College Living Expenses Often Underestimated

Tuition is not the whole story in college expenses. The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at college living expenses, an “under discussed” aspect of college affordability, according to Lumina Foundation strategy director Zakiya Smith. The average list price of tuition and fees for in-state students at public four-year colleges in 2014-15 is $9,139. Room and board charges for the same students come to $9,804.

College Scholarships You May Not Know Exist

By Jane Hurst

Going to college is an expensive prospect, and without the aid of student loans, bursaries, and scholarships, many students would not be able to afford to go. There are actually all kinds of great scholarships available, over and above the ones that you can apply for through your current school. In fact, you may not even have known that some of the following scholarships even existed.

1. Jackie Robinson Foundation – The Jackie Robinson Foundation Scholarship Program offers students graduating from high school and entering college up to $7,500 annually. Students must prove financial need, as well as leadership potential. Applications are due by Feb. 15.
2. Discount Park&Ride – If you are a student with a great business idea, create a business plan, and submit it to Discount Park&Ride. Describe the company, how it will be better than the competitors, how you plan to get customers, etc. The applicant with the best business plan will receive a $2,500 scholarship. Application deadline is June 15.
3. Exxon Mobil Corporation – Scholarships for minority students entering math and engineering studies are available through an Exxon Mobil and SECME partnership. There is also a scholarship available for those studying agriculture.
4. Bank of America – The Joe Martin Scholarship is available for students in colleges and vocational schools who are dependents of associates who have worked for the Bank of America for a minimum of one year. Awards from $1,000 to $5,000 are available, and they are renewable. You can get application forms after Dec. 1.
5. General Electric – US citizens and legal residents of the US, or minority students enrolled in full-time studies, are eligible for this scholarship, which is renewable for up to three years. The LULAC Scholarship is based on your academic performance, writing ability, community involvement, and extracurricular activities.
6. Wal-Mart – This is a company that gives many associate scholarships to students in communities where there are Wal-Mart stores. These are scholarships for Wal-Mart employees and their dependents. Wal-Mart supports many scholarship organizations, and application deadlines will depend on the scholarship you are applying for.
7. J.P. Morgan Chase – Graduating high school seniors in NYC are eligible to apply for the Thomas G. Labrecque Smart Start Scholarship. This is for students attending a four-year program in one of the five boroughs. Awards pay for full tuition, textbooks, and summer internships with JP Morgan Chase. Application deadline is Jan. 30.
8. AT&T – The AT&T Labs Fellowship Program scholarships are for women and minorities in post-graduate studies. Applications are accepted beginning November 1, and the deadline for application is January 15. Another option is the scholarship for African American children or stepchildren of AT&T employees.
9. Google – Google offers a few different scholarships, including the Google UNCF Scholarship for African American students planning on studying computer science or computer engineering. The deadline for application depends on the scholarship you are applying for. Other Google scholarships include the AISES Scholarship and the Google Global Community Scholarship.
10. Best Buy – There will be $1,500 scholarships available to 1,000 US and Puerto Rican students who are graduating from high school and entering college. Students must show great academic achievements, work experience, and volunteer work.
11. Golden Key – The Golden Key International Honour Society offers over $100,000 in scholarships every year to members. The funds are awarded annually, but you only need to apply once. Submission deadlines depend on the scholarship you are applying for.
12. Ronald McDonald House – If there is a chapter of the Ronald McDonald House Charities in your area, and you are younger than 21, you are eligible to apply for scholarships. To date, more than $52 million in scholarships have been awarded. Deadline for application is Jan. 20.

Byline:

Jane Hurst has been working in education for over 5 years as a teacher. She loves sharing her knowledge with students, is fascinated about edtech and loves reading, a lot.

Implications Of Elections For Higher Education Policy

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) is pleased to present the latest installment from its Policy Matters series.

Higher Education and the 2014 Elections

This policy brief provides a summary of the election’s outcomes and potential implications for federal and state higher education policy. Changes in Congressional and state-level political balance of power are discussed, as well as the resulting higher education policy outlook for the Obama administration and Congress. State ballot measures involving higher education are also summarized.

Authored by the AASCU Government Relations and Policy Analysis Team

College Applicants Get Information on Future Jobs And Salaries

Melissa Korn and Douglas Belkin, Wall Street Journal

Sydney Frankenberg is considering several schools and multiple majors as she prepares to apply to college. A key question at the top of her list: Which program will land her the best job at the most reasonable cost?

A few years ago, Ms. Frankenberg would have had little to go on in her quest to assess the return on investment for college. But as tuition and student debt skyrocket and many recent graduates get a slow start to their careers, North Carolina this summer joined a handful of states offering students and parents new tools to provide at least partial answers.

“You want to have a good time and learn about yourself,” said Ms. Frankenberg, a 17-year-old senior at the Cannon School in Concord, N.C. “But at the end of four years, you have to get a job and support yourself.”

Return-on-investment calculations have been used by industries such as manufacturing, technology and retail for decades. But such measurements are just now coming to higher education—“grudgingly and brutally,” said labor economist Anthony Carnevale —where they are used to compute how students do later in life. “Education has finally been invaded by 20th and 21st century management practices,” said Mr. Carnevale, who runs Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Backers of the new tools point to the $150 billion in federal student-aid funds that schools get every year, and to research that shows nearly half of recent graduates are unemployed or have jobs for which they are overqualified.

Many schools say the new calculators can be misleading and argue that higher education’s value goes beyond any dollar figure.

Neither the federal government nor the vast majority of individual schools track ROI, so some states have stepped in, albeit with differing metrics and limited data. Well below half of all college students in many states are accounted for in the data used to create the state ROI calculators, since most are limited to students who attend public institutions, remain in-state after graduation and work for a company that participates in unemployment insurance.

Nevertheless, the results can be illuminating. Indiana released a report last November that breaks down average salaries after graduation by both major and school. A high-school student could, say, compare what a business and marketing major earns on average five years after graduation if he attends Indiana State University ($46,508), Ball State University ($50,222) or Indiana University in Bloomington ($57,930).

Texas, which has more than 1.3 million students in public community colleges and universities, offers two databases with outcomes information, including one that was revamped in October to include debt-to-income ratios and information on graduate students in the University of Texas system.

In September, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law requiring the California State University System and requesting the University of California system to provide undergraduate salaries by industry, among other data points.

In Minnesota, where a state-sponsored tool went live in May, Larry Pogemiller, director of the office for higher education, said he has fielded several anxious complaints from college presidents. “Nobody likes somebody looking over their shoulder to find out if they’re getting good results or not,” he said.

Some do. This fall, the University of Akron in Ohio launched a quarter-million-dollar advertising campaign centered on the tagline: “Greatest Lifetime Return on Investment” for any Northeast Ohio Public University, based on a private third-party report.

Private colleges backed a 2008 law that prohibits the federal government from creating a database tying academic records to postgraduate earnings. The ban effectively undermined the creation of a federal ROI college calculator, said Amy Laitinen of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank.

Critics of such a federal measurement argue the data collection is tantamount to an invasion of student privacy and holds schools responsible for factors beyond their control, such as students who weren’t well prepared when they started or who didn’t study in school.

“Just because you have data points and you can match them doesn’t mean it’s causal,” counters Sarah Flanagan, spokeswoman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Still, support for a federal scorecard with an ROI component has bipartisan support. President Barack Obama is expected to release a ratings system this fall to measure outcomes, among other factors, while Sens. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Mark Warner (D., Va.) have proposed a bill that would collect more information on retention, graduation, debt and employment outcomes.

Meanwhile, 36 states have signed up to contribute to a federally coordinated database that allows state government agencies to query other participants for information about far-flung graduates. But two major destinations for graduates—New York and California—aren’t involved in the project, limiting the system’s potential.

Back in North Carolina, Ms. Frankenberg, who is considering majoring in political science, business or international relations, will take advantage of the new state ROI system—as far as it goes. The tool lets prospective students see as many as 10 years of data on postgraduation employment, wages and continuing-education enrollment for local graduates of the state’s community colleges and public universities. She can see that 48% of political-science and government majors who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—one of her targets—were employed or enrolled in graduate school in the state five years after graduation, with median annual wages of $36,520.

But she can’t compare that very easily to the ROI for poly-sci students at Tufts University, the U.S. Naval Academy or Carleton College, where she also is applying.

“The schools aren’t telling you what not to major in,” she said. “And major matters.”

Building Grades 9-14 Career Pathways For Students

From Jobs For The Future:
In collaboration with state leads from across the Pathways to Prosperity Network, the JFF team recently published a policy report, State Strategies for Sustaining and Scaling Grades 9-14 Career Pathways: Toward a Policy Set for Pathways to Prosperity. This report provides a comprehensive overview of the state-level policies and actions that support the Pathways to Prosperity work, as well as concrete examples of how the Pathways key implementation levers are put into practice across the network.

In providing exemplars of how different states and regions are building grades 9-14 career pathways in their respective political, educational, and economic contexts, the paper reaffirms Pathways to Prosperity as a highly versatile model that can be championed by a wide range of stakeholders and implemented with funding streams and legislation, both big and small, old and new.

Report Advocates Major Overhaul Of Role And Effectiveness Of College Boards of Trustees

Governance
Boards putting higher education at risk
Inattentive college and university governing boards are putting American higher education at risk, according to a new set of guidelines for trustees issued by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges

Source: (ECS)

How To Teach Effectively On Line

Tracing Successful Online Teaching in Higher Education: Voices of Exemplary Online Teachers
by Evrim Baran, Ana-Paula Correia & Ann Thompson  for Teachers College Record
This article presents a multiple-case study that investigated six different cases of exemplary online teachers and their teaching contexts within a large research university. The findings reveal common exemplary online teaching practices and suggest recommendations for supporting and nurturing successful online teaching in higher education institutions.

Deep Analysis Of The New Gainful Employment Rule For Colleges To Receive Federal Money

The U.S. Department of Education released the final version of its Gainful Employment rule, freshly rewritten to try and avoid being thrown out by another judge. Ben Miller tells us what’s changed since the draft rule released in March, how the final rule will affect which programs fail the test, and what the debt-to-earnings rate that the rule relies on will mean for college dropouts.

edcentr.al/gainful-programs

Accreditation Hinders Launch Of New Post secondary Institutions

Big Drop In College Enrollment : What To Do About It

From College Board

If you have been skeptical about American demographic changes and the resulting decline in college enrollment, review the latest United States Census Bureau statistics. Released Sept. 24, 2014, the report shows a historic drop in college enrollments:

These decreases follow a period of significant growth between 2006 and 2011 when the number of enrolled students climbed by more than 3.2 million. Many have theorized that the slow economy drove students back to the classroom in an environment where jobs were scarce.

While the headlines are arresting, it’s worth spending time reviewing the details:

These shifts should not come as a surprise. In their 2013 edition of Knocking at the College Door, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education reiterated their long-standing prediction that a decrease in high school graduates will result in stiffer competition for recent high school graduates.

How to Cope with Changing Demographics

While the trends are sobering, there are glimmers of positive news. The past year saw a continued increase in the percentage of students from recent graduating classes going on to college. This increase in college-going rates will not, on its own, offset declining enrollments, but it does point the way to strategies you can employ on your campus: