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Can We Help Students Avoid Making Bad College Decisions?
Remember Occupy Wall Street? Hordes of young people, mostly college graduates with a load of debt and no job, protested against their “oppression” and demanded that the government do something do relieve them of their poor decisions.
Would some of them, at least, have had a successful path if they had gone to a different school or chosen a different major? Probably so.
In today’s Martin Center essay, Jenna Robinson writes about a new plan at the Department of Education to eliminate the Obama-era “gainful employment” regulations aimed at sketchy for-profit schools and replace it with a program of publicizing student debt to earnings data for students at all colleges. The data would be published on the Department’s College Scorecard site.
“This level of transparency could help students make better decisions about their college education. But it is not clear that students will change their behavior with the new information, as some state transparency efforts have shown,” Robinson writes.
Much more useful that this information at the institutional level would be to provide it at the major level — i.e., how do students at a school do depending on what course of study they pursued. How do accounting majors compare with sociology majors, for example?
The University of North Carolina system does accumulate such data. Robinson picked one popular major (psychology) and then looked at the results for majors at ten of the UNC institutions. At only two, NC State and Elizabeth City, was the ratio of debt to earnings under 8 percent. Students contemplating a psych major might think again if they had this information.
If major-level data like that were available nationally, it could help quite a few students steer clear of majors that might seem fun and easy at the time, but which are apt to be debt-traps in the long-run.
Nevertheless, Robinson isn’t terribly optimistic that such information would make a lot of difference:
However, it’s likely that many students will continue to have expectations and make decisions that do not align with market reality. In many states, including North Carolina, excellent data on graduates’ salaries and employment rates are already available. Universities already disclose graduation and retention rates, default rates, and average debt levels annually to the Department of Education, which makes them available on various websites.
In sum, the Education Department’s new approach is certainly a good step, but just a single, small one
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Teens Already Forgot How To Write. Now They Don’t Read
If you’re an aspiring writer thinking about penning a novel aimed at the YA (young adult) market, you may want to consider looking into a new line of work. A new report from the American Psychological Association reveals that teenagers simply aren’t reading all that much anymore.
That probably won’t come as too much of a shock if you know any teens and see how they are constantly focused on their phones (along with most adults these days), but it’s even worse than you may have imagined. Not only is the reading of dead-tree printed material way, way down, but the kids aren’t even reading digital e-books for pleasure in very large numbers. Reading anything longer than a text message or Facebook status update, it seems, is simply too much of a chore.
A third of U.S. teenagers haven’t read a book for pleasure in at least a year, according to a new survey from the American Psychological Association (APA). And it’s not because they’re too busy watching TV.
The research, published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture, points to the continuing dominance of digital media among teenagers. Teen use of traditional media — such as books, magazines and television — has dropped off, while time spent texting, scrolling through social media and using other forms of digital media continues to increase, the survey says.
To reach their conclusions, APA researchers analyzed data from the Monitoring the Future study, an ongoing annual survey of around 50,000 eighth, 10th and 12th graders. The study included survey responses from 1976 to 2016.
While it may seem like a sliver of good news, there is at least an increase in consumption of “audio books.” Rather than reading the material, younger people increasingly would prefer to put in their earbuds and have someone read the book to them instead. Podcasts also continue to be popular for non-video entertainment as well as news consumption.
Shouldn’t we be more worried about that? The act of reading, even if it’s on a screen, is a specific way of taking in information. Reading comprehension has always been an important aspect of the educational process. And like any other skill, when you stop using it, the skill atrophies.
The same applies to the ability to employ handwriting. Going back to 2013 we saw instruction in cursive writing fall off the requirements for students in 41 states. Even block printing isn’t emphasized very much. The focus is on the ability to use a keyboard. That’s certainly a requirement for most office jobs these days and computer skills are vital, but handwriting is built into our psyche. It’s a treasure which was once reserved for the elite (in the middle ages) but was eventually drilled into everyone. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.
First we stopped writing and now we’re apparently losing track of the importance of reading. If the day comes when a solar flare or some other type of electromagnetic burst wipes out our technology for a generation, we’re going to be in hot water. And apparently, most of the younger survivors won’t even be able to spell hot water or read the instructions on how to boil it.
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College-bound? The fees could end up being a big surprise
It’s turned into something of a summertime ritual: decoding the college bill.
Colleges and universities across the country sent out their invoices in recent weeks for the upcoming school year. Beyond traditional tuition, room, and meal costs itemized in the statements, institutions have tacked on a dizzying array of fees over the years, adding thousands of dollars to the cost of earning a degree and often leaving students and their families confused about why the final tab is higher than they expected.
The pile-on can be overwhelming: There’s the athletic center fee and the mentoring fee, a capital projects fee and a library fee. And, oh, don’t forget about the technology fee.
Fees help colleges shore up their budgets, pay for in-demand amenities such as state-of-the-art gyms, and spread out costs more fairly, by charging extra to students who use certain services or equipment.
But the ultimate result is that even families who have done their homework before their children commit to colleges can find surprises lurking among the line-item charges, said Shannon Vasconcelos, director of college finance at College Coach, a Watertown advising firm.
“It’s very confusing . . . what’s on there and if it should be there,” Vasconcelos said. “They can feel nickeled-and-dimed a little bit.”
In some cases, savvy families can get a fee or two waived — but many of them are mandatory.
Some fees kick in even before the first class begins (mandatory two- or three-day orientations that can cost more than $500) and don’t ease until students collect their diplomas (graduation fees to cover the costs of the rental facility, cap and gown, and printing costs, from $25 and to more than $200).
Science majors are charged hundreds of dollars in lab fees, and aspiring filmmakers must pay extra for studio time. Boston University automatically bills for a $130 Sports Pass, reminding students that cheering on the home team is a cornerstone of college life and to “make the most of your Boston University experience. Be excited, be passionate, be a fan!” (The pass entitles students entry to over 70 games, a value of $600, the university notes.)
At New England College, a small, rural school in New Hampshire, students who need more one-on-one mentoring can pay $4,600 a year extra.
BU officials say that students can opt out of the Sports Pass once they get their bills. New England College officials said the mentoring program is an optional service that has about 80 students enrolled and that helps increase the retention rate of participants.
Some fees are universal, such as for health insurance (yearly premiums can cost as much as $3,000) while others are more obscure and tied to a particular college (students at the University of Northern Colorado voted a few years ago for a mandatory LEAF fee — for Leadership for Environmental Action Fund — of $20 annually to support environmentally sustainable projects).
Consumers may think of fees as add-ons, but at many institutions they support fairly basic needs.
Fitchburg State University charges undergraduates a capital projects fee of $1,470 annually that helps pay for new buildings and campus structural improvements, including dining halls and athletic fields.
And some financial aid programs, such as tuition-specific scholarships, don’t cover these fees, forcing students to pay for them out-of-pocket or through loans.
“If you have 10 or 20 fees, all of sudden you feel like you’re opening your telephone bill,” said Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University who has studied student fees.
From 2000 to 2017, fees at public universities increased by more than 100 percent, while tuition increased by 80 percent, Kelchen found.
Fees now make up about 21 percent of what colleges collect in tuition and fees annually, he said.
Why this increasing reliance on fees? At public colleges and universities, decreasing taxpayer support and a reluctance to draw controversy by raising tuition have turned fees into a crucial financial spigot, Kelchen said.
In Massachusetts, tuition at state and community colleges has remained flat for nearly a decade, while fees have skyrocketed.
That’s why at Fitchburg State the annual cost of tuition is $970, but the university fee, which covers administrative, facilities, and academic expenses is $7,500. The total cost to attend Fitchburg State for Massachusetts residents is about $21,300, still lower than at many private colleges.
Also, most Massachusetts public higher education institutions are allowed to keep their fee revenue on campus, while they must turn tuition money over to the state, providing another incentive to leave tuition untouched but raise fees. According to state higher education officials, the governor’s budget has called for a study on whether seven state universities and 15 community colleges should be able to keep tuition money, but the proposal failed to win legislative support the past two years.
Private colleges may face less political pressure to keep tuition flat, but they aren’t immune from fee creep, as they try to lure students with lower tuition.
“It’s easier to get a new fee than increase tuition in some cases,” Kelchen said. “Pay close attention to fees as well as tuition.”
That’s what Bruce Brumberg of Newton was doing when he saw that the bill Cornell University had sent for his son included about $2,800 for health insurance.
Colleges require students to have health insurance that covers medical care at facilities near the campus, so most will automatically bill students and expect them to fill out forms to opt out.
His son is covered under the family’s plan, and Brumberg didn’t want the college plan, but it took him several attempts last month and additional paperwork from his own insurance company before the university waived the fee, he said.
Costs such as health insurance aren’t always broken out on the traditional admissions pages that students and parents check when researching institutions, Brumberg said.
“There have to be better forms of communication, so at least parents who are looking at college costs are aware of it,” he said.
It can be an even greater challenge for first-generation students who are navigating the college process for the first time, and often on their own, said Thalia Pena, a college affordability adviser with uAspire, a Boston-based organization that works with low-income students.
Many are receiving a flood of e-mails and paperwork from colleges over the summer, and unless the documents are clearly marked, the fees can be easily overlooked, Pena said.
She recently worked with a student who didn’t realize until the end of her first year that she could waive the more than $1,000 cost of the college’s health insurance because she was already covered under her family’s plan, Pena said.
“It would have made a more manageable bill, if she had caught that,” Pena said. “It was money that could have been used for something else.”
About 10 percent of undergraduate students report buying the university’s health insurance, according to a 2017 survey by the American College Health Association, a trade group.
If students or families don’t understand why they’re being charged a certain fee, it is worth asking the college’s finance office and checking if it can be waived, said Vasconcelos, with College Coach.
But Vasconcelos warns that it’s unlikely colleges will scrap many fees.
“Once a fee is implemented, somebody is counting on the money,” she said. “It’s hard to get rid of it.”
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