yeah, I just want to say something about the three-year college costs. You know it’s funny, if you go back to the 1970s, which we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, a lot of colleges actually reduced the length of their semesters, and they said this was to save costs for parents. But of course, the semesters stayed shorter, so kids got less education overall. And the prices never went down. So I think you also have to kind of take these big ideas from schools about saving you money with a grain of salt.

Gigot: The likelihood is that they’d find a way to charge the same amount anyway, even if you only went for three years.

Ms. Riley: Exactly. That’s exactly right.

Henninger: But you get a year earlier to start work and pay back those loans.

Gigot: That would be the benefit. It’s an opportunity cost would be lower. But Dan, the government is going to–isn’t going to change any of this. If anything, they’re increasing the subsidies. they want to make Pell Grants an entitlement. Right now, it has to be passed with annual appropriation. They want to make it automatic.

Henninger: Yeah, and, you know, there is a social aspect to this as well. It’s pretty well proven that the payoff to a college education is higher lifetime earnings. The demand for college now is tremendous. People are just going to these colleges. Probably what we need is either online colleges or more colleges to meet the supply.

Gigot: But which college doesn’t necessarily help, does it?

Ms. Riley: No, no. There are a lot of studies that show, if you are a person who got into both Harvard and, say, the University of Arkansas, and you chose the University of Arkansas, your lifetime earnings would not be that much different. Of course one solution is just improving K-12 education.

Gigot: That would help enormously. And you might get higher returns on people who then don’t go to college or go to community colleges.

Ms. Riley: Yeah, the way it used to be.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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It’s Blog Action Day, and the politically correct bloggers (of which I am, mostly, on my less-sarcastic days) are supposed to tell everyone to save the planet, damnit. So reduce, reuse, recycle, walk, don’t drive, eat local, think global, compost, be as organic as is everly possible, don’t tangle up dolphins or club baby seals, and if you can possibly swing it, please consider adopting some polar bears or penguins (they’re in trouble and it’s totally our fault).

Previous Planet-Saving Posts:

Sustainability Degree Offered at Arizona State University
Saving the Planet is a Solid Career Choice
Textbook Rental Saves Money and Trees
Green Toilets at ASU Polytechnic
Penguin Games
It’s Not Easy Being Green
Free Money For Textbooks
No More Tray Sledding For You!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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)

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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After saving for 18 years, my parents had my college money saved up and ready to mete out for strictly education items only. And still, the first semester’s worth of tuition, dorm costs, and meal cards were a bit of a punch in the abdominal region for all three of us. Oof.

And then came the necessary accoutrements: computer, extra long sheets, phone, textbooks, school supplies, etc. That shopping expedition, which was the absolute bare-bones minimum, I assure you, gave us vomitous feelings. My entire childhood had been strictly budgeted just so my college education would be covered. None of us were used to just laying down thousands of dollars for anything that didn’t fall into the Life or Death category.

It’s easy to fall prey to the Everyone else has a pink furry lamp so I have to have one too! mantra, but try to avoid it.

Loft Bed: It Depends
If you’ve managed to keep the buying under control, then, no, you won’t need a gigantic wooden behemoth that you’ll have to disassemble and try to get rid of nine months from now.

If you brought along enough extra furniture and plastic crap to fill an apartment and are shocked to discover you will be calling upon your Tetris skills to cram it all into half of a tiny square room, then yes, you will be needing a loft bed. Since everyone regrets investing in a loft bed within a few months of buying and building one, you can probably find one cheap on Craigslist.

Dorm-Room Phone: No
Everyone under the age of sixty has a cell phone, so paying for a land line in your room is dumb. It’s also risky if your dorm has big loud parties with all doors open along the hall. There’s always some guy or girl who misses their ex (who is spending the year abroad in outer Mongolia), and feels it is absolutely imperative that they drunk-dial said ex, beg to get back together, and then pass out with the phone off the hook while outer-Mongolia ex is ranting and raving about what a jack-ass the drunk half of the ended relationship is. You will be paying for this

Desk Lamp: Yes
If a lamp doesn’t come standard with the room, get one. Otherwise you’ll be studying by fluorescent ceiling lighting, which will hum and flicker and will foster violent tendencies around two a.m.

Laptop: Yes
This does not require explaining.

Printer: No
It’ll take up too much space, and the ink cartridges suck to replace, and they will always run out ten minutes before a paper is due. Learn to use and love the campus computer labs and the people who work there (use the lab, love the people). You can print stuff out there, and if anything goes haywire (and it will), the Gods of the Computer Lab will be able to help you. This will not be the case if you are crying about a term-paper meltdown in your dorm room.

New Textbooks: It Depends
See previous post.

Linens: Yes
A towel (two if your school is near a beachy area), a washcloth, comforter, and one set of sheets. Make sure the sheets are the right size. For some reason, even though only a non-majority percentage of students at any given college are over six feet tall, they make all dorm beds extra long. Which means that for probably only one year, all American college freshmen have to buy (and then never ever use again) extra long twin bed sheets. Asinine.

Dorm Fridge: Maybe
Only if you or your roommate either can’t share or have a difficult time reading labels or remembering which shelf belongs to whom.

Microwave: No
99% of the other dormies will have one, and if you’re wanting to “cook” anything stinky and offensive, most dorms have a kitchen. Even the lamest and grungiest versions will come equipped with a microwave.

Shower Shoes: Yes
Because dorm hook-ups are way less hot when all involved parties have foot fungus.

Bucket-Thingy to Carry Bathroom Paraphernalia: Yes
It will cost you less than five bucks, and if you don’t bring one, I can guarantee that (a) your room will be the farthest one away from the bathroom, and (b) you will drop your towel in front of a hallway full of people while trying desperately to juggle slippery bottles of shampoo, wet toothbrushes, squishy toothpaste tubes and sharp razors. I don’t care how hot you are, it’s still hard to be sexy while standing there naked, wondering whether squatting or bending over to retrieve the towel and the bathroom items is your best bet.

Running Shoes: Yes
Even if you’d rather walk, forward motion at any speed is the cheapest and best way to get away from your fellow dorm residents for a while and have some time to think and release some stress.

Posted by Alexa Harrington