College in America Blog

High schools, urged on by parents, funnel as many kids as they can into colleges and universities with the intent that this is the surefire path to social mobility and, at a minimum, middleclass prosperity. This is the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom does not work anymore. The barista at my local coffee shop is […]

It is against the odds today to enroll in college and graduate with a good job. If you are poor or a first generation college student the odds can be even longer. There is one major variable that determines who graduates from college and who doesn’t–your parent’s income. If your parents don’t make much money […]

Once upon a time in America a young man could earn a high school diploma, get a good job in manufacturing, and raise a family. The conventional wisdom is that those days are over. There is a funny thing about conventional wisdom—it is often wrong. Manufacturing is back. As Margaret Thomson, Director of Marketing and […]

The kids are off to college. The exhortation, “If you earn a BA degree, you will earn a million dollars more than a high school graduate,” is still ringing in their ears. Before you write any more tuition checks for your teenager perhaps you should take a closer look at that popular advice. The Source […]

The Federal Guaranteed Student Loan program, created as part of the 1965 Higher Education Act, was renamed the Robert T. Stafford Student Loan Program in honor of US Senator Robert Stafford of Vermont in 1988. For a period of twenty-six years college students, for better or for worse, signed up in droves for Stafford Loans […]

The actor, James Garner, died this month at age 86. His big break was the role of the poker playing Bret Maverick in the ABC TV program, “Maverick.” The show ran from September, 1957 to July, 1962 which roughly overlapped my undergraduate years. (Garner left the series after three seasons.) Every Sunday night at 7:30 […]

Why is everyone urging you to go to college? You can blame it on the French guy, Alexis de Tocqueville. The fuss started about one hundred eighty years ago when he wrote, “Democracy in America.” He observed that America was distinct. In American it didn’t make much difference into which station of life you were […]

Do you have a chess app on your iPad? (There are many available, and they are free.) Even if you are a chess club nerd this app regularly kicks your butt. Your parents can probably remember when IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue, beat the world champion of chess, Gary Kasparov, in 1997. It made for interesting […]

In “the good old days” it was easy. A kid went to college, majored in anything that struck their fancy, graduated, and sifted through numerous job offers. If finances were tight, she worked a part time job on campus and a fulltime job during summers to make ends meet. These truly were “the good old […]

If you google “managing student loan debt,” you will get a lot of search results relative to the consolidation, minimization, or forgiveness of loan payments. If you are worrying about how to make your loan payments, it is too late to start managing student loan debt. There are three elements to managing student loan debt. The first […]