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Interview With Lawrence Goldstone, Author Of The Anatomy of Deception
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The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Obsession, Commerce, and Adventure
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Interview With Joseph Boyden, Author of Through Black Spruce
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Interview with Nino Ricci, Governor-General Award-Winning Author
Moving to college means that students have a new found freedom. As students finally living on your own, you are now in charge of your bed time, meals and sex life.
Although I’m sure you all appreciate not having to leave the door open when you have someone of the opposite sex over, you may still want to get some questions answered by your parents. There are some things about sex that are obvious and then there are somethings that aren’t.
Yearbooks are fun to look at, especially years later when the trends have changed.
Well if you want if you want a blast from the past, upload your photo on Yearbookyourself.com and see what you would look like with classic haircuts and outfits through the decades.
One in four kids is not graduating high school, which is a worse rate than their parents. Meaning, your kids are less likely to graduate from high school than you were. And, the US is the only industrialized country where that is the case. And apparently, the schools’ graduation goals aren’t helping either. Read more…
IRVING, Texas, April 1, 2008 /PRNewswire/ — Coca-Cola, in conjunction with Chuck E. Cheese’s — the home of safe, fun family entertainment — is teaming up on a college scholarship promotion. Parents can visit the Web site — http://www.ncaa.com/collegebound – and enter for the chance to win Coca-Cola’s $25,000 College Bound Scholarship for their kids as part of its partnership with the NCAA.
“At Coca-Cola FoodService, we work to help our customers be successful, whether that’s providing them with a portfolio of great beverages or helping them bring exciting programs like this NCAA partnership to help a lucky student,” said Terry Bucher, vice president national sales for Coca-Cola Foodservice.
“It’s a natural fit for Coca-Cola and Chuck E. Cheese’s to offer our guests the chance to win a college scholarship,” said Brenda Holloway, company spokesperson for CEC Entertainment, Inc. “Most people know we care about ensuring kids have a fun, safe time when they’re in our entertainment centers. But we also care about children’s’ well-being when they leave our centers.”
“This scholarship coincides with Chuck E. Cheese’s commitment to being more than just an entertainment center,” continued Holloway. “Our centers are havens for all ages that afford the opportunity for active play, which in turn can contribute to a healthy lifestyle.”
Coca-Cola partnered with Chuck E. Cheese’s in developing this contest. The Coca-Cola Company, an official NCAA® Corporate Champion, brought the NCAA partnership to the table, and asked Chuck E. Cheese’s to help formulate a method to market to its consumers in a new way. The online contest was created, as well as the college scholarship, which is a first-ever endeavor for Chuck E. Cheese’s.
“In addition to the scholarship, during this year’s playoff weekend in San Antonio, we will host a basketball clinic with an NCAA Division I coach at a local San Antonio Chuck E. Cheese’s,” said Bucher.
“This is the first time we’ve worked with Coca-Cola and its NCAA partnership,” continued Holloway. “It’s a new approach to marketing for us, but we think it’s a great way to reach a new audience. Our commitment to promoting an active lifestyle and supporting education goes hand in hand with the mission and goals of Coca-Cola and the NCAA.”
The clinic will be held on Friday, April 4, from 4 - 5 p.m. at Chuck E. Cheese’s located at 11735 Bandera Road in San Antonio. Ten middle school students from the area have been invited to take part in this event, which will be hosted by a Division I coach. Though the student participants have been pre-selected, the event is open to the public for those who would like to observe a Division I basketball coach’s expertise first-hand.
To enter this scholarship contest, which runs through April 30, consumers visit the Web site at http://www.ncaa.com/collegebound or http://www.chuckecheese.com to enter. For official rules and details, visit http://www.ncaa.com/collegebound.
MONTREAL, QUEBEC–(Marketwire - March 31, 2008) - Compared to post-secondary students at public colleges, students pursuing post-secondary studies at privately operated career colleges tend to be older, with a mean age of 29, and have a greater reliance on government student financial aid. In addition, most of them (72 per cent) are women, and they are more likely to have dependents under 18 and less likely to have financial backing from family.
These are several key findings of the Survey of Canadian Career College Students, the first major study of students attending career colleges. The survey, jointly commissioned by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation and Human Resources and Social Development Canada, with the cooperation of the National Association of Career Colleges, was conducted by R. A. Malatest and Associates Ltd.
Other key findings include:
- Six out of 10 students attending private post-secondary institutions took a break, after completing high school, of between one and 10 years before returning to their studies;
- Less than one in 10 indicated that they would have preferred to attend university;
- Most seek education that will equip them for specific jobs and careers, taking courses of seven to 12 months’ duration, compared to one- to four-year study programs in public colleges;
- The average cost of these programs is more than $14,000, and more than half of private career college students anticipate a debt load of $10,000 or more, compared to about one-third of public college students.
The study’s central objectives were to understand the socio-economic background of students attending private post-secondary institutions, identify the reasons and factors for choosing such an institution, assess students’ work and educational transition plans post program, and detail the level of student satisfaction with the education and services provided. The study is available at http://www.millenniumscholarships.ca/en/research/AllPublications.asp.
The Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation is a private, independent organization created by an act of Parliament in 1998, with a mandate to deliver bursaries and scholarships to Canadian post-secondary students until the end of 2009. The Foundation encourages students to strive for excellence and to pursue their post-secondary studies. To date, it has awarded more than 900,000 bursaries and scholarships, worth some $2.6 billion, to Canadian post-secondary students. Approximately five per cent of these awards have been distributed to students in private career colleges.
ARMONK, NY–(Marketwire - February 14, 2008) - IBM today announced it is teaming with University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and North Carolina State University (NC State) in Raleigh to deliver new courses on programming languages that have become the foundation of the emerging web-based economy. These skills are critical for young people entering the global workforce today.
Businesses today are looking to the next generation of IT experts who understand the dynamics of the globally-integrated enterprise; who can work across geographically distributed teams; and easily utilize different open-standards technology assets to quickly develop enterprise mashups, plug-ins and other Web 2.0 resources.
As part of today’s announcement, IBM is working with UCLA and NC State to expose students to Web 2.0 technologies using languages such as Java and Groovy, in addition to programming platforms such as Eclipse and Ruby on Rails.
At UCLA, students in computer science class CS130 can opt to work with IBM mentors on Web 2.0 and Eclipse plug-in projects they themselves design. Meanwhile, graduate students at NC State in Raleigh have the first-ever opportunity to get their hands on Project Zero, a new IBM-created Web 2.0 development environment for creating enterprise mashups and rich web applications for a variety of business needs.
Later this year, IBM will release Lotus Mashups both commercially and at no charge to the academic community. Lotus Mashups includes an easy-to-use tool that helps individuals with no IT skills create and share any type of situational application on the fly. Using Lotus Mashups, business users can quickly assemble together components from across the Web and in the enterprise, including functionality built using Project Zero.
According to Connecticut-based labor demand research company Skillproof, the number of job openings for IT professionals in the United States increased by 45.2% from 2004 to end of year 2007, with open-standards and Web 2.0 development skills topping the list of job openings. Even as the number of IT jobs has declined from mid-2007 through early 2008, open-computing skills remain proportionately hot.
Choose Your Own Technology Adventure at UCLA
To help prepare students for the ongoing demand for open computing skills is a class project IBM pioneered for UCLA’s CS130 Computer Science class. “Choose your own (technology) adventure” operates on a simple principle — harnesses students’ interest-areas to shape the coursework rather than on standard textbooks and syllabi.
Selecting from open technology areas, students propose their own course projects, ranging from a mobile phone mashup that alerts users about local events — to an iTunes-like personal music player that lets users play music trivia games, share playlists and build communities. From start to completion, IBM experts provide hands on mentoring to students to boost their software engineering skills, improve team collaboration and gain exposure to best-case practices from IBM’s own development groups.
“Choose your own (technology) adventure is giving UCLA students a truly unique opportunity to learn software engineering skills from the best and brightest at IBM such as working in a team environment while learning collaboration, networking, rapid decision making,” said Professor Paul Eggert, who teaches the CS130 class in UCLA. “Throughout the project, they are researching and evaluating technologies and connecting with open source developers and industry experts. This method is helping us attract more students to learning about these key technology areas by making things like Java and Eclipse extremely relevant to their areas of interest. ”
With the help of IBM mentors Jeff Tan and his fellow students created an event planning application called “Bounce” as a part of their CS130 class last spring — a learning experience that has inspired Jeff to attempt other projects — such as a Web 2.0 gaming portal. “Web 2.0 — I barely knew what it was until that quarter, and now I see no way back,” he said.
Added teammate Gabe Nataneli: “From a software engineering perspective, coming up with a well-defined project is one of the biggest challenges. IBM’s course method helps us learn these crucial skills by putting a huge emphasis on project development and definition,” he said. “Students in our class liked working with IBM because of the freedom ‘Choose your own (technology) adventure’ offered. The result is a project we can show to prospective employers.”
Now on its fourth quarter at UCLA, over 50 students and 27 IBM mentors have been working together on mashups, Ruby on Rails and Eclipse plug-in projects.
Project Zero at North Carolina State University
At NC State, an IBM incubator project called Project Zero is being used to teach students to develop business applications by taking advantage of simplified programming methods, rich web interfaces, and enterprise mashups.
In this spring’s graduate level computer science class, students will be among the first group of developers to work with this new development environment. They will learn to use Project Zero with Groovy and Java to develop a time-slot signup system — a common type of situational business application — without the need for in-depth architecting.
The Project Zero incubator is being hosted at projectzero.org.
Bringing open computing skills to the enterprise
IBM’s latest efforts expand on its university programs — emphasizing both IT and business skills to meet the needs of a competitive, global workforce at over 2400 universities world-wide for over 2 million students. These initiatives include a series of mainframe programming skills for Linux taught at the University of Arkansas to a program designed for the University of Arizona to help students build, run and manage blogs, wikis and mashups.
This year, IBM’s Academic Initiative plans to dedicate resources world-wide to drive double digit growth of students reached over 2007. It also plans to increase the number of world-wide events to host local customers, software companies and universities on skills such as around large systems such as IBM System z — and associated open-standards based middleware.
“By collaborating with universities on new methodologies, the resources available through its Academic Initiative, IBM is poised to help faculty and students get an edge on the needs of the marketplace,” said Jim Corgel, general manager of IBM’s ISV & Developer Relations group. “The efforts now taking place at UCLA and NC State are just part of how IBM is helping universities adapt to the quickly changing world of technology. We accomplish this by exposing students to tomorrow’s technologies today and sharing best practices from IBM’s global development teams.”
For more information on the IBM Academic Initiative, visit: www.ibm.com/university
More information about the Project Zero community can be found at the community website: www.projectzero.org
PHOENIX, AZ–(Marketwire - February 7, 2008) - Minority students are taking advantage of affordable education options in increasing numbers, with minority college enrollment up overall and especially at schools with the smallest tuition increases, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office. With student debt levels mounting for college students in general, enrollment in these less costly two-year public schools, where tuition hikes have been the smallest, could help minimize the need for student loans.
As a college education has become increasingly imperative in the job market, with 90% of the fastest growing jobs in the U.S. requiring some level of postsecondary education, more students are flocking to colleges across the country.
College enrollment numbers are up across the board, with the largest enrollment increases seen in minority populations. Between the 2000-01 and 2006-07 academic years, enrollment of college-bound White students grew by a little less than three percent, while enrollment of Black and Asian/Pacific Islander students grew by 15 percent and enrollment of Hispanic students shot up by 25 percent.
Enrollment for some minority groups has also shifted toward two-year schools. Hispanic and Black enrollment in two-year schools has increased, while enrollment in four-year public colleges has gone down. Nearly 60 percent of all Hispanic students are enrolled in two-year schools, as are 50 percent of Black and Asian/Pacific Islander students, compared to 43 percent of non-Hispanic White students.
The G.A.O. reports that over the past decade, two-year colleges have seen the smallest tuition increases, both in absolute dollars and percentage-wise. With enrollment at two-year colleges on the rise, three out of every five students in 2006-07 attended institutions where the average in-state tuition and fees were less than $5,000 a year. In fact, only three percent of students attended institutions where average annual tuition and fees exceeded $25,000.
These college enrollment trends, combined with a surge of financial aid reform at colleges and universities, may gradually make it possible for students to begin borrowing less money in federal and private student loans or for them to stop having to rely on college loans at all.
