Student Loan Blog

Millions in Grant Money Go to California Colleges for Stem-Cell Research

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:44:00 GMT

Twelve academic institutions in California recently received approximately $271 million in grant money from a state agency to construct laboratories for stem-cell research, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“In California, Millions Are Distributed for Stem-Cell Research,” May 8, 2008).

The funds, divided into 12 grants, represent the largest single chunk of money distributed from a $3 billion bond authorized by Californians in 2004 to help make the state the world leader in stem cell research.

The University of California system is the largest recipient of the grant money, where 9 of its 10 campuses were grantees. Such well-known institutions as Stanford University, The Scripps Research Institute, and the University of Southern California also received funding.

"We're very excited about what has been made possible today," said Arnold Kriegstein, director of the Institute for Regeneration Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, another grant recipient.

The grants will be used for the construction of approximately 800,000 square feet of research labs, which will be manned by about 2,200 graduate students, faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and scientists.

Scientists will use the new facilities to study stem cells, the precursors to every type of cell in humans, in an effort to better understand diseases and to develop clinical studies of new therapies and grow replacement tissue for the body, according to the Chronicle.

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Options to Study Sign Language Overseas Slowly Growing

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:41:00 GMT

Students who want to study American Sign Language — the fourth most commonly taught language other than English at American colleges and universities — have limited, but growing, options to enroll in sign language programs abroad, according to an article in Inside Higher Ed (“Studying (Sign) Languages Abroad,” May 5, 2008).

“Part of this is because the United States sort of leads the world in sign language instruction at a university level, so you often don’t see French Sign Language or Italian Sign Language having very solid positions in universities,” Sherman Wilcox, chair of the department of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, told the Chronicle.

But, students who wish to study overseas are slowly discovering a handful of opportunities to study other sign languages.

Italian, Jamaican Sign Languages Among Formal Study Options Abroad

Just last year, Siena School for Liberal Arts, a nearly decade-old school in Siena, Italy, added two three-week long summer sessions to its single semester and year-long study programs. In one summer program, American ASL students study Italian deaf culture and Italian Sign Language, which is significantly different than ASL. In the other, deaf Americans and deaf Italians live together and study each others’ signed and written languages.

A Goshen College program allows ASL students to spend six weeks in Jamaica studying the country’s deaf and hearing cultures and Jamaican Sign Language, which is similar enough to ASL that students are immediately able to communicate, said Sheila Yoder, director of the program and assistant professor of American Sign Language at Goshen. For the other six weeks of the program, students live and work at one of eight different Jamaican schools for the deaf.

While formal study abroad programs created specifically for students of sign language are still few and far between, interest in sign language has increased dramatically, a recent survey by the Modern Language Association reveals.

College-level enrollment in American Sign Language grew to 78,829 in 2006 from 11,420 in 1998 — an increase that is parallel to interest in international education.

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Schools Standardize Graduate Tuition for Ph.D. Programs

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:47:00 GMT

To adapt to the changes in interdisciplinary Ph.D. education, both Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania are standardizing their graduate-level tuition rates across the schools’ individual colleges, according to an article in Inside Higher Ed (“Shifts in Ph.D. Tuition Policy,” May 7, 2008).

Cornell, which operates several state-funded and privately endowed colleges, is changing its tuition policies to be more competitive price-wise with its public university peers.

“Our tuition is just very, very high compared to a lot of the competitor schools,” said Alison Power, dean of the graduate school at Cornell.

Graduate tuition for Cornell’s privately endowed colleges will be reduced by 10.1 percent, or from $32,800 to $29,500, and tuition for the state-supported schools will be frozen at $20,800.

The University of Pennsylvania will standardize tuition for its Ph.D. candidates by leveling it to $24,000 a year for the first five years of the program and then reducing it to $3,000 for subsequent years. The university’s doctoral tuition fees are currently calculated on a course-by-course basis.

Moving from a per–course tuition system to a flat–rate tuition system for the school’s Ph.D. students will not only encourage cross-college collaborations, but will also enable professors to better balance the particulars of their programs, Andrew Binns, the university’s associate provost for education, told Inside Higher Ed.

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Senator Proposes Penalties for Colleges That Hoard Endowment Funds

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:58:00 GMT

In a recent letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vermont, proposed restricting IRA rollover contributions to colleges that don’t use their endowments to help low and middle-income students pay for college, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Proposal Would Restrict Certain Gifts to Colleges That Hoard Endowments,” May 13, 2008).

Welch said wealthy colleges, which are among the biggest beneficiaries of those IRA distributions, should be ineligible to receive the perks if schools’ endowments aren’t used to contain college costs for needy students.

He urged the House Ways and Means Committee — which is currently drafting a new tax bill — to include penalties for schools that hoard their endowment assets.

Another proposal by Welch, that would require colleges to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments every year and to annually report how much of their endowment funds have been spent, is part of current House legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act.

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Sallie Mae Mistakenly Reports Up to 1 Million Borrowers Delinquent

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:42:00 GMT

As many as 1 million Sallie Mae customers may be experiencing problems with their credit scores after the student loan company erroneously reported some of its borrowers’ student loan accounts as delinquent.

Sallie Mae’s customers on graduated or extended repayment plans were unintentionally reported as borrowers who made only partial payments, which led Equifax, one of the three national credit reporting agencies, to label the accounts as past due.

Due to the mix-up, some borrowers found that their credit scores had dropped by 100 points or more, according to an article on Bankrate.com, (“Sallie Mae Error Causes Credit Score Plummet,” May 14, 2008).

A Sallie Mae spokesman said the error had affected less than 10 percent of its 10 million borrowers. The student loan company is working with Equifax to correct the problem and is supplying credit reference letters to any Sallie Mae customers who need help rectifying their credit score or help proving to a potential lender that Sallie Mae was responsible for the error.

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Proposed Bill Combines House, Senate Versions of the Higher Education Act

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:51:00 GMT

Congressional aides hope to finalize a renewal of the Higher Education Act by Memorial Day that merges different versions of the proposed bill passed separately by the House of Representatives and the Senate last year, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Compromise Higher-Education Bill Takes Shape in Congress,” May 14, 2008).

Although the draft of the measure that is circulating Washington does not include provisions on graduate education, new programs, or private student loans — three of the bill’s 11 sections — the measure is already nearly 700 pages.

The issues that the two houses appear to have reached a compromise on include college cost watch lists, accreditation, and campus piracy:

Negotiators hope to give consumers more accurate and useful information about higher education costs by bolstering current watch lists. These lists, established by the House bill, already identify the most and least expensive colleges and those with the highest percentage of tuition increases. But under the compromise bill, institutions with the highest and lowest “net price” would also be listed.

The current 15 members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the Department of Education on accreditation, would be replaced with 18 new members, six each appointed by the secretary of education, the Senate, and the House.

Colleges would be required to develop plans to detect and prevent illegal downloading of music and videos on college campuses and to offer alternatives to such illegal downloading.

Issues that are still being negotiated include whether states should be punished for cutting their higher education budgets, whether textbook publishers and colleges should be required to disclose more information about the costs of the books, and whether colleges should be required to notify students and employees within 30 minutes of a campus emergency.

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Controversial Saudi Prince Funds Islamic Centers Abroad

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:34:00 GMT

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud, a member of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, has endowed $31 million to Britain’s Cambridge and Edinburgh universities to create research centers devoted to Islamic studies.

The two academic centers will focus on projects designed to encourage understanding between Islamic and Western cultures. The prince has also financed the creation of two centers for American studies in the Arab world, at the American University of Beirut and the The American University in Cairo.

Yasir Suleiman, director of the Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Cambridge, told The Chronicle of Higher Education the prince’s donation has not yet raised any concerns about each centers' scholarly independence, as the prince’s similar donations to Harvard and Georgetown universities did three years ago (“2 British Universities to Benefit From Saudi Prince’s Gifts,” May 9, 2008).

In 2005, the prince donated $20 million to each Harvard and Georgetown to further the schools’ long-standing traditions of scholarship in Muslim and Arab cultural studies.

At the time, some U.S. lawmakers expressed their concerned that the prince, who completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States, would attempt to use his donations to exert influence over the academic direction of the centers. But John Esposito, director of Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said the prince has been hands off in his endeavor.

The prince has been attempting to foster intercultural dialogue with the United States since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Chronicle reports. However, his $10-million offer to the Twin Towers Orphan Fund — an educational and welfare assistance program for children orphaned after Sept. 11,2001 — was rebuffed after Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, learned the prince said the United States’ policies in the Middle East were among the “issues that led to such a criminal attack.”

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College Considers Working Overtime to Ease Financial Strain

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:19:00 GMT

Facing $4.5 million in budget cuts, Kean University in New Jersey is seriously considering “working overtime” by extending its academic week to Fridays and Saturdays, according to an Inside Higher Ed article (“Solution To Financial Woes: More Classes?” May 7, 2008).

The proposed solution is one of several being considered as the school faces a potential 17-to-24-percent tuition hike next year. It would offer tuition discounts for students who take classes on those days to help keep the tuition increase to a single digit figure.

Kean University officials say the proposal would allow the school to better use the classrooms the administration already pays to operate seven days a week. They estimate that on Fridays alone only 13 percent of general-purpose classrooms are being used at any given time.

But not everyone is happy about the proposal.

In fact, Kenneth Sanders, associate provost for academic affairs, says that many professors are wary of the changes. He also admits that the response to professors being asked to work overtime on Fridays and Saturdays has been “mixed.”

Critics of the plan claim that neither students nor faculty were consulted during the process, a pattern that has emerged before at the school under similar circumstances.

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Student Correspondents to Get National Exposure as ABC News Launches College Campus News Bureaus

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:08:00 GMT

In an effort to reach younger viewers, ABC News plans to open five multimedia news bureaus on select college campuses this fall.

Students at Arizona State University, Syracuse University, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Texas at Austin will have their work featured on various ABC News outlets, including “Good Morning America,” “World News With Charles Gibson,” and “Nightline,” as well as on ABC News Radio and ABCNews.com.

Students selected as bureau chiefs will receive on-site training at ABC News headquarters in New York.

The network hopes its college initiative will provide greater insight into the lives of the prized demographic of 33 million 18-to-25-year-olds living in the United States.

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$50 Million Given to California Community Colleges to Aid Needy Students

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:30:00 GMT

In what may be the largest gift ever donated to the nation’s community colleges, the San Francisco–based Bernard Osher Foundation recently announced that it has pledged up to $50 million to help needy students attending California’s two-year institutions, writes Matt Krupnick of The Mercury News (“Endowment to Aid Needy Students,” May 5, 2008).

The gift funds will be placed in an endowment that will be managed by the Foundation for California Community Colleges, with $25 million to be paid immediately and the remainder to be paid over the course of the next three years. In order to receive the second $25 million, the FCCC must raise $50 million on its own during that three-year time period.

California’s community colleges serve nearly 25 percent of the nation’s community college students, with 2.6 million students enrolled each year, and comprise the world’s largest public college system.

To Bernard Osher Foundation President, Mary Bitterman, it had become clear that the state’s community colleges needed more financial assistance than the four-year universities to which the Foundation has already given millions.

“The more we have focused on the needs of California, we have really begun to look at the critical role community colleges play,” Bitterman said. “Our trustees decided that we would really like to help community college students.”

The Bernard Osher Foundation followed its initial donation with the announcement of an additional pledge of $20 million to multiple campuses within the University of California and California State University systems, to establish endowed scholarships for students transferring from California community colleges.

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Stanford School of Medicine Won't Follow Harvard's or Yale's Financial Aid Initiatives

Student Loan Girl — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:04:00 GMT

Students at the Stanford School of Medicine will not be offered the same type of tuition breaks students attending rival medical schools Harvard and Yale will see next year.

Harvard Medical School and the Yale School of Medicine recently announced they are eliminating the expected family contribution for households that earn less $120,000 and $100,000, respectively.

Charles Prober, Stanford’s senior associate dean of medical student education, told The Stanford Daily that there are no plans to extend such an offer to Stanford medical students (“No Change in Store for Med School Aid,” May 5, 2008).

Stanford a Leader in Minimizing Medical Students Loan Debt

However, he pointed out that Stanford is already a leader in medical school affordability. Stanford graduates have less student loan debt than those who graduate from competing schools, he said. Stanford’s 2007 graduating class had a debt of $78,000 in student loans, compared to $98,953 at Harvard and $115,385 at Yale.

The median medical school debt is $140,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Stanford also sets a cap on the amount of federal student loans that can be borrowed each year, which this year is $13,500. If students have remaining tuition costs after the estimated parental contribution is determined, the school covers up to $30,000 of a student’s remaining costs with a need-based grant.

Student Loans Aren’t the Only Option

Students must cover any remaining costs with private student loans or other sources but Stanford, Prober said, offers its students a number of alternatives to student loans.

Medical students can earn up to $72,000 in Stanford’s Medical Scholars research Program by doing health-related research projects. Students can also offset their tuition costs by working as teaching assistants, a job in which they can earn about $18,000 per quarter. After 13 quarters, Stanford drops its tuition costs by 80 percent.

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Elite Korean Schools Prep Students for American Ivy Leagues

Student Loan Girl — Sat, 10 May 2008 17:11:00 GMT

South Korea has some 103,000 students studying at American colleges and universities, outnumbered only by students from India and China, nations which have more than 20 times the population of South Korea, writes Sam Dillon of The New York Times (“Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills,” April 27, 2008).

“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, a Harvard University graduate who attended Daewon Foreign Language High School in South Korea.

Secrets to Their Success

Those attending Kim’s alma mater have become notorious for achieving outstanding success — all but a few of the 133 Daewon students who applied to selective American schools this spring were accepted, Dillon says.

The school’s formula is a relatively simple one.

Administrators place South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students who want to attend an American university in special English classes.
These English-specific classes focus on teaching composition skills which are critical for taking American standardized tests and producing college admissions essays.
The school emphasizes unceasing study during rigorous 17-hour days.

Stringent Standards, Requirements, and Fierce Study Habits Produce Results

At schools like Daewon and its rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, the requirements of students are much different than those at the average U.S. high school or even most U.S. prep schools.

The admissions process resembles those used by American colleges and universities. Just one admission requirement of Daewon’s students is fluency in at least two foreign languages besides English. And both Daewon’s and Minjok’s academic years are one month longer than those of American high schools, Dillon says.

Grueling days filled with hours of studying are commonplace. Students’ often start at 6 a.m. followed by hours of English-based and South Korean-based curriculum. Classes end at 7:45 p.m., but the bell indicating the end of study hall doesn’t ring until 10:50 p.m. and even then teachers still end up receiving emails from students until 5 a.m.

Kim Hyun-kyung, a 17-year-old Daewon student, views each day as an accomplishment.

“I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she told the Times.

To drive home how seriously the school takes studying, at one time a banner hung on one of the Minjok buildings that read: “This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not.”

Families Push Just as Hard as Schools

The expectation of excellence doesn’t end with teachers and administrators.

“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” said one student’s mother. Her daughter, a recent Daewon graduate, learned this lesson from watching her older sister being scolded for getting anything less than a perfect score on her tests.

If statistics are any indicator, all that studying and pressure to do well may be paying off for many of these students.

Sixty-seven Daewon graduates achieved perfect 800 math scores on their SATs, Dillon said. And, the average combined SAT score (verbal and math) for Daewon students was 2203 out of 2400. As a basis for comparison, students at Phillips Exeter, the prestigious New Hampshire boarding school, scored 2085 on average on their combined SAT scores.

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As Food Prices Rise, Cost of Campus Meal Plans Going Up

Student Loan Girl — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:05:00 GMT

College students may see a sharp spike in the cost of their on-campus meal plans this fall, due to rising food prices, according to a story this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Soaring Food Prices Have Campus Dining Halls Squeezed,” May 6, 2008).

Several schools have already announced that they intend to increase their meal-plan prices next year, and it’s likely that many more schools will follow:

• Louisiana State University	7.0% increase
• Clemson University	6.0% increase
• University of Miami	4.5% increase
• Ohio University	3.5% increase

In an attempt to avoid huge deficits and stay within their budgets, college food-service operations across the country are getting creative with their meal plans and coming up with unique solutions to contain their costs.

Louisiana State University, for instance, will focus on reducing the portions of its meals.

At Ohio University, the school will focus on marketing meal plans to off-campus students in an attempt to increase overall revenue. In addition, food-service staff will be baking items like cookies, pizza dough, and rolls, from scratch, instead of using premade products.

Rich Neumann, director of dining services at OU, estimates that baking from scratch will save the school almost $100,000 each year alone.

One of the simpler, if more manipulative methods is the one implemented by Western Washington University for one week last month. The school simply removed trays from the dining halls so that students couldn’t carry as much food.

The strategy worked.

According to the director of WWU’s dining services, the dining halls saw a 34-percent reduction in waste when the institution went trayless.

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Cornell Medical School in Qatar Makes History with Inaugural Class

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:08:00 GMT

Cornell University’s medical school in Qatar graduated its inaugural class on May 8, marking the first time a U.S.-based medical school has awarded degrees outside the United States.

The 15 graduates of the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar will participate in a second commencement ceremony later this month in New York’s Carnegie Hall, along with the rest of Cornell’s graduating medical class, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Cornell Graduates Its Inaugural Class at Its Medical College in Qatar,” May 7, 2008).

Eleven of the 15 graduates will enter medical-residency programs in the United States, one will pursue research in the United States, and three will continue their studies and training in Qatar.

The Qatari branch of Weill Cornell, located in Qatar’s Education City, is one of several U.S. medical schools forming partnerships with hospitals and universities overseas, The Chronicle reports, although none of these partnerships is as extensive as Cornell’s arrangement.

Weill Cornell’s six-year Qatari program includes two years of premedical study and four years of medical education. Students perform clinical rotations at the hospitals and clinics of Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar’s capital, Doha.

In 2011, the school plans to add a 382-bed medical and research center that will focus on women’s and children’s health.

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Survey Indicates Significant Number of Colleges May Switch to Direct Lending Program

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:36:00 GMT

In the last few months, the number of lenders who have exited or suspended participation in the guaranteed Family Federal Education Loan Program has ballooned to 66 organizations, according to FinAid.org, leaving many schools wondering if their students will be able to get the money they need for school this fall.

The FFEL program, which funds the majority of federal student loans, has been abandoned by a handful of state universities, including Indiana, Michigan State and Pennsylvania State, in favor of the Direct Loan Program, according to an Inside Higher Ed article (“Drift Toward Direct Lending,” April 30, 2008).

Data from a new survey by Student Lending Analytics, suggests that the flow of institutions leaving the FFEL program for direct lending could be significant.

Some 28.9 percent of community colleges have contemplated moving to Direct Loan, while 7.2 percent have already decided to switch. Of the other colleges and universities in the FFEL program that responded to the survey, 19.3 percent said they were considering switching to direct lending, while 5.8 percent have already made the decision to do so.

Of those schools surveyed, almost 40 percent indicated a concern about the increasing number of lenders announcing they would no longer offer federal student loans as the main reason for making the transition. An additional 34 percent surveyed cited concerns about the financial stability of lenders.

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