Student Loan Blog : trends

Trade Schools Are Better Than Community Colleges, Say Americans in Poll

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:38:00 GMT

Results of a recent public opinion poll point to a strong belief among Americans that career and technical schools may be better than community colleges at preparing students for today’s competitive workforce, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Americans Favor Career and Technical Colleges Over Community Colleges, Report Says,” June 4, 2008).

The poll results, released by the Career College Association, reveal 40 percent of the 830 respondents choosing career colleges as the best alternative to four-year institutions, versus the 17 percent who favored community colleges.

Community college officials have taken issue with the survey’s findings, pointing out that the growth in enrollment at community colleges has dwarfed increases in enrollment at career schools in the for-profit sector — a fact administrators consider to be a vote of confidence in the community college system.

“I don’t deny some [technical school] programs are good programs, but to draw a comparison like that and write a survey on it seems to me to be a curious way to use their resources,” said David Baime, vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges.

Survey Reveals Shift Away From ‘Education for Education’s Sake’

Instead of indicating the superiority of one type of institution over another, the survey results may indicate a subtle shift in education values, say CCA executives, with a greater number of students each year choosing the skills-based training at career or technical colleges over the traditional “book-learning” education found at other two- and four-year colleges.

“Spending four years cloistered on campus is growing increasingly unlikely for a growing number of Americans — Americans still in need of the skills and abilities delivered through higher education,” the report’s authors concluded.

The growing trend among college students has been toward viewing higher education as a pathway to a specific job or career, notes Harris Miller, CCA president. “Apparently, today they’re not convinced that traditional higher education, for all of its important strengths, really serves that purpose very well.”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

Wilkes University Puts Freshman Recruits Front and Center and Billboard-Size

Student Loan Girl — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:56:00 GMT

Wilkes University, a small, private school in northeastern Pennsylvania, is using a quirky new in-your-face $120,000 ad campaign to get the attention of today’s media- and marketing-savvy students.

The university is plastering personalized messages on billboards, pizza boxes, gas pumps, and even on MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to students it wants to make a part of its freshman class, reports Michael Rubinkam in a story by The Associated Press (“Pennsylvania College Woos Students by Putting Them in Ads,” April 30, 2008).

The “trendsetting and forward-thinking” marketing campaign appeals to the “look-at-me generation,” teens comfortable sharing all-things-personal on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, says Nancy Costopulos, chief marketing officer of the American Marketing Association.

The Message: Personalized and Not for the Shy

Wilkes features applicants in its ads who have a “mix of talents and determination” and who live in markets where the university wants to promote itself, says Jack Chielli, the school’s director of marketing. Students must also consent to having their names used.

The ads, writes Rubinkam, are meant “to convey the message that the school gets to know its students personally and pays close attention to their needs.”

To get messages with the right personal touch, 160over90, the Philadelphia marketing firm contracted by Wilkes, interviews participating students and their friends and families, uncovering likes, dislikes, hobbies, nicknames.

The agency uses the information it gleans from these in-depth interviews to design the highly personalized ads that have turned some college-bound seniors into quasi-celebrities in their high schools and communities:

“Lake Lehman senior Greg Heindel: You give your time at the soup kitchen, the firehouse, and your church summer camp. Wilkes University would like to give you something — a top-quality education.”
“Hey Kristen Pecka. Only your closest friends at Central Catholic call you Pecka-lecka-lecka. Choose Wilkes University and add 2,362 more people to that list.”
“Scranton High senior Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)”

Each ad includes an invitation to “call a Colonel” (the school’s mascot) and provides a phone number that plays a recorded message from a current Wilkes student.

It’s the Thought That Counts

Even if targeted recruits end up choosing another school, says Chielli, he considers the ads successful as long as they continue to grab attention and get other students to think about Wilkes.

But besides drawing more students to apply, the school wants to help make it possible for them to actually attend: Nearly all students receive some form of financial aid apart from student loans to help cover the $25,000 price tag. Wilkes awards $22 million in financial aid each year.

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

Fewer Foreign Students Seeking Advanced Degrees in the U.S.

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:44:00 GMT

The growth rate of international students studying at American colleges and universities has slowed, despite an increase in foreign applications to U.S. educational institutions for the third straight year in a row, according to a recent survey.

The 2008 edition of the International Graduate Admissions Survey, a review conducted annually by the Council of Graduate Schools, found that the number of international applications increased by just 3 percent in 2008, compared to a 9-percent increase in 2007 and a 12-percent increase in 2006.

Applications are down for students from China, Korea, and India, who together account for the vast majority of international students studying in the United States each year.

The CGS survey also found a continued slowdown in the number of foreign students applying to U.S. science and engineering programs — two fields that draw heavily on international students.

In the physical sciences, applications increased by only 7 percent this year, after gains of 12 percent in 2007 and 15 percent in 2006. Meanwhile, the number of engineering applications rose by just 1 percent, following a 13-percent increase last year and a 19-percent jump between 2005 and 2006.

International Applicants Hampered by Tighter Visa Requirements

The decline in applications may be partially attributed to increased competition from advanced degree programs abroad, Karen Klomparens, dean of the graduate school at Michigan State University, told The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Growth in Foreign Applications to American Graduate Schools Slows,” April 14, 2008).

Klomparens points to Australia, New Zealand, and Europe as favored student destinations offering increased choice in doctoral education.

Some international students may also be deterred by stricter U.S. student visa requirements following the September 11^th terrorist attacks in 2001. Foreign students applying for U.S. visas must now submit to extensive record checks, a rigorous interview process, and continued monitoring.

“There’s a growing perception among international students that the United States is not as welcoming to international students as it has been in the past,” study author, Ken Redd, told the Seattle Post Intelligencer (“More Foreign Graduates Forsaking U.S. Colleges; Visa Crackdown Cited,” April 13, 2008).

Redd’s review of international graduate applications is the first phase in the three-part CGS survey that will also track offers of admission and final enrollment numbers.

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

Study: College Courses Taught by Part-Time Faculty Lead to High Freshman Dropout Rates

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:39:00 GMT

College freshmen are more likely to drop out of school before their sophomore year when they take introductory-level courses taught by part-time, rather than full-time instructors, a recent study suggests.

Increasingly, part-time and adjunct instructors are being assigned to teach first-year classes, also referred to as “gatekeeper courses.” Less than one percent of the students enrolled in these courses are continuing on to earn their associate’s degree, writes David Glenn of The Chronicle of Higher Education (“ ‘Gatekeeper’ Courses Should Not Be Assigned to Part-Time Instructors, Research Suggests,” March 27, 2008).

With the number of part-time and adjunct professors teaching introductory classes having more than doubled in the past 35 years, the study poses significant implications for the impact of first-year instruction on degree-earning rates, say the study’s authors, Audrey J. Jaeger, an assistant professor of higher education at North Carolina State University, and M. Kevin Eagan, Jr., a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The Dropout Effect

Jaeger and Eagan’s paper, which will appear in the New Directions for Teaching and Learning journal later this year, was discussed at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in March.

As part of their study, Jaeger and Eagan analyzed transcripts of 30,000 students who were enrolled in introductory classes at four public four-year universities in a southeastern state between 2002 and 2005.

The researchers found that when the colleges assigned part-time faculty, lecturers, and postdoctoral fellows to teach these introductory-level courses, students were significantly less likely to return to school their sophomore year.

There was no such dropout effect, on the other hand, in gatekeeper courses taught by graduate assistants or full-time, non-tenure-track instructors.

Personalized Attention Often Absent With Part-Time Faculty

Jaeger, the paper’s lead author, says that the chief reason for such high dropout rates among freshmen taught by part-time instructors may be attributed to the fact that adjuncts tend to have limited office hours, restricting their ability to communicate face-to-face with their students.

As a result, Jaeger speculates, students often become frustrated or disengaged with the course material.

This theory would seem to be reinforced by data pulled from the National Survey of Student Engagement.

In a review of this data, Paul Umbach, a professor of higher education at the University of Iowa, found that part-time and other contingent faculty tended to spend less time interacting with students and fewer hours preparing for class than their full-time counterparts.

Increasing Teacher Support Is Key

Jaeger and Eagan emphasize that their analysis is not intended as a criticism of part-time faculty. In fact, they urge university officials to better support their part-time professors, and propose specific courses of action administrators could take:

Assign part-time professors to smaller courses less vulnerable to dropouts
Allocate larger office spaces where part-time faculty can better interact with their students
Provide resources that facilitate interaction and support outside the classroom

A less sympathetic member of the AERA conference panel offers an alternate, if extreme view of what should be done instead: Stop hiring part-time faculty.

Asked Leonard L. Baird, executive editor of The Journal of Higher Education, “Could administrators be shown a cost-benefit analysis that might demonstrate that the money they save by hiring these people is outweighed, or even overwhelmed, by the revenue they lose when students drop out?”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

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.

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

Yahoo! Website Finds of the Year 2007: Weird & Wonderful

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 06:11:00 GMT

Annually since 2003, Yahoo! UK & Ireland has been handing out their “Finds of the Year” awards to the most interesting and innovative websites of the year. Yahoo! UK’s panel of judges chooses a winner and several runners-up in nine categories:

In addition, users are invited to review the nominees in each group and vote for their favorite to win the People’s Choice category.

Here are some of our favorites from the Weird & Wonderful winners.

Weird & Wonderful Finds of the Year 2007

Faces in Places, Winner: Faces in Places collects photos of the various faces people have found in everyday locations.

Even if you’ve never been able to make out the old man in the moon or Jesus in a tortilla, we guarantee that after one tour through this site, you’ll be seeing faces where you never expected: in mops and typewriters, on noodles and pizza slices.

One of our favorites is Potty, which captured smiling faces, made with a stovetop, bottle tops, and pencils, on two ordinary cooking pots.

Got a great face photo of your own? Add it to the Faces in Places Flickr group.

Toy Voyagers, Runner-Up: This site follows the adventures of toys traveling around the globe with the help of humans. If you’ve ever seen the 2001 French movie Amélie, where a lawn gnome travels the world with his journey recorded in photographs and letters home, it’s the same general idea.

Users register their toys and set up a character profile and life mission. Each toy can then keep a travelogue or diary, documenting its globe-trekking adventures by posting written entires and photos of its journey.

Fishycam, Runner-Up: Just two goldfish in a fishbowl tracked by a webcam. It may sound boring, but there’s something weirdly hypnotic about the ever-circling fish. Tune in for a few minutes, and you may just find yourself hooked.

The cam quality’s a little sketchy, but site-owner Stephan is taking donations to collect the £300 he needs for a new webcam, if you feel like contributing to the Fishcam cause.

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

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.”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

Gone in a Puff of Smoke: College Campuses Cutting Out Smoking

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:31:00 GMT

To smoke or not to smoke? That isn’t so much the question anymore as, Where art thou, Legally Sanctioned Smoking Area? And the answer to that is harder and harder to find as the number of smoking bans increases across both the country and college campuses.

According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, as of October 1, 2007, there are 95 colleges and universities nationwide with campus-wide smoke-free policies, and almost another 300 with partial bans that prohibit smoking in all residential housing (“U.S. Colleges and Universities With Smokefree Air Policies,” Oct. 1, 2007).

The most recent additions to the list include schools in New Jersey, Indiana, and Georgia, and with this November 15^th representing the 31^st anniversary of the national Great American Smokeout, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network is pushing for more schools to follow suit, reports Judy Fortin for CNN (“Smoke-Free College Trend Growing,” Nov. 12, 2007).

A Battle Against Statistics

Smoking rates in the United States are highest among college-age students, Fortin notes, with college students smoking more even as all other age groups cut down on their tobacco use. But anti-smoking students, administrators, and other advocates continue to push for their cause.

“Students form lifelong habits in college, so reducing their exposure to cigarettes may have a lasting effect,” writes Emily Bazar for USA Today, quoting Besty Foy of the American College Health Association (“More Colleges Banning Smoking,” March 1, 2007).

“If you’re not allowed to smoke on campus, if you can’t buy tobacco products on campus, it will definitely deter some students from smoking,” says Foy.

The Non-Smoking Campus: Healthier But Less Safe?

Advocates for campus smoking bans argue that the average student and especially those students plagued with asthma or other chronic lung problems have the right to a healthful environment at school.

When a campus is smoke-free, “it’s just a healthier place to be,” says Martha Nesbitt, president of Georgia’s Gainesville State College, in Fortin’s article. Gainesville State is in its fourth year of a campus-wide ban on all tobacco products.

“As you go in a building,” says Nesbitt, “you’re not going to have to go through smoke. When you walk out, you don’t see cigarette butts littered around. It’s just a cleaner, healthier campus.”

For college smokers, on the other hand—and according to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, that’s 28.4 percent of full-time college students and 43.5 percent of part-time students—school smoking bans don’t just raise an issue of infringement on personal freedom, they could compromise student safety on campus.

New Jersey’s Bergen Community College, which was scheduled to pass its proposed campus-wide smoking ban last month, has a 167-acre campus, meaning students may have quite a long walk for a smoke break.

Michael McFadden, a smokers’ rights advocate in the area, says the proposed ban would create safety issues for the school’s students, forcing them off campus.

“It can put the student in a dangerous situation,” says McFadden, in an article by Patricia Alex in Drexel University’s The Triangle. In McFadden’s view, Alex writes, “the bans amount to social engineering that is more Orwellian than American” (“New Jersey College Passes Campus Wide Smoking Ban,” Oct. 19, 2007).

Student smokers who live on campus find the bans to be particularly unfair, considering these injunctions prohibit them from exercising a personal choice within or near their own residence.

“I can vote for president of the United States. I can go to war,” says Alex Eukmer, a student at Indiana University in Bloomington, in Bazar’s USA Today article. “But I can’t necessarily smoke a cigarette because they’re afraid I’ll make a bad choice?”

But for a growing number of college administrators, it’s not a question of good or bad student choices, but of the choice the school itself wants to make when it comes to smoking.

“We want our institution to make a statement about doing the right things when it comes to good health,” says Chuck Kupchella, president of the University of North Dakota, in Bazar’s article. He sums up the nationwide college smoking debate bluntly: “Smokers still will have rights, but just not on our campus.”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

College Presidents’ Salaries Not-So-Slowly Sliding Up the Pay Scale

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 04:09:00 GMT

It costs a lot of money to go to college. It costs even more money to run a college. And it’s costing increasingly more money to pay college and university presidents’ salaries and compensation packages, with many reaching the million-dollar mark.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s most recent survey of executive compensation, salaries for presidents of private institutions has increased 200 percent over the last five years, with 81 presidents making more than $500,000 a year. Eight out of the 182 public institutions surveyed now pay salaries of at least $700,000, a jump from the two who reached that benchmark last year (“Presidential Pay is Increasing Fastest at the Largest Institutions,” Nov. 16, 2007).

In some ways, the life of a growing number of college presidents can be compared to that of a U.S. senator. In addition to their high salaries, these presidents might receive free housing, cars, travel, meals and “gifts” from friends of the institutions.

But with yearly college tuition hikes outstripping both the rate of inflation and increases in financial aid, one of the questions becomes whether rising presidents’ salaries are contributing to rising tuition costs (see our Nov. 4 blog, “Student Loan Debt Is on the Rise”).

A New York Times article by Jonathan D. Glater reports that families and lawmakers are concerned about these unfettered increases, questioning college and university presidents making millions even as students graduate with soaring levels of student loan debt (“Increased Compensation Puts More College Presidents in the Million-Dollar Club,” Nov. 12, 2007).

“The public has lost confidence in the altruistic mission of higher education,” says Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, in Glater’s article. “They see higher education as just another institution that’s in it for its own bottom line.”

Salaries on the Rise at Both Private and Public Schools

At private institutions, 81 college presidents earned $500,000 or more in the 2006 fiscal year, an increase of 15.7 percent from the previous year.

NOTE: Because some institutions changed Carnegie classifications, the number of institutions from which these data were collected changed from 670 last year to 654 this year. The statistics do not include special-focus institutions or the compensation of presidents who worked only part of the year.

