Entries for October 2009

One of the complaints I hear most often, and which I see posted most frequently on Web stories about financial aid, is a version of this: "If you're poor, you get all the free money you could possibly want. If you're rich, you already have all the money you need or want. But if you're in that nice medium called middle class you get screwed right out of your socks," which was posted last year at USNews.com by "College studen" (sic) of Texas. (I'm assuming CS simply mistyped and knows how to spell the word student.)

Is there any evidence supporting this?

A soon-to-be-published book by a Princeton sociologist found that low-income minority students (mainly African-Americans and Hispanics) who have good grades and test scores appear to have an edge over whites and Asians with similar grades and test scores (but not necessarily other factors such as extracurricular activities or recommendations, which were not considered in this study) at getting into the elite private colleges that tend to give out the most scholarships.

But by U . S . News's count, only 54 of the 5,000-plus American colleges and universities promise to provide enough scholarships to meet all students' financial need. And those colleges give plenty of aid to the far greater numbers of middle- and upper-middle-class students whom they admit. Harvard, for example, charges no more than 10 percent of a family's income for all those who earn $180,000 or less.

A few dozen other schools promise to meet the need of students from low-income families only, typically cutting their generosity off at annual incomes of about $40,000.

Operating on the theory that it takes a thief to steal from a thief, a group of Internet scammers has been targeting students who illegally download music, books, and video.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported on an apparently bogus collections agency that sent out letters to Bucknell students demanding $500 to settle the students' alleged illegal downloads.

That's a new twist on an old strategy of targeting college students. Prosecutors say there are at least six common scams students should watch out for:

Many students say they don't want to take part-time jobs when they start college because they'll need all their time to study (or party).

But new research confirms what parents and counselors have been saying for years: Part-time campus jobs not only raise cash but can help raise students' grade-point averages.

After interviewing and examining data on hundreds of undergraduates from 1996 through 2004, researchers found that the average GPA of freshmen at four-year universities who worked between one and 20 hours a week was 3.13. Those who didn't work at all had GPAs averaging just 3.04.