Hacking College

Debt: Not just for undergrads

Dean — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:11:38 +0000

Approximately half of the 45,000 people who will graduate this year from ABA-accredited law schools will never find jobs as lawyers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the next decade 21,000 new jobs for lawyers will become available each year, via growth and outflow from the profession.Most of those who do find jobs will be making between $30,000 and $60,000 per year.

Debt: Not just for undergrads

Gap Year: Congrats! You’re Accepted to College, Now Go Away

Dean — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:17:16 +0000

Higher education experts say that giving students an opportunity to explore the real world helps them mature. And early research reveals that once they restart their academic studies, they actually perform better than those who go straight from high school to college.

An estimated 1.2 percent of first-time college freshmen take a gap year, most of them male students, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California Los Angeles.

“These are still small percentages,” said John Pryor, director of the cooperative institutional research program at HERI. But college admission officers say the gap year is gaining momentum.

Gap Year: Congrats! You’re Accepted to College, Now Go Away

Figuring Out The Real Price Of College

Dean — Sun, 13 May 2012 22:54:34 +0000

There’s a tool that can help you figure this out. It’s called the “net price calculator.” And all colleges are now required to post a net price calculator on their website.

The calculator asks a series of questions about the student and the family’s financial situation. At the end, you get a page that shows the school’s sticker price, the scholarships and grants you’d be likely to qualify for, and the price you’d be likely to pay.

Figuring Out The Real Price Of College

This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone

Dean — Sun, 13 May 2012 22:48:06 +0000

Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart. “The great missing debate in contemporary politics,” Sandel writes, “is about the role and reach of markets.” We should be asking where markets serve the public good, and where they don’t belong, he argues. And we should be asking how to rebuild class-mixing institutions.

This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone

Jobs Few, College Graduates Flock to Unpaid Internships

Dean — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:32:25 +0000

Confronting the worst job market in decades, many college graduates who expected to land paid jobs are turning to unpaid internships to try to get a foot in an employer’s door.

Jobs Few, College Graduates Flock to Unpaid Internships

Student Loans Weighing Down a Generation With Heavy Debt

Dean — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:32:03 +0000

ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

Student Loans Weighing Down a Generation With Heavy Debt

Tuition is too damn high

Dean — Sat, 12 May 2012 03:29:29 +0000

Government is to blame for rising higher education costs — but not for the reasons the GOP tells you

Tuition is too damn high

The Campus Tsunami

Dean — Fri, 04 May 2012 03:29:47 +0000

This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”

The Campus Tsunami

How Colleges Fight For Top Students

Dean — Wed, 02 May 2012 19:35:00 +0000

“Families think their sons and daughters are awarded a merit scholarship because of the fact that they are wonderfully smart and talented,” says Robert Massa, a vice president at Lafayette. “[T]he primary reason for awarding a non-need-based merit scholarship is to change a student’s enrollment decision from another institution to our institution. That’s why colleges do it.”

How Colleges Fight For Top Students

One law school reduces admissions, says that’s the future of legal education

Dean — Wed, 02 May 2012 05:03:09 +0000

Frank Wu doesn’t mince words.

“The critics of legal education are right,” said Wu, the chancellor and dean of the University of California Hastings College of the Law. “There are too many law schools and there are too many law students and we need to do something about that.”

So he is. Starting this fall, Hastings will admit 20 percent fewer students than in years past, a decision that required the college to eliminate several staff positions.

One law school reduces admissions, says that’s the future of legal education