Posted by admin on Mar 30, 2009 in
College News Hey, guys. I have a confession to make. I’ve failed you. A lot of news has happened since I last updated the blog and you guys were probably waiting on me to tell you about it and I never did. I’m sorry. I can amit when I have made a mistake. With the posting of this feel good story out of D.C., I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. This is a great read. Who said young people are irresponsible? Talk to you guys later.
Link Source: http://media.www.browndailyherald.com/media/storage/paper472/news/2009/03/02/CampusNews/Students.Rally.For.Environment.In.D.c-3654229.shtml
Forty Brown students associated with emPOWER drove down to Washington, D.C., this past weekend, joining 12,000 college students from around the country in support of the “Power Shift ’09″ conference.
The conference’s main objective is to use the power of the youth to push for new energy legislation, said David Schwartz ’09.5, a member of the Sustainable Food Initiative who attended Power Shift.
Power Shift’s goal is to “hold our elected officials accountable for rebuilding our economy and reclaiming our future through bold climate and clean energy policy,” according to the conference’s Web site.
The group of Brown students – which includes members of emPOWER, the Sustainable Food Initiative and Project 20/20 – left for Washington Feb. 27 and is set to return today. Schwartz said the group has been networking with other students from around the country and attending workshops, “identity caucuses” and keynote speeches.
The identity caucuses, which focused on the specific issues of gender and ethnicity as they relate to climate and energy justice issues, were part of the conference’s increased emphasis on justice over last year’s Power Shift, Schwartz said.
“This is not just about climate change – this is about a whole range of justice issues. What good does it do if we have clean energy if people can’t benefit from it? What good is it that you have good drinking water if it’s not in some communities?” he said. “There’s definitely a broadening of focus this year.”
Schwartz, who gave a presentation on sustainable food to an audience of 150, said the conference was more than meetings and workshops. Power Shift also featured musical performances from Santigold and The Roots, as well as screenings of films about the environment.
Tara Prendergast ’12, who also attended Power Shift, said she first got involved in emPOWER when she signed up at an activities fair. She said she decided to attend the conference because she believes this is a “watershed” moment in the environmental and energy movement.Prendergast attended several workshops over the weekend, including one about regulating corporate carbon emission. She said the workshop discussed different cap and trade ideas and considered the pros and cons of each idea.
“There was a debate about which one we should be supporting, particularly between cap and dividend and cap and invest models,” Prendergast said.
Demonstrating and rallying are also a major part of Power Shift. On Saturday night, 600 people gathered outside the White House to demonstrate, and there is a large rally planned for today in front of the Capitol, Prendergast said.
She said lobbying was also a large aspect of the conference. More than 5,000 students are slated to lobby senators and representatives from their states and districts. The lobbying effort would not only be the biggest in environmental lobbying history, Prendergast said, but also the biggest general lobbying day in history.
Prendergast, who is from Colorado, will meet with the staff of Colorado representatives. She and fellow Brown students will also meet directly with Rhode Island representatives.
The group will lobby for a set of goals laid out by Power Shift and ask for the representatives’ support, she said.
One of the major aspects of the conference, stressed by both Schwartz and Prendergast, was the chance to network with other students and organizers involved in pushing for changes in energy and sustainability policy.
“A lot of it was just hanging out and having fun and networking and meeting people,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz and Prendergast agreed that at least some of the goals of the conference have been met already.
“It’s an incredible symbol” to have “5,000 people lobbying,” Prendergast said. “It’s very visible and really brings that message home that this is an issue that we really care about, and that we really need strong measures.”
Tags: college students, community service, good drinking water, legislation, lobbying, sustainable food
Posted by admin on Feb 11, 2009 in
College News Hey, guys. This article is pretty much hot of the presses. Jobs are being lost, money is lost, endowments are being lost BUT that does not mean YOU have to be lost. This article is going to help students weigh every single option when it comes down on WHERE to go to school. Since resources are tight, I thought this would be a great article for emerging college students, transfers and regular college students in general. ENJOY!
Source Link: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid={DA6C44F8-48A3-4E4C-B5A0-5106CE14081A}&siteid=rss
Cost of living, career prospects should factor into school decision
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (MarketWatch) — When Dan Sharpe was looking at colleges during his senior year in high school, his search led him back to his home town near Columbus, Ohio.
Sharpe, who graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University a few years ago, also looked at East Coast schools but found their cost of living daunting. After two college internships, one of them in the Columbus area, he landed a job as a project manager with the non-profit Columbus Foundation after graduation.
Today, he lives in a spacious loft apartment in the city’s fashionable Brewery District for under $600 a month. Staying in the area during and after college “allowed me to take advantage of lots of internship options and keep my living costs reasonable,” he said.
Tuition, curriculum, and financial aid packages often top the list of considerations for high-school seniors anxiously awaiting college acceptances.
But as Sharpe’s experience shows, location can have a huge impact on college living costs, internships, and post-graduation employment.
“I’ve talked to hundreds of seniors in college who have told me that they didn’t realize how important college location was until they got to school. But it should be one of the top considerations for students and parents,” said Todd Hoffman, a college researcher and consultant who quantifies the comparative merits of various college locations with his brainchild, the College Destinations Index.
Head of the class
Using 12 measures, the index, published by the American Institute for Economic Research, analyzes data from more than 290 cities and college towns to identify 75 of the best places in America to go to school. It includes financial considerations, such as cost of living, job opportunities, and earning potential, as well as other factors such as student diversity and the availability of cultural and leisure activities.
The top 75 locations range from college towns with less than 250,000 people to major cities with populations greater than 2.5 million.
Big-city picks include Boston, New York, and San Francisco. Students who decide to live off-campus can expect to pay about $1,300 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Boston and almost $1,500 in San Francisco — about twice what they would pay in Cleveland or St. Louis. Assuming two students shared the apartment, the cost difference between the expensive and cheaper locations for each of them would amount to several thousand dollars a year.
Despite their pricey profiles, these big cities rank highly because they offer many internship opportunities that are not available in other parts of the country. For students, the question is whether those opportunities will translate into jobs down the road.
“In a competitive job market, employers view internships as something that sets students apart and makes them more marketable,” Hoffman said.
“You’re not going to have as many of those opportunities in rural settings, even if you are attending a great college or university,” he added.
Post-graduate plans
High-cost cities also tend to have a high per-capita income, which can translate into higher starting salaries for students who decide to stay after graduation.
Of course, if major cities aren’t to your liking, there are plenty of great college destinations in smaller cities or college towns.
The Columbus, Ohio area, where Sharpe attended college, serves as a headquarters location for internship-rich companies such as Nationwide Insurance, Abercrombie & Fitch, The Limited and Bob Evans, and two-bedroom apartments can be had for under $700 a month.
Prospective students should also consider how career plans fit into a college location. Those contemplating a career in technology will probably have more success finding internships and employment in a place with a strong industry presence such as Boston or the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, while someone considering a career in public service might gravitate to a school near a state capital or in Washington, D.C.
Even an area’s real estate values can factor into a location decision. Hoffman said that with property prices at depressed levels, he’s seeing more parents buy a house or condominium, then rent the property to a child and his or her roommates and perhaps even pay the child to manage the property.
The strategy typically works best in areas such as Cleveland where real estate costs are reasonable compared to the price of on-campus housing. Despite the risk of declining property values — parents who bought at the height of the real estate boom may now be regretting the decision — becoming a child’s temporary landlord could save thousands of dollars in living costs in stable or rising markets.
The CDI’s usefulness goes beyond students, since favorable financial characteristics and amenities that create great college locations can also make the areas prime destinations for retirees, tourists, or people thinking about relocation.
Said Hoffman: “Great college destinations are also often great all-around place to be.”
Marla Brill is a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based freelance writer.
Top college destinations
Major cities
1. Boston
2. New York
3. San Francisco
4. Washington, D.C.
5. Atlanta
6. Chicago
7. Seattle
8. Baltimore
9. Los Angeles
10. Minneapolis-St. Paul
Mid-size metros
1. San Jose-Palo Alto
2. Raleigh-Durham
3. Denver
4. Austin
5. Nashville
6. Charlotte
7. Columbus
8. Milwaukee
9. Portland
10. Indianapolis
Small cities
1. Boulder, Colo.
2. Madison, Wis.
3. Anne Arbor, Mich.
4. Princeton-Trenton, N.J.
5. Santa Cruz, Calif.
6. Honolulu, Hawaii
7. New Haven, Conn.
8. Fort Collins, Colo.
9. Worcester, Mass.
10. Lincoln, Neb.
College towns (under 250,000 residents)
1. State College, Pa.
2. Bloomington, Ind.
3. Champaign-Urbana, Ill.
4. Iowa City, Iowa
5. College Station, Tex.
6. Lawrence, Kan.
7. Charlottesville, Va.
8. Columbia, Mo.
9. Gainesville, Fla.
10. Athens, Ga.
Source: American Institute for Economic Research
Tags: anne arbor, athens, atlanta, college destinations, college students, college towns, denver
Posted by admin on Jan 29, 2009 in
College News If it is college news, I am going to go ahead and hold myself to this one, you are going to hear it here first. That’s just it. Interesting article about college endowments. Thought you guys and gals might enjoy it.
Source Link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0128/p01s02-usec.html
Budgets are cut as a new study reports an average loss of 23 percent in endowment value.
College endowment funds, like other investments, took a huge hit this fall – resulting in billions of dollars less to spend on school budgets that cover everything from staff to building projects to student financial aid.
For colleges that rely on income from their endowments to fund a third or more of their operating expenses, cost-cutting measures, including layoffs and hiring freezes at some schools, are already under way.
Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is making a controversial move in response to losses: It announced plans Monday to close its art museum and sell the collection.
If there’s any good news for higher education, it could be that only a small number of colleges rely heavily on endowments to keep themselves running – and that college endowment funds in general performed better in the bear market than did the major indexes.
Still, between July 1 and Nov. 30, 2008, endowments lost nearly 23 percent of their value, according to a survey of 435 colleges and universities for a report released Tuesday by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) in Washington.
“For a small number of colleges, endowments have a very significant impact,” says Sandy Baum, a senior policy analyst at the College Board, a nonprofit association in New York. Among the majority of colleges, which have smaller endowments, “the silver lining to not having a large endowment is [they're] not very dependent on it.”
Despite the losses, most institutions, particularly those with large endowments, are expected to make financial aid a top priority. “There’s a lot of hiring freezes or slowdowns going on, but … student financial aid is one of those things, in bad economic times, where you don’t want to reduce support,” says John Walda, NACUBO’s president and CEO.
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Dartmouth, for instance, all draw more than a third of their operating budgets from their multibillion-dollar endowments, but they’ve announced their intent to maintain financial aid – including relatively new policies to give more help to low- and middle-income families.
Less of a tuition increase
Princeton has gone a step further on affordability: On Monday, it announced its lowest undergraduate tuition and fee increase since 1966 – 2.9 percent. Next year’s charges will top $47,000, but the average grant to students on financial aid is nearly $34,000. Also, Princeton is increasing its undergraduate scholarship budget by 13 percent.
“Even though [Princeton is] much less wealthy than before, they’re not going to try to compensate for that through tuition increases,” Ms. Baum says. “We don’t know yet how many other similarly fortunate institutions are going to do that, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they take that approach.”
Many colleges will have trustee meetings in the coming months before determining tuition. “How you proceed on the tuition side and the financial aid side is going to have a very big impact on families’ willingness to enroll…. But because the economic markets are so unstable, it’s very hard for institutions to make plans with any certainty,” says Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education, a research and advocacy group in Washington.
Like many of its peers, Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., is facing an unprecedented budget situation in the wake of an 18 percent decline in its endowment from July to December. That brought the value down $700 million, to about $3 billion. The school relies on endowment spending for about 35 percent of its undergraduate college’s operations.
Dartmouth officials recently announced that “some staff layoffs are inevitable” to help trim more than $60 million from the annual $700 million budget for its undergraduate college and professional schools. Tenured and tenure-track faculty and student financial aid are not subject to cuts. Just more than 70 out of 600 eligible nonfaculty employees have taken retirement incentives.
“It’s a little bit somber,” says executive vice president Adam Keller of the mood at Dartmouth. But people aren’t surprised that layoffs are coming, and the community is working together to minimize the need for them, he adds. “We have more than 300 suggestions from employees about … things we could do to save money, and we’re looking at those very seriously.”
The University of Rhode Island Foundation has seen an 18 percent decline, too, from its June 30 value of about $88 million. But the impact is small relative to schools with large endowments. It marked the median point of the NACUBO survey, with half the endowments higher and half lower. Typically, the endowment contributes about $4 million to the $308 million operating budget for the public university.
“There’s a possibility that we won’t be able to award any of that $4 million in the next fiscal year,” says foundation president Glen Kerkian. It won’t be clear until the end of the foundation’s fiscal year in March how much it can award, and whether the university will be able to bridge the gap with other revenue. “Almost 55 percent [of endowment spending] is for scholarships…. This is what makes this like a double whammy…. Scholarships are as needed, and possibly as unavailable, as they’ve ever been,” Mr. Kerkian says.
Spending part of an endowment
As endowments have enjoyed strong returns over the past several years, Sen. Charles Grassley (R) of Iowa has raised the idea of forcing colleges to spend a certain amount of their endowments – perhaps 5 percent – to help reduce costs for students. Now the pressure may be off.
“The whole idea of endowments is … [to] have security for the long run and continue your operations in bad times,” Baum says. So it’s “totally appropriate” for schools with large endowments to spend at a lower rate in periods of rapid enrollment growth and to raise the rate in a downturn.
Over the past 10 years, the NACUBO survey has seen average annual spending rates ranging from 4.5 to 5.1 percent.
Tags: college, endowments, enrollment, students, tuition
Posted by admin on Jan 24, 2009 in
College News Yo, kids, Happy New Year! I know……it’s late but it’s better than never……trust me! I found a great article that I think you guys should definitely take a look at. Going to and staying in college can be very, very challening in the environment we are in in this New Year. This article touches squarely on that issue.
We chose to post this article because A, it really touches on the core of education and B, we have been talking about saving money on books and college in general well before America wanted to admit there was a crisis. So sit back, read, enjoy and check us out at Around Campus Bookstore. Thanks!
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0121/p12s01-usgn.html
Many students need extra aid to pay spring-semester tuition.
By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the January 21, 2009 edition
It’s crunch time for college students. No, this isn’t about exams. It’s about tuition bills.
Facing job losses, dwindling college-investment accounts, and a tight credit market, students and parents have been streaming into financial-aid offices, asking for adjustments to their aid packages. Colleges are trying to help, but as the second semester starts up, some students have had no choice but to drop out or scale back the number of classes they’re taking.
To expand financial aid, many colleges are cutting back on hiring, and construction projects are going on hold. Some institutions are getting creative on the fundraising front – think special appeals to alumni. Another tactic: Some colleges are offering leniency to students with unpaid balances.
School officials thought the trouble would hit this past fall. Instead, overall enrollments were “perfectly normal,” says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) in Washington. But now, he says, “people are apparently running out of steam.”
Midyear departures are particularly disruptive. Schools create budgets based on enrollments for the year. And for students, “it’s very hard, having done one semester, to then [temporarily stop or transfer] and not end up losing a lot of credits and a lot of time,” Mr. Nassirian says.
Nearly a quarter of private colleges and universities and 13 percent of publics expect second-semester retention to be worse than last year’s, according to a survey of 214 chief financial officers by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Service.
“There’s clearly a heightened awareness [of the financial situation facing students] and a lot more proactivity by colleges and universities,” says Bob Giannino-Racine, executive director of ACCESS, a nonprofit financial-aid counseling service in Boston.
Syracuse University in New York noticed a 30 percent rise in requests for additional aid this fall. It launched a campaign in early December to try to raise $2 million for emergency grants by Jan. 31. It’s already helped more than 350 who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to return.
One is sophomore Nykeba Corinaldi. “I’m taking it literally semester to semester,” she says. Her mother is unemployed, her father doesn’t contribute, and she couldn’t secure a loan on her own after one fell through this summer. The financial-aid office gave her extra grants and loans this fall, and now, thanks in part to the Syracuse Responds initiative, she’s back to finish out the year. “It was a huge boulder off my shoulders,” she says.
At Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta, about 500 students, a quarter of the school, had not fully paid their bills by late last semester. A fundraising drive has matched students with donors willing to cover their balances. Seniors have priority, and it appears they’ll all be able to graduate.
But that’s still not enough. “Unfortunately, we have had significant numbers of students who have stopped and said, ‘I’m going to try to come back in the fall,’ ” says Arlene Cash, Spelman’s vice president for enrollment management. “We’re working hard to find ways to support them.”
A number of schools have also announced tuition and financial-aid plans early in the cycle, hoping prospective students won’t give up altogether on the idea of college. Benedictine University in Lisle, Ill., and Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., for instance, are freezing tuition for the coming year.
Ohio State leaders pledged that if tuition goes up, financial aid will go up proportionately. “We’re trying to get the word out to the community broadly that you can’t afford not to go to college and that there’s all kinds of help available,” says Martha Garland, vice provost for enrollment services and dean of undergraduate education.
Manchester College in Indiana wants to ease concerns about affordability by offering a “Triple Guarantee”: Academically strong low-income students from Indiana will receive grants to cover any gaps after federal and state aid is received; students will graduate in four years, or they can get a fifth year of classes for free; and if they don’t land a job within six months of graduating, they, too, can have a free year of classes.
The four-year graduation guarantee is “addressing a cost of college that lots of families don’t consider – that fifth or sixth year” that is fairly common at some institutions, says Manchester executive vice president Dave McFadden.
Despite these efforts, it’s understandable if families aren’t so upbeat. Many public universities are anticipating tuition spikes in the wake of state budget cuts. Nearly half of publics and 7 percent of privates plan to raise tuition for the coming year at a rate higher than the past three-year average, the Chronicle/Moody’s survey found. And in a December survey by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, 8 percent said they had frozen or cut financial-aid budgets, or plan to.
College affordability “is a true middle-class crisis now,” Mr. Giannino-Racine says. Waves of students who used to take the private four-year route are shifting to public and community colleges. In turn, students with less competitive backgrounds could be pushed out of college altogether, he and others say.
Higher-education officials are hopeful that as part of the economic stimulus package, Congress will increase Pell Grants for low-income students and infuse cash into states so that they can avoid deep cuts to public universities. House leaders have outlined a $15.6 billion increase in Pell Grants as part of their proposal to help higher education.
Tags: college dropouts, college seniors, financial aid, graduation, HBCU, Spelman, Syracuse