Posted by Alexa Harrington

Mr. Sam Jackson over at The Sam Jackson College Experience, in his powers-for-good brilliance, has come up with a way to aggregate many students’ experiences with the admissions process so as to bring said experiences to the attention of postsecondary institutions and (hopefully) have some changes made for the better. He, along with myUsearch, is offering a $1000 College Admissions Frustration Scholarship to the student who writes the essay best answering these questions:

What has been the most frustrating part of your college admissions process? Why is it important for colleges and universities to change this? What suggestions do you have for colleges and universities to try to relieve your frustration and the frustration of your fellow students?

Sam started his blog as a high school student when he was in the throes of his own personal college admissions process hell, and is continuing to try to point out to the powers that be which bits of the process are warped and what might be done to change the warpiness for the better. See? Using his powers for good.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is like the Disneyland of number crunching. You can find crazy amounts of data on which occupations are going to be good or bad career choices in the nearish future, how much money workers in those occupations can expect to earn, what the competition for those jobs will be like, etc. They have people (I wish I had people) crunching various combinations of numbers and writing up reports on what the future holds in the job market.

There’s a great report which is pertinent to the soon-to-be college grads: The 2004-2014 Job Outlook for College Graduates. In the report the authors explain that having a college degree will considerably improve your chances of getting a job in one of the “pure college” occupations. By “pure college” they mean that at least sixty percent of the workers in a given occupation between the ages of 25 and 44 have at least a bachelor’s degree, if not higher.

There’s an excellent chart (Chart 2) a few pages into the report that shows all twenty pure college occupations that are expected to have the most job opening for college graduates. Feel free to read the whole report and to peruse the big chart of number-crunched perfection. I’ve scaled it down to the top five.

Job opportunities for college graduates will be especially excellent in the following five fields:

Postsecondary teachers

Elementary school teachers, except special education

Accountants and auditors

Secondary school teachers, except special and vocational education

Computer software engineers, applications

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Whenever possible, I like to point out educators who have used their powers for good. Samuel Mockbee was absolutely one of the exceptional ones. Before leukemia got the better of him in 2001, he was an architecture professor at Auburn University and was the co-founder and co-director of the socially- and ecologically-conscious Rural Studio program.

The intention of the program at its inception in 1993 was (and still is) to teach students in Auburn’s Design, Architecture and Construction Program to design and build homes and community buildings for low-income residents in the Hale County region of Alabama. (Hale County is best known as the impoverished area in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.) Students are challenged to use as many recycled and reclaimed materials as possible when building the homes. Mockbee taught his students that “it’s got to be warm, dry, and noble.”

I have the book Andrea Oppenhe Dean wrote about the program and the resulting projects and it’s beautiful. There is nary a standard structure to be found. I wanted it for the photography (and because I’m obsessed with anything even vaguely related to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Walker Evans), but I got sucked in when I started reading the introduction. It’s an incredible story, and I’m happy it’s real and is still occurring.

Further Reading:

Proceed and Be Bold: Rural Studio After Samuel Mockbee
Salon: Samuel Mockbee
Education for Community Building
AU’s Rural Studio Blueprint for West Alabama Forestry Project
Architecture Week: Mockbee Southern Genius

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Trying to decide whether to attend a community college or a university right out of high school is a question worthy of pondering. I’ve attended both (university, then CC, then university) and each has its pros and cons.

Class Size

Community Colleges tend toward fewer students per class, which means more student/teacher interaction. This is good for students who like access to their instructors so they can ask questions and avoid getting lost (in the course material or in the shuffle).

Universities usually have massive auditoriums full of a few hundred students, all of whom are trying to keep their heads above water and have hordes of fellow student to compete with for the prof’s office hours. Higher level courses have smaller class sizes (the riff-raff have been weeded out and those left have proven their mettle).

Campus Housing

Community Colleges rarely have on-campus housing to offer.

Universities generally have one or more version of campus housing in order to accommodate students, grad students, faculty, married students, etc.

Expense

Community College will put less of a dent in your college fund.

University tuition costs vary depending upon whether they are public or private, but are more expensive than community colleges.

Caliber of Instruction

At any school there are the amazing instructors and the dismal ones. It’s just the way it goes. I have experienced both kinds at two-year and at four-year schools.

A lot of great instructors teach at community colleges because they actually want to teach and not do the whole publish-or-perish game. I’ve had community college instructors who were there because they wanted to teach at a college-level and they were effing good at it. They could break down some utterly confusing and complicated calculus or chemistry or physics moment into its most simplified, basic form and with one eloquent statement sweep it up, explain it, and have it all fall into place, fully comprehended, in my head.

I’ve had university profs who were so busy with their research (which is, unfortunately, the only way to achieve and maintain professor status) that they were more like silent partners in the course and their TA’s did the actual teaching and question-fielding. But I’ve also had ass-kicking professors who clearly went into their chosen field because it is the thing that makes their world complete and they are happiest standing in classroom explaining their idea of perfection to college students.

Architecture

Community Colleges are rarely architecturally stunning as they tend to lack both real estate and funding.

University architecture is what we all think of when we picture a college campus: the buildings vary depending upon the decade in which they were built, but overall a university campus is usually far superior to its community college counterpart.

Transition Issues

The transition from high school to a community college is easier, but you miss out on all the dorm parts.

Jumping from high school to college isn’t as smooth as it could be, but moving away from home when you’re a barely legal adult and living sans parental supervision in a puke-infested dorm is the American version of painfully unmentionable tribal rites of passage. It’s a grow-up-quick, sink-or-swim, survival-of-the-fittest situation and it is what memories are made of.

Degrees Obtainable

Community colleges offer Associate of Arts degrees, nothing higher. However, they are extremely useful as a means to a transfer end: most general ed. coursework that a university requires of its freshmen and sophomores can be taken at a community college.

At a university you can be educated to within an inch of your life: they offer Bachelor’s degrees, Master’s degrees and Doctorates. Go crazy.

College Life

Little or none at a community college.

Lots at a university. Sports, clubs, bonding with fellow collegians, you name it.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

According to this article in the CS Monitor, more and more parents are keeping their kids home and sending them to virtual schools in which the teachers and coursework are accessed online. Any extra supplies are sent by mail to the students’ homes. One mom describes the idea of sending her kid to a virtual school as “the 21st-century, middle-class version of the private tutor.”

Kids who attend virtual schools can spend the extra time on the subjects they have a harder time grasping, and can more speedily attack the subjects they’re comfortable with. In an actual classroom, the teacher has the difficult job of having to walk that middle road: teaching at the average students’ learning pace. The unavoidable results of this are that the kids who are having a tough time get left behind, which affects them academically as well as socially and emotionally, and the kids who understand the information immediately can end up feeling bored and unchallenged.

The idea of sending kids to virtual school is gaining popularity:

Enrollment in online classes last year reached the 1 million mark, growing 22 times the level seen in 2000, according to the North American Council for Online Learning. That’s just the start, says a new paper by the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. Its authors predict that by 2019 half of courses in Grades 9 to 12 will be delivered online.

But, as with every new notion, the implementing of it often involves some working out of the inevitable kinkage. Monitoring learning hours accurately, issues with funding, and having better “official oversight” in place is still being worked out. I think it’s worth the effort to have it be a workable option for kids who either don’t have access to adequate schools, or who don’t fit into their available school for whatever reason.

I’m fortunate enough to live in a city with a decent public school system, and (so far) I have the time and energy to be there when my daughter is doing her homework and to spend time helping her with her extra reading every day. Which is all by way of saying I feel confident that between her day at a good public school and being home in the evenings with her not-utterly-exhausted parents, my kid is going to be covered on all educational fronts.

However, if Seattle schools sucked or if my daughter had issues that I didn’t feel the public education system was handling effectively, I would be stoked of I had solid online options available.

Further Reading:

NPR: Public Schools Expand Curriculum Online

Resources:

North American Council for Online Learning
Virtual School Clearinghouse
University of California College Prep
K12

Posted by Alexa Harrington

College enrollment has maintained a generally upward trend for the past several decades. (Being educated has turned out to have been an excellent idea.) In keeping with the increased enrollment trend, the number of adults pursuing education has been on the rise. According to the N.C.E.S., the adult education numbers for Fall 2007 were 6,956,000 adults aged 25 and over enrolled in college (compared to 10,825,000 18 to 24-year-olds enrolled).

I can’t see that the numbers of adults seeking higher education will diminish any time soon, as we have the Baby Boomers beginning to hit retirement age. As far as generations go, the Boomers are a highly educated group. A lot of them are looking at retirement as the perfect excuse to go back to school.

Being severely technical about it, traditional college students are ages 18 to 24, and nontraditionals are age 25 and up. The ‘traditional’ window is only six years (so you’d better get on with it), and yet those students are the norm and have a smoother college career than most nontraditional students. That may have something to do with the fact that attending college is their main focus. Also, everyone expects them to be there and doing nothing beyond going to school, which simplifies things a bit.

The nontraditionals, however, have a slightly more complicated and less normal postsecondary education process. Things are getting easier as time goes on and the powers that be realize that there’s a decently-sized chunk of the college student population that has different needs, issues, and requirements like childcare, funding, and access to evening, weekend and online courses. Going to school as an eighteen-year-old is different than being a college student with a whole separate non-college life that you can’t disengage from.

Younger students can immerse themselves completely in the college life. Adult nontraditional students can end up having a little bit of a schizophrenic superhero alter ego thing going on. I was a lucky little girl and got to experience college as a traditional and as a nontraditional student. The younger version had a lot more fun and a lot less stress and a somewhat less mature work ethic. The older version had no fun, stupid amounts of stress and had a work ethic capable of turning a lump of coal into a diamond in about two weeks.

I have such fond memories of my first degree—everything is college-campus gorgeous and is rosy-golden and halcyon-hued. My second degree has not one happy moment and is steeped in so much reality it reeks. As such, I would highly recommend not having a newborn in tow when heading back to school. Most adult students head back into the fray when their progeny are at a more independent age and I’m certain this yields better results.

There are more and more adult education-seekers out there these days, which will help their situation considerably. Evening, weekend and online courses are widely available and are usually the best option for adult students who have a career or a family to consider. Not going the traditional daytime college-campus route means missing out on the full college experience, but decreasing the daily commute time or being able to continue working is the most feasible plan for some. Another perk, of course, is that all the other nontraditionals with whom you can commiserate with are more likely to be taking the online, weekend and evening courses.

Adult Education Resources:

AdultStudent.com

Top Ten Adult Student Books

Fun With Statistics:

N.C.E.S.: Participation in Adult Learning

U.S. Census Bureau: 2006 School Enrollment

Posted by Alexa Harrington

High school students are teenagers, and if we were to go strictly along biological lines, teenagers are adult animals. And if we were all still living in caves, teenagers would have moved out of their parents’ cave and found their own well before the modern-day version of adulthood (the 18th birthday).

Modern times and the laws regarding adult status do nothing to curb the biological imperative that makes all teens desperate to move out and escape the parental cave. Higher education is a popular no-parent destination. It has the excellent advantage of being fully approved of by parental units and is lacking in parental supervision.

High school students who are still in the planning phase of their exodus (aren’t graduating in a few weeks) can spend the next several months creating superbly detailed spreadsheets filled with any and all glorious escape possibilities.

College Navigator is a marvelously thorough tool from the U.S. Dept. of Education that allows the user to compare and contrast every public and private college or university in the country. It’s so easy a monkey could figure it out, and it allows the user to compare all the pertinent number-crunched info for any school (too many categories for me to list here). Which means all research will have been done except the fun campus-visit part of the process.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Allie Osmar has a great post up on her blog listing the good and bad bits associated with her first year out of college and in the corporate world. She uses the same pain assessment graphic hospitals use when trying to get a straight answer out of little kids regarding the level of pain they’re experiencing (smiley face = no pain, crying face = lots of pain). Osmar does an excellent job of laying out an honest list of the painful and wonderful parts of that first post-college year.

It’s funny(ish) because it has to be—no one straight out of college is quite yet numb to the state of nature that is Being An Adult (nasty, brutish and not nearly as short or as sweet as your college days were). The real world has the potential to really, really suck. But it is what it is and we can make of it what we will. I think everyone has the capacity to do well and be happy (all at the same time is a nifty trick). Realizing that everyone else is having ten wretchedly real-life moments to every amazing one will really help you get through the day. We’re all in the same boat and it’ll all be okay, I promise. Do what you can do and for god’s sake don’t take everything so seriously.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It’s fascinating to watch a new idea morph over time to become something greater, worse, or completely other than that for which it was first conceived. Einstein’s mind-blowing equations are probably the most obvious and jarring illustration of that. E-mail is another good one; it was initially developed in the 1960’s and was then improved upon in the early 1970’s as a way for the guys who were figuring out that whole Internet thing to be able to communicate with each other more efficiently than by telephone or letter.

E-mail has become an entity unto itself, and while it has not replaced letter writing, memos and phone calling, it has certainly made a significant dent in their usage. Even people who don’t habitually trawl the Internet for the staggering amount of information it has to offer will at least check their e-mail (I know this to be true because I used to be one of those people).

Not quite as tremendous a morphed-idea as Einstein or e-mail (though I’m certain it is to those film school graduates whose careers were launched as a direct result of it) is the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance was developed as a way for unknowns in the film industry to get their work shown. Now, because Sundance was such a great concept and has proved to be a better judge of art and of quality film than the current box office sales standard, having your work stamped with anything related to the Sundance name can pave your way to Hollywood glory. There’s a festival, there’s an institute, there are awards, etc.

There used to be only a teensy handful of film schools in this country; now they’re all over (even in Oklahoma). Using my supreme calculus skills, I did a little math and figured out that the increased number of film schools equals an increase in the number of starving film school grads being turned loose on the planet to fight for some elbow room in Hollywood. Added to that there’s the user-friendly digital video technology that has brought forth a generation that can shoot and edit their own movies before they graduate from high school.

It was already a competitive industry, but now it’s getting to the point where film school graduates might need to start promising their firstborns in order to get a break. So you can see how coming at Hollywood sideways via an independent film festival like Sundance might be considered a swell idea.

Further Reading:

Budding Filmmakers Crave a Break

FSU Film School Grads Garner Accolades, Awards From Sundance Film Festival, Major Industry Awards

23 Facts About 23 (Official) Years of Sundance

Posted by Alexa Harrington