Class of 2013: The Most Indebted Ever

“70% of graduates had at least some debt according to the latest poll from Fidelity Investments but as the Wall Street Journal reports the average student-loan debt for a borrower who received a bachelor’s degree in 2013 is $30,000 – an all-time record. With $986 billion of outstanding student loan debt (up 50% from Q1 2009) and unemployment rates running at or near all-time highs for the 16-24 year old cohort in this nation, it is little surprise that delinquencies are surging. The unemployment rate among graduates is 7.1% (which is considerably worse than it looks given that many are stuck in low-paid jobs) but it is those who don’t complete college that face the greatest burden – the median annual income of a non-completer was $25,000 (compared to $33,900 for a degree holder), less than the average student loan debt. As the WSJ notes though, the 2013 class is unlikely to hold the ‘most indebted class ever’ title for long as 2014 enrollments and tuition costs look set to continue the 20 year trend…”

Source: Zero Hedge

Only 150 of 3500 U.S. Colleges are Worth Investment

“The U.S. is home to some of the greatest colleges and universities in the world. But with the student debt load at more than $1 trillion and youth unemployment elevated, when assessing the value of a college education, that’s only one part of the story.

Former Secretary of Education William Bennett, author of Is College Worth It, sat down with The Daily Ticker on the sidelines of the Milken Institute’s 2013 Global Conference to talk about whether college is worth it.

“We have about 21 million people in higher education, and about half the people who start four year colleges don’t finish,” Bennett tells The Daily Ticker. “Those who do finish, who graduated in 2011 – half were either unemployed or radically underemployed and in debt.”

Related: The One Skill Every American Needs to Learn

That average student loan balance for a 25-year-old is $20,326, according to the Federal Reserve of New York. Student debt is second largest source of U.S. household debt, after only mortgages.

Bennett assessed the “return on investment” for the 3500 colleges and universities in the country. He found that returns were positive for only 150 institutions. The top 10 schools ranked by Bennett as having the best “ROI” are below (for the full list he used, click here, and for the latest figures, click here):

1. Harvey Mudd College
2. California Institute of Technology
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
4. Stanford University
5. Princeton University
6. Harvard University
7. Dartmouth College
8. Duke University
9. University of Pennsylvania
10. University of Notre Dame

He found college is “worth it” if you get into a top tier university like Stanford, or study an in-demand field like nuclear engineering at even a lower tier school.

Related: Are Millennials a “Lost Generation”?

The problem, Bennett says, is people going to second-tier schools, majoring in less-marketable liberal arts fields, and taking on debt to do so.

Alternatives to a traditional four-year college include entering the workforce prior to college, joining the military, or going to a 2-year community college.

Bennet discovered, for example, graduates of Jefferson College of Health Science and Nursing in Virginia make more after two years than those from the prestigious University of Virginia in Charlottesville…”

Source: Yahoo! Finance

Student Zombies: You’ll Never Learn!

“…For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.

Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”

Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing new, of course. But Rosen’s study, published in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way.

But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts. So detrimental is this practice that some researchers are proposing that a new prerequisite for academic and even professional success—the new marshmallow test of self-discipline—is the ability to resist a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone…”

Source: Slate

Colleges In U.S. Offer Highest-Ever Discount to Entice Students

“Private nonprofit colleges are offering students tuition discounts of 45 percent, on average, in response to a changing financial environment that stems from the weak economic recovery.

Price reductions, designed to boost attendance, were at an all-time high in 2012 and outpaced the rate during the recession, according to a study of 383 private-nonprofit four- year schools, released today by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Some colleges are struggling with enrollment declines even after offering a reduction and enduring price sensitivity is driving the drop, according to chief business officers at institutions that have been affected. Attending some private colleges can run more than $60,000 annually, including room and board, books and other costs. Schools are using many strategies to get students to enroll, said John Walda, the group’s president and chief executive officer.

“The expectation that a private institution can maintain or grow enrollment and increase net revenue simply by offering large tuition discounts is no longer valid,” Walda said in a statement. “Price sensitivity, changing student demographics, and a dynamic, competitive landscape all point to the need for increased attention to a strong brand, good marketing, diverse revenue streams, and cost containment…”

