Filed under: College, Family Money, School
Break out the duct tape, fire up the glue guns and get the sewing machine out of the closet, it’s prom season! Crafty, college-bound prom goers can win serious scholarship dollars for designing dream dresses and tuxedos — no fairy godmother required.
Filed under: College, Family Money, School
Looking to send someone off to college next fall? Hurry, time’s running out to apply for a $2,500 Upromise Scholarship. Due by February 15, applications are being accepted for 2010-11 scholarships aimed at assisting 100 undergrads with financial need.
The Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell this week, noting with little fanfare (subscription required) that the college degrees we’re told are a ticket to wealth and happiness aren’t all they’ve been cracked up to be.
The College Board, a glorified trade group representing the interests of colleges and universities, has long touted an $800,000 lifetime earnings advantage for college grads. Now other researchers, armed with more rigorous data, are suggesting that the lifetime earnings advantage of college may be less — a lot less. Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research calculated that the lifetime earnings advantage of a college degree is just $279,893.
(Continue the story…)
Filed under: College, Technology
In a word — Yes. Thanks to a combination of factors, Scitable, both the science website and the platform itself, has the potential to change the way students learn and, more importantly to students; how much they have to pay for access to up-to-date, credible, high-quality information.
Continue reading Scitable: Can this free website shake up the textbook industry?
Filed under: College
It’s that time of year again, if you have kids in college or getting ready for college: It’s time to fill out the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form, the tedious, repetitive, boring and mildly intrusive paperwork required to qualify for financial aid.
Everyone should fill out the FAFSA form: It’s free, and you have nothing to lose and tons to gain by filling it out and turning it in. But The Los Angeles Times reports that “students often limit their college search to institutions that they think they can afford — typically junior colleges and state colleges and universities, rather than high-priced private schools. The folly is that high-priced private schools often provide so much aid that they become more affordable than less prestigious colleges. . .” (Continue the story…)
Filed under: College
The New York Times reports on the ease with which a few small colleges are boosting applications with clever direct mail marketing campaigns — that look a lot like credit card offers.
The mass mailings are designed to make the prospective applicant feel special: envelopes marked “distinctive candidate application” contain letters offering a waiver of application fees and essay requirements — and in some cases, a decision can be yours in just three weeks. (Continue the story…)
Filed under: College, Career, Fraud, Consumer Ally
So what if that dude in the cubicle next to yours decides to get a masters degree, then grabs the promotion you wanted — but the degree turns out to be fake? A number of high-profile cases over the years demonstrate that some people in middle and senior corporate, government and non-profit management are not above using a bogus credential to get ahead.
Filed under: College, Family Money
A friend who recently graduated from college explained his problem to me: He doesn’t have a job and no longer qualifies for his parents’ insurance plans.
So now, in addition to the difficulty of making student loan payments without any money, he doesn’t have health insurance. Unfortunately, his situation is not rare: a report from the Commonwealth Fund found that 34% of college graduates spends some time without health insurance in the year after graduation — a roll of the dice that puts a third of recent grads one medical emergency away from financial ruin at worst and a a lack of access to needed health care at best.
Filed under: Budgets, College, Family Money
Yesterday was my first day of classes for the semester and with that came the syllabus for one class with a list of three books I needed. On Amazon, the three titles would have cost me a total of $103.52.
Filed under: College, Debt, The Dolans, Video
Ken and Daria Dolan, America’s first family of personal finance, answer your questions every Friday.