Ivy League heavyweights Harvard and Yale recently announced that they’ll be allocating more of their endowment funds to financial aid awards for middle-class students in order to reduce the amount of parent and student loans families may need. And last year, both Amherst College and Davidson College joined Princeton University in eliminating student loans from their financial aid packages altogether.
Those students who still find themselves in need of financial aid or whose financial aid packages still include student loans should look first at their options for federal financial aid. Federal college loans typically offer more attractive terms than private student loans, so students and families should always take advantage of any available federal financial aid first.
If federal funding doesn’t cover all their education-related expenses, students may be able to get the additional financial assistance they need from private student loans.
About NextStudent
NextStudent, Federal Lender Code 834051, is dedicated to helping students and their families find affordable ways to pay for college. NextStudent offers one-on-one education finance counseling and has a portfolio of highly competitive education finance products and services, including a free online scholarship search engine, federally guaranteed parent and student loans, private student loans, both federal and private student loan consolidation programs, and college savings plans.
For more information about NextStudent and its student loan programs, please visit our website at www.nextstudent.com.
PHOENIX, AZ–(Marketwire - January 31, 2008) - The United States continues to fall behind other major industrialized nations in terms of the percentage of the population with a college degree, according to a recent series of joint studies released by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and Jobs for the Future.
Currently ranked tenth among industrialized countries in the percentage of 25-34-year-olds holding an associate’s degree or higher, the U.S. is projected to slip further, ranking near the bottom in the percentage of entering students that complete a degree program. Notably, the U.S. now stands as one of the only countries where older adults are more educated than younger adults.
At the current rates of degree attainment, the U.S. will produce approximately 48 million new undergraduate degrees by 2025 — 16 million fewer degrees than the 64 million it would need to match leading nations Canada, Japan, and South Korea in the percentage of adults with a college degree (estimated at 55 percent) and to meet emerging national workforce needs. To make up the gap, the U.S. would need to produce an additional 781,000 college graduates a year — a 37 percent increase over current levels.
Only eight states are currently on track to reach the level of educational attainment needed by 2025 to compete with the best performing nations and meet workforce demands.
COLLEGE COSTS OUTPACE INFLATION
The studies, conducted as part of the Making Opportunity Affordable project, note that college affordability is increasingly affecting accessibility. Even when adjusted for inflation, tuition and fees at four-year public universities have risen 24 percent over the past five years, according to the Trends in College Pricing 2006 report by the College Board.
The result has been that lower- and middle-class families have been struggling more to pay for college, with fewer low-income students enrolling and two-thirds of college students graduating with debt. Today, the average student borrower at a public college or university owes $17,250 in student loans; 10 years ago, the average borrower attending a public institution graduated owing $8,000 in student loans, after adjusting for inflation.
The studies project that, in order to expand the percentage of its adult population with college degrees, the U.S. will need to increase college accessibility for low-income students, as well as for continuing education students and for students in minority groups that have been traditionally underserved in higher education.
COLLEGE FUNDING OPTIONS FOR STUDENTS AND PARENTS
In an effort to increase college accessibility for lower-income students, Congress passed the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007. The bill, which went into effect on October 1, increases the maximum federal Pell Grant award and is set to cut interest rates on subsidized federal college loans in half over the next five years.
Students who don’t demonstrate enough financial need to qualify for subsidized federal college loans or a federal Pell Grant could still qualify for low-cost, low-interest unsubsidized federal Stafford student loans. Students aren’t required to make any payments on their Stafford student loans while they’re still in school (at least half time). Non-need-based low-interest federal college loans are also available for qualifying parents of undergraduates.
Students whose education-related costs exceed their available federal financial aid may consider private student loans. While private student loans may provide the additional financial assistance some students need, since federal student loans generally offer more attractive terms than private student loans, it’s strongly recommended that students and their parents look to available federal financing options first.
About NextStudent
NextStudent, Federal Lender Code 834051, is dedicated to helping students and their families find affordable ways to pay for college. NextStudent offers one-on-one education finance counseling and has a portfolio of highly competitive education finance products and services, including a free online scholarship search engine, federally guaranteed parent and student loans, private student loans, both federal and private student loan consolidation programs, and college savings plans.
For more information about NextStudent and its student loan programs, please visit our website at NextStudent.com.