Source: Bloomberg

Arrested & Beaten for Dozing in Class

“After a diabetic high school student fell asleep in study hall, the school police officer slammed her face into a filing cabinet, arrested her and took her to jail, she claims in court.
     Tieshka Avery claims she was so violently abused that she vomited in the police car.
     And all because she fell asleep reading “Huckleberry Finn.”
     (Public school districts in the South have been accused of operating de facto “school to jail” programs, targeting minority students for arrest for minor infractions. The ACLU and the federal government have filed lawsuits alleging the practice. See below.)
     Ashlynn Avery and her mother Tieshka Avery sued the City of Hoover, its Police Department and Board of Education, police Officer Christopher Bryant, and school employees Don Hulin and Joshua Whited, in Federal Court.
     On May 3, 2011, “Ashlynn Avery was in Hoover High School’s In-School Suspension (ISS) for what was termed ‘skipping class,’” the complaint states.
     ”While in ISS, Ashlynn was assigned to read ‘Huckleberry Finn.’
     ”As a result of a combination of Ashlynn’s chronic medical conditions, including sleep apnea, Type II diabetes, and asthma, Ashlynn dozed off during ISS.
     ”Joshua Whited, the ISS supervisor, noticed that Ashlynn had dozed off, walked to her cubicle and struck the cubicle with his hand, causing the cubicle to hit Ashlynn’s head, waking her up.
     ”Ashlynn returned to reading ‘Huckleberry Finn.’
     ”Once again, Ashlynn dozed off.
     ”While she was sleeping, Whited took the book from her, slammed the book onto the desk, causing the book to bounce and hit Ashlynn in the chest.”
     Ashlynn claims she was told to leave the room, and called her mother, and that “while Ashlynn was hysterical, speaking with her mother and walking down the hall, Officer Christopher Bryan [sic], who was behind her, made aggressive contact against her by slapping her backpack.”
     The complaint continues: “Ashlynn, not knowing who was behind her, said ‘Leave me alone’.
     ”While still on the phone with her mother, Officer Bryant proceeded to shove Ashlynn face first into a file cabinet and handcuff her.
     ”Ashlynn was taken to the police station.
     ”On the ride to the police station, Ashlynn, due to her emotional state, vomited in the car…”

Source: Courthouse News Service

Why Our Brains Get Addicted to the Internet

The Education Industry Is Traversing a Broad, Multi-Decade Social Mood Peak

“Our February 2011 education study forecast “a massive shift in society’s attitudes toward education.” Our study said this shift would reverse a century-long, upward trend in the popularity and cost of higher education (click here to read it).

The bursting of such an enormous bubble takes years to accomplish. Nonetheless, significant change is already under way. In this update, we report on the status of seven developments in the education industry. Five are on track with our forecasts, one is evolving, and we have to admit that the emergence of the last one surprised even us.

1. The “Creative Destruction” of the Industry Has Begun

What We Said
Traditional educational institutions may eventually lose control of the manufacture and distribution of education much as the music and publishing industries lost their grip on music and text. Bear markets topple dominant players and open the field to nimbler entrepreneurs, who will develop alternatives to institutional education.¹

What Has Happened Since
Seven months later, in an October 2011 article titled “The University of Wherever,” The New York Times practically quoted our study:

Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries….²

As Pete Kendall reported in the October 1995 issue of The Elliott Wave Theorist, intense technological advancement is common to advances leading to major peaks in the economy. Such breakthroughs tend to lower the costs of production and consumption of certain goods and services and enable entrepreneurs to capture business from old, less nimble providers. Entire industries must adapt to survive; otherwise, they die. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction.”

Today’s technological breakthrough is the Internet, of course, which the July 1998 Theorist called “a massive engine for falling prices in countless businesses and professions.” Education is no exception. On March 4, 2012, The New York Times took note of the trend:

Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs — a tool for democratizing higher education. … in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them … without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential….³

For example, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun offers remote students the same lectures, assignments and exams that on-campus students pay $50,000 a year for. But the online courses are free. Online students get a “statement of accomplishment,” though not Stanford credit, for passing the classes. “If we can solve [quality-control problems such as cheating and accreditation], I think it will disrupt all of higher education,” Thrun says.

Bill Keller of The New York Times agrees: “Disrupt is right … [Free, online education] would be an earthquake for the majority of colleges that depend on tuition income … . Many could go the way of local newspapers.”² Thrun goes on to say,

I’m not at all against the on-campus experience … . I love it. … But it’s also insanely uneconomical. … Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost.²

In December 2011, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expanded its free, online M.I.T.x OpenCourseWare program to include nearly 2100 online courses. The university says more than 100 million people have used the program. Like Stanford, MIT also offers credentials for those who complete courses.⁴

Diploma-granting institutions are skeptical. Stanford’s provost said,

There are issues to consider, from copyright questions to what it might mean for our accreditation if we provide some official credential for these courses, branded as Stanford.

Thrun’s answer to the accreditation problem is to completely bypass the old system via a new business model. The idea is that online education can produce detailed data on precisely what the courses teach, which aspects of the classes the students master, how long they take to complete the courses and so on. This dataset can be far more useful to employers than just grade point average and a diploma from an elite school. Thrun’s new company, Udacity, plans to monetize the model by selling pinpoint leads to job recruiters:

If a recruiter is looking for the hundred best people in some geographic area … that’s something we could provide, for a fee. I think it’s the cusp of a revolution.³

Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said, “If I were still in industry and someone came in with an M.I.T.x credential, I’d take it.”⁴

Thrun’s and MIT’s efforts are part of a trend that now extends even to grade schools. We included in our 2011 study a list of 100 online educational resources. Among those are the thousands of concise lessons in math, biology, chemistry and physics aimed at younger students and given away by Salman Khan, a Harvard MBA, at khanacademy.org. Khan now rides a growing wave of popular acclaim and has secured backing from Google, Bill Gates and others. Khan says his goal is to “change education worldwide.” Here are a few highlights from Khan’s March 11 CBS 60 Minutes interview⁵:

Khan Academy has created a dashboard so teachers like Courtney Cadwell can monitor each student’s progress … . I can see who’s rushing ahead, who’s lagging behind. I can see if they begin to stagnate. … you can see the number of seconds they spent on each problem. …⁶

Khan promises he’ll never put a price tag on his instruction.

The new “free-ed” model could soon bring top-quality education to many students, including third-world scholars who otherwise would have no such access. Many of those students, in turn, could become great online teachers.

In the meantime, the progress of education’s creative destruction will ebb and flow with social mood…”

Source: Socionomics Institute

Boy Who Held Pencil Like Gun Suspended

“A Suffolk school suspended a second grader for pointing a pencil at another student and making gun noises. Seven-year-old Christopher Marshall says he was playing with another student in class Friday, when the teacher at Driver Elementary asked them to stop pointing pencils at each other.

“When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, the boy’s father. “It’s as simple as that.”

Christopher’s father was a Marine for many years. He thinks school leaders overreacted.

“A pencil is a weapon when it is pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made,” said Bethanne Bradshaw, a spokesperson for Suffolk Public Schools.

The Suffolk school system has a “zero tolerance policy” when it comes to weapons. And, Bradshaw admits, that policy has tightened up in recent years because of widely publicized school shootings…”

Source: Wavy.com

High School Runner Disqualified for Thanking God

“An act of faith has cost an area track team a win and a chance to advance to the state championships.

This past weekend, the Columbus High School Mighty Cardinals had just won a boys relay race when a runner’s final gesture got them disqualified.

As he was crossing the finish line, Derrick Hayes pointed up to the sky. His father believes he was giving thanks in a gesture to God.

“It was a reaction,” father KC Hayes said. “I mean you’re brought up your whole life that God gives you good things, you’re blessed.”

Columbus ISD Superintendent Robert O’Connor said the team had won the race by seven yards. It was their fastest race of the year.

Though O’Connor cannot say why the student pointed, he says it was against the rules that govern high school sports. The rules state there can be no excessive act of celebration, which includes raising the hands.

“I don’t think that the situation was technically a terrible scenario as far as his action, but the action did violate the context of the rule,” Supt. O’Connor said.

But critics, including the runner’s father, see it as a violation of religious freedom. Some of them have even complained to the state, which does not appear to be budging.

“You cross a finish line and you’ve accomplished a goal and within seconds it’s gone,” KC Hayes said. “To see four kids, you know, what does that tell them about the rest of their lives? You’re going to do what’s right, work extra hard, and have it ripped away from you?”

It has proven to be a difficult lesson for a team which showed how well it can win. It must now show how well it can handle loss.”

Source: WFAA

Me, Myself, and My Selfie

“…Recently, I was standing in line at the grocery store behind a woman and her two tween daughters. “I’m bored,” whispered one girl. “Let’s do one for Facebook.” And before you could say “Instagram,” the girl pouted into the lens—one hand holding her iPhone camera aloft, the other hand on her hip—and snapped. Her sister posed alongside with a similarly two-lipped pout, eyebrows raised and head cocked quizzically to the side. 

For a generation raised on mantras of self-esteem, I suppose framing pictures at arm’s length and striking a heroic, sultry or brooding pose to share with the world must come naturally. From Justin Bieber and Madonna to teens and adults everywhere, the self-portrait photo has become a social media staple and cultural marker of our time. The word “selfie” is now a part of mainstream vocabulary (there’s even a new Wikipedia entry), conjuring up images of Myspace-style angles, “duck” faces, and peace signs reflected in dirty bathroom mirrors. Psychologists and sociologists argue that the selfie craze stems not only from technology, but from the drive for self-expression and identity experimentation among users.

“What is its allure? For one thing, it’s ridiculously easy to do,” wrote Bim Adewunmi in The Guardian. “Selfies offer a medium of control in a snap-happy era, where you’re in charge of the image produced, and all the editorial decisions are yours.”

As we’ve become a nation of amateur portrait snappers, smartphone cameras now boast wide-angle lenses, software enables photography via webcam, and Instagram (the popular photo-sharing service) allows users to tweak and select filters in a manner once reserved for professionals. Today, anyone armed with a smartphone can spend hours documenting themselves digitally. At last count, Instagram had more than 25 million photos tagged simply, “#me.”

But technology alone doesn’t explain the rise of the selfie. Psychologists and others who study teenagers say digital self-portraiture is an extension of typical adolescent behavior that previous generations expressed through clothing and hairstyle. Through selfies, photographers “try on” different faces—serious or surprised, artsy or melancholy—as the fluidity of digital media allows for provisional, disposable identities…”

Source: World Magazine