College Rankings

Weeks Become Months: Teaching During a PandemicIn March of 2020, I said, “See you on Monday” to my students on what I believed to be an ordinary Friday, albeit a Friday the 13th. That would be the last day I would see them for months. There was a period of uncertainty as everyone grappled with our new reality. The unadulterated meaning of pandemic, hit fast and hard.  After weeks of educational triage, sending emails and hoping that students would tune into our online classrooms, the 2019-2020 school year ended with only a brief respite before the next school year began. March to May was rough, but how could we learn from what didn’t work during “quarantine teaching?”  How do we uphold educational integrity while still acknowledging that we are in the midst of a global pandemic and a frag...

New FAFSA Changes – Winners and LosersThe Free Application for Federal Student Aid will be undergoing significant changes soon and families, who hope to obtain financial aid, need to prepare for the FAFSA changes. Tucked into federal pandemic relief legislation that Congress passed during the Christmas holidays, was a dramatic overhaul to the FAFSA and financial aid rules. Last week, I talked to Mark Kantrowitz, a nationally prominent financial aid expert, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the federal financial aid system. I’d urge you to listen to my conversation with Mark, who knows more about the upcoming FAFSA changes than just about anybody in the nation. The changes will kick in for the 2023-2024 school year. This means parents filling out the FAFSA as early as Oct. 1, 2022 will b...

Taking the ACT and SAT Going Forward – Or NotIf your child is a high school junior, it could be trickier this year to decide whether to take the SAT or ACT in 2021 (assuming greater availability) and also whether to submit scores. To help with this decision, I am running an informative post written by Bruce Reed, a cofounder of Compass Education Group, which regularly creates high quality advice about standardized testing. In addition to Reed’s post below, I’d urge you to download a copy of an invaluable guide that Compass has been producing for years and regularly updates. The Compass Guide to College Admission Testing, which is 69 pages, covers such topics as the current testing landscape, test-optional developments, PSAT and PreACT, Score Choice and superscoring and much more. Taking th...

Former lobbyist details how privatizers are trying to end public educationWhen champions of market-based reform in the United States look at public education, they see two separate activities — government funding education and government running schools. The first is okay with them; the second is not. Reformers want to replace their bête noire — what they call the “monopoly of government-run schools” — with freedom of choice in a competitive market dominated by privately run schools that get government subsidies. Published at Fri, 16 Apr 2021 10:00:56 +0000 Article source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/04/16/former-lobbyist-details-how-privatizers-are-trying-to-end-public-education/

What Can Teachers Learn by Strapping Brain-Monitoring Devices to Students?It’s a bit of a mystery what goes on inside the brain when students learn. But thanks to relatively new breakthroughs in portable EEG devices, which can measure the brain’s electrical activity in what are known as brainwaves, researchers are able to run experiments in classrooms as never before. Ido Davidesco, an assistant professor of learning sciences at the University of Connecticut, says such research will yield insights that can help teachers do their jobs better. One area he’s exploring involves trying to better understand what teaching practices best hold students’ attention. “This question became even more timely and relevant [during the pandemic] because students and teachers find it really hard to concentra...

What You Need to Know About the CDC's New School Guidelines In a move long awaited by educators, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines on Friday for how to operate schools safely during the pandemic. The recommendations, more detailed than those released by the agency under the Trump administration, attempt to carve a middle path between people who want classrooms to reopen immediately and those teachers and parents who remain reluctant to return to in-person instruction before widespread vaccination. What do the guidelines say about reopening classrooms? With proper mitigation, such as masking, physical distancing and hygiene, elementary schools can operate in person at any level of community virus transmission, the guidelines state. The document ...

Education’s Role in Second Chance Month and National Reentry WeekBy:Sean Addie – Director of Correctional EducationDr. Amy Loyd – Acting Assistant Secretary This week we are joining our colleagues at the U.S. Department of Justice, agencies across the federal government, and our partners across the country to mark National Reentry Week and lift up the important work being done to support individuals reentering society from incarceration. The week also bookends Second Chance Month, and here at the Department of Education, we understand the pivotal role that education plays in helping people rejoin and contribute to society. Education can have a transformational impact on an individual’s life –– and education plays a vital role in easing an individual’s reentry from jail or prison back into...

How Covid-19 Has Made Online Education The New NormalHistory has shown that with crisis, there comes a hidden opportunity. Covid-19 is not an exception. And its education where we have been witnessing some sweeping changes that will definitely define this decade. 2020 & 2021 – these two years will be remembered as milestones in the field of education, skills, and jobs. Millions of students have embraced online learning and organizations are moving to digital workforce.  Education’s age-old three Rs – Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic – are being joined by a fourth: Rethink. It’s time to reimagine and redefine education.  We’re living in a world of digital technology and the evolution of online education during this crisis has made it the new norm. Students are now encouraged to learn ne...

Reframing the ‘Lost’ College VisitiStockEditor’s note: A version of this column was first published by the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools. As we find ourselves in pandemic spring 2.0, college visiting is not possible for the majority of juniors just beginning their college journeys and seniors finalizing enrollment plans. When my mother was alive she would say, “If you can’t fix it, feature it.”  Her sound advice reminds me to invert the problem of canceled college tours. Instead of wringing hands over the lost college road trip, we can emphasize the opportunity facing institutions and students. Covid is inviting us to reinvent college discovery and student engagement. The majority of college-goers don’t have the resources for multi-day visiting trips. Indeed, col...

Finding colleges offering big scholarshipsIt’s late in the college admission season, but schools are still giving out college scholarships to those who know where to look. The pandemic caused many colleges to provide better scholarships than they would have liked. And actually, some schools, long before the pandemic hit, were giving out large merit scholarships. I wrote about one aspect of this phenomenon earlier this month: One senior’s scholarships and wait list results so far… Today I am sharing award letter results that a teenager in Los Angeles received this year from Midwestern liberal arts colleges along with the colleges that waitlisted her. Emily applied to 14 private colleges and was rejected outright from just two of them – Colorado College and Haverford College. Eight schools ...

The College Transition: Tips for Students with Disabilities iStockPreparation is key for all college-bound students, but thinking through what you’ll need to be successful is especially important for students with disabilities. Here are some ideas and insights to help you settle into college. Did you have an IEP (Individualized Education Program) or 504 Plan in high school? Plan to apply for accommodations in college. Recognize that increased academic demands will require more academic support. Services received in high school will not automatically follow students to college and not all accommodations granted in high school are considered reasonable in college. However, colleges do grant accommodations to students under Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The proces...

Online Schools Are Here to Stay, Even After the Pandemic To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Rory Levin, a sixth grader in Bloomington, Minn., used to hate going to school. He has a health condition that often makes him feel apprehensive around other students. Taking special-education classes did little to ease his anxiety. So when his district created a stand-alone digital-only program, Bloomington Online School, last year for the pandemic, Rory opted to try it. Now the 11-year-old is enjoying school for the first time, said his mother, Lisa Levin. He loves the live video classes and has made friends with other online students, she said. In December, Bloomington Public Schools decided to keep running the online school e...

Student Demand:   The Critical Metric for Program Investment Decisions In the face of financial shortfalls, many schools make a fundamental error:  they focus on employment data to find new programs or current programs to grow.  Unfortunately, there is a very limited relationship between employer needs and program margins.    Focus on Student Demand to Increase Margins If you need to grow and increase margins, focus on student demand–it is students who fill seats and pay tuition.  Our analysis, illustrated below, shows that student demand is four times better than employment in predicting potential margins for current or new programs. Let’s look at the data behind these claims, which was drawn from actual program markets and margins.  Gray ran analytics to see which market factors bes...

Quality doctoral programmes are vital for developmentGHANA Ghana’s National Accreditation Board was established in 1993 by the government of Ghana for four primary purposes.One is giving official quality approval to both public and private tertiary education institutions in terms of curricula content and standards of academic programmes.Two, it constantly monitors tertiary education institutions to ensure compliance with normative standards and ethics of organisation, governance, academic and administrative leadership.Three, it ensures that education institutions satisfy appropriate standards in physical facilities such as classrooms, laboratories, academic and professional staffing.Four, it determines the equivalence of degrees, diplomas and certificates awarded by institutions inside ...

Higher Education:  Are You Ready for the Economic Boom?   We have a great deal to be optimistic about in higher education.  For one, most state budgets didn’t fall much and the federal government just gave them billion dollar booster shots.  The U.S. economy is poised for a boom, led by federal spending and pent-up consumer demand.   Optimistic Outlook for Higher Education   Neil Irwin of the New York Times inspired this optimism with his article “17 Reasons to Let the Economic Optimism Begin.”  He describes past recessions that gave us every right to be skittish about recoveries. “… a mild recession was followed by a weak recovery followed by a financial crisis followed by another weak recovery followed by a pandemic-induced collapse…an economy in which a persistently weak job market has...