New Year’s resolution – a book a month?

I’m thinking about reading some of these as a new year’s resolution, maybe tackling one book each month.

20 Classic Novels You Can Read in One Sitting

Some of these books I can either get free or for less than a dollar on my Kindle.  Although most of them are under 200 pages, in the comments it was noted that a few of these are really not two-hour reads (Wuthering Heights?).  As a slow reader, I should take that into account.

Here’s the list.

1. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
4. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
5. Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
6. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
7. Candide, by Voltaire
8. Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
9. The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
10. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
11. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
12. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
13. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
15. Night, by Elie Wiesel
16. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
17. The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
18. The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
19. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
20. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

Some more ideas are in the comments, including one of my favorites, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway.  It would be interesting to re-read some books that I remember fondly from my youth and see if they’ve stood the test of time.

Two (or three) hours a month – how hard can that be?  I can think of it as my own personal battle against the end of deep and focused reading.

How college students spend their Christmas break

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Hope you are enjoying your holiday break!

It’s good to give thanks

Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners.

John Tierney offers some advice on how to become a more grateful person.

Thank you for reading Cost of College!

Students should heed hedge fund managers’ wary outlook on student loans

It may be wise for students to follow the lead of hedge fund managers in considering the risk-return trade-off of their education investment.  It seems that hedge fund managers are avoiding student loans these days, sticking with relatively safer mortgage-backed securities.

Given the state of the economy, Milwaukee, Wis.-based Stark Investments is staying away from all student loan bonds right now. It is instead focusing on mortgage-backed debt with comparable yields and less risk, said portfolio manager Anup Agarwal. “We don’t expect unemployment rates to go down for the next year or two so it’s difficult to get excited about student loans against that backdrop.”

Uncertainty about student defaults has essentially frozen the market for bonds backed by student loans that aren’t guaranteed by the government. The volume of such bonds secured by loans made by SLM Corp., also known as Sallie Mae, is at just 16% of the level in 2009, according to rating firm DBRS Inc….

Historically, investors have assumed 25% to 30% of student loans bundled into their bonds will default. But today they are baking in between 30% and 40% default rates among the current crop of graduates, said Chris Haid, a director in asset backed trading at Barclays Capital. Even those assumptions are a best guess and defaults could ultimately go higher if unemployment rises, Mr. Haid said.

So what is the lesson for students?

Students should pick schools where the payoff from higher salaries upon graduation exceeds the cost of the education by the widest margin, he contends, especially when the job market contracts.

By that arithmetic, technical colleges come out on top, Mr. Ades said. “We’re in a skills based economy and what we need is more computer programmers, more [nurses],” he said. “It’s less glamorous but it’s what we need.”

Law school, on the other hand, can end up a sucker’s bet in periods of high unemployment, experts in student loan-backed bonds say….

What this boils down to for prospective students is that banks are lending less, and charging higher interest rates for the loans they do make. Colleges, on the other hand, aren’t charging any less. With less debt available to them, students will be forced to ask whether paying top dollar really pays off, Mr. Ades said.

I took a typing test

Visit the Typing Test and try!

Hmm, not too bad for it being the first time and for not following the instructions.  I’d like to try again and see if I do better.

Pay science teachers competitive salaries for higher student achievement

Droll comment from the University of Chicago Headline blog

China May Have Better Test Scores, But We Can Still Kick Their Ass in Dodgeball: In Michigan gym teachers paid more than science teachers

Details from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy:

This is not unusual, because school districts don’t differentiate what a teacher does when considering compensation, regardless of the district’s educational needs. Teachers are paid on a single salary schedule based on seniority and education level.

Science education has become a concern after students across the nation did poorly on a recent national exam. Fewer than 33 percent of elementary and high school students had a solid grasp of science according to results earlier this year from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Market conditions should play a factor in teacher pay

Michael Van Beek, education policy director at the Mackinac Center, said the single salary pay scale puts schools at a disadvantage in trying to attract and retain the best science teachers.

“If you are skilled in the science field, you are going to have a lot of opportunities with a private-sector company that will reward you more than a school district,” Van Beek said. “Science and math are what the United States is most significantly trailing other countries in. Those are the fields that are seen as driving innovation and wealth creation.”

Why is it important to attract and retain the best science teachers?

Good teachers are the single most important school factor in raising student achievement.

By the way, you can read more commentary from University of Chicago students over at Headline, a student organization dedicated to updating students on breaking international news, trends and issues.  (Full disclosure:  my son is head blogger there.)

Student cheating – the SAT, the Internet, and Ted Kennedy

How widespread is SAT cheating?

The arrest this week of six Long Island high school students accused of cheating on the SAT is only the beginning of a wider investigation into similar behavior on the island, The New York Times reports.

A reporter for The Times, Jenny Anderson, writes that two other schools are being investigated by Kathleen M. Rice, the district attorney for Nassau County, who says she believes that the cheating problem is widespread. School officials and tutors have suggested that the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, should require students to take it in their own schools or notify districts when outside students are going there for the test.

Here are some numbers.

More than half of teenagers say they have cheated on a test during the last year — and 34 percent have done it more than twice — according to a survey of 40,000 U.S. high school students released in February by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics. The survey also found that one in three students admitted they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment.

The statistics don’t get any better once students reach college. In surveys of 14,000 undergraduates conducted over the past four years by Donald McCabe, PhD, a business professor at Rutgers University and co-founder of Clemson University’s International Center for Academic Integrity, about two-thirds of students admit to cheating on tests, homework and assignments. And in a 2009 study in Ethics & Behavior (Vol. 19, No. 1), researchers found that nearly 82 percent of a sample of college alumni admitted to engaging in some form of cheating as undergraduates.

While it appears that student cheating is becoming more prevalent, this story about Ted Kennedy reminds us that this type of deceit has always been around.

… Kennedy was forced to withdraw from Harvard for two years after cheating on a Spanish final. According to “The Education of Edward Kennedy,” by Burton Hersh, the future U.S. Senator and presidential candidate had the roommate of one of his football teammates take the exam for him.

More education correlates with more spending on booze

Your Bureau of Labor Statistics trivia fact of the day is that educational attainment is strongly correlated with alcohol expenditures.

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I think that educated people are just drinking more expensive stuff.

DREAM Act updates

States that allow illegal/undocumented college students to pay in-state tuition

• California
• Illinois
• Kansas
• Maryland (community colleges)
• Nebraska
• New Mexico
• New York
• Oklahoma
• Texas
• Utah
• Washington
• Wisconsin

Maryland’s law is suspended until the results of a referendum that will be on the ballot in November of next year.

The General Assembly passed the Dream Act in May but opponents were able to get enough signatures to put the proposal before voters. The immigrant advocacy group Casa de Maryland has sued to block the referendum but as of now, voters will have a chance to decide if the Dream Act will become a reality.

California is moving ahead with plans to provide financial aid to illegal students.

Following through on a campaign promise, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law Monday easing access to privately funded financial aid for undocumented college students. He also signaled that he was likely to back a more controversial measure allowing those students to seek state-funded tuition aid in the future.

Rick Perry signed the Texas DREAM Act in 2001, as reported by USNews last month.

In sharp contrast to the national Republican Party line, Texas Gov. Rick Perry still supports his state’s version of the so-called DREAM Act, which permits foreign-born children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state college tuition. “To punish these young Texans for their parents’ actions is not what America has always been about,” the potential dark horse GOP candidate told the New Hampshire Union Leader in his first New Hampshire interview of the 2012 campaign cycle.

Art imitates life on these Old Navy college team t-shirts

Old Navy left out the grammatically correct apostrophe in its college team t-shirts for sale online.

Oops!

I suspect many kids won’t notice the error.