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Cooper Union Will Actually Start Charging Tuition To Grad Students

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A handful of colleges remain in the U.S. that do not charge students a penny in tuition. Just about all of them happen to be super-selective private schools with big financial endowments and lots of wealthy alumni. Cooper Union, arguably New York’s top art and design school, has an endowment of over $600 million, which helps it cover the $37,000. per year tuition rate.

Unfortunately, Cooper Union has felt the effects of a down economy like all other schools. For the present, it plans to start charging only graduate students a tuition fee, while continuing to allow undergrads to study free. The plan was pitched by CU president Jamshed Bharucha as a way to allow the school to move forward with the creation of new programs that combing art and engineering. But a number of alumni have agitated against the new fees, calling them a betrayal of the school’s identity and warning that new charges for undergraduates will probably soon follow.

Presidents of state universities around the country can only look with jealousy on Cooper Union’s move to force a small percentage of its students to pay for classes. As state legislatures slash budgets again and again, public university systems are having not only to raise their tuition rates faster than ever, but also to cut academic programs including some of those in the most career-focused areas students need most.

Undergrads who would like to get a shot at a free education at Cooper Union should be aware that it’s one of the toughest schools on earth to get accepted to.

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To Fund Your Online Degree Program – Don’t Forget About Trying To Get Tuition Assistance From Your Employer

September 27, 2011 By

Students who are looking how to pay for their online degree program can often spend so much time looking into Pell Grants and other types of financial aid that they overlook the best possible option: getting an employer to pay for school.

Although the tight economy has made some companies tighted up on this benefit, it’s still true that many companies are willing to pay for you an employee to return to school and many actually want to. Besides the fact that you may simply become better at your job by learning new skills, there’s also a potential benefit to your employer in that you may tend to stay with the company while it is paying for your education. Tuirion reimbursement is a great tool to create more employee loyalty. And while there are lots of news stories each day about people being laid off, it’s also true that many companies would prefer to hold on to their best workers. Finding a good replacement and training him or her for the job is actually an expensive proposition in many fields. As a result, some companies may actually ask you to sign an agreement stating that you’ll stay in your job for at least a year after completing any school they pay for.

Keys to talking to your boss about tuition reimbursement include:
- Know what you want to study before you ask for any reimbursement. Having a vague idea that you’d like to go back to college is alot less compelling than a clear plan for what you want to learn about.
- Present a clear reason why school will make you a better employee how you can be productive on the job.
- Increasing your professionalism can be an important goal to talk about. Particularly if you work in a job where you face clients directly, your company can often get a benefit from you becoming more polished on knowledgeable about the business in general.
- Make it clear exactly how long it will take you to complete your degree and why you think that schoolwork will not get in the way of your work duties. Going to school online is one clear way that you can make sure your school schedule is designed around your work, and not the opposite.

If your employer is willing to give you tuition reimbursement, it’s likely that you’ll be asked to maintain a certain grade average. Find out what the ground rules are and, perhaps most importantly, ask exactly how you will receive your tuition reimbursement. Some companies deduct it from your paycheck and don’t reimburse you until you complete your studies later on, which is not terribly desirable, while others pay the tuition directly to your school.

Read more on Getting Your Employer To Pay For School

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Ways That Young Teachers Can Get Their Education Loans Forgiven or Cancelled

August 1, 2011 By

If you have to borrow money for your teaching degree, there are some federal government programs that can help you ease your financial pain by getting part of your loan forgiven.

The “Federal Loan Forgiveness Progarm For Teachers” allows for those who teach in schools that have at least 30% of students in low-income groups to have a portion of their Federal Family Education Loan, Stafford Loan or Federal Perkins Loan forgiven. The program can save you $5,000. off your loan repayment if you teach in such an “eligible school” and the subject you taught is relevant to the major you took your teaching degree in. But the program allows forgiveness of up to $17,500. if you teach math, science or special education in an eligible school.

Defining A “Full Time Teacher”
Sound complicated? Well, yes it is, a bit. There are lots of pieces of small print attached to this program. You must be a “full time” teacher, but this can mean that you teach A) for a full year at once school, B) two consecutive half years at different schools or C) the equivalent of two half years at two different schools at the same time, depending on what your own state’s definition of “full time employment of a teacher” is. You must hold a license to teach and, in almost all cases, a bachelor’s degree (which means loan forgiveness will probably be most applicable to a master’s degree).

Teachers can either have a percentage of their loans forgiven, or have the unpaid balance on them cancelled. The most standard approach is for the governent to forgive 15% of a loan during the first and seconds years of teaching, 20% in the third and fourth and up to 30% during the fifth year of teaching.

The make matters more complex, the government’s database of schools that qualify as eligible for this program (by serving low-income kids) was not working at the time of this writing.

Like all government programs, this one has a wide variety of requirements. If you do teach in a district that has a significant proportion of low-income kids, however, its’ worth doing some research to see if you can save on those loans you’re struggling to pay down. You can learn if you qualify here the the governments Stafford Loan Forgiveness Page, and more on cancellation options for various teaching school loans here.

Filed Under: Careers & Salaries, Cost of college, Paying for college

Study Says For-Profit Schools Are A Good Investment For Taxpayers

May 12, 2011 By

The debate raging around for-profit colleges has tended to focus on whether or not the government should keep on providing Pell Grants to students who attend them. Critics have argued that University of Phoenix and other proprietary schools have weak graduation rates that don’t justify the continued investment of public funds. But a new study argues that from the taxpayer’s standpoint, for-profit and private schools actually represent a far better investment than the tax breaks and other funding perks given to state colleges and universities.

The organization the did the study, the Nexus Research and Policy Center, states quite openly that it is funded by U of Phoenix founder John Sperling and that it’s goal is to change the nature of the conversation about for-profit schools. But several respected educators have chimed in to say that the study is of very reasonable quality (Dennis Jones, President of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems) and and “sound and important” (David Longanecker, President, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education). Among the study’s findings: Graduates of for-profit colleges can expect to earn $285,000 more over the course of their lifetimes than those without a bachelor’s degree. Read the study on the site of the American Institutes of Research here.

Filed Under: Paying for college

California’s A Financial Mess, But Citizens Want The State To Spend More on Higher Education

November 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Just under 75% of folks in Califorinia think that their state gives too little money to colleges. That’s up from about 57% just three years ago, and it’s a surprising number given the weak economic environment, belt tightening by state governments everywhere, and the fact that California is one of the most debt-riddled states in the U.S. But the poll taken by the Public Policy Institute of California shows that people in California are worried about higher education cuts and willing to pay higher taxes to support it. In fact, they want more education funding even if it means cutting other programs. Also noted: about 60% of all parents Cali are worried about paying for their kids’ college, 72% of Latino parents fear the financial stress of college bills, and a majority of Californians think the state’s college systems are doing a good job or an excellent job. More on the survey here.

Filed Under: Cost of college, Paying for college, Student life Tagged With: , , ,

Top 10 Reasons To NOT Go To College

November 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When I was a college senior about 35 years ago, I wrote an economics thesis about the value of a college degree. It asked simple question: Over the long term, would an average student get a better financial return from a college degree (in higher career earnings) or from taking the full cost of college and simply investing it conservatively, say in bonds or large cap stocks?

I realize now that the whole idea had one flaw: that if most people did not go to college, they would not necessarily have all that tuition money sitting in a pile to invest somewhere else – many would only be able to access it by getting loans specifically for college.

But after about 75 pages of calculations and analysis on how much more the average college grad earned in a lifetime than a non-college grad and comparing that to a typical return one could get over 30 or so years from an investment of $16,000 (yes, that’s what a full four-year degree from a high-end private school cost in those days – more here on how to save nowadays through the cost of online college), I arrived at a clear conclusion: it was a very close call. The value of a college degree varied a lot from person to person, but on average, the return from it was very similar to just investing the money intelligently.

I got a B on the thesis and a double degree in English and Economics.

Now that I’m in the process of putting two kids through college and seeing that one loves it and the other absolutely hates it, why not go against the general pro-education sentiment we all seem to have with this list of possible reasons to NOT bother going to college. Here are my top 10:

  • You might do better by spending the four years getting your career started. Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard, is constantly mentioned as an example of how you can skip college and still become rich. Of course, he had a plan. If you either have a plan yourself or you want to get into a really high paying trade like plumbing, you may have a very valid case for not going to college.
  • It’s insanely expensive. Since 1976, the year I graduated, the cost of college has gone up sevenfold while even the cost of healthcare, often portrayed as the ultimate runaway cost in our society, has gone up just threefold. Since I did my thesis, I think that may have skewed the numbers in favor of the non-college choice.
  • It’s so insanely expensive that kids are taking on far too much debt. Average student debt in the U.S. is now over $23,000 for undergrads, while professional graduate students are now leaving college in a $75,000 hole on average. That’s just an awful lot of debt overhang to start out a career with.
  • Sixty per-cent of students who start college take more the four years to complete it. That means that school often costs 25% more than students and families originally plan for.
  • Having a four-year college degree doesn’t impress anyone any more. A bachelor’s degree today hardly sets you out from the crowd. On the other hand, not having one might.
  • College may train you to be a follower rather than a leader. Learning to be the kind of nice, compliant student who is loved by teachers and doesn’t act up in class can be a big advantage in school. If you look at the history of highly famous people, however, most of them are raving lunatics who never put up with anyone telling them what to do or how to act.
  • A college diploma does not guarantee employment. While college grads to have lower unemployment rates than non-degree holders, there are still plenty of kids out there with degrees who don’t have jobs right now. A lot depends on what subject you major in, what school you went to and how truly engaged in your career objective you are.
  • Many good paying jobs simply don’t require a college degree nowadays. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that of the 10 careers expected to grow the most in the next decade, only two require college degrees. Other fast growing categories like nursing and customer service do not.
  • Lots of what you learn in college is available for free online. If you’re not hung up on having a degree, there is a huge volume of information that can be accessed online, including videos of top professors from schools like Tufts giving their classes. If you are a self-directed student, you can learn much of what you need at your kitchen table.
  • You will probably change careers a few years after finishing college. I cannot count the number of times I’ve attended a presentation where a speaker asks: “Will everyone who is still in the career they started after college please raise their hand” and virtually no hands go up. People usually change directions several times in their careers. It makes you wonder how much real use anyone has for all that training they got in college
Filed Under: Careers & Salaries, Paying for college, Student life Tagged With: , ,

Textbook Rentals Don’t Save So Much After All

November 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Textbook rentals sound like a good idea, and have spawned a number of startup services like Chegg. But while about half the major schools in the U.S. are now offering rental textbooks through their bookstores, many of them are finding that the savings aren’t that great.

Among the problems: professors believe it’s their right to choose the reading material for their courses, and many of them choose the newest editions of textbooks, which are not widely available for rental yet. And while Congress passed a law recently that required textbook publishers to give professors the prices of new textbooks and actually list the revisions from the old to the new editions, those brilliant legislators in Washington didn’t bother to put anything into the law that actually forces the publishers to comply with it.

In addition to the fact that it costs a school a bundle to start a book rental program, students are finding that even then, the rental costs aren’t that cheap. For more on a textbook situation that seems to satisfy no one, go here.

Filed Under: Cost of college, Paying for college, Student life

What Exactly Is A For-Profit College?

November 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

For-profit schools are what they sound like – schools that make money by teaching students. Many of the largest ones are actually free-standing corporations, with large numbers of stockholders. The University of Phoenix, which is a subsidiary of The Apollo Group, has a whopping 455,000 students enrolled. For-profit schools like DeVry, Phoenix, Capella and Kaplan tend to dominate the online learning space. They currently account for about 8% of the total number of college students in the U.S. They offer a wide range of degree programs, but tend to focus on career-oriented learning in everything from trades to nursing, law enforcement and education. Many offer fast-track degree completion programs that cater mainly to adult learners. (Click here for a list of non-profit online schools)

For-profit schools get only a portion of their revenue from direct student tuition payments. A large proportion of their fees are paid by the government, but way of Pell Grants and other federal and state education aid programs.

Many of the for-profits have come under fire recently for over-aggressive recruitment tactics and, allegedly, a lack of focus on getting students actually graduated. As a result, there are rule changes going into effect in 2012 that will force these schools to publish their tuition fees and the hire rates of their graduates.

What’s a bit lost in the debate about for-profit schools, however, is the fact that non-profit colleges and universities get huge tax benefits from the cities and towns they are located in, have a tenure system that doesn’t necessarily reward professors for actually teaching, and have very little to offer in terms of proof that their graduates find employment as a result of their degrees.

The source article here says that for-profit schools are generally more expensive than their non-profit counterparts. That’s just not correct, however, when you factor in astronomically expensive private colleges, which are also non-profit.

Filed Under: Accreditation, Adult education, Online education, Paying for college, Student life Tagged With: , ,

Bachelor in Computer Science Degree: To Specialize or not to specialize?

October 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

A bachelor’s degree in computer science can be a good ticket to a position where you manage a team of developers. Because the degree requires study of various humanities topics, it shows employers that you have the kind of communication skills needed in more senior positions.

But should you look at a general BS degree in computer science or one of the many specialized programs schools are offering? Nowadays you can focus on game design, network security, graphics, criminal justice computer issues, and a whole raft of other niches. A targeted approach can work – but you may want to ask yourself if you’re sure you want to spend your entire career in game design before going after a degree in that specialty.

Here’s more on how to choose a bachelor in computer science degree program , what kind of earnings it will probably bring you and what the long term career prospects are in the IT field.

Filed Under: Adult education, Careers & Salaries, Careers and education, Paying for college

Are for-profit colleges really the devil?

September 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It’s been open hunting season on for-profit colleges lately, largely due to a new report by the General Accounting Office charging that University of Phoenix, Argosy and several other well-known schools are using shady techniques to enroll minority students and get their hands on millions in Pell Grants that the federal government doles out each year. (Click here for a list of non-profit colleges online)

The Career College Association, (the top trade group representing for-profit colleges) has quickly responded that the abuses described in the GAO study are real and need to be cleared up. But that hasn’t been enough to stop U.S. Senate Education Panel chairman Tom Harkin (Democrat, Iowa) from thundering that major legislation is needed to control this sector. In Harkin’s view, the for-profits threaten to get more than 50% of all federal grant money in the next few years, by systematically helping students deceive the government into giving them education loans.

There’s no doubt that for-profit colleges are businesses, and that businesses tend to stretch the rules to turn a profit. But the controversy is also a curious indicator of how our politicians seem deeply suspicious of schools that teach for profit, while remaining willfully oblivious to the questionable practices of America’s hallowed private schools that call themselves non-profits.

With tuition and board at many private colleges now topping $50,000. a year, a parallel controversy is rising up over just how much money non-profit colleges are really spending on worthwhile educational goals. Take a walk around just about any private college in the U.S. today, and you’re likely to see dining halls with chefs making crepes and sparking multi-million dollar hockey rinks. What you may not find is a lot of actual professors teaching classes. Under current tenure and sabbatical rules at most schools, professors either leave teaching to assistants while they undertake research projects or simply take off on life-enhancing journeys to parts unknown – on paid time, of course. According to one report, almost half of Harvard’s professors will be away on sabbatical next year.

Among the revelations of a scathing new book called “Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – and What We Can Do About It,” (by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus) is that in the past 10 years, most American schools have spent far more money to increase their administrative staffs than to bring in new teachers. Meanwhile, college presidents have become a new class of corporate CEOs, with million dollar salaries, large staffs and massive perks (who can forget the story of Daniel Goldin, who was hired as president of Boston University in 2003, got caught up in an internal political fight before even arriving and walked away with a $1.8 million severance package without having spent a single day on the job).

Several conservative writers have argued that Harkin’s criticisms are based on an Obama administration goal of gaining more control over the education system by funneling more students away from for-profit schools and into community and state colleges directly run by the government. To be sure, there’s a bit of irony if Senator Harkin’s warning about the for-profits eventually getting a majority of Uncle Sam’s Pell Grant money: For-profit schools pay a significant portion of it back to the government in taxes, while non-profit colleges and universities, which still get more than 50% of these grants, don’t pay a single penny back in taxes.

A number of articles about graduates from for-profit schools have painted a picture of worthless degrees and crippling debts (the most colorful was a story in Huffington Post about a graduate of Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale working as a stripper). But most have conveniently overlooked the fact that there are also thousands of graduates from non-profit and state colleges walking the streets right now who are unemployed and up to their necks in debt.

For-profit colleges have highly developed recruiting techniques and big marketing budgets, and, in truth, tend to obscure tuition rates on their websites. Given that they recruit a high proportion of minority students with little family experience of higher education, it seems sensible to require that these schools be as transparent about fees as their non-profit counterparts. But that does nothing to address the wastefulness of the many sacred cows that comprise the rest of our highly respected college and university system.

Filed Under: Adult education, Careers & Salaries, Cost of college, Paying for college, Student life
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