It seems that student veterans will finally be getting the assistance they need this Veterans Day. A new website from the American Council on Education will improve access to education benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill for military veterans who have faced a number of delays in the processing of their financial aid. The site, which was unveiled earlier this week, will also help the student veterans choose colleges and future careers, with tips and advice on why college is an important investment and preparing for the transition from the military to a college campus.

The site intends to make it easier for student veterans to navigate not only the college and financial aid application process, but to give those students frustrated with backlogs at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs a place to go for guidance.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill has faced a number of obstacles since its creation in August. A backlog of applications caused delays as long as eight weeks for some eligible military recipients, with emergency $3,000 checks eventually issued to student veterans whose financial aid packages were pending. The new law—similar to the WWII GI Bill— was created to bring more financial aid to troops who had served since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (Scholarships are also available to the children and families of the victims of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.) The bill will provide up to 36 months of financial assistance, payable for 15 years following the student veterans’ releases from active duty. The bill covers maximum in-state tuition and fees at public institutions, including many military-friendly schools, and covers a monthly housing allowance, and an annual $1,000 books and supplies stipend. (Student veterans enrolled in online degree universities will not receive housing allowances.)

Many of the colleges participating in the program have been accepting late payments from the students to make up for the lag in financial aid application processing. Assuming all goes well with the disbursement of funds from the VA, and the department gets a handle on the backlog—the department hired additional staff when the number of applications continued to grow and overwhelmed regional offices—most student veterans should be getting to the point where they will be receiving regular checks to cover the costs of their new lives on college campuses across the country.

Posted: under Back to School, College News.
Tags: College Search, Financial Aid, GI Bill, military, veterans

Comments (0) Nov 11 2009

I went to a flagship university. Almost everyone I knew came from a city or town I had heard of, because most were there for the same reasons I was - that home state tuition. Those few I met who came from neighboring states or even from as far away as one of the coasts were few and far between. Tuition was significantly higher for those students, making it difficult for many to justify private school costs at a public institution. Still, the school drew some semblance of an out-of-state population because of its research centers and reputation in certain fields of study.

An Inside Higher Education article today explores a tactic being used by flagship universities across the country to boost budgets and work toward replenishing nest eggs that had dwindled during a difficult economy. More and more state schools plan on working harder to increase out-of-state enrollment.

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is hoping for a 15 percent boost in undergraduates outside of Massachusetts over the next decade. Rutgers University, where about 10 percent of the student population comes from outside New Jersey, wants to see its out-of-state numbers around 25 percent instead. In New York, the state’s comptroller actually issued a report on the millions of dollars in lost revenue because of the State University of New York’s low out-of-state enrollment numbers. The article points out that at state schools like the University of Vermont where out-of-state students outnumber in-state students, the demand for an in-state education is much lower.

So how will these schools lure more students from out-of-state, and get them to pay higher tuition costs? The first step is opening up more slots to out-of-state students. The president at the University of Colorado hopes the state lifts the cap on non-resident enrollment. And states like the University of California at Berkeley, a prestigious school that even Californian students must prove their academic worth to attend, will surely have less trouble finding out-of-state recruits based on reputation alone than lesser-known state institutions. Some state schools are looking into new merit-based scholarship programs targeting out-of-state students, but wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of bringing more money into the school? The article suggests building relationships with out-of-state high schools, working alumni networks and even reaching out to top, non-resident students, to boost their out-of-state numbers.

Going to school in-state is still a good option to consider if you’re worried about the cost of college. You can still be far enough away from your parents while enjoying home state tuition. Many state schools also reward students in other ways, including scholarships and grants for local freshmen, especially if you’re pursuing a high-need field of study and plan on remaining in that state post-graduation. Conduct a college search on our site based on your own criteria to find the place that best fits your needs and has the qualities you find most important.

Posted: under Back to School, College Costs, College Search.
Tags: College Costs, College Search, state colleges

Comments (0) Oct 16 2009

Student veterans still waiting on their financial aid this fall have finally gotten a bit of relief from the Department of Veterans Affairs.  The VA announced Friday that due to delays in processing requests for veterans’ education benefits under the new post-9/11 GI Bill, they will be issuing emergency checks of up to $3,000 available to students whose benefits are still pending.  These advances will be available through regional VA offices starting October 2, and students will need to bring a photo ID, a class schedule, and a certificate of eligibility to receive them.  The emergency funds will come out of future benefits checks due to the students.

The massive backlog at the VA office first began to make headlines in August and early September when it was revealed that the VA had made it through only a tiny segment of pending benefits requests.  The VA has hired additional staff and ramped up processing since then and anticipates dispensing with the backlog entirely by November 1.  However, as the weeks wore on, a clamor has been growing among veterans and the press as students went days, then weeks, and now potentially months without receiving payments for tuition and fees or, more importantly, monthly stipends that allow them to pay for living expenses while attending college.

Part of the delay is due to the massive popularity of the new benefits, with requests simply overwhelming the capacities of the VA office, especially since implementing new rules and procedures can also slow down processing.  In addition, the procedures themselves make speedy processing difficult.  The VA cannot issue benefits checks until schools have confirmed students’ enrollment and tuition charges, which in some cases didn’t take place until late summer.  Between back and forth correspondence with schools and veterans, and the manual labor involved in processing each claim, a backlog built up quickly and veterans wound up having to borrow money or use credit cards to pay for rent, books, and other expenses.

Colleges have been working with veteran students to minimize the impact of delays, accepting late tuition payments without dropping students from their classes, allowing students to charge books to their bursar accounts, and issuing emergency loans where possible.  Between schools’ efforts and the new emergency aid through the VA, most student veterans should be able to make it through the next month until they–hopefully–begin receiving regular benefits checks.

Posted: under Back to School, College News, Financial Aid.
Tags: Back to School, college news, Financial Aid, GI Bill, military, veterans

Comments (0) Sep 29 2009

As students begin the fall semester, news of the H1N1 swine flu virus spreading across college campuses is everywhere.  But whether the flu has hit your college or not, getting sick at school is a real concern and can quickly derail your semester.

Living far away from home, many college students aren’t well-equipped to take care of themselves and stay on top of their coursework while ill, especially if they contract something more serious than a cold.  While the flu’s getting all the attention now, other common illnesses can put students out of commission for days, or even weeks, causing them to miss class, miss work, and get behind on projects that are crucial to their success in school.  Missed work due to illness can even jeopardize your financial aid.  Part of taking care of yourself when you’re sick at school is taking care to minimize the impact of illness on your semester.

Beyond attending to your immediate needs (seeing a doctor, getting rest, etc.), the most important thing to do if you get sick is to contact your professors, preferably before you miss a class or an assignment.  If you’re really ill and need to miss more than one class or an important assignment, quiz, or test, the earlier you establish communication, the better it will go.  If you have a diagnosis, you can share it, but don’t go into the minute details of what your body is doing and don’t assume that because you’re sick with something verifiable, your professors will instantly cater to your every whim.  A doctor’s excuse doesn’t always go as far as demonstrated willingness to take responsibility for your missed work and to work with your professor to get caught up. Most instructors will be willing to provide you with information and course materials from missed classes, and depending on circumstances and how you approach the situation, they may allow you to make up work, as well.

If you’re going to miss a lot of school or you have professors unwilling to budge, contacting your academic advisor is a good step, as well.  A note from an advisor carries more weight than a call from a student, and if you lack the time or energy to address each professor personally and immediately, talking to your advisor can save you some time.  They can also give you advice and information on what to do about missing class, and help you keep from falling behind.

Finally, once you’re healthy, back in class and taking care of your missed work, there may still be other matters to attend to.  Even if you have tried your hardest, you may wind up with too much work to catch up in a class.  If talking to your professor and your advisor about incompletes and other options doesn’t bear fruit, you may need to drop classes or you may see your GPA suffer.  If you have scholarship awards or other financial aid, lower grades or less than full-time enrollment can have an impact on your eligiblity for these awards.  Be aware of the GPA and enrollment requirements for your scholarships and grants (even some student loans) and if you are in danger of not meeting them, talk to the scholarship provider or your financial aid counselor to find out your options.  Your financial aid office is also a good place to stop if illness has generated medical bills or lost income for you–they may be able to adjust your aid package to help you deal with these expenses.

Posted: under Back to School, College Culture, College Life, Tips.
Tags: Back to School, campus life, College Life, college students, college tips, student life

Comments (0) Sep 16 2009

Suffolk University offers “Sacred Hoops, Sneaker Pimps, and Hoop Dreams: Race, Gender, and Consumerism in 20th Century American Basketball” through its Seminar for Freshmen program. The University of California-Berkeley uses “StarCraft Theory and Strategy” for its course on war tactics. Santa Clara University has gotten students talking about waste and decomposition through its environmental science department’s “Joy of Garbage.”

Attracting students to courses by having some fun with their titles is not a new phenomenon, but a recent article by The Boston Globe says that it has become more common in a climate where professors are looking to boost enrollment in their classes, perhaps to make themselves less vulnerable during budget cut season. Boston College recently renamed a straightforward course on German literature to “Knights, Castles, and Dragons.” The effect? Tripled enrollment.

Professors quoted in the article describe how important marketing has become in getting more students to fill seats in their classrooms. Students have a wealth of options at their fingertips when applying for courses, and after they’re done filling their rosters with classes required by their majors, there may be little room for the more fun-sounding titles. So, anything that will give a student pause when putting together their course load is probably a good strategy. The professors also said that a heavy reliance on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter has given the college-bound a shorter attention span, and that even those already in college are bored more easily with the traditional course offerings. Students want to be entertained, even those in fields like computer science, philosophy, or traditionally more “stuffy” majors.

A word of advice, though: Be sure to consider the finished product of your transcript when signing up for courses with kooky titles. That “Science of Superheroes” class at the University of California-Irvine may be fun, but a balance of electives with interesting names and traditional courses applicable to your major will make you a better sell if you plan to pursue an advanced degree or land a job interview where the employer wants to see your coursework. As with an eye-catching course title, image is everything.

Posted: under Back to School, College Culture, College Majors, College News, Just for Fun.
Tags: College Classes, College Majors, college students, course enrollment, student life, undergraduate students

Comments (0) Sep 10 2009

With college football season underway, it’s a good time for high school athletes starting their senior years to be making their decisions on whether they’ll be pursuing sports on the college level. Athletic scholarships go a long way toward making those decisions easier, and even in a struggling economy, sports programs continue to set aside funding to better their teams. Better yet, even those who aren’t the top soccer, baseball or tennis player on the roster are eligible for scholarship opportunities offered by local groups outside of the NCAA awards looking to reward students who balance their schoolwork with athletics.

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune points to several tips for talented athletes in the market for scholarships, including making yourself known to coaches and schools early and often and making sure your grades are where they should be. Most athletic scholarships require a minimum GPA for eligibility, even if you’re the star of your basketball team. And even if you do get that coveted sports scholarship, you’ll be expected to maintain a decent GPA to be eligible for continued funding and a spot on the team. Student athletes should also keep an open mind about schools they’re targeting. Big-name schools are much more competitive, and unless you’re one of the top athletes in your field, they may offer much less play time even if you do make the team than smaller colleges outside of Division I. A college search is a good place to start to learn more about colleges offering your sports program.

It isn’t easy to be recruited for a full ride at a top university. A strategy of more students recently has been specializing in one sport, or getting involved in sports outside of football, baseball and basketball that get less attention to stand out more in the competitive world of sports scholarships. New sports scholarships in fields like lacrosse, for example, are becoming more common, and with new scholarships, the competition is often much less fierce than with more popular, established award programs.

For those who excel in both sports and athletics, straight academic scholarships may prove to be a good option as well, especially if you’re a good essay writer.

Posted: under Back to School, High School, High School News, Scholarships, Sports, Tips.
Tags: athletic scholarships, athletics, College Search, Scholarship Search, Sports, sports scholarships

Comments (0) Sep 08 2009

The new Post-9/11 GI Bill went into effect on August 1, bringing expanded educational benefits for students who have served in the military since 2001.  These benefits are supposed to be available to students for the fall semester, but a mounting backlog of applications has the Department of Veterans Affairs saying recipients should expect processing delays of up to 8 weeks.

This means that many veterans attending college may not receive their first payments from the VA until potentially October or even November, despite classes starting in August and September.  So not only will their tuition and fees go unpaid, but they also will have to find other sources of funding for housing, books, and living expenses, which many veterans expected to rely on VA stipends to pay.  While most colleges are working with their veteran students to arrange stopgap financial aid, the delayed payments still represent a huge problem for students going back to school after military service.

The application process for VA benefits under the GI Bill is somewhat complex and involves multiple steps between a student’s initial decision to enroll in college and his or her ultimate receipt of a check from the VA.  Students, schools, and the VA all need to complete paperwork to set up benefits, and May 7 was the earliest students could begin applying.  In addition, current VA employees and new hires needed to be trained to process applications under the new program, so processing is taking longer than normal.

Add in the popularity of the expanded GI Bill benefits, the recession bringing students back to college in droves (with fewer financial resources available to them), and colleges across the country dealing with massive budget crises and increased demand for emergency aid, and you get the potential for disaster.  More students are applying for benefits, the VA is less able to process these applications in a timely manner, and schools have more students in difficult situations to assist.  All parties have fewer resources at their disposal to deal with the situation, making it still more challenging.

Still, vets who have found their benefits delayed should talk to the financial aid and veteran’s affairs contacts at their school if they need additional financial aid to cover their expenses in the short term.  While money is scarce, it is still available in most cases.

Posted: under Back to School, College News, College and the Economy, Financial Aid.
Tags: Back to School, College and the Economy, College Costs, college news, Financial Aid, GI Bill, military, veterans

Comments (0) Sep 04 2009

The Obama health plan isn’t the only hotly debated controversy in which the of the social good is currently being invoked.  College rankings also fall into this category with the release of Washington Monthly’s annual rankings this month, which differ sharply from the better-known U.S. News and World Report rankings, and focus primarily on universities’ contributions to the “social good.”

Washington Monthly publishes two sets of rankings, one for national universities and one for liberal arts colleges, each year.  This year, the top three spots in the magazine’s national university rankings all went to schools in the University of California system: UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and UC Los Angeles, respectively.  The top three liberal arts colleges were Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and Williams College.  Amherst and Williams both appeared in U.S. News’ top three, as well, but rankings differed sharply for many of Washington Monthly’s other top schools, which included many state colleges, as opposed to the elite private colleges that dominate U.S. News.

A large part of the drastically different rankings comes from Washington Monthly’s chosen methodology, which asks as much what colleges are doing for the country as it asks what they can do for their students.  This is determined by looking at factors that include student involvement in national service, university involvement in research, and the social mobility attending college gives students.

The service index is achieved by looking at the number of current students involved in ROTC, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, as well as graduate participation in the Peace Corps.  Research is determined by the university’s production of PhD graduates, the number of degree recipients going on to achieve PhDs at other institutions, and other components such as research spending and faculty awards.  The matrix is slightly different for liberal arts college, as many don’t award PhDs and some don’t provide data for all of the research categories.  Social mobility is based on each school’s ability to enroll and graduate needy students, determined by a calculation involving the percentage of students who receive federal Pell Grants and the school’s undergraduate graduation rate.

Washington Monthly provides a more thorough description of their rankings system, as well as the rationale behind their decision to rank colleges, on their College Guide website.  Other magazines participating in the college rankings game include Princeton Review and Forbes Magazine.

Posted: under Back to School, College News, High School, High School News, Tips.
Tags: choosing a college, college news, college rankings, College Search, college tips, community service, Financial Aid, Graduate School, high school students, Tips

Comments (0) Sep 03 2009

This fall, a group of journalism students at DePaul University will learn how to be even more concise with their news briefs. The Chicago school claims their new course “Digital Editing: From Breaking News to Tweets” will be the first class devoted to Twitter and how the new media tool has changed the way reporters do - and should do - their jobs.

According to the syllabus, the course will look at not only how Twitter can be used as a source for finding out about legitimate news events, but how to fact-check information gleaned from the microblogging site. The class, taught by Craig Kanalley, a DePaul alum and digital intern at the Chicago Tribune, will also explore the effects of citizen journalism and bloggers on the industry, Search Engine Optimization and basic WordPress.

The school’s news release describes Twitter as a “major player” and source of breaking news information, citing citizen reporting on the Iranian election and the school’s own students tweeting at President Obama’s inauguration as examples of how the site has not only competed with the major news organizations, but at times beat them to the big story.

Is the school placing too much emphasis on Twitter as a news source? Maybe a whole class devoted to the subject seems silly. But it’s safe to say Twitter has become a go-to for journalists following politicians, who post everything from their plans to host health care forums to what they purchased recently at farmers markets. There’s no doubt new journalists need to be well-versed in not only Twitter but how social networking in general can supplement - not drive - their stories.

Twitter is also useful not only for writers, but for job seekers, public relations and marketing professionals or those promoting fledgling freelance careers. Professors use the site as another way to reach their students or promote new courses. A one-time course this fall at Harper College in Schaumburg, Ill., will look at what Facebook and Twitter can do from a business perspective. While I’m not sure how many people would buy into some academics’ assertions that sites like Twitter improve students’ writing, perhaps it’s not as silly to think of an all-Twitter course at a university when you consider how it and sites like it have changed how people communicate.

Posted: under Back to School, College Classes, College Culture, College News, Just for Fun.
Tags: College Classes, College Culture

Comments (0) Sep 03 2009

Posted: under Back to School, College Culture, Just for Fun, Tips.
Tags: College Culture, college tips, Internships, job search

Comments (0) Sep 01 2009