Beautiful Photos from Space

Boston.com published 24 gorgeous images of Saturn, taken by the Cassini spacecraft and compiled by NASA. The photo captions are brief and informative. Enjoy!

Is College Tuition Too High?

I'm disturbed by this. We've heard about the rising costs of college for years, but I didn't realize how much it's outpaced everything else. No wonder our students are starting their adult lives with huge debts that take them many years to pay off! According to an article in Salon.com,

"In the past several decades, the cost of higher education has climbed at an astounding pace -- faster than the Consumer Price Index, faster even than the cost of medical care. Over the past 30 years, the average annual cost of college tuition, fees, and room and board has increased nearly 100 percent, from $7,857 in 1977-78 to $15,665 in 2007-08 (in constant 2006-07 dollars). Median household income, on the other hand, has risen a mere 18 percent over that same period, from about $42,500 to just over $50,000. College costs, in other words, have gone up at more than five times the rate of income."

Another aspect of this situation that doesn't seem right is the distribution of financial aid grants, with more of the money going to higher-income students than to lower-income students.

"Engines of Inequality," a 2006 report by the Education Trust, a national education advocacy and policy organization, found that state flagship universities and a group of major research universities spent $257 million in 2003 on financial aid for students from families earning more than $100,000 a year. Those same universities spent only $171 million on aid to students from families who made less than $20,000 a year. Similarly, between 1995 and 2003, according to the report, grant aid from the same public universities to students from families making $80,000 or more increased 533 percent, while grant aid to families making less than $40,000 increased only 120 percent....Indeed, the highest achieving students from high-income families -- those who earned top grades, completed the full battery of college prep courses, and took AP courses as well -- are nearly four times more likely than low-income students with exactly the same level of academic accomplishment to end up in a highly selective university," the report concluded.

I'm sure these trends are due to economic principles like the law of supply and demand, not some conspiracy by elites to keep the rest of us down. There's a much greater demand for college degrees than there used to be, so naturally the price becomes higher. And taking better care of high-income families at the front end probably pays off in greater alumni support in the long run. But these statistics reportedly apply to state universities and major research institutions, which have a mission to serve public interests. Doesn't seem right to me.

--Gated communities of learning:Rising tuition and sinking bank accounts are turning the nation's colleges into bastions of inequality. By Andy Kroll (originally appeared on TomDispatch)

It was April 1, but it was no joke. The Los Angeles Times ran a story in Top News, about an "administrative error" at the University of California San Diego, that disappointed many families and embarrassed the university.

"All 28,000 applicants who have been rejected by the University of California, San Diego received an email congratulating them on their acceptance, only to receive another notification admitting there was a mistake....UCSD admissions director Mae Brown called the snafu an administrative error....'We accessed the wrong database,' Brown said."

Believe it or not, it gets worse.

"Morgan Currier, a senior at the Cleveland High School....checked her page on the UCSD applications portal and learned her status hadn't changed, so she called the admissions office to get the straight story. "We got the answering machine with a message left over from Christmas, saying 'Happy Holidays,' " said Currier...." --U of California San Diego Admissions Gaffe Dashes Students' Hopes, by Gale Holland and Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2009

Yikes!

According to the article, similar mistakes have been made in the last five years by Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

I don't know about you, but after reading this I'm making sure my office voice mail recording is current and double-checking the recipients of my emails!

Defending Our Own Honor

Instructors from the TAKE Foundation are coming to Lincoln next week to train females in self defense. They do great work. One of the best things my husband ever did for me was insist that I take a self defense class. Recent attacks on women at their workplaces in Lincoln are a grim reminder that we aren't teaching girls what to do. But we can...and should. Watch the video and get motivated!