Archive for the ‘College’ Category

When I received this email about a “dating” service that matches up wealthy older (mostly) men with young, cash-starved college students, more and more who attend Georgia schools, I thought it was a spoof.

A service where attractive young college students pay their bills and buy their “Fendi” bags by “dating” wealthy men sounded like a Lifetime movie.

I was wrong.

Apparently, there is a nationwide online service that matches “Sugar Daddies” with “Sugar Babies,” many of whom are college students exchanging their youth, beauty and attention, sexual and otherwise, for cash and other expressions of gratitude from wealthy men in what the company calls “mutually beneficial” relationships.

SeekingArrangement.com has received a lot of press, including a 2009 opus in The New York Times Magazine in which founder Brandon Wade explains, “We stress relationships that are mutually beneficial. We ask people to really think about what they want in a relationship and what they have to offer. …

Continue reading Faced with tuition bills, more GSU and UGA students turning to “Sugar Daddies” »

This is my live account from  the Georgia Partnership on Excellence in Education daylong media symposium Friday featuring education movers and shakers

First up is Dr. Dana Rickman, policy and research director for the partnership, on the Top Ten Education Issues to Watch in 2013.

Please note that all these comments are from the speakers today, not from me. (I did add a few comments, but I clearly designate them as mine.) I am writing as folks speak and may miss a typo but will go back during the breaks and clean this up.

Top 10 issues, says Rickman:

Race to the Top: Halfway through implementing grant. Where do we stand?

Elevating low performing schools. Will require high performing  teachers and leaders.

How do we pay for k-12 eduction? (”I don’t know,” says Rickman. “That really is the answer to that question.”)

Help wanted: Hiring 250,000 new graduates. Where are they? Only 42 percent has a college degree; State needs 250,000 more graduates.

Early learning: What this issue …

Continue reading Top 10 education issues facing Georgia »

Education Week released its “Quality Counts” report today, and Georgia ranked 7th in the comprehensive rating system for the second year in a row and also became the first state to earn a perfect score in the category of transitions and alignment, which examines early-childhood education, college readiness, and career readiness

Maryland earned first place followed, in order, by Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, West Virginia, Kentucky, Connecticut, Vermont and Ohio.. All those earned a grade of B-minus or higher. The rest of the states fell in the C-minus to C-plus range except for South Dakota, which earned a D plus. (Go here for an interactive map.)

Because the Education Week rankings are untainted by any political or philosophical underpinnings, they are taken more seriously than some other rankings. They are largely a data-driven measurement but they do look at a wide range of indicators.

For other rankings released this week, …

Continue reading Quality Counts: Georgia ranks 7th and earns a first-time ever perfect score in one area »

Many teens drink for the first time in college. The CDC released troubling data this week on teenage girls and binge drinking. (AP Images.)

Over the holiday, I talked with many friends and family members about their children’s struggles in college, and almost all the problems had to deal with too much partying and too little studying.

(I am also surprised at the number of teens who are transferring after only semester but I will leave that topic to another day. When I went to college, most of us stuck it out for the full freshman year. By then, some of us had come to like our campuses and to feel more at home.)

Related to that same issue, the AJC had a story yesterday on the rise in binge drinking in girls and women.

Binge drinking continues to be a worrisome, under-recognized health problem among women and girls, according to a CDC report issued Tuesday. Nearly 14 million women binge drink about three times a month, and consume an average of six drinks per binge, the CDC …

Continue reading For many college students: First time away. First time drinking. First time for sex. »

Interesting release from the University of Georgia on why girls fare better than boys in elementary school.

If interested in this issue, check out this interview I did with the author of “The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in a Challenging and Complex World.”  Author and behavioral psychologist Anthony Rao maintains that today’s classrooms favor how girls learn.

“Girls use more words. They are heavy on reading and early literacy and more social cooperation,” Rao told me. The boy brain is wired for motor skill development and spatial tasks, and boys learn more by touching and exploration. (There are exceptions, he says, describing himself as a compliant learner eager to do what the teacher wanted.)

“When you promote all this assessment and increasing standardization, you narrow the way you are going to teach kids, eclipsing the ways that boys learn better,” said Rao. “You go to much less hands-on and manipulation of objects and to more sit down and …

Continue reading New UGA study: Their classroom demeanors give girls a boost in grades over boys in classroom »

We read a great deal about college students who are overly dependent on their parents, but 21-year-old Aubrey Ireland contended that she faced the opposite problem –  obsessive parents who secretly monitored her emails and calls, watched her sleep at night via Skype and showed up at her college uninvited to check up on her and speak to her department head.

A court sided with Ireland, ruling that her parents’ behaviors amounted to stalking and ordering them to stay clear of their only child while she was finishing school. Among the parents’ transgressions: Installing monitoring software on her computer and her phone.

A dean’s list music theater major from Kansas, Ireland said she had no choice but to take her parents to court. Outraged, her parents are now attempting to recoup the $66,000 in tuition they paid the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. (The school gave Ireland a scholarship to complete her final year.)

Ireland told “Good Morning …

Continue reading Helicopter parents turn into stealth bombers and court orders them to stop stalking daughter at college »

Does STEM always spell success for college graduates?

Whenever I write about the efforts to bolster U.S. graduates in science, technology, engineering and math, readers send me notes about their problems finding work despite a STEM degree. And that includes math teachers.

(If you are interested in this topic, take a look at this Duke study on which countries produce more engineers and the job prospects for those graduates. The report concludes: Our research shows that companies are not moving abroad because of a deficiency in U.S. education or the quality of U.S. workers. Rather, they are doing what gives them economic and competitive advantage. It is cheaper for them to move certain engineering jobs overseas and to locate their R&D operations closer to growth markets. There are serious deficiencies in engineering graduates from Indian and Chinese schools. Yet the trend is building momentum despite these weaknesses…The calls to graduate more engineers do not focus on any field …

Continue reading Does a STEM degree guarantee a job? Not always. »

A fun and lively holiday greeting from Georgia State University and the Georgia State Rock Band:

Continue reading Happy holidays Georgia State University style »

With Georgia’s tendency of late to look south to Florida for education ideas, we may see some discussion this year in the Legislature on the Sunshine State’s latest brainchild: Incentivize students to become engineers, scientists, health care specialists and technology experts by discounting tuition in those areas of study. Dissuade students from becoming anthropologists, poets and theater majors by charging full tuition for those degrees.

“Do you want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology? I don’t,” said Florida Gov. Rick Scott in a speech last year.

I once was part of an interesting discussion with Emory President James Wagner — he was meeting with the AJC editorial board — on whether tuition should be calibrated so that an education major, for instance, pays less than an engineering major, whose education costs colleges more to provide. The issue came up during a broader discussion about rising college costs and …

Continue reading Should colleges charge future engineers less than future poets? »

Georgia will now fund colleges based on completion rates rather than enrollment rates. (AJC/file photo)

Reflecting the national trend to outcomes-based education funding, Georgia’s public colleges will now earn dollars based on how many students earn diplomas rather than how many enroll.

Tennessee has led the nation in this effort, eliminating enrollment as a funding criteria for its public colleges. (For a story on the Tennessee funding formula and how it works, go here.)

To look at Tennessee’s actual program, go to this state presentation. This Tennessee Higher Education Commission presentation includes actual data for colleges and details the weighting formula.

“The outcomes-based funding formula bases the entire institutional allocation of state appropriations on the basis of outcomes including degree production, research funding and graduation rates at universities, and student remediation, job placements, student transfer and associates degrees at community …

Continue reading College funding: Does it make sense to fund campuses based on whether students earn their degrees? »