21st Century Scholar

I can’t tell if this is the best time to bring this up, but I am going to anyway. By the time you read this blog, USC graduation will be about a week old. This means that within the next three months or so, most graduates, except those who are continuing on to new academic [...]

“The loan you save may be your own.” –#dontdoublemyrate “If Congress doesn’t act, it’s the students who pay.” It’s almost like the April 24 skit by President Obama. Jimmy Fallon and Black Thought of the Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was made for my blog! If you haven’t had a chance to watch [...]

Did you know that April was “Financial Capability Month?” Me neither! President Obama made this declaration on April 2, but somehow I missed it among the many news outlets I visit everyday. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was mentioned as one of our main governmental sources to learn about financial literacy and capability. When you [...]

Last week, I saw In Time with Justin Timberlake. Have you seen it? I still can’t stop thinking about it. The premise of the movie is that rather than money, society relies on time as the main currency of survival. Each character in the movie has a time counter on his or her forearm that [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I received Facebook messages from a few friends about the FAFSA—one of them was really disappointed because she believed that after going to a couple of financial aid workshops and starting to work on the FAFSA, that she and her family were going to have to pay a lot of [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the FixUC plan. The February 2 article in Inside Higher Ed titled No Money Down! about the plan inspired me to look into it even more. I get the basics: You go to a UC and then graduate. You pay nothing while in school. You only have to pay 5% [...]

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 [...]