• Alaska students are 49th out of 50 states in college enrollment. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. The paradigm of the educational establishment says college is always the best choice but it seems the marketplace says otherwise. Alaska’s workforce is, statistically, fully employed.
• More Alaskans attend college at home than Outside.
• University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) gets lots of SAT scores in the mail but does not translate that into enrollment.
• Alaska kids score at or above average on the SAT except in writing.
• Family income does influence whether or not a child takes the steps to pursue a college education, i.e. takes the SAT.
• Academics run in families. Kids who have parents with college educations typically pursue one also.

It’s important to remember that this is a very narrow sampling of Alaska’s young adults. UAA has a very large non-traditional student population. Academic and career decisions made at age 18 or 19 are not binding and, often, don’t last a lifetime.

You can download this chart here.

Alaska teens often look Outside for their college education. They see it as an opportunity to see the rest of the world, perhaps escape winter and have a great adventure. Apart from the attraction of palm trees or desert or beaches, it’s very difficult, financially, to justify taking out loans for an out-of-state education. As I often point out, freshman English 111 at the University of Alaska costs less than $500 if a student lives at home or takes it online. Is it worth the expense of taking the same course at Arizona or Stanford or Montana State at 2 or 3 times the cost? Especially, if tuition and living expenses must be financed?

Our culture is sold on the whole premise that a college education has to be outrageously expensive and debt is unavoidable unless parents have set aside big, big bucks. I disagree.

As an example, I know a fellow who attended community college in the Seattle area and finished his BA at UW. Debt-free, he then spent the bucks to earn his MBA from Harvard. This makes so much sense. In the long run, does it matter whether he took freshman composition at a community college or Harvard? No, it doesn’t. Where it does matter is his bank account. And I haven’t even touched on compounding and the time value of money.

Granted, sometimes the local college is not the very best or the most desirable. (I have yet to see a palm tree at UAA.) But taking on college debt has to be considered very soberly by looking ahead to the sacrifices necessary to repay. I think the short-term sacrifice of not having the very best or most ideal are worth having the freedom of being able to choose a career, a job, a location or a home after graduation without the burden of student loan payments.

Once you figure in financial aid, "the price to go to Harvard should be the same, or less, than the price to go to the flagship public universities," says Bill Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid.

Harvard now is asking families earning $120-180K annually to contribute 10% of their income toward the cost of college. The emphasis in calculations is shifting from assets to income.

If you are interested in this type of study check out Maya Frost’s soon-to-be-published book, The World Is Your Campus: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands On Tuition, and Get An Outrageously Relevant Global Education.

Here’s her own summary of what to expect:

A Taste of Freedom:▄ Never worry about your GPA, SAT score, or class rank ▄ Enter a top liberal arts university as a junior at age 18 ▄ Get paid to work virtually while spending the summer in exotic locations–and get credit for it ▄ Graduate at the age of 20—even if you’ve studied in four universities on three continents ▄ Get two years’ worth of college credits—during your senior year of high school ▄ Get a degree from a top-ranked college at a total cost of less than $40,000 (No loans, no debt.) ▄ Explore the ruins of Machu Picchu, go snowboarding in the Andes, sleep under the stars in a Chilean desert, dance all night in Buenos Aires, celebrate Carnaval in Brazil, hike the glaciers of Patagonia, become a cherished member of a family in another country, and develop a global perspective by sharing experiences with friends from around the world—as an exchange student at 16 ▄ Speak two or more languages fluently ▄ Pay $1500 instead of $15,000 for the same study abroad program as your Ivy League peers ▄ Start your sophomore year of college—at 16 ▄ Connect with accomplished mentors who can boost your skills, reveal your talents, and open the door to new levels of learning ▄ Master the art of self-management ▄ Travel widely, find meaningful and well-compensated work, and discover your place as a valued and valuable global citizen

Her four daughters have done all of this and she’ll fill you in on how to do it, too.

Motivation for these new policies is not entirely altruistic. Congressmen from both parties are questioning the uses of college endowments while students are graduating with onerous debt.

This is, indeed, good news for students and our society and economy as a whole. Heavy debt requires grads to choose careers based on income that they may not otherwise choose. Grads who have low debt are free to choose the employment that better fits their talent, passion, and personal ambitions.

Last week, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) released the results from their second Civil Literacy test of college freshmen and seniors. The statistically valid questions cover America’s history, government, international relations and market economy. The test results inform ISI of how much our college students know and how much they learn by the time they graduate with a four-year degree. The results of the first assessments in 2005 were dismal and this year’s tests confirmed those results. Here are their latest findings:

1. College Seniors Failed a Basic Test on America’s History and Institutions.
2. Colleges Stall Student Learning about America.
3. America’s Most Prestigious Universities Performed the Worst.
4. Inadequate College Curriculum Contributes to Failure.
5. Greater Learning about America Goes Hand-in-Hand with More Active Citizenship.

(more…)

What does this mean? Well, it seems that the conventional practice of separating educational tracks based on college ambitions is no longer applicable in today’s economy. So, how does a parent ensure that a child is ready? Remember a previous post discussed how 3/4 of college prep students weren’t ‘prepped.’ That means that those young adults aren’t ready to enter the job market either. It seems that using objective academic standards to assess skill level is the direction to head. The challenge for us is doing this well at home.

Bror’s Blog summarizes new research from the testing folks at ACT that indicates most students who take college prep courses are not adequately prepared for college. Disturbingly, they found that 3/4 of college-prep high school grads did not have a reasonable chance to succeed in a college course. The complete report can be found here.

How should this affect the way a high school student is educated at home? Certainly, not all students should go on to college. It seems the goal is to adequately prepare each student whether it’s college or the work place.