The report, commissioned by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, mirrors concerns raised by many high school counselors that colleges have assigned too much importance to test scores and is highly critical of test-preparation programs, which appear to benefit mostly affluent students. The commission, which included Harvard Admissions Dean William Fitzsimmons as well as several other well-regarded college admissions officials and high school counselors, recommends that colleges shift toward exams that test students on their knowledge of high school curriculum subjects, such as the SAT subject tests, Advanced Placement exams, and the International Baccalaureate exams.

The College Board, which owns the SAT, issued a statement defending its admissions exam as fair. “Working with our member institutions and other educators, we look forward to continuing our efforts to further improve the value of our SAT Subject Tests to institutions,” the statement said. It noted that scores on the SAT, along with high school grades, are strong predictors of college success and joined the commission in its call for appropriate use of test scores.

Of the commission’s report, ACT Inc. says that it has “always recommended that colleges use multiple indicators of college readiness along with ACT test scores for admissions, scholarships and other high stakes decisions. No single measure can be an effective measure of students’ likely success in college.” (U.S. News uses SAT and ACT data to rank colleges, a practice the report criticizes. Robert Morse has responded here.)

The report will no doubt be the subject of much conversation when the NACAC membership arrives this week in Seattle for the group’s annual convention. Many counselors believe that standardized tests hurt a variety of students, from disadvantaged minorities to kids who just don’t test well. “I cannot tell you how many students I have worked with who are amazing in their classes but freeze when it comes to the SAT or ACT because they know how much is riding on the scores,” says Patricia Mucenski, a counselor at Lisbon High School in Maine. “Unfortunately, for these students who do have good GPAs but poor test scores, merit aid is usually lessened or not offered at all.”

The difficult task admissions officers would face in a world without SATs and ACTs is how to compare evenly applicants from schools across the nation. “Grades, without adequate context, aren’t of much use, either, because of the radical differences in the way grades are used from school to school and even teacher to teacher,” says Bruce Poch, vice president and admissions dean at Pomona College. “Grade inflation in secondary schools is well documented.”

The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which tends to oppose standardized testing, was quick to praise the findings of the report. The organization says about 775 colleges have test-optional admissions criteria. Bob Schaeffer, the organization’s public education director, predicted the report would accelerate the pace of colleges dropping the SAT and ACT. Others disagree. It’s too early to know if the report will lead more colleges to drop the tests from their admissions criteria. Bari Norman, who is a private college counselor with clients in New York and Miami, says it’s not easy to convince parents that their children can go to selective universities like Harvard (which acknowledges the report but declined to say whether it will change its test policy) without competitive SAT or ACT scores. “I think universities such as Harvard need to step up to the plate in a real way and actually de-emphasize the use of these scores in their admissions processes,” Norman says.

Source : US News.

The National Association for College Admission Counseling just released its long-awaited Report of the NACAC Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission that makes recommendations on how the SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests should be used in college admissions.

Our use of SAT and ACT test scores in the America’s Best Colleges rankings is one area that the commission—made up of college admissions deans and high school counselors—weighs in on. It says:

The Commission believes that, as tests designed to provide information about individuals to colleges and universities, the SAT and ACT were never designed as measures of the quality of an institution of higher education. Accordingly, the Commission encourages U.S. News to eliminate test scores as a measure of institutional quality.

U.S. News has no plans at present to change our college rankings methodology in response to this NACAC report. Our methodology reflects the current state of college admissions, where standardized tests are still used in the vast percentage of admissions decisions and have been playing an increasingly important role over the past few years. Currently, 60 percent of colleges say that test scores are of “considerable importance” as a factor in student admissions, up from 43 percent in 1994, according to NACAC’s own research. As long as standardized tests play an integral role in the college admissions process, U.S. News will use them as part of our ranking methodology.

Contrary to the commission, U.S. News believes that when combined with other indicators of academic quality, standardized test scores can be used to compare institutions. Indeed, this is what many colleges and universities do when they compare themselves with one another. We believe that the scholastic abilities of the students enrolled at one school compared with those at another are an important factor in determining the academic atmosphere on campus.

Only about 5 percent of the four-year regionally accredited colleges in the U.S. News Best Colleges universe say they don’t use the SAT or ACT in admissions. U.S. News does not rank those schools. The other 95 percent of colleges say they either require the SAT or ACT for admission or say they are test optional. We have found that typically around two thirds of incoming students at test-optional schools submit standardized test scores.

The bottom line: If a meaningful percentage of colleges drop their SAT or ACT requirements for admission, then U.S. News will change our ranking model. So far, that is not happening.

Source : US News

Some of these programs have quite a few hoops to jump through. The public service loan repayment program will pay off your balance only if you consolidate your loans into the income-based repayment plan, earn no more than 150 percent of the poverty line, make 10 years of payments, and work in public service for 10 years. Other loan repayment programs, however, require only a few years of work.

WARNING: Make sure to read the fine print of any loan forgiveness or loan repayment program, since a job change or relocation can mean a big financial penalty.

How to find loan repayment offers:

1. Call your department head or university financial aid office for advice.
2. Check with professional and trade associations in your field. They often maintain lists of loan repayment programs.
3. Or you can start with this list of some of the most popular loan repayment

Source : US News.

Wrong!

The reality is that even highly ranked grad schools are themselves competing fiercely for the best applicants. Don’t believe us? Listen to Karen Klomperans, dean of Michigan State University’s well-ranked graduate business school:  “We want to attract the best M.B.A. students, and there is a lot of competition among the top 30 institutions for those students.”

Here are eight tips on how you can use grad schools’ competition to improve your financial aid packages:

1) Before you apply to any graduate school, realistically evaluate your grades, scores, qualifications, and willingness to move to a distant school. For example, if you’re a C student and can attend only the nearest school, you shouldn’t expect many programs to compete for your matriculation.

2) Search among the schools for which your qualifications are typical of admitted students for at least two you’d like to attend.

3) Search among schools for which your qualifications are at the top of the admitted pool for at least one you’d like to attend.

4) Search for schools you’d like to attend and for which your qualifications make you competitive that have comparatively low tuition and total costs of attendance (including travel and living costs).

5) Apply to a couple of affordable schools, a couple of schools for which you are competitive, and a couple of schools for which you are a catch.

6) Once you’re accepted and get your aid offers, do the math to calculate the net price for each school. That means adding up tuition, fees, room, board, travel, books, etc., and then–from that total–subtracting out the free money for each school.

7) If the net price of the school you prefer seems unaffordably high, figure out what net price you can realistically afford. Many graduate schools don’t offer grants or scholarships because they figure students will make such high incomesafter they graduate that they can easily pay back loans. Use a loan payment calculator to figure out how much your payments might be. Use our career and salary estimators to see if you are likely to be able to pay off your grad school debt.

Before the commitment deadline and before you make any decision, contact the head of the graduate department and politely explain why the school is your first choice but you might not be able to attend because you have more financially attractive alternatives. Be open-minded about the solutions. Grants can be scarce, but an assistantship or tuition discount might get you to the same out-of-pocket cost. Warning: Don’t expect a highly-ranked school to match offers or compete financially with a school ranked much lower. Many schools feel you should pay more for a degree that they believe is more valuable. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether the extra cost is worth the benefit.

If you still need more money, search for other sources of financial aid.

Source : US News

Check out the details of your employers’ educational benefits before you sign up for a course. Make sure your course qualifies. And find out if there are any grade requirements. Some employers won’t reimburse for low grades.

If your employer doesn’t have a formal employment benefit, write up a request. To encourage employers to help their workers, the federal tax code now allows employers to pay as much as $5,250 a year in tuition for work-related courses. It’s fairly easy for almost any employer to set up an Employer Assistance Program—it takes as little as a one-page document. Best of all, the student doesn’t have to pay taxes on that money.

More on the many education benefit options available from the Journal of Accountancy.

Source : US News.

Still, some charities, and some schools—mostly big public universities or private schools with big endowments—do award scholarships to the neediest