Data and text courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

At public universities, the median total annual compensation in 2006–07 for the sample of 182 leaders was $397,349. The following chart shows how many presidents were in each of the $100,000 pay classifications.

Data and text courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Schools and Presidents Defend Their Pay

Officials at schools with some of the highest paid presidents argue that “running a large university is increasingly similar to running a corporation,” writes Glater. In fact, the Chronicle points out, more college presidents are coming from corporate environments.

School officials, Glater explains, maintain that generous salaries are necessary both to draw presidents that can operate under the corporate mindset needed “to help build institutional wealth and prestige” and to keep them from defecting to a higher bidding school once they’ve been hired—one-third of public college presidents have no formal written employment contract, according to the Chronicle.

For fear of being ousted as the next Benjamin Lander—the former president of American University who was fired for allegedly requesting more than half a million dollars business compensation for personal expenses—some presidents themselves want to make it clear that not all college heads abuse their compensation packages and expense reimbursements. For some presidents, their greatest yearly expense comes in the form of donations given back to their schools.

In another Chronicle article, reporter Piper Fogg interviewed five college and university presidents about how they spend their money. Although all of them admitted to some personal splurging, they also pointed out the thousands of dollars they give back to the schools they work for (“With All Those Perks, How Do College Presidents Spend Their Money?,” Nov. 16, 2007).

David Hodge, president of Miami University (Ohio), earns $399,005 per year, but has donated more than $100,000 in the last year to create need-based scholarships for his students.

Lois B. DeFleur, president of the State University of New York at Binghamton, might own a Piper Comanche 260C single-engine airplane that she bought over 30 years ago, but the school only reimburses her for mileage at the automobile mileage rate—she pays for the gas, $5 a gallon, out of her own pocket. And out of her $344,500 pay package, DeFleur has donated about $100,000 over the last five years to her school, as well as the $25,000 she received for winning the McGraw Prize in Education.

If college presidents are increasingly expected to operate as CEOs, Hodge and DeFleur certainly differ from typical corporate executives in what they voluntarily give back to their employers out of their own salaries. And while college presidents’ pay is rising rapidly, the Chronicle notes that compared with the salaries of corporate CEOs, college executive salaries still lag far behind.

As long as colleges and universities stay on their current path toward functioning as corporations, presidents’ salaries will most likely continue to climb—it will be for the schools, the students, and the public at large to see if they get the corporate-level college management that corresponds to the corporate-level pay.

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

Student Loan Debt Is on the Rise, and College Grads Face Growing Financial Obstacles

Student Loan Girl — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 20:10:00 GMT

Money. Some of us have it. Some of us need more of it. Particularly recent college grads transitioning from their campus to the workspace, from having student loans available that help pay their living expenses to having to make it on their own—all while paying back those student loans that paved their way to graduation.

With the surge in student loan debt outpacing the growth in starting salaries, and with tuition increases far exceeding increases in federal financial aid, a growing number of college graduates are facing barely manageable levels of student loan debt.

Tuition Hikes Outstrip Increases in Federal Financial Aid Awards

“Student aid continues to grow, but not as fast as tuition, and not enough to make up for the difference between family incomes and the price of college,” says Larry Abramson in a story for National Public Radio (“Tuition Hikes Outpace Student-Aid Increases,” Oct. 26, 2007).

According to the College Board’s “Trends in College Pricing” 2007 report, average published tuition and fees for in-state college students at four-year schools climbed by 6.6% for the 2007–08 academic year, a hike that “outpaced increases in the financial aid that lowers what most students actually pay” writes Erica Perez in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (“College Costs Outpace Inflation,” Oct. 23, 2007).

Starting Salaries Increasing More Slowly Than Student Debt

With more tuition to have to pay, students are graduating with more student loan debt than ever. In 2004, two-thirds of college graduates left school with student loans, and between 1993 and 2004, the average debt for college graduates with student loans soared a staggering 107%, according to a report by Luke Swarthout, a Higher Education Associate for the U.S. PIRG Education Fund. Student loan debt, Swarthout notes, is rising faster than both the cost of living and the cost of health care (“Student Debt and Consumer Costs in the Minneapolis–St. Paul Area,” July 2006).

Student debt levels are also eclipsing income gains. The “rapid rise in student debt comes while the real median income of younger Americans has only modestly increased” by 4.4% between 1995 and 2004 for household earners under 35, writes Swarthout.

Starting salaries for recent graduates can’t keep pace either. A report on “Student Debt and the Class of 2006” released by the Project on Student Debt found that for graduating seniors, average student loan debt rose 8 percent between 2005 and 2006, while starting salary offers rose only about 4 percent.

“Too many young people leave college saddled with heavy debt burdens and struggle to cover their loan payments on top of basic living expenses,” says Robert Shireman, Executive Director of the Project on Student Debt, in a press release for their recent study. “Students need better options and counseling when they’re deciding how to pay for college.”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

A Fix That Doesn’t Stick: British Scientists Invent Non-Stick, Water-Soluble Chewing Gum

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:53:00 GMT

You’re walking along down the street humming a happy tune because you’re having one of those remarkably great days, and then you take the step that stops you dead in your tracks.

We all know the feeling of slowly trying to peel our heel up from a gooey sidewalk. This is the unmistakable experience of stepping in freshly chewed gum.

But those sticky situations and the unsightly stretches of asphalt pocked with blackened gum may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to British scientists at Bristol University who have created the first non-stick gum, reports Fiona MacRae in the Daily Mail (“Scientists Invent the World’s First Non-Stick Chewing Gum That Washes Off Pavements,” Sep. 13, 2007).

The gum, called Revolymer 7, Rev 7 for short, is reportedly still full of taste and has the same chewy consistency, but can be easily peeled off hard surfaces and washed off sidewalks with just water, which could save cities thousands in specialized gum clean-up costs.

Gumming for Change

The United States tops all other nations in gum consumption, with sales reaching around $2 billion a year. All that gum in people’s mouths translates into gobs of discarded gum in movie theaters, on park benches, under tables, and all over pavement and parking lots. Chewing gum doesn’t break down over a period of time, so gum litter accumulates and remains difficult to remove.

According to Daimer Steam Cleaners, gum removal procedures cost U.S. taxpayers $2 to $3 per piece of gum. In Great Britain, writes MacRae, gum clean-up can cost councils £150 million—over $300 million—a year.

It’s this proliferation of carelessly thrown-down gum that provided the impetus for inventor Terence Cosgrove, a physical chemist and professor at Bristol University.

“Chewing gum is a social habit that goes around the world. But unfortunately, a large number of people dispose of their gum inappropriately,” says Cosgrove, quoted in MacRae’s article. “It is unpleasant, could have health issues associated with it, and is unsightly.”

To create the non-stick gum, Cosgrove and his fellow scientists used the basic gum formula of synthetic rubber, chalk, wax, sugar and flavorings, but replaced the gum’s sticky component, an adhesive compound also found in car tires, with a non-stick synthetic substitute.

For all you gum chewers and smackers out there, Cosgrove’s creation could be paradise in a stick. At the 2007 Festival of Science held by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Bristol team announced that tests of their product showed the non-stick formula is attracted to water, making it effortless to wash away—just rain will do the trick—and easy to remove from both shoe soles and hair.

Say goodbye to mashing that messy mixture of peanut butter and ice cubes in your hair to detangle the wads of gum you woke up with on your pillow instead of in your mouth.

God Save the Sidewalks

The new gum, which will only be produced in mint and lemon flavors at first, is scheduled for a small-scale release in the U.K. next year if is meets safety regulations. In the meantime, its creators are continuing to seek a major confectioner for wide distribution.

Emma Brennan of the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign expresses optimism about the invention’s potential to make a difference on the walkways of London, where Oxford Street alone, according to MacRae, wears an estimated 300,000 pieces of discarded gum.

“It can cost up to £20,000 to use power-washers or steam cleaners to remove gum from town center,” says Brennan.

But she hopes the removal of the sticky factor in Cosgrove’s gum doesn’t encourage gum lovers to chew and dispose irresponsibly.

Says Brennan, “It is important that people don’t use the invention of non-stick gum to justify dropping it on the pavement rather than putting in the bin.”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

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.

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

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.”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit