21st Century Scholar

The Thursday Pop One of my favorite quotes from the reality prison show Lockup on MSNBC is from an inmate who said: “We control everything but the gates.” I thought that was a powerful quote because this inmate really did believe (or at least wanted the viewer to believe) that he had an immense power [...]

The Thursday Pop When I started out with this blog column in January, it was a lot of fun. I critiqued an MTV contest on the best new financial aid/college access idea and wrote about Lady Gaga. Later entries mentioned the Wu-Tang Clan method of understanding financial aid offers. I’m telling you, writing this blog was [...]

The Thrusday Pop This fall, I am teaching about 45 first-year graduate students. When I look back on the first 14 weeks of the semester, I am struck by how stressed out they are. Yes, there is the usual stuff about writing good papers, managing class participation, and making connections in a new social setting. [...]

The Thursday Pop OK, so Halloween is just 11 days away, and while many of you may be more interested in deciding between that Smurf costume (for yourself, or your dog) and the Scurvy Pirate look (again, for you, or the dog), I’m dealing with ghoulish misrepresentations about applying for financial aid. Over the past [...]

by Lisa Garcia SummerTIME—CHEPA’s four-week intensive summer writing and college knowledge program for rising college freshmen—is in full swing. All 90 students meet with a CHEPA staff member, student, or campus volunteer to review their financial aid notification (FAN) letters. Most of our students are well prepared financially to transition to a two- or four-year [...]

Not my kind of pop!: Waiting for the police to show up (+ a couple of financial aid notes) This post would probably be a bit different if there wasn’t someone sitting in front of my house smoking some kind of drug. This is really happening as I write this at 8:20 a.m. on a [...]

David Bowie & Queen remind me to calm down—it’s SummerTIME I volunteer with this really cool program called SummerTIME run by the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at USC. I work with the recently graduated high school seniors who will become college freshmen in just a few short weeks. The program helps them focuses [...]

What is Gainful Employment? Why Should Universities Care? by Mark DeFusco, Ph.D. Recently, for-profit colleges and universities have been rocked by allegations of impropriety and their valuations have plummeted in the wake of hearings and Qui Tam investigations. The fear has been that these for-profit institutions have taken advantage of uninformed consumers who flock to [...]

Communicating financial aid and financial literacy: Why are we still holding on to our radio star status? Do you remember Buggles? I had to smile as I wrote that! Some of you might know their big hit song from the video game GTA Vice City, but I have always associated Video Killed the Radio Star [...]

My financial aid & Facebook experiment: “Pregunta about financial aid, race, and class” As I mentioned in my blog on May 19th, I was working with David Levy and the College Access Foundation to put on a series of workshops related to reading financial aid offers. We included the basics as well as some “inside [...]