Monday, April 5, 2010

Education - Everything you need to know about the world of education.

It's a win-win for seniors who tutor kids

Old tutors say they learn as much as the students they help.

MORE ON EDUCATION

Experience Corps tutor Barbara Johnson helps out in a kindergarten class at Belmont Elementary in Baltimore. Experience Corps, a program operating in 22 cities nationwide, trains volunteers over 55 to tutor and mentor elementary school students. (Rob Carr - AP)

Negotiating the price of college -- Flagel, Part 4

Here is the fourth and last part of a financial aid primer written by Andrew Flagel, dean of admissions and associate vice president for enrollment development for George Mason University in Virginia. Check out Flagel’s amusing and forthright “Not Your Average Admissions Blog, A Beneath the Surface Look at Everything College Admissions (With a Few Shameless Plugs).”

By Andrew Flagel
For the most part, admissions and financial aid are honorable professions. My colleagues are generally very ethical people who strive to help students and deeply believe in the importance of their mission and the service they provide.

That being said, sometimes their work this time of year – the months that colleges and universities package financial aid – can seem a little dirty. I’m not talking DIRTY – I’ve yet to hear about a colleague finding a way to engineer financial aid kickbacks or helping the cartels launder money through financial aid.

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Parents spending more time with teens, college race blamed

Two economists who work 2,274 miles away have identified the essence of parenthood in the Washington area since 1995. It turns out we have been spending all that time with our older children — chauffeuring, applauding, coordinating, correcting, planning, obsessing — because we have a deep need to beat the other stressed-out parents in getting our kids into good colleges.

The researchers are Garey and Valerie A. Ramey, a married couple at the University of California-San Diego. They have done the hyper-active parent thing themselves and have a son at Stanford University to show for it. They also admit that most of this exhaustive parenting is done not by men but by women, including, by her own account, Ms. Ramey herself. To sum up, college-graduate soccer moms are trying to outdo all the other soccer moms to get their children into a good school so their daughters can repeat the cycle with their own children.

The Rameys met at the University of Arizona, where both graduated summa cum laude. They are brainy academics who like playful labels, so their study is titled “The Rug Rat Race.” They cite national time-use surveys to show that between 1995 and 2000 the hours spent by college-educated women caring for or handling travel and activities for