Last week was a time of firsts for over 1,000 students on our fair campus. First classes, first meetings, and yes, first roommates. Continue Reading

Ah, the college days, full of long nights, good friends, hard classes, and high costs.
On average, a student living on campus will have to pay around $15,000 to fund their education for one year. That’s a lot of money no matter who you are. Continue Reading

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Grant Stauffer is willing to admit it: He slacked off his first couple of years of high school. He eventually got on track, but “my parents still believe there’s a little more maturing I need to do, especially as far as my whole work ethic goes.” Continue Reading

Beas Hamga, a 7-foot, 225-pound center from Douala, Cameroon, signed a National Letter of Intent Wednesday to continue his basketball career at UAB, head coach Mike Davis announced on Thursday. Continue Reading

Among the many wonderful things you may learn in college, there’s one thing you may learn the hard way: money management. As a recent college graduate, there are many money saving tips I wish I’d known before heading to college. Continue Reading

The dreaded Freshmen-15 is real.

Legend has it freshmen college students gain 15 pounds in their first term. Fact is this is no legend. Going to college doesn’t just mean changing schools, it means changing lifestyles.

Chances are, you’ll be less active than you were in high school. This, combined with bad dining hall food, dorm-room junk food, endless frat parties with bottomless kegs and a slowing metabolism, inevitably leads to one thing — weight gain.

Gaining a few pounds isn’t the only thing you need to worry about, though. Without home-cooking, you’ll probably lack the necessary nutrients your body needs to thrive. On the bright side, it’s possible to stay healthy in college.

By adapting the following tips to your current lifestyle, you can make healthy changes that aren’t so over-bearing you won’t be able to stick with them.

1. You need calcium

Consume about 1,000 mg of calcium daily. Women are at higher risk of developing osteoporosis, a disease which decreases bone density. This develops gradually with age, but adequate calcium intake reduces the risk. Bone density accumulated when you’re young is all you’ll have for the rest of your life, so make sure your bones are as strong as they can be. One eight-ounce glass of milk has about 300 mg, so drinking three glasses of milk a day will provide all the calcium you need. Other foods that are high in calcium include yogurt and cheese. Low-fat dairy products have as much calcium as whole-fat products.

2. You need folic acid

Folic acid is one of the B vitamins. It’s important to intake 0.4 mg of folate a day, especially for women in their child-bearing years. Folate reduces birth defects by regulating DNA synthesis and cell division. It’s also needed for normal red blood cell synthesis. Folic acid can be found in green, leafy vegetables, orange juice and fortified breakfast cereals.

3. Get your daily servings of fruits and vegetables

I know it seems like fresh fruits and vegetables are more expensive than other grocery store items, but they really aren’t. Buy the fruits and vegetables that are on sale. Seasonal items usually cost less. Even if they do cost a little more than a bag of chips, ditch out on the junk food because fruits and vegetables are much more nutrient-dense.

4. Be active

Half an hour of moderate physical activity on most days is recommended to stay healthy. However, longer and more rigorous activities can provide greater health benefits. You’re probably paying a fee to use the student recreation center, so you might as well take advantage of that. Plus, it’s a great way to meet people.

5. Lose a pound a week

One pound equals about 3,500 calories, so reduce your calories by 500 each day and, by the end of the week, you will drop a pound. However, instead of dropping 500 calories from your diet, try dropping 250 and working off the other 250 at the campus recreation center. This way you’re not starving yourself and you can get your recommended amount of activity each day.

6. Eat right in the dining hall

Keep these concepts in mind when choosing foods, whether it’s in the dining hall or at home. Developing these habits now will help to continue a healthy life-style in the future.

CHICAGO — The University of Chicago saw a 42 percent increase in undergraduate applications for next fall’s freshman class, an astounding number even among universities accustomed to double-digit increases. Continue Reading

PHILADELPHIA — A stay-at-home mom in Maine. A physics teacher in an under-supplied school in Quito, Ecuador. A food-service-supply salesman in Lancaster, Pa., laid up for months with little to do after a hang-gliding accident. And two out-of-work West Philadelphia men looking to take an intellectual journey from their living room.

They are among millions around the world who have been attracted to Yale University’s free courses on the Web, complete with audio and video lectures, syllabi and supplementary materials.

“It was such a great thing to me,” said Steve Ziegler, 40, of Lancaster, who during his recovery watched Ivy League English-class lectures on Cormac McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian,” which quickly became one of his favorite books. “I was able to get more out of something that I love because Yale put these courses online.”

More universities are beginning to upload full-length, free courses through iTunes, YouTube and the international consortium site OpenCourseWare.

The University of Pennsylvania put up an environmental course and a psychology course on its “open learning” site last year, with plans to expand.

Eastern University in St. Davids, Pa., launched a Christian spirituality course and an urban sociology course, also in the last year.

The University of Delaware started a page on iTunes last month with courses currently restricted to staff and students, but with some likely to become public.

While some worry such projects are tantamount to giving away perhaps a university’s most prized treasure — its teaching — others say the projects fulfill a mission to disseminate information widely.

Of the eight Ivy League schools, Yale has been a leader, with 25 free courses online and 11 more coming this fall.

“We wanted to share our academic treasures more widely with the world,” said Diana E.E. Kleiner, a history of arts professor who directs the project.

Since the Web site’s launch in December 2007, more than 2 million from 193 countries have viewed — though not necessarily completed — courses, she said. Many others have tapped into the courses on iTunes and YouTube, she said. Though these are the same courses taken for credit by Yale undergraduates on campus, they are noncredit on the Web.

The learning is self-directed. There are no grades, no feedback, no course credit and no class-time interaction with faculty. Participants send e-mails to professors, which some opt to answer.

Some of Yale’s star professors take part, including economics professor Robert J. Shiller, who wrote “Irrational Exuberance,” about bubblelike market behavior.

The project is being funded by a $3 million, four-year grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

One of the biggest challenges is raising funds to add new courses, Kleiner said.

Such ventures can be costly.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 launched its OpenCourseWare site and eventually uploaded materials for all of the university’s 1,950 courses, said Steve Carson, external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare. Thirty classes offer video.

It cost about $30 million — all but $5 million funded by outside sources. The university spends about $3.6 million a year to maintain it, some of which also is funded from the outside.

The site’s popularity has grown. In 2009, 15 million watched courses, up from 4.5 million five years earlier, he said. About 42 percent are students at other schools, 9 percent educators and the rest “self-learners,” he said.

The project has boosted relations with universities worldwide, improved teaching as professors evaluated themselves, strengthened ties with students and alumni, and helped with recruiting, Carson said.

“About half of our incoming students said they have looked at the site,” with many reporting it influenced their choice, Carson said.

As more universities around the world began asking for help to do the same, the nonprofit OpenCourseWare Consortium was created that now includes about 13,000 free courses from more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world. Twenty-two are in the United States, including the University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, Tufts, Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins.

Professors say the project has been rewarding to them and a public service.

“We can’t admit everybody to Yale, but we can give this to everybody absolutely free,” said physics professor Ramamurti Shankar.

He’s heard from high school students aided by his course, the stay-at-home mom in Maine who told him it expanded her mind and an educator at a university in Istanbul, Turkey, who used his course.

Philosophy professor Shelly Kagan — who teaches “Death,” which explores immortality, suicide and other issues and has become one of the most popular courses — said he had gained a wider audience, both geographically and in the kind of students he reaches.

“I had a janitor who e-mailed me and said he listened to some of my lectures while cleaning,” he said.

Vincent Evangelisti, 53, and Matthew Moseley, 39, the West Philadelphia housemates, are making their way through Yale’s intro-to-psychology course. They’ve also looked at Roman architecture and molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

“We’ve been absolutely thrilled,” said Evangelisti, a 1979 Yale grad.

Ziegler, a high school dropout who said he has nonetheless always had a thirst for knowledge, began to watch as a way to stimulate his mind, awash in painkillers and idleness after his 2008 accident. He started with an MIT biology course and moved on to English courses at Yale.

He found the material accessible and understandable.

“I wouldn’t consider trying to get through ‘Paradise Lost’ without having a course online,” said Ziegler, who has recovered and is back at work.

SEATTLE — Need to get to Seattle University? There’s a green transit pass for that. Need to meet somebody when you’re there? Try the new eco-friendly gathering space.

Eating in the cafeteria? The disposable forks are biodegradable, made from corn. Leftovers? There’s composting, both off-site and on. Trouble getting home? Try car-pooling, van-sharing or something called maxi pool.

Seattle U. is typical of many universities across the country that are trying to win the hearts and minds — and tuition checks — of students by becoming greener than their peers.

Perhaps nowhere is the trend more apparent than in the Pacific Northwest, with its reputation for environmental awareness.

The move toward greener campuses is driven as much by the concerns of a new generation of students as it is by university leaders. And it reaches beyond the cafes and dorms into the lecture halls. At the University of Washington, for instance, one of the few departments expanding during a time of budget cuts is the fledgling College of the Environment.

Local universities have been quick to crow about their green successes. Just consider some recent news releases: “Western Washington University Students Sweep Awards at Environmental Competition,” reads one. “Princeton Review Chooses The Evergreen State College for Its ‘Green Rating Honor Roll,’” reads another. “Seattle University is the greenest green campus in Washington state,” trumpets a third.

Beyond the hype, the universities are laying down serious plans for reducing carbon emissions. The University of Washington, in particular, has been lauded by a number of national organizations for its sustainability efforts and the extensive detail contained in its 73-page Climate Action Plan.

In the plan, the school sets ambitious targets: a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emission over the next decade, and the elimination of all net emissions by 2050.

The university says it expects technological improvements to account for some 60 percent of its energy-reduction goals. Suggested improvements range from the mundane, such as reducing steam leakage from the pipes in its heating plant, to the fanciful, such as pumping cold water from the depths of Lake Washington to cool campus buildings.

The school hopes behavioral changes, prompted by education and financial incentives, will account for another 20 percent of its goals. Carbon offsets — planting trees, for example — would take care of the remainder.

While some initiatives like the Climate Action Plan are coming from administrators, others are bubbling up from students like Krysta Yousoufian. The University of Washington computer-science junior is one of 20 students who sometimes stand next to trash bins in the dining halls to remind staff and students that almost all their leftovers are compostable and should be placed in the green-waste bins.

“We don’t mean to be chastising students at all, and we try to be as friendly as we can,” says Yousoufian, the associate-director of Students Expressing Environmental Dedication (SEED). “We understand it’s confusing, and we are here to help, not to make people feel stupid.”

Yousoufian says students are generally supportive, although there have been some awkward moments. To avoid those in the future, she says, SEED members plan to start wearing T-shirts or pins, and perhaps playing music, to make their mission clearer.

“The UW is a pretty sustainable campus,” she says. “I think students come in and have the culture of green thrown at them.”

Micheal Meyering, who oversees waste management and composting for the campus’s Housing and Food Services, says his goal is to enable the 30,000 daily customers to simply dump everything in a compost bin after eating a meal by making every cup, plate, knife and fork compostable.

That should become reality by mid-March, he says, by which time compostable lids for coffee cups and soup bowls will have been introduced.

“If you go back about three years, we had the classic waste model. Everything on the customer side was garbage,” he said.

Back then, the university sent 120 tons of green waste annually to Cedar Grove Composting, according to Meyering. That’s now grown to 540 tons per year.

Seattle U. has gone one step further by composting some of its food scraps on campus. Tyler Dierks, Seattle U.’s recycling coordinator, says he composts about 1 cubic yard of kitchen leftovers each week, which becomes mulch for the campus flower beds. Sometimes, he says, a tomato or squash plant will grow from the mulch, a reminder of how it was created.

Seattle U. has a long-standing commitment to such practices. It stopped using pesticides back when Ciscoe Morris, now a gardening celebrity, was the campus groundskeeper some 30 years ago.

Students at a number of other local campuses have taken to growing their own food in small garden plots. Evergreen even boasts its own organic farm, which serves as an outdoor classroom. And students at both Western and Evergreen have voted in favor of paying a fee to ensure their power comes from green sources such as wind and solar.

New buildings on most campuses — including a new business school at the University of Washington — are being built to environmental construction standards.

At Seattle U., staff recently celebrated the opening of the new Admissions and Alumni building, which features floor-to-ceiling windows and a roof that collects and filters rainwater. Designed as a gathering spot for students and the community, the building is expected to get a prestigious gold rating through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system.

Some students seem apathetic about the greening of their campuses, but if there’s any push back — a feeling that it’s overkill or too entwined with a particular political viewpoint — it’s not immediately apparent. Most seem to embrace the idea of creating a cleaner, greener place to study.

The fact that publications like The Princeton Review, which aims to help students choose a college, have recently added “green” ratings to their college guides indicates that students are increasingly weighing environmental policies when deciding what university to attend.

“There’s a lot of student activism on campus, and students are used to people talking to them about social or environmental issues,” says Katie Boehnlein, a Seattle U. senior involved in environmental advocacy. “I hope that when they leave, students will take away some knowledge about their local environment and think more about the decisions they make every day.”

MCT

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Being “upside-down” means owing more on your house or car than it’s worth.

Right now, Patricia Summers is upside-down on her college degree.

She still owes $18,000 on loans taken to get her degree in advertising from the University of Missouri. Her college time will end up costing more than $50,000, not counting what she could have earned from a full-time job had she not gone to college.

But that job probably would have been a dead-end, low-paying service job, advocates of higher education contend.

Which is exactly what Summers is doing now: serving burgers at a Sonic drive-in.

The recession is recalibrating the economics of higher education.

“Whether college is worth it depends on how much you pay for it,” said Kevin Carey, the policy director at the Education Sector, a Washington-based education think tank. “It’s not worth much if you pay too much for a degree that has no value in the market, or one that pays too little to pay back what you borrowed.”

College costs are rising fast, as are student debt loads. Take Aaron McNally, 29, who last year received a master’s degree in English from the University of Northern Iowa, adding to what eventually became about $50,000 in debt. That’s more than the national average — $40,208 — for a freshly inked M.A.

On the other end of the four-year slog, salaries are sputtering — if you get the job in your chosen field. Not finding the public relations post, McNally took a job as an assistant manager at an Independence, Mo., grocery store.

Bigger investment. Disappointing returns. Yet college is still the only way to go, right?

Well, don’t ask Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, Michael Dell of Dell, Larry Ellison of Oracle or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. They all dropped out.

Clearly college is not for everyone, but statistics and studies still show a college degree usually translates to a higher income.

“People with high levels of education make more money on average,” Carney said. But he warned that whether a diploma means more income or a better life depends on the individual.

“A college education is no guarantee.”

With money scarce, many newly cost-conscious families are trying to work out the math:

—They swallow hard when they realize that, based on the current estimated cost of tuition, room and board, four years at Harvard costs $188,860. Even the $60,236 four-year cost for an in-state student at the University of Kansas can be daunting.

—The average student debt after four years is $22,656.

—A bachelor’s degree doesn’t earn what it used to. “After adjusting for inflation, the earnings of male college graduates are no higher than they were in the early 1970s, and the earnings of female college graduates have increased only moderately,” according to a College Board study of educational benefits.

—Fewer than 1 in 5 students in the class of 2009 had a job at graduation.

That gets us back to that Sonic in Columbia. Summers, who graduated in 2009, still is searching for a job in her field.

The Independence native, who also works at the MU bookstore, has her fingers crossed, and she still thinks college was worth it.

“I learned a lot of skills I couldn’t have gotten if I hadn’t gone to college.”

But Summers said that if a decent job doesn’t come along soon, her feelings about the value of her degree could change.

Although Summers is “upside-down” for the moment, her degree isn’t really comparable with a Florida condo mortgage, experts say. There are many non-monetary intangibles that come with college.

Studies indicate that college graduates are healthier, donate more blood, vote more often than other Americans and are more open- minded. They smoke less, exercise more and, a 2005 Pew study found, were 25 percent more likely than high school graduates to say they’re very happy.

But would such people, with their ambition and discipline, succeed anyway?

Studies have tried to get a fix on what more schooling adds. Some studies looked at twins and found the better-educated sibling fared better.

And the Census Bureau offers these after-tax median incomes of people 25 years or older in 2008: High school degree, nearly $33,800; some college, but no degree, nearly $39,700; bachelor’s degree, $55,600.

It also should be noted that the salary gap between high school and college degrees is still growing.

Educators and politicians — President Barack Obama included — preach loudly and frequently that everyone should seek some college. In speech after speech, you hear that college graduates make at least $1 million more in their lifetimes than those who quit after high school.

Who could pass that up? Certainly not governments, which garner more tax revenue from higher-paid citizens.

But is it true?

In 2007, Sandy Baum, a professor of economics at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., studied the value of a degree for the College Board. Her research — which factored for inflation and left out advanced degrees and their higher earning power — found that someone with a bachelor of arts degree plus 40 years of earnings came closer to earning $550,000 more, on average, in today’s dollars.

Still, Baum said that college was easily worth the cost. Plus the recession has laid bare another factor to consider:

“Even in this economy, the number of unemployed college graduates is half that of the unemployed who did not go to college,” she said.

Another, even grimmer way to look at it: The poverty rate is 10.8 percent among high school grads. It is one-third less for those with bachelor’s degrees.

Is it just the recession that is devaluing the B.A., or is it a longer-term question of supply and demand?

The percentage of college-educated people in the U.S. population is still growing. In 2008, 29 percent of adults 25 and older had bachelor’s degrees, a 5 percent increase from 1998.

Plus, about 1 in 5 people with bachelor of arts degrees was born abroad.

Now comes the freshman wave of 2009, the largest in history for many colleges and universities. Less-expensive community colleges are filled to bursting.

Some of that is because of ambition, some because of population growth. Some people are going to college to be retrained. Others see the classroom as a place to wait out the economic storm. In this job market, they say, what else is there to do?

So the competition among B.A. holders is tougher than ever. Time to juice the resume with a master’s degree, right?

Not necessarily. While the 2008 median earnings for a M.A. holder was $67,300, an increase of more than $10,000 over the B.A., there is more variation in the price-cost analysis.

While a master’s degree can mean extra skill or sophistication, if it’s not in the right area, it can end up being irrelevant. McNally thought more English courses might help get a job in public relations, but he concedes that his master’s probably wasn’t needed for his current job. He still believes his education was good value.

“Maybe not in the financial sense, because I believe the cost is astronomical,” he said. “But I feel as though I have benefited outside of the direct professional application, in my ability to understand the world, and to communicate with people in everything from philosophy to theology to the arts.”

Emily Rosner, 27, of Kansas City, Mo., has hopped from one low-paying job to another since she graduated in 2006 with a degree in fine arts and computer design from Olivet Nazarene University near Chicago.

“Some people I graduated with landed great graphic-design jobs. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” said Rosner, who for now makes $20,000 a year working at a Starbucks coffee house.

Rosner said she learned life skills in school, and after struggling to pay rent and $19,000 in college loans, she plans to go back for a teaching license.

“College was great, but I wouldn’t push someone to go just to get a piece of paper. There are a lot of good jobs that don’t require a four-year degree.”

College certainly is good for many, but not all, said Marty Nemko, a former instructor at the University of California at Berkeley.

“We are sending too many kids to college,” Nemko said. “It is devastating and inhumane to make students feel that if they don’t attend college after high school they will end up as second-class citizens.”

Less than half — 44.7 percent — of University of Missouri students graduate in four years. The figure for the University of Kansas is 32 percent.

Nemko said that if students don’t have the drive for college, they probably won’t graduate and “are likely to end up with a mound of debt and an assault on their self-esteem and not much else.”

Nemko, a consumer advocate who focuses on education, does not dispute the post-graduate boost in future incomes.

“I’m trying to help people to be smart consumers of education and know when and what they should buy,” he said.

A national Gallup study released in August found that 52 percent of the college students surveyed “strongly agreed” when asked whether college was worth the cost. That was down from 62 percent the previous year.

When parents were asked that question, they were more likely than the previous year to answer “strongly agree.”

One reason parents and their high-achieving high schoolers still throw applications at elite, expensive schools are the statistics that show a degree from a flagship state university usually means a higher-paying job than a degree from a smaller school.

But not always. A 1999 study showed that the rejection letters sent by elite schools to applicants are a good indicator of future incomes. Forced to attend lower-ranking schools, those ambitious teens often end up with higher incomes. It could result from an “I’ll show them!” attitude, but it also raises questions about the inflated value placed on elite schools.

Nemko sees colleges that rake in tuition from students who are unlikely to end up with degrees as a rip-off. Even with degrees, some students can feel cheated.

Last summer a 27-year-old unemployed woman from the Bronx, N.Y., was so disappointed in what her degree in information technology had gotten her in the job market that she sued Monroe College for $70,000, the cost of her tuition. She claimed the school did not help her land a job in her field.

“I doubt if it will go anywhere. It is not much of a law suit,” said Gary Axelbank, a spokesman for the college. “We had 3,000 graduates last June, and every one of them walked out thrilled.”

Without a doubt, a degree is worth having, said Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

“Graduates who say college was a rip-off probably chose the wrong school, the wrong major, or they are living in the wrong region, where jobs are hard to come by. Education can’t fix those,” Carnevale said.

MCT