College completion rates: 54 percent of first-time students graduate within six years. Photo by Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images Just over half—or 54.1 percent, to be exact—of first-time college students starting school in 2006 graduated within six years. That's according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The full report, which breaks down completion rates by state, age, type of school, and enrollment status (part-time or full-time), shows some notable gaps in completion rates for those categories. For four-year public colleges, 81 percent of students enrolled full-time for the duration of their college experience graduated within six years—70 percent from the same institution they started with. But just 19 percent of those who attended school part-time graduated within six years. You'd think that's because it may be taking students longer than six years to complete a four-year degree part-time, right?
Buying Your Way Onto the NY Times Bestsellers List. College CIO Predicts Tablets Will Kill Smart Boards. 9 Persuasion Lessons from a 4-Year-Old. Online Classes for the Masses - What Gets Lost. How to Be a Better Test-Taker. Technology Is Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say. New York City Schools Struggle to Separate the Gifted From the Just Well-Prepared. Teaching Lessons. Schooling: Sara Mosle on students, teaching and schools, from within and beyond the classroom. Lizzy Stewart How do we help students achieve academically and socially? As a teacher, I have lofty answers. But challenges — and questions — arise when I try to translate my ideas (and ideals) into concrete lessons, delivered in 90-minute increments to a very particular set of sixth graders, each as individual and evanescent as a snowflake.
To help teachers succeed, schools offer “professional development,” universally known as P.D. Like a lot of teachers, I’ve come to regard such training with a mix of optimism and disappointment. Then I started work at a school that takes P.D. seriously. Among its guiding principles is a belief that students who develop social skills like cooperation, assertiveness and empathy can achieve more academically. I’d already watched colleagues attain enviable classroom management through this technique. The fun and games have an ulterior purpose. The Trouble With Online College. First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.
Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the record is not encouraging. According to Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, for example, about seven million students — about a third of all those enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center describes as traditional online courses. These typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students. The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access to education. Don’t Let Logic Get In The Way. Hanging around with folks in the Marketing world has taught me a lot over the years.
One of those things is that you shouldn’t try to screw up a perfectly good story with logic. Over time, I’ve learned about everything from how to use internet tools to help spread your ideas, to the dark side of gaming lists and searching for faux or inflated popularity, to accruing credentials via social proof as much as from real life and hard work.
I’ve read so many business and marketing books to date, that I’m starting to feel like each new book seems like a rehash of older ideas, without much new value or new ideas being shared. I’m starting to feel like I’ve come to the end of the internet, and need to start back at the beginning, rediscovering the novelty, creativity and inventiveness that made it all interesting in the first place. Why this jaded viewpoint? The ‘Net and social media aren’t new anymore. Hover No More: Helicopter Parents May Breed Depression and Incompetence in Their Children. Helicopter parents, stop hovering: it’s officially not good for your kids — especially if they’re already grown. A new study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that being overly involved in your grownup kids’ lives can do more harm than good.
The research was conducted by the same scientists who showed last year that intensive parenting — constantly stimulating your children — can make moms more depressed. You may think you’re helping out by phoning your kids’ college professors to haggle over the difference between a B+ and an A–, but that interference may be undermining young adults’ ability to problem-solve and fend for themselves. Constantly texting adult children and friending them on Facebook — letting them fly the coop but still demanding daily check-ins — is not exactly building a generation of confident and resilient grownups. And the problem only snowballs. (MORE: The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting) But her work should help moms to shift that perspective. Long-term Course of ADHD Diagnosed in Preschool Years Can be Chronic and Severe. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that is first diagnosed in the preschool years tends to be chronic and severe, but each child’s course of illness is different, according to long-term follow-up data from the NIMH-funded Preschool ADHD Treatment Study (PATS).
The study was published online February 11, 2013, in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Background Most ADHD studies focus on school-aged children, especially boys. PATS was the first long-term, large-scale study designed to focus on preschoolers with ADHD, and to determine the safety and effectiveness of treating them with methylphenidate (Ritalin). Results of the initial study found that overall, low doses of this medication over the short term are effective and safe, provided the preschoolers, who are particularly susceptible to side effects, are closely monitored. Results of the Study Of the original 304 participants, 68 percent participated in the follow-up study. Significance. Creating Hipsturbia in the Suburbs of New York. Across the street is the home-décor shop that purveys monofloral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily. And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where the red-velvet cupcakes are gluten-free and the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for “hipsters welcome.”
You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central. But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them. Welcome to hipsturbia. Mr. “We were the we’ll-never-leave-Brooklyn types,” said Ms. Charitable tax deduction for religion: Only the beginning of God's odd tax breaks. Photo by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images. A couple of thousand years ago, my understanding is that it was generally believed that events on the planet Earth were controlled by an array of fairly egomaniacal gods.
Good weather and good harvests depended on appeasing these gods with various sacrifices, splendid temples, and so forth. And in an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, this kind of god-appeasing activity is clearly a critical public service. In a very homegenous society, you can best achieve that god-appeasing through direct state investment in the temple sector (a single-payer religion initiative, so to speak) but in a diverse democracy it would make more sense to decentralize the appeasement process by establishing a generous tax subsidy for religious activities. And that's more or less where we are, even though the Wrath of God theory of the business cycle is largely out of favor in policy circles. The answers are no and no. The Power of Failure. Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work. Seven years ago, the consulting group Bridgespan presented details on the performance of several prestigious nonprofits. Nearly all of them had one thing in common — failure.
These organizations had a point at which they struggled financially, stalled on a project or experienced high rates of attrition. “Everyone in the room had the same response, which was relief,” said Paul Schmitz, the chief executive of the nonprofit Public Allies. “It was good to see that I wasn’t the only one struggling with these things.” Transparency about what works and what doesn’t is crucial to eventual success.
As in any field, people who work in nonprofits, social enterprises, development agencies, and foundations experience failure on a regular basis. Some nonprofits are tempted to hide their failures, partially for fear of donor reaction. Others publish their failures for the world to see. Not all funders are looking for infallible investees. Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, another federal court rules. From California to Boston, the legal storm over gay marriage is moving swiftly and inexorably toward the U.S. Supreme Court. A Boston-based federal appeals court on Thursday put yet another legal dent in the federal government's ban on same-sex marriage rights, saying the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional because it denies equal benefits to gay and lesbian couples.
The unanimous three-judge decision was the first federal appeals court ruling invalidating federal same-sex marriage restrictions and could wind up as the case that pushes the contentious gay marriage question to the Supreme Court sometime this year. With legal challenges to DOMA and state laws such as California's Proposition 8 unfolding across the nation, the Boston court made it clear that the Supreme Court must weigh in. "Only the Supreme Court can finally decide this unique case," the 1st U.S. The 9th U.S. The law was passed at a time when it appeared Hawaii would legalize gay marriage. The Standard for Influence.
When compensation for social-media plugs must be disclosed. Do they really, really like you on Facebook? Or did they click the "like" button because they got something? The Federal Trade Commission holds a workshop today that will look at how companies should disclose incentives on social-media "platforms that allow only short messages or a simple sign of approval," says FTC advertising practices chief Mary Engle Incentives for consumers to "like" companies on Facebook fall into a "gray area" that depends on whether the number of likes a company has influences consumers in choosing their products, Engle says. The FTC's advertising endorsement guidelines require compensation to be disclosed, as with Twitter hashtags such as "#paid," she says.
The National Consumers League's Sally Greenberg, who is testifying at the FTC workshop, says consumers on social media need the same protections as with traditional advertising. Recent plugs with perks: •Target was offering a free "beauty bag" with makeup samples last week in return for a "like. " How Not to Manage a Brand’s Social Presence. Updated: Tom Hammond from the senior NMTW called me and talked about the situation. Though we probably don’t agree on how the situation was handled, it shows professionalism and commitment that he took the time to reach out. Evidently, it wasn’t a canned response but a “personal” response from one of the VP’s at the credit union. I’ll admit that this story comes out of some personal frustration. I recently had a situation where my credit union closed my account, after having been a member for over 20 years.
The balance on this account had been in negatives for 15 days or something, and that’s evidently a big policy point for them, so they closed it. But this specific post is about social media presence management. I first sent an email to the credit union’s only published email. I then found the credit union’s account on Facebook, because I’d seen that they were quite active on it, promoting the establishment of new accounts. You lost a 20-year member today. Here’s the Meat of It All.