According to a recent Boston Globe article, a small but growing number of students is graduating from a 4-year institution in 3 years in order to save money.

With soaring tuition costs and the added difficulty of not securing loans, these students take more classes in order to graduate sooner and save money.

Some school officials are worried that 3-year students are over-taxing themselves and will burn out towards the end, and that students will miss the tradional period of self-exploration that college students enjoy.

While I agree that students to learn and grow on a personal level at college, don’t you think that 4 years at $40,000 is a rather expensive way to find yourself?

According to MSNBC, the College Board (the organization which runs SAT and PSAT tests) is suing a Texas-based test preparation company for illegally helping students by handing out old tests!

Read the whole article here or see the excerpt below.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Dallas, alleges that the Karen Dillard College Prep company got a copy of the PSAT administered last October from a Plano, Texas, high school principal whose brother works at the company.

The lawsuit brought by the New York-based College Board, alleging copyright infringement, could bring attention to the burgeoning test-prep industry, which some critics contend gives well-off students an unfair advantage on entrance exams.

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According to the lawsuit, Novotny obtained a copy of the PSAT administered Oct. 17 from his brother, Michael Novotny, the principal of T.C. Jasper High School in Plano.

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The SAT is administered seven times per year, and questions and portions of the exam are sometimes reused. The exams are considered “live” until they are officially retired. Test-site administrators are instructed to collect all test forms and lock them away.

Whistle-blower comes forward
The lawsuit also claims the company sold or tried to sell some copyrighted materials to another test-prep company and even to unspecified Texas school districts.

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Click here to read the whole article.

Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain outlined his higher education agenda recently.  Here is an excerpt courtesy of NCHelp.org:

Presumptive Republican Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) issued his higher education agenda last week that focuses on the six policy goals, including fixing the student lending programs. They are:

• Prepare for the 21st Century in Higher Education—encourage government to support innovative approaches to education, removing regulatory barriers that prevent us from moving forward with new ideas.
• Improve Information for Parents—make institutional information available to families in a clear and concise manner to help students make more informed choices about higher education.
• Simplify Higher Education Tax Benefits—simplifying the existing tax benefits to ensure that a greater number of families have a lower tax burden when they are helping to send their children to college.
• Simplify Federal Financial Aid—Senator McCain charges that too many programs and a complicated application process deter many eligible students from seeking student aid and that the number of programs also makes it more difficult for financial aid officers to help students navigate the process. Consolidating programs will help simplify the administration of these programs, and help more students have a better understanding of their eligibility for aid.
• Improve Research by Eliminating Earmarks—eliminate earmarks to improve the federal government’s support for university research.
• Fix the Student Lending Programs—Senator McCain proposes an expansion of the lender-of-last resort capability of the federal student loan system and will demand the highest standard of integrity for participating private lenders. He also contends that effective reforms and leveraging the private sector will ensure the necessary funding of higher education aspirations, and create a simpler and more effective program in the process.