The "Standard" Lecture: Are the Current Forms of Lectures Really the Most Effective?

Ryan Kerns

The standard lecture style in most American colleges today involves a single professor lecturing to a class that can get as large as 250-300 students. Unfortunately, these large lecture sizes are synonymous with freshmen classes where students sometimes have problems adjusting to the large class sizes and the different style of teaching. In high school, these students were in classes of 15-25 kids where teachers usually had an interactive teaching style and they could have plenty of personal time with the teacher if needed. However, when a college professor just stands in the front and talks to the class for 90 minutes, it doesn’t leave much room for interaction or questions. This leads to the question, “how effective is the standard lecture style?” This subject has been long debated and usually to no avail. Many professors argue that lecturing is the only way to teach that many students. However, many students counter-argue that they don’t get personal time with the professor that they need in order to truly learn the material and pass the exams. E J Tonkes, P S Isaac, and V Scharaschkin wrote in their article titled Assessment of an Innovative System of Lecture Notes in First-year Mathematics, “Students complain that the old-fashioned lecture style of copying notes from a board hinders the learning process, as they simply concentrate on writing.” They go on to explain how professors have tried to solve this by printing out notes for the students, but this usually leads to little class attendance and participation. Unfortunately, college tests are extremely tough in that they require kids to apply the things that they were supposed to have learned in lecture and apply them to different types of problems. Professors have to start wondering whether or not the standard for of lecturing is the most effective when some test averages are down in the fifties.

Is College Right for Everyone?

Bo Andrews

College is a great opportunity for success; however, recently, it has become a problem of failure. As college tutition rises and competition within the school increases, many students cannot afford the college tution nor make satisafactory grades to stay in four-year colleges. With such drastic problems, college may not be right for everyone.

In a study used in the Chronicle of Higher Education, only 10-15% of the American youth population have the needed math and language skills to be successful in college--maintaing a "B" average. Consequently, attending a four-year institution is not in every Americans' best interest. As the number of students who attend college from high school has increased by 40% since 1970, many students are in long term debt and have large loans to pay. Unfortunately, money is a main reason some students cannot go to college. In order to pay for college without having any debt, there has to be a change in college tutition costs--not neccessarily a decrease in costs. Colleges charge high tutitions because of all the costs tuitions cover such as meal plans, health services, recreation centers, public transportations, and dorms. If colleges could make two different tuition payments, more students may have the oppurtunity to go to college. A new tution would only include class payment while the student could choose to commute from home, ride a bike, pack a lunch, or use a family doctor. Employing a lower different tuition cost gives everyone a chance to learn life skills neccessary for finding a job in today's world.

As of right now, college is not right for everyone. Through adjustments in tuition costs, college is the correct choice for all graduating seniors who have the "motivation and stamina" to do well.

Competitiveness and Collegiate Athletics

Michael Sandt

If you're a college student, like I am, you probably spend way too much time watching ESPN. Some may even have the iconic logo burned permanently into their retinas. Regardless of how avidly you watch SportsCenter, this is one video you must see.Once you finish the video you'll probably go through a couple distinct phases of shock and awe. First, disbelief, this can't possibly be happening. In a collegiate soccer match, on TELEVISION?! Second, wonder, why on earth is this young lady doing this. It's quite apparent that there's no way she can get away with it, yet she continues. And lastly, anger, where were the referees whilst this was occurring and why did she not get ejected.

Regardless of your reaction, the question remains. What on earth happened to sportsmanship? Now I'll be the first to say; that if you're not cheating, you're not trying. But I mean this in the most innocent and non-violent way possible. Not telling a referee that it was indeed a goal or, in my case, kicking the puck in the net. Those are results of a competitiveness amongst athletes. This however, blatantly and utterly crosses the line. While I do agree that some form of retaliation was called for in both cases, is it really necessary to pull a girl to the ground head first by her hair? I think not. Had her retaliation been less violent she probably wouldn't have come under so much criticism. It just goes to show you, as a college athlete you're under much more scrutiny than anyone else in the college community.

Merit vs. Need-Based Financial Aid

Brenden Duncombe-Smith

There have always been need-based financial aid awards at most major colleges, but in the recent years this has started to become the majority of the aid awarded. In the past a large portion of the aid awarded to students was merit based. Institutions of Higher Education used these merit based scholarships to attract top students. Admitting a large number of top students increases a schools competitiveness and prestige among other schools. Some college presidents dislike the idea of merit based scholar ships but feel that they are necessary for their schools to remain competitive. Robert Massa, vice president for enrollment management at Dickinson College feels that the term "merit based" is really just a euphemism for bribery. He mainly feels this way because the whole point of merit based aid is to attract students who will most likely attend more prestigious schools by offering them a very inexpensive education. Schools that offer this merit based aid often run out money for need based aid and end up having to accept a percentage of their class need aware, meaning they cannot accept any students who cannot afford the tuition. However, institutions like Hamilton college have shifted this trend to completely eliminate any form of need based aid. Largely because thinking among higher education has changed and it is now more valuable for institutions to be able to accept anyone regardless of need. While this is still impossible for some smaller schools it seems to be a turn in the right direction, away from "bribery". In addition most schools have found that the merit based scholarships go largely unaccepted by the top students.

A little Incentive could go a long way.

Anna Smoak

I know I've said this before, but I'll say it again: College tuition is increasing at alarming rates. While nobody is ever happy when they have to pay even more money for college, perhaps following the example of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and letting students help decide how their money is used would help to calm some of the unrest felt about these increases.

Recently University of Wisconsin at Madison has been 'forced' to raise tuition by up to $3000 dollars for some students (excluding families who make under $80000 per year). This would makes me angry and I don't even go to this school, so I can only imagine how current students of this school would be feeling. As a result "students sought a legitimate say in how the Madison Initiative funds would be allocated across campus". And the university complied by creating a 'student committee to reiew spending proposals.' And this committee isn't simply ignored by the university as one would imagine. In fact, projects going on around the University right now were ranked among the top six by the student committee.

So in conclusion, if universities insist upon raising tuition, the least they could do would is give the students a voice in how the money is spent. Maybe then their wouldn't be such unease about high tuitions, and that could result in higher results and more money in the long run.

Textbook Costs Just Keeps Rising

Vinh Nguyen

Since I made a post pertaining to textbook costs last week, I decided to make another post relating to the price inflation of textbooks. On my last post, I mentioned that the expenditures most students spend on textbooks is the largest after tuition, room and board. According to this article, some colleges believe that the publishing industry is making the costs even higher by releasing new editions and packaging books with expensive study aids such as study guides, test questions, disks, etc. What is the publishing industry's response? The $3.4-billion-a-year higher education publishing industry reasons that textbooks must be continually modernized in order to grasp the students' attentions. However, the reissuing of editions forces professors into using new books, resulting in students buying new books. A recent study that was done by California's Public Interest Research Group reveals that the average time between editions is 3.8 years even when the information has not changed since the last edition. Moreover, new edition of the textbooks that were surveyed cost 58% more than the previous edition. Believe it or not, professors sometimes play a role in increasing textbook prices without knowing. Because most professors like to order textbooks that have appealing graphs and charts to keep the students' interests, these pictures can be expensive to design. Furthermore, professors are looking for more contents for teaching, leading to the addition of learning tools such as Web site access, study guides, etc. Since these additions are sometimes mandatory, students have no other options but to spend more money on them. So next time one goes to the bookstore to buy a book, think about whether he or she should get the older version or get the new version from overseas.

Wireless Classrooms: Why Requiring Laptops may not be Worth the Risks and Distractions

Ryan Kerns

With technology advancing more and more everyday, laptops are becoming very predominate in higher education. In fact, many colleges like Georgia Tech are now requiring that all students own a laptop in order to attend their school. Many people believe that laptops are an easy way for students to transfer their data to and from classes and provide an easy, efficient way for teachers to grade assignments. However, what most teachers tend to overlook is how many distractions computers provide while students are in class. With wireless internet connections, students are able to access their e-mail accounts, log onto Facebook, or just sit there and play games online during class. For example, my English class requires that we have our laptops with us throughout the entire class. Unfortunately, as soon as people are done with their assignments, they turn to their e-mails and other things on the web. What is worse is the fact that many of the kids will chat on their Facebook accounts during an actual lecture when the information is important. According to Michael Bugeja in his article called Distractions in the Wireless Classroom, this is a reoccurring theme across the nation. He goes on to explain how one such teacher is banning laptops from her classroom. She claims that the result is, “huge increases in attention and better performance on exams… students have even mentioned that they feel like they are doing better without the laptop." This just helps to prove that laptops may more of a distraction than they are worth.

Unfortunately, distractions are not the only problem with requiring laptops. With crime rates on the rise, laptops have been a prime target for robbers on college campuses. This creates a huge risk for important information being stolen including identity theft. Andrea Foster explains one extreme case of this in her article, Increase in Stolen Laptops Endangers Data Security. She explains that, “a thief walked away with a laptop containing the University of Virginia biochemist's name and Social Security number, as well as those of more than 7,000 other professors, staff members, and students.” She goes on to say that, “[t]he next month, Mr. Grant discovered that criminals had amassed at least $22,000 in debt under his name.” So, with everything that seems to be going against laptops in the classroom, are all of the distractions and information security risk really worth a more efficient way to grade assignments?

Crowdsourcing: The Student Help Desk Chapter

Bo Andrews

Everyday, students call in or email IT help desks on college campuses. Accurate and timely, the IT help desk staff members provide logical and technical answers for fixing student computer hardware and software problems. The help desk process is a great invention;however, with such a high cost to uphold, IT help desks must have an alternative. Creating a student crowdsourcing database will not only save money, but also stimulate student interaction.

College IT help desks are essential on college campuses because of the amount of students, teachers, reasearchers, and administrators. With such a high demand for technical help and support, twenty-four hour help desks charge high prices for calls and emails. For example, the help desk at Indiana University charges $11.41 for calls and $9.39 for emails. In the last year, the IT help desk accepts 150,000 questions. As more problems occur with corrupt documents and poor servers around campuses, the need for help continues to rise.
Dewitt A. Latimer, the CIO at The University of Notre Dame, is a main force behind an idea to cut costs severly--by crowdsourcing. The idea is to allow students and faculty to answer each others' questions. The benfit is a low cost and an increase in interaction with one another, but there are pitfalls. Are all answers going to be accurate? Can you trust the person sitting next to you about the virus that just ate your midterm essay?
The answer is no. In order to satisy the budget cuts, crowdsourcing is a project that must be done. If a university can keep the old helpdesk, but focus on a new interaction-based help desk, the effects are all positive.

The New Look of Music Downloads

Michael Sandt

File Sharing. Most college students are familiar with the term. Programs such as Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, and Morpheus have become synonymous with the world of illegal music downloads. In recent memory, colleges have picked up on this trend and moved to stop students from using such applications. Now, some colleges have decided to change their attitude about file sharing.

Six unnamed colleges have started participation in a secret program designed to test a new software known as Choruss. According to some sources, colleges involved in the program would pay a blanket license fee for students at their university to download as many songs from the service as they want. The concept being that students could log on to a website and instantly have access to a large pool of songs for a low flat fee. Some student governments have even proposed covering the fee for the students. Under the current policy, students could download as many songs as they wanted and keep them permanently, even after they have unsubscribed from the service. Critics argue that students could easily download the entire library and cancel the service while only paying one month's fee. Proponents are quick to say that such a convenient service could be enough to get students to 'do the right thing'. Pay for music downloads and support the artists and record companies.

The colleges involved in this study have been shrouded in secrecy and several other colleges suspected to be participating have denied any affiliation. With that type of concealment it is hard to judge whether or not such a program could have success on modern college campuses. As for me, I think it's a very clever idea. Appealing to a student's sense to be honest as well as providing them with a convenient as well as cheap service for accessing music could prove to be fruitful. While they will never fully stop such downloading, with this program they could surely curb it.

College Health Care

Brenden Duncombe-Smith

The current economic climate has forced school to cut costs everywhere, including hiring freezes. However, few people realize just how badly these budget cuts affect the student health care provided at universities. The budget cuts are being passed straight down to the students, which is drastically increasing the cost of student healthcare. It is even affecting the staffing of student health centers on many campuses. At the University of Maryland at College Park the hiring freeze has caused the school to go without a psychologist, which is arguably one of the most important positions for health care on a college campus. Jon Englund author for InsideHigherEd.com, noted that one way to prevent this was for schools to start accepting more health insurance plans that students may already have from their parents. In fact Ohio University gained so much extra revenue from billing insurance company that instead of having a deficit they are now ready to expand their facilitates. They are even planning to hire more psychologists and increase the hours of the health center. This is just one solution to the problem ever increasing costs, but it is unacceptable to allow health care costs for students to increase so much. Most students are completely unaware of the fact that health care in college may be so expensive, and as a result they are very surprised when they find out how much it will cost them to be treated some even forgoing appointments to save money. Regardless of what solution is found it is clear that one is required because it is entirely unacceptable to allow students to skip treatment to save money.

Are the Busy Bees the Smarter ones? A comparison between working and non-working students

Anna Smoak

While many people speculate on the pros and cons of working while in college, many fail to note that a proper balance of work and study can improve grades, and really prepare a student well for life after college.

Yes it is true that working too many hours can take away from either a student's study time or sleep time or even both. But "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."

Why is this? Students with jobs tend to be more responsible and aware of how they spend their time. They are already efficient at time management which is a large part of college freshman troubles. There could also be other motives for students to get jobs while in college. One could be that the student wants a job they can use to pad their resume. So prospective employers look at them knowing they have had previous work experience. Another reason could be that the students have to work in order to pay their way through college (maybe through a work-study program). And these students wouldn't go through such trouble if they didn't really want to succeed during their college career, therefore they may have a higher GPA than less motivated students.

So while students who work may have higher GPAs than those who don't, it could be because those students who look for work would have a higher GPA anyway, than those who don't. That is to say, getting a job won't necessarily boost your GPA. Try studying harder first.

Ways to Saving Money Buying Textbooks

Vinh Nguyen
Most people know textbooks in college can be costly. According to this article from The New York Times, most students spend from $700 to $1000 a year on textbook, making it the largest cost after tuition, room and board. As a matter of fact, a recent report found that the prices had nearly tripled from 1986 to 2004, rising an average of 6 percent a year, almost double the inflation rate. For these reasons, some students mentioned in the article tried to find ways around by sharing or borrowing books from other students or buying 2 out of 15 assigned books in order to save money. Nonetheless, there are a few ways one can save his or her money.
First, one can get a new textbook but older editions or overseas, which sometimes can be less expensive yet brand new with no highlights on every page. By doing so, one can save some money while he or she can still get a complete "package", including CDs, problem sets and sometimes even a workbook.
Second, one can buy used books from bookstores or websites such as Amazon.com, Half.com, CheapestTextbooks.com, etc. The only real disadvantage to this method is that it might take a few weeks for the books to arrive if one is ordering them via online.
Lastly, not many students know that they can actually rent textbooks for half the price of a brand new textbook from websites like TextbookRentals.com, Collegebookrenter.com, etc. Nonetheless, there are some inconveniences to this method. One can't keep the book for further studying or reviewing and he or she cannot write on the book; otherwise, he or she has to pay the full price instead and ends up paying more than a brand new book.
With the economy like today, one would want to save some money, potentially hundreds of dollars, to spend on other things. Finally for the last tip, one can buy used books online, which are half the price of the brand new books, and sell them back to the bookstore for half the price of the brand new books at the end of the semester. Thus in the end, if the books are still in good condition, one will end up not paying more than $10 total for textbooks.