Fulbrights Soaring, Grad School Apps Up Too
Well, we may still end up with a nation of unemployed 20somethings, but at least they'll be a really well-educated jobless group. According to Inside Higher Ed this weekend, grad school and Fulbright apps are up, wayyy up. Fulbright fellowships are US State Department-sponsored grants that send 1,500 college grads to study, teach or do research in 140 different foreign countries and by last week, some 8,500 students - 1,000 more than last year - had sent in their 2010-11 applications. Grad school applications are soaring too and Teach for America has never been so popular. Certainly seems like a good way to spend one's time, when there are so few jobs to be had. How's your new college grad faring?
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Swine Flu on College Campuses Jumps 34%
H1N1 vaccines have begun arriving on college campuses - and the very idea of a live vaccine nasal spray, which is what landed at my younger son's school, completely freaked him out. But just as those vaccines arrived, the rate of college swine flu cases nationally jumped by 34%, according to the American College Health Association. Some 8,861 new cases (including 20 students who were hospitalized) were reported the week of Oct. 17-23, including a surge on campuses where the disease seemed to be on the way out. Not good. On the positive side, the virus is continuing to be fairly mild, and campus health centers are urging students to come in and get immunized. Here's hoping my kid actually did so. He just kept repeating, "Live! Live?!"
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Halloween Pumpkins & a Rite of Passage
This may be the first Halloween in decades that I'm not carving a pumpkin. Talk about a rite of passage. We've gone through the baby costumes, the pint-sized pirates and wee witches, and then the gory, less-than-savory costumes. And my family has spent many a late October night carving pumpkins. But this year? Our youngest child is a high school senior and unless she suddenly gets the urge to carve up one of the beautiful, Martha Stewart-caliber squashes on the porch, this will be our first jack o'lantern-less year. And that's OK. We've decorated a little, we've got our stash of Reese's laid in and we'll welcome all those little trick-or-treaters with delight. But in many ways this feels like a turning point, an unexpected rite of passage into empty nesthood. And I'd be sad, had I not just read Peter Mayle's entertaining New York Times' piece on Halloween in France. "Do you mean to tell me," Mayles' French friend says in tones of utter outrage, "that pumpkins all over America are massacred, with all that good honest flesh tossed away, simply to provide a primitive decoration?" Don't those barbaric Americans know, he goes on, about pumpkin fritters and pumpkin risotto? Pumpkin gratin??
Ooo, merveilleux! Our failure to carve pumpkins this year doesn't stem from Halloween Grinchiness. We're being French! (We're also trying Mayles' friend's recipe for pumpkin risotto. And maybe whipping up some pumpkin chocolate chip bread too to pack off to our college kids.)
Young Football Players & Brain Damage
Got a college or high school athlete? Scary news about the risks of concussions and long term brain damage in the New York Times today. Seems the same type of brain injuries seen in boxers - and eight NFL football players who died in their 30s, 40s or early 50s - has popped up in a former college football player who didn't go pro. In other words, it's not just the intense, physical atmosphere of pro football games that causes chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And it's not just concussions. Now researchers are looking at football's "repetitive subconcussive blows" and youth sports and the possible impact on the brain.
"The focus of the discussion of brain-trauma issue has been on the NFL. It really needs to be on youth players," Sports Legacy Institute co-founder Chris Nowinski told the NY Times. "Ninety-nine percent of football players in this country are college and below. They're not being paid. They don't have as good access to medical people. And the fact that they're at risk for this disease should give us great pause."
Scary. Do you have a football player? Is this something you worry about? Or was the possibility of injury the reason you encouraged your child to try a different sport? (So asks the mother of swimmers and water polo players...)
Military-Only Class at Ohio State
College Soph Seeks Personal Assistant
I was already rolling my eyes over reports of Purdue University and its luxury dorms - maid service, flat screen TVs and, of course, no roommates or icky shared bathrooms for the low, low price of $5,000 extra. But this one? Oh my.
A Georgetown sophomore is advertising for a personal assistant. Vox Populi, a Georgetown blog, has the full advert - and an awesome headline too: "Georgetown sophomore seeks personal assistant, takes premature self-importance to whole new level." Seems this undergrad - oh, "and part time employee in the financial services industry" - needs someone to do his or her laundry, organize the closet, make the bed, shop and (personal fave) pay parking tickets for $12 an hour. Before you get too excited about applying for the job, note that for tasks such as laundry, which can be done while multi-tasking, you will only be paid for the actual sorting and folding time. So that homework you're doing, buster? That's on your own time.
I had no idea Blair Waldorf went to Georgetown. Chuck Bass would cover the whole wash and dry cycle.
State Universities Taking More Out-Of-Staters
Who gets into college is always a hot topic, but the current economy has raised a sticky topic once more - when it comes to state taxpayer- supported, public universities, how many of those admissions slots should be reserved for taxpayers' children? Now universities from California to Massachusetts are contemplating policy changes that would beef up the number of out-of-state freshmen coming in, a move that will hike colleges' per-student income from an average $6,070 per in-state undergrad to $14,378 from out-of-state. And the big question, according to Inside Higher Ed will be, how badly will taxpayers howl? In California, where 90% of UC Berkeley's incoming freshmen hail from the Golden State and they have a difficult enough time getting in? At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where officials are considering increasing the number of out-of-staters from 20 to 30%?
What do you think? Only way for public universities to survive? Or a breakdown of the trust between taxpayers and state institutions?
Use a Helicopter, Get a Recruit?
Apparently, helicopters are the latest trend in college athletic recruiting, says the New York Times. There's the high school team, scrambling across the field when, with a whirlwind of rotor-driven dramatic effect, a college coach descends from on high. Any teen would be wowed, right? One UCLA coach says there's more to it than shock and awe. He uses helicopter hours that have been donated by Lawrence Welk's grandson to get around Los Angeles' notorious traffic. With a helicopter, he says, he can hit four or five games in the time it would take him to drive to two. But his colleagues at other copter-using schools, including Cincinnati, say they make sure they don't arrive at halftime, when attention might be distracted, but during the game: first a "Tom Cruise fly- by" and then the landing.
Shock and awe are one thing, but having watched so many friends' athletic kids struggle with academics in college - there's a reason college teams hire tutors for their athletes, the kids miss so much classtime, it's the only way they can maintain any kind of grades - it seems a pity that colleges don't concentrate a little less on the grand theatrics, and spend a bit more time on the making-sure-students-have-balanced-lives end of things. Because in the real world, helicopters don't swoop down for job interviews. Your thoughts?
30,000 Post-9/11 Vets Not Getting College Benefits
Everyone hailed the new Post-9/11 GI Bill as this glorious idea - a newly funded bill that would send a new generation of veterans to college, nearly free of charge. The law went into effect on Aug. 1, and 82,000 new college students zipped off to school. Here's where it gets dicey. The federal government hasn't paid those college benefits for fall semester to 30,000 eligible vets. Last Thursday, the federal government's lead administrator, Keith M. Wilson, was hauled before a Congressional subcommittee to explain why. Talk about the hot seat, say incredulous reporters at Inside Higher Ed.
Wilson says the backlog was caused by the sudden flood of applications - the department received 275,000 applications all at once - and old technology. The four separate computer systems required to process a single application don't appear to be networked or integrated together, so it's taking 90 minutes to process each application. Unbelievable. Your thoughts?
Swine Flu Vaccines
Swine flu continues its spread through college campuses. By Oct. 2, there had been at least 34,000 cases at universities reporting their influenza statistics to the American College Health Association, but at last we're starting to see the first H1N1 vaccines rolling out, along with regular flu shots. Got a note the other night from my younger son's college asking parents to urge their kids to come to the student health center for shots - I did my urging, now it's your turn too!
And if you've got younger kids, here are related posts from around About.com: