CNN Money recently reported on the tuition costs at the ten most expensive colleges and universities in the nation. The most expensive schools list includes both private and public schools located across the country.

Although some of the schools boast a hefty tuition cost, many place limits on the amount of financial aid in loans that students can borrow. Rather than force students in loan debt to pay for the high costs of a college education, they increase the amount of grants that students can qualify for. This can come in handy for your high school students who are concerned about paying for a college education.
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The recent reports on the cost of a college education have generated much buzz in the media and blogosphere lately. As the cost of a college education rises at a slower pace, the amount of financial aid has decreased at a much faster rate. After decades of trying to make college accessible to the general public, rising cost increasingly make college something only the elite in America can afford. Preparing your students for the realities of paying for a college education should be done early and often.

Because need-based financial aid is decreasing, high school students must rely on other financial aid options such as merit-based aid, private and local scholarship programs, community service scholarships and business grants.
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Administrators of the ACT recently released the class of 2005 results. According to the report, “average scores on the ACT college entrance exam held steady across all subjects for the high school class of 2005 compared with last year’s seniors, an indication that schools are treading water in their efforts to prepare students for college-level work.”

The ACT is used as an admissions test for about half the states, mostly in the middle part of the country, while the SAT is more popular on the East and West Coasts. Most colleges accept either exam.
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The term coach is typically reserved for the person responsible for leading an athletic team to victory. Lately, the title has been used to identify a variety of people offering an even greater variety of services such as life coach, nutrition coach, career coach and relationship coach. Add to the list college coach.

Many colleges and universities are starting to acknowledge what many adults have known for a long time: most freshmen are not mature enough to handle the responsibilities suddenly forced on them as college students. To help these young adults navigate the journey to adulthood with success, schools such as Orange, Calif.’s Chapman University have begun offering coaching services to incoming freshman.
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College campuses are some of the most wired places in the country. Students at most colleges and universities can connect to the school network from anywhere on campus with, or without wires. Newsweek recently published an article on the trend for college campuses to lead the way to a completely digital world.

The most wired students in the history of the world, just like Allen, are going off to college. Today’s entering freshmen created PowerPoint presentations in middle school, if not before – and yet may have never “dialed” a telephone. They grew up digital: with PCs, broadband and cell phones at the ready. Likelier to reach for Google than for a dictionary, they live-journal their days and photoblog their snaps, trade music and swim in a sea of messages – e-mail, instant messaging and text. Some of their parents may not even know what verbs like live-journal and IM mean. “Students are so tied in to computing and networking that it’s almost like an extension of their central nervous system,” says Garland Elmore, a professor of informatics and communications at Indiana University. “It’s how they connect to their friends, it’s how they connect to information – it’s how they connect to their world.”

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Teach for America, a Peace Corps for the public school system, will be celebrating its 15-year anniversary this weekend in Washington, D.C. With more than 10,000 Teach for America alumni, 3,600 current teachers in America’s poorest classrooms and 1.75 million students touched by the mission of Teach for America, it is safe to say the organization has had a definite impact on the public school system.

The Teach for America web site describes the organization as “the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools, and become lifelong leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity. Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting some of our nation’s most promising future leaders in the effort.”
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