Student Loan Blog : technology

Job Outlook for College Graduates Not Encouraging

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:20:00 GMT

Up-and-coming college graduates may soon face one of the toughest job markets in years as they encounter employers who are scaling back hiring and a job market flooded with hundreds of thousands of recently unemployed workforce veterans.

Just last month, the U.S. Department of Labor reported a 6.5 percent unemployment rate, the highest rate seen in 14 years. And a recent annual employment report revealed that corporations plan to scale back hiring graduates of all degree levels by 8 percent over last year (“Economy Chills Hiring Prospects for College Graduates, Report Says,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 18, 2008).

The “2008-2009 Recruiting Trends” report, conducted by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, paints a very grim job outlook for college graduates, a dramatic change from only a few years ago.

“In two short years,” the report states, “we have moved from a zenith of exuberant and aggressive college hiring, through a period of cautious optimism, to a place of quiet desperation.”

In the CERI survey, hiring projections varied by company size, industry, and location. Of the 945 employers who responded to the survey, 49 percent said they expected to decrease their total hiring this year, while 29 percent said they would increase hiring, and 20 percent planned to hire at the same levels as last year.

The smallest employers — organizations with fewer than 54 employees — said they would increase hiring for bachelor’s degree graduates but by only one percent. The largest organizations, those with more than 3,700 employees, said they were planning to decrease hiring by about 9 percent.

With Limited Prospects, Students Should Start Job Searching Now

Defense and government organizations may be the hardest hit among larger employers, with expected 15-percent declines in hiring, while nonprofit organizations anticipate no change in hiring from the previous year.

The best job prospects for graduates are in the fields of technology and science, where oil and gas industry employers plan to hire 8 percent more bachelors degree graduates, and in the fields of medical manufacturing and healthcare, where employers say they will offer positions to 10 percent more associate degree graduates.

Many employers dealing with economic uncertainty are looking to hire new graduates as soon as possible, perhaps before things get worse, said Philip Gardner, director of CERI. Gardner advises students to start work on lining up a job at their first opportunity. “It’s going to get worse,” he said. “Spring is going to be very, very difficult for students to find work.”

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NextStudent Web Marketing Team Shifts Direction of Student Loan Blog

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:02:00 GMT

To better serve you and carry out our mission of being your one-stop destination for all your education financing needs, the NextStudent Web Marketing team is moving our Student Loan Blog in a whole new direction.

In the days ahead, you’ll see the Student Loan Blog shifting from a focus on general-interest news and trends to what’s happening in the world of financial aid, student loans, and the congressional legislation that affects you and how you’ll be able to pay for school.

You’ll still be able to find the college advice, smart shopping tips, and lowdown on student life we’ve been bringing you — we’re just moving things around a little bit.

Keeping You Up-to-Date on Financial Aid and Your College Financing Options

Our news-savvy writers on the NextStudent Web Marketing team will be scanning the latest headlines to keep you informed about the legislation changes that could affect your education and the financial aid options that help you pay for school.

We’ll let you know about schools that are trying to make a higher education more affordable, from offering free tuition to low- and middle-income students to eliminating student loans from their financial aid packages.

We know you’re busy and have a million things battling for your time. That’s why we’re making our blogs shorter and more direct, so you can get the news you need faster.

The NextStudent Web Marketing team is committed to helping you make informed decisions about your education through our revamped college-related blogs.

Student Life and Your Pop Culture Fix

But if you think you’ll miss our old stuff, don’t worry. You’ll still be able to find our stories about things like death by popcorn and the short life spans of rock stars.

These blogs will be going on our sister site, The Students Blog, which focuses on college life and technology. Read about how to pimp out your Firefox browser, five free online tools to help you cite your research papers, or the six college dropouts who made millions.

You can also check out our NextPath online newsletter for tips on everything from traveling the world rent-free to buying a digital camera.

So sit back and enjoy the work of our Web Marketing writers who spend hours trolling the Internet to bring you the trends and stories that are fresh and new.

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Can’t Find Your Friends? Check the Library

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 08:26:00 GMT

Libraries aren’t what they used to be.

No more stuffy, hair-bun-bearing librarians, no more thumbing through cumbersome card catalogs, and no more getting lost in aisles of endless Encyclopedia Britannicas.

Libraries are now high-tech, high-speed information portals that offer a wealth of resources: free, online and easy to access.

Sure, libraries still have books too … tons and tons of books. But it’s not the stacks that are drawing the visitors. It’s the Internet.

And who are these visitors?

Generation Y. The 18-to-29-year-old crowd has become, almost counterintuitively, the age group that most commonly frequents public libraries, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Libraries Change Face to Save Face

Whether they’re updating their Facebook accounts, Stumbling their favorite websites, doing research for a term paper, or just socializing online with their friends, the young adults of Gen Y are increasingly making a trip to the library to tune in to the Internet, particularly when their own Internet connections are slow or limited.

Libraries across the country have received virtual facelifts over the past few years in an effort to appeal to a younger crowd and to offer services the public craves. Local municipalities and non-profit organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have devoted resources and millions of dollars to technological renovations at libraries.

The result? 62 percent of Gen Y respondents in the Pew survey reported having visited public libraries within the past year. And out of 53 percent of total respondents who spent time in libraries last year, 65 percent of them said they used the Internet while they were there.

Bookworms Make Way for Surfers

Considering that over ten years ago, a survey by the Benton Foundation showed that this same age group felt libraries would eventually become less relevant, Julie Vorman of Reuters reports that the Pew survey results are surprising and exciting (“Generation Y Biggest User of U.S. Libraries, Survey Finds,” Dec. 30, 2007).

“Internet use seems to create an information hunger, and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries,” says Leigh Estabrook, co-author of the Pew report, in Vorman’s article.

That hunger for information is being quenched — 99 percent of libraries now have Internet access for their Web-surfing patrons, according to a USA Today piece by Anick Jesdanun (“Young Use Library Most Despite the Net,” Jan. 1, 2008).

But high-tech advancements at libraries are not the only draw for frequenting teens and young adults. As rows of shelves give way to computer desks, libraries now act as social gathering sites, offering virtual homework help, gaming software programs, and even access to virtual librarians, the online avatars of real-world librarians in the virtual-reality game Second Life, Vorman reports.

“We’re seeing a lot of conversion of what may have been stack areas, warehouse areas,” says Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association, in Jesdanun’s USA Today article. “Libraries are creating social spaces.”

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Online Ordering Causing Mailroom Mayhem on College Campuses

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:46:00 GMT

The internet has completely changed the way college campuses operate, from class offerings and registration to college admissions and financial aid services. Now the technology is changing the way campuses deliver and receive mail. As more college students gravitate to online shopping, college and university mailrooms are overhauling their mail processing operations to accommodate the influx of packages.

Some pretty bizarre ones at that.

Car tires, barbecues, dishwashers, ant farms and air conditioners are just some of the orders college students are having mailed to their dorm rooms, according to a New York Times article by Jonathan D. Glater (“Majoring in Mailroom Management,” Nov. 21, 2007).

When students make their online purchases they often give little thought to the cost let alone the effect their shipping volume or types of packages they’re ordering will have on the mail processing centers at their schools. But for some schools, the adjustment has not been simple or cheap.

Revolutionizing the Mailroom At a Cost

The University of Southern California, for example, has experienced double the amount of their typical package volume in the last four years, expecting to process more than 67,000 packages by the end of this year. It has spent thousands of dollars adjusting their mail processing systems by building a new highly-complex mailroom almost as large as half a volleyball court for just one of their residence halls, Glater reports.

“Some folks don’t realize the logistical implications,” said Jeff Urdahl, the recently retired director of housing at USC, told the Times. “It’s a different world.”

Although online shopping statistics don’t exist for the college age demographic, according to shop.org, a division of the National Retail Foundation, internet buying increased nearly $220 billion last year and this year it is expected to top $259 billion.

And how are students paying for these purchases? Most interviewed for the Times article said their online shopping splurges are financed by college jobs, savings and parental allowances, but many students are also resorting to their good friends Visa, Master Card and American Express.

But students’ online ordering habits are not only affecting theirs and their parents’ bank accounts, they are also proving costly for the schools themselves. SUNY Binghamton spent $25,000 to implement a new bar code scanning system to track the increase of incoming packages, which rose from 33,000 in 2002 to 57,000 this year. Purchase College, also in New York, spent $37,000 on a similar system.

For Arizona State University, the second largest university in the country, the process became so cumbersome, the school chose to wash its hands clean of the mail distribution process and turned over all mail responsibilities to UPS.

Mindless Internet Shopping Hurts Students and Schools

The effect of students’ online spending is not isolated to schools; students’ bank accounts are taking huge hits as well. Credit and debit card use, necessary for online shopping, makes it much more difficult for students to keep track of their spending and their account balances.

Some students told the Times that they may buy something off the internet three times a week. This has led college students, according to Young Money, a student financial magazine, to have credit balances averaging $2,700, and as the popularity of internet shopping continues to rise, these numbers may only go up.

Students like Sarah Staton, a first year student at USC, don’t mask their online shopping activities; however they don’t quite seem to understand the effects it has on their finances.

“I do buy a lot of things, but it’s O.K. because I buy things that are cheap,” she told the Times. She admits to shopping on the internet more than two hours a day, especially for shoes. “How can I make a fashion statement if I don’t have the right shoes that match what I’m wearing?”

With this type of attitude, it looks like college mail centers and students will have to keep expanding their wallets.

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Amazon and SpiralFrog Looking to Cut Into iTunes' Market Share

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 02:03:00 GMT

Spurred by the monolithic popularity of iTunes and the decline of CD sales, veteran online retailers like Amazon.com, start-ups like SpiralFrog and other companies are clamoring to get into the fray of digital music on demand.

With so much competition, consumers can get great deals and music options, depending on what they’re looking for.

Amazon Betting on Flexibility to Lure Consumers

Amazon’s venture into MP3 sales launched last week with an inventory of nearly 2.3 million songs from the catalogs of major music labels Universal Music Group and EMI Music, as well as thousands of independent labels—and none of these songs are copy-protected with digital rights management technology.

DRM technologies, which have been implemented by the music industry both on CDs and digital files, aim to restrict how consumers can use or distribute their music purchases. In the world of downloadable music, these DRM controls will typically restrict, for example, what kind of hardware (iPod, Zune, etc.) a music file will play on, or how many times a digital file can be burned to a CD.

While the Universal and EMI songs available from Amazon aren’t subject to DRM, they represent only a portion of the labels’ vast music libraries. Nevertheless, Amazon is setting the stage to compete directly with Apple’s iTunes, which has so far dominated the digital music market.

Amazon MP3, as Amazon’s digital-music virtual aisle is called, offers songs for 89 to 99 cents a pop and albums for $5.99 to $9.99 each, a slightly lower price point than iTunes, which sells individual copy-protected songs at a flat rate of 99 cents each and DRM-free songs from EMI for $1.29 apiece. Full album downloads from iTunes typically sell for $9.99.

iTunes uses AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format with proprietary DRM to encode its downloads, which means, unless you spring for the slightly pricier DRM-free songs or if you want something not on the EMI label (which is the only label currently offering DRM-free songs through Apple), your iTunes downloads will only play on an iTunes platform.

So if you have any portable digital player other than an iPod or an operating system that doesn’t support iTunes (Linux, for example), you won’t be able to listen or watch your iTunes downloads. And your iPod won’t play any DRM-enabled files that you purchased outside of iTunes.

Amazon MP3, on the other hand, by providing all DRM-free content, gives you the freedom to play your purchases on most types of portable devices (including the iPod) and through various desktop media players like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Realizing that flexibility is the convenience factor most music lovers are looking for in their online purchases, Wal-Mart is following in Amazon’s footsteps. The low-cost retailer offers its DRM-free tunes from EMI and Universal Music for 94 cents each and albums for $9.22, which is roughly 27 percent cheaper than iTunes.

Free Songs: Too Good to Be True?

SpiralFrog is taking a different approach, offering its non-DRM downloads free instead of engaging in a price war with online retailers. But the free music comes with a catch: Visitors can download songs at no charge but “have to wait 90 seconds for each track to download, and they must answer questions each month about their buying habits,” explains Joseph Menn in the Los Angeles Times (“SpiralFrog Offers Free Songs—With a Catch,” Sept. 17, 2007).

Songs can be stored on your computer but can’t be burned onto a CD. And if you don’t visit the SpiralFrog website at least once a month to watch more ads, your SpiralFrog music library gets digitally locked, and you won’t be able to access your music. You do have the ability to transfer your music files onto two Windows-compatible portable players or mobile phones at a time—but of course, this excludes the Apple iPod, the most popular digital music player out there.

The SpiralFrog website opened with a selection of 770,000 songs and 3,500 music videos from numerous independent labels and Universal Music. According to eFluxMedia, SpiralFrog has also recently signed a deal with digital label/publisher INgrooves to make INgrooves’ full catalog of audio and video files available, which adds close to 100,000 songs and 2,000 videos to SpiralFrog’s library, including 4,000 Brazilian albums from INgrooves’ iMúsica division (“SpiralFrog Opens for Business,” Sept. 17, 2007).

SpiralFrog makes its money from displaying online advertising. The ad revenue, Menn explains, will be split between SpiralFrog and the labels and music publishers, with the music industry getting more than half.

By offering free media downloads, SpiralFrog wants to appeal to customers tired of paying for their entertainment at iTunes or other pay sites.

“This is a very viable alternative to selling music because clearly that mode is broken,” says Scott Stagg, a SpiralFrog investor, in a quote in Menn’s article. “This is very similar to TV: You get it for free and the advertisers pay the money.”

The record labels, for their part, hope that free sites like SpiralFrog will help keep users away from illegal downloading and unauthorized peer-to-peer share services like LimeWire.

Whether you decide to get your music free, by dealing with a few restrictions, or at the best deal you can find by shopping around, SpiralFrog, Amazon and Wal-Mart are just a handful of the companies competing for you. Rumor has it Google may also get into the melee of online music sales.

Let the games begin.

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Could Google Go Obsolete?

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:29:00 GMT

The programmers and executives at San Francisco–based startup Powerset are hoping that the answer to this question will be “yes” once they debut their search engine that operates on natural-language technology.

Powerset finally offered its first public preview on September 17, reports Associated Press writer Michael Liedtke, at a conference hosted by TechCrunch, “a blog widely read by venture capitalists and other high-tech luminaries” (“Search Startup Ready to Challenge Google,” Sep. 17, 2007).

Powerset’s natural-language search engine would give Internet users a platform to conduct their searches in plain English—in other words, in the kinds of sentences people speak in real life—as opposed to by typing in an assortment of keywords.

Right now, all the major search engines—Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—use the traditional keyword-based model, with Google cornering more than half of all search engine traffic.

The difference between the two types of searching technologies has to do with how the search engine processes the search terms you type in when you want to find something on the Internet.

A keyword-based engine, like Google, basically disregards “minor” words like articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (in, by, about, etc.), and hones in on what it considers to be the most important terms. Natural-language engines take into account a string of words as a whole rather than looking at them as individual pieces.

For example, if you wanted to find information on student loans, in a natural-language search, you would type your request in the same way you would ask a person: “How much money can I get as an undergrad?” In a Google search, on the other hand, you would search by keywords like “undergrad money college” and hope to get results with information on maximum loan amounts. Change the order of your keywords—“money college undergrad”—and get different search results.

This distinction, writes Liedtke, means “Web surfers will theoretically be able to get more meaningful results by typing more precise search requests in the form of straightforward questions.”

Searches Going Au Naturel

Perhaps more buzzworthy than the natural-language engine itself is the fact that Powerset is licensing its technology from veteran powerhouse Palo Alto Research Center, the subsidiary of Xerox famed for introducing one revolutionary technology after another—laser printing, the graphical user interface (GUI), Ethernet networking, and the first commercial use of the computer mouse, just to name a few.

Ronald Kaplan, PARC’s top natural-language specialist, is now Powerset’s chief technology and science officer, Liedtke reports.

“We have the best natural-language search technology that has ever been developed,” says Barney Pell, Powerset’s co-founder and chief executive.

And he plans to take that technology, along with Powerset’s $12.5 million in venture capital, and give Mother Google a run for her money.

Although Powerset is not the first to push natural-language searching, with Ask Jeeves failing miserably in the 1990s and Hakia currently struggling to make inroads in the Internet search market, Pell believes his company’s technology will be able to fill in the holes that keyword searches leave behind.

He compares the problem of searching with keywords to trying to talk to a toddler with limited language skills.

“In one sense, you are happy you can talk to it at all, but you still really want it to grow up so you can hold a real conversation,” he says.

Not everyone expresses the same optimism. Industry analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research says the problem with natural-language searches lies not with faults in the technology’s algorithms, but with a computer’s inability to differentiate between variable meanings of the same word and discern the subtle nuances of language.

In a search, Li says, asking “What caused the collapse of Enron?” and “What caused the downfall of Enron?” will generally yield completely different search results even though the questions are essentially the same.

For other skeptics, whether Powerset can achieve its goal of revolutionizing the search engine sector will depend on the company’s ability to transform the mindset and ritual practices of Internet searchers. These critics argue that the majority of current searches are short, only a few words long, and that Internet users, increasingly demanding that all their online interactions happen in high-speed, may not easily make, or even want to make, the shift to more typing and longer search strings.

Danny Sullivan, a blogger for SearchEngineWatch.com, says Pell fails to provide a convincing argument for why today’s keyword search users would miraculously transition to the other side.

