College
WWYD: I Want to Go to Grad School … Again
Considering grad school for the second time, and how to make it affordable.
Online Learning: A Case Study
Maria Bustillos took a seven-week MOOC AKA Massive Open Online Courses AKA the thing some colleges are considering implementing for credit to address shrinking state budgets. She took a course by Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (“Professor Andy”), a highly respected and well-liked educator (“listening to the voice of Andrew Szegedy-Maszak is exactly like soaking in a huge stone bath scented with rose petals while being fed grapes and gently serenaded by a distant lute”). The result: The MOOC was like watching a really engaging documentary and walking away a much more informed person, but it couldn’t compare with taking Professor Andy’s class in-person and benefitting from the critical thinking gained from discussion sessions. Plus, as Maria explains, the experience is much different for someone who has already completed college (“it’s relatively easy to learn about complicated subjects, online or off, if you already have the discipline and research skills to follow through, abilities that educated adults already possess”).
1 Real, 1 Fake, Both True
“Even at elite colleges, most students leave school without a strong enough grasp on how to totally revitalize the manufacturing, housing, automotive, and health care industries of an entire country.”
Sarah Kendzior on Graduate School
Savage Minds interviewed Sarah Kendzior (who wrote about the U.N.’s unpaid internship the other week) about her experience in graduate school while earning a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. It’s very good.
College Unbound
NPR has an excerpt of of Jeffrey Selingo’s book College Unbound, which economist Tyler Cowen says he liked so much that he read it in a single sitting.
Elizabeth Warren Continues to Kill It
Yesterday she introduced a piece of legislation (her first!) that would cut student loan interest rates to the rate banks pay to borrow money (when rates rise in July, students will pay nine times what banks pay). WARREN FOR EVERYTHING.
Financial Aid Practices
How should colleges balance merit aid for talented students who may not need the money with financial aid for students who come from low-income families?
Degrees of Value
I like the initial premise of this piece by Kevin Carey, the policy director of a think tank named Education Sector, in The New Republic—the idea that media outlets like to post sad stories about college graduates who are unable to find jobs in their fields of studies so they end up accepting work that doesn’t necessarily require a college degree (i.e. bartending, barista-ing), which ultimately devalues what a college degree is worth these days.
Tracking One High School Student’s College Decision-Making Process
Leobardo Espinoza Jr. is a student at Topeka High School in Kansas, and I’ve been following his posts on The Choice Blog as he decides where he’ll go to college—especially when he posted that he received a full academic scholarship to one of his fallback schools back in January (The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas).
