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Kantro’s Tips to Save You Money!

August 31st, 2010 by lwestfall No comments »

Fastweb’s Financial Aid Guru Mark Kantrowitz has compiled his top tips on repaying student loans, saving money and alternatives to student loans. Any wise student will heed this advice!

Repaying Student Loans

• Sign up for auto-debit with electronic billing, where the monthly loan payments are automatically debited from your bank account. Many education lenders offer a 0.25% or 0.50% interest rate reduction for this.

• Accelerate repayment of high interest debt first. After you make the required payments on all your debts, make an extra payment on the loan with the highest after-tax interest rate. Usually this is credit card debt or private student loans.

Smart Borrowing

• Do not borrow more than your expected starting salary for your entire education. If you borrow more, you will have to use an alternate repayment plan like income-based repayment or extended repayment to afford the monthly loan payments. If you borrow more than twice your starting salary you will be at high risk of default.

• If you find yourself needing to borrow more than $10,000 per year of education, you are probably overborrowing and should consider switching to a less expensive college.

Financial Aid

• Apply for financial aid even if you think you won’t qualify or even if you didn’t qualify last year. The need analysis formulas are complicated enough that it is difficult to predict whether you will qualify. Moreover, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is a prerequisite for the unsubsidized Stafford and PLUS loans, which do not depend on financial need. An estimated 2.3 million students would have qualified for the Pell Grant in 2007-08 but did not submit the FAFSA, and 1.1 million of them would have qualified for a full Pell Grant. (Two-fifths of students do not submit the FAFSA and about a quarter of these would have qualified for the Pell Grant.)

• Submit the FAFSA as soon as possible after January 1. The FAFSA is used for state grants and college grants in addition to federal student aid, and some states and colleges have very early deadlines.

Making and Handling Money

• Work part-time while you are in school. Even if you don’t qualify for Federal Work-Study, there are plenty of part-time jobs on or near college campuses. Working 10-15 hours a week will help improve your grades by forcing you to learn time management skills. Working a full-time job will hurt your performance by taking away time from academics. Enroll full-time and work part-time, not vice versa.

• Try to minimize credit card debt. Do not charge more than you can afford to pay off in full each month. Beware that spending $500 with plastic feels the same as spending $5, so it is hard to exercise restraint.

For more tips like these and expert advice visit http://www.fastweb.com/financial-aid/articles/2613-kantros-tips-to-save-you-money.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Debt on Student Loans Rising

August 12th, 2010 by Catherine 1 comment »

More students have debt on student loans than on credit cards, the Wall Street Journal reported this week — $829.8 billion. And since the government has been doing most of the lending, the majority of that money is owed directly to Uncle Sam.

The good news about federal loans is that the interest rates are lower. The bad news is that student loans are not included in bankruptcy — if you need to default, the government will garnish your wages first, then your tax refunds, and so on.

The WSJ report also noted that college tuition is increasing during an economic recession, forcing more people into lending. Meanwhile, an increasing number of non-profit colleges are failing the U.S. Education Department’s “financial responsibility test”.

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Posted in Financial Aid, Higher Education

Affirmative Action Hot Topic in Brazil

August 2nd, 2010 by Damian No comments »

Affirmative Action In Brazil Hot New Topic

In 2002 Rio de Janeiro became the first Brazilian state to adopt quotas for Afro-Brazilian students in institutions of higher education. The last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery, Black activists hoped that the country was finally coming to terms with its bitter legacy. However, just eight years later, affirmative-action policies—which have since been adopted by scores of other Brazilian universities on behalf of the country’s most disadvantaged groups—could be ruled unconstitutional by the country’s Federal Supreme Court.

The government’s census statistics show that 49.7 percent of Brazilians consider themselves white. Of the rest, 6.9 percent say they are black; 42.6 percent say they are pardo, a Portuguese term for people of mixed African and European descent; and 0.8 percent are categorized as “other,” which includes those who claim indigenous or Asian descent.

The numbers show that the scales are anything but equal. Only 2 to 3 percent of students at public universities are black, and a minority are of mixed race, according to Ms. Slhessarenko and the Rev. David Santos, a Roman Catholic friar and executive director of Educafro, a nonprofit that helps prepare minorities for university entrance exams.

Proponents of racial quotas, like Brother Santos, say they are necessary because Afro-Brazilians lag behind in almost every health, social, and education indicator. Getting them into universities, he argues, is the quickest way to begin addressing those distortions and to try and provide some indemnity for 388 years of slavery.

Opponents, meanwhile, argue that quotas constitute a form of reverse racism, and that they fuel racial tensions where none existed before.

Read the entire story here

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Posted in Admissions, Higher Education, Minorities

Tags: Affirmative Action Brazil

Former Film Students Attempt to Shoot Feature Film in 24 Hours

July 30th, 2010 by Damian 1 comment »

In the tradition of movies whose stories have taken place over the course of a day such as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Dog Day Afternoon”, “Do The Right Thing”, and “Training Day”, “The Deadlines” takes place in one house over the span of a single night.

The most interesting thing about this particular production is that Florida native Blake Hooks, and his co-director, Jason Sanders plan to shoot the entire film in 24 hours!

“The main reason we decided to attempt the 24-hour thing is because most of us have been on sets where you sit around more than you shoot,” Hooks said. “It becomes aggravating and you become less motivated on the project when you spend an entire day shooting one scene. So we started thinking there had to be a way to do ‘guerrilla’ film making with quality.”

Hooks said his life was changed by a TV production class he took at George Jenkins High School. In 2003, Hooks moved to California after attending college in Tallahassee and studied film production at Los Angeles City College.

Shooting on the 90-minute horror movie “The Deadlines” will both open and wrap on Aug. 8. Filming will take place in in Bakersfield, California.

Visit FilmSchools.com for more on the top film schools and degree programs in film and television.

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Posted in Art, Careers, Film

Tags: Film film making film schools independent film

University of Phoenix passes Best Places to Work test

July 29th, 2010 by Catherine No comments »

Just graduated from the University of Phoenix? Or somewhere with a slightly smaller student body? (Phoenix boasts more than 400,000 alum) If you’re looking for that first job out of school, and you’re in the Cleveland area, consider some of the Best Places to Work in Cleveland — such as the University of Phoenix, which made the cut in the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s survey of employees. We don’t know if they’re hiring, but… it can’t hurt to apply.

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Posted in Careers, For-Profit Education, Online Education

Tags: Cleveland University of Phoenix

The Art of the Oil Spill

July 22nd, 2010 by Catherine 1 comment »

In an effort to keep the the impact of the BP oil spill fresh in the public mind, (and to protest offshore drilling or just process the environmental damage to the Gulf Coast), artists have created paintings, sculptures, and logos to express their outrage, reports the Art Institutes blog, InSite.

“Artists and designers are very passionate people,” says Art Institutes graphic design instructor Beth Remsburg . “When something motivates us to act, we do. There are certain events that tug at our souls; our very being.”

Some artists have expressed their outrage in 2 contests (sponsored by Greenpeace and LogoMyWay) to create new logos for BP that they feel more correctly expose the company’s lack of care for the environment.

The Jonathan Ferrara gallery is showing an online fundraising exhibition, Gulf Aid Art, showcasing works done by Louisiana artists in response to the oil spill. Monies raised will assist artists affected by the disaster.

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Posted in Art, Graphic Design

Explore the Red Planet Online!

July 13th, 2010 by Damian No comments »

Explore Mars Online

Thanks to NASA, students and amateur scientists can now explore the Red Planet online using software released today by Microsoft Research.

Though many of the images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are already available on the space agency’s Web site, Microsoft has now loaded them into its WorldWide Telescope interface, which creates a way for users to easily pan around the images to see them in context, and presents them in higher resolution than previously available online.

“You can actually see rover tracks on the Martian surface,” said Dan Fay, director of earth, energy, and environment for Microsoft Research, in an interview.

The WorldWide Telescope software is free but only runs on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. A Web interface of the system is available, but the Mars images are not yet available there.

Meanwhile, some professors and schoolteachers use the Web telescope in their classrooms, and anyone online is encouraged to scour the images to find unique features of Mars that professional researchers might have missed.

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Posted in Science, Technology

Tags: Mars NASA Technology The Red Planet

Laid Off? An Internship May Be Just What You Need!

July 12th, 2010 by Damian No comments »

Internships

Out of gainful employment, out of job offers and running out of savings, Scott Stevens of Portland, Oregon, has turned to a familiar strategy to gain experience and keep his skills fresh: The internship.

In spring 2009, Stevens, 35, took an internship on a sustainable tourism project for Travel Portland, a nonprofit destination marketing organization. In this role, he researches what it would take for an entire city to become sustainable and how best to market this initiative to the public.

His salary: Zero. Instead, the former IT sales and marketing professional is doing the internship for the experience.

“I liked the idea of an internship as a way to keep busy and connected,” he says. “The value to me is in learning something new.”

With the economy in the doldrums, Stevens isn’t the only experienced worker to go the internship route. Some, like Stevens, are using internships to build their resumes and gain experience during a period of unemployment. Others are looking to enhance their professional knowledge or sample a new field ahead of a possible career change.

Test-Driving a New Career

Another reason to embrace an internship as a grown-up is to lay a foundation for a future career change. Such is the case with Lisa Tresmontan.

In early 2009, Tresmontan, 31, agreed to take a low-paying internship with Joshua Charles Catering in San Mateo, California. In this position, she works nights and weekends helping CEO Josh Feinbloom with everything from food preparation to event planning. In early 2009, Tresmontan oversaw every aspect of a customer’s wedding reception; in June, she helped cater an entire weekend of festivities.

Tresmontan landed the internship through friends of friends in the catering industry. It helped that her mother works in the business as well.

While Tresmontan admits that moonlighting is a lot of work on top of her full-time job as associate sourcing manager for Pottery Barn, she said she wasn’t ready to take a leap into the catering business without exploring it first.

“I wanted to make sure I liked it, and I’ve actually liked it more than I thought I would,” she says. “Someday, when I’m ready, I can leave the corporate world behind me and commit full time to this new career.”

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Posted in Careers

Tags: Careers internships unemployment

Sen. Durbin speaks out against for-profit schools

July 2nd, 2010 by Catherine 4 comments »

Senator Dick Durbin at the National Press Club

According to this Chicago Tribune article, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois is speaking out against for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and Illinois-based DeVry University.

In recent remarks at the National Press Club, the Senator says that these schools burden students with debt, make money essentially from the Federal government’s loans, and don’t help students get good-paying jobs.

He gives the following example: a woman who received her bachelor’s and masters degrees online — “without ever having to step foot in a classroom” – is now carrying $110,000 in debt, but can’t repay it because she is working for a nonprofit that helps poor children.

The Senator called the online degrees “worthless” and said tighter regulation of for-profit schools is needed. As the article says, he “did not single out any one bad practice” from the schools, but is instead opposed, it would seem, to their reliance on loans from the Federal government.

The article does not comment on how the woman found her job or what it entails.

Many for-profit schools do make money based on student loans funded by the government. Of course, many students can also attend private nonprofit schools only because of help from the government. And because public schools are by definition public, they too are funded to a large degree by the government (state and Federal). The question comes down to one of purpose.

Is the purpose of the for-profit schools to make education accessible to people who would normally not receive it, and then to reinvest profits into new technologies and faculty? Or, as the Senator says, are they forgetting their purpose and instead thinking only of profit?

A few other questions that the Senator’s remarks bring to mind: is regulating for-profit schools the answer to the problem of debt? Are for-profit schools the only schools to give out “worthless” degrees? How does one really define “worthiness” in the first place?