Internet users “aren’t using keywordese now because they somehow have been trained to do it,” Sullivan writes in a blog post. “No one from Google sat the searchers down and said ‘only two words, and don’t use conjunctions.’ People search however they want—and right now, they use only a few words” (“Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend,” Oct. 5, 2006).

Testing to Determine Powerset’s Potential

The natural-language debate aside, how successful the technology and the company will be remains to be seen. Powerset is rolling out its search engine gradually and will begin by analyzing feedback from the 16,000 people who have registered as users of its test site, Powerlabs. The temporary site is currently operating in a limited capacity, explains Liedtke, only indexing content from Wikipedia, the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia.

Powerset has set up Powerlabs to display, alongside its own results, the results returned by competitor sites like Google and Yahoo when given the same search questions. Powerlabs then requires users to choose which search engine’s results worked better for them before they can proceed with their next search.

With all the press over the past two years surrounding Powerset’s natural-language model, Google execs may be starting to feel the pressure of a competitor threatening to break Google’s steel grip on Internet searchdom. According to Liedtke, Google has been working on its own version of natural-language search technology since the end of 2005, pumping nearly $2.2 billion into research and development and beefing up its staff by thousands.

But executives at Powerset aren’t deterred by the competition or the criticism.

“Google is the king. … Their system does an amazing job, given what they have to go on” says Pell. “But we think they have plateaued.”

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Happy Birthday to :-)

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:13:00 GMT

To send e-mails or chat online without emoticons would be like listening to your computer’s artificial voice read an excerpt from the Harry Potter books—you may get the plot, but Harry’s spells are no longer frantic and Voldemort’s hissed threats no longer ooze evil.

This month, we celebrate September 19,1982, the birth date of the “smiley” emoticon, and all you chatting kings and queens out there may want to pay your respects to a man who revolutionized the way we communicate online with three simple keystrokes.

Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, first introduced :-), or “the smiley,” on a departmental electronic bulletin 25 years ago. Fahlman considers his post to be the foundation of emoticons, otherwise known as emotional icons.

Scott Fahlman.

“I’ve never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I’ve never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did,” Fahlman writes on Smiley Lore :-), the university Web page he’s dedicated to the origins of the electronic smiley face. “But it’s always possible that someone else had the same idea—it’s a simple and obvious idea, after all.”

Following the Smiley Craze

Fahlman could never have imagined what would follow after his quick, impulsive post. As use of the smiley spread throughout his department, then from college to college, and finally across the country to the global e-space, writing in online formats changed forever.

“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman says in an Associated Press article (“:-) Turns 25,” Sep. 18, 2007). “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this started.”

The online bulletin with Fahlman’s post wasn’t saved and remained lost for years following the smiley explosion, Fahlman says on Smiley Lore. Neither Fahlman nor anyone else had any idea how popular that little sideways face made up entirely of punctuation would become, or that a two-sentence message would eventually be archived as a piece of communications history.

With the help of Mike Jones from Microsoft, an exhaustive search of Carnegie Mellon’s backup tapes uncovered Fahlman’s original post, which reads, “I propose the following character sequence for joke matters: :-). Read it sideways.”

Today, 25 years later, Internet users have thousands of emoticon options to choose from. Emoticons help to convey tone of voice or shades of meaning in online conversations that could otherwise be easily misconstrued without hearing a speaker’s intonation or seeing a facial expression to differentiate the excited from the angry, the serious from the sarcastic.

For example,

See you later ; )

means something completely different than

See you later

Smiling Strong for 25 Years

For some language purists, the use of emoticons cheapens the written word. They point to masters like Shakespeare and Faulkner, who crafted exquisitely descriptive phrases to paint vivid images and convey undertows of emotion, all without the use of emoticons.

But it’s hard to compare chat-speak to literature when online chatting and e-mail act more as stand-ins for speech than as writing.

“What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don’t have the voice,” says Clifford Nass, a Stanford University communications professor, in a quote in the AP article.

Whichever way you view it, the online world, from teen chatterboxes to forty-something CEOs, has embraced the smiley and other emoticons to such an extent that our words would now be lost in translation without them.

So the next time you stick out your virtual tongue or send a cyber wink, give a small thanks to the emoticon father himself, Steve E. Fahlman, for giving you the tools to do so.

Still a little lost when it comes to figuring out what that B-) and :--} in your e-mail mean? Check out this emoticon dictionary from Nerd Times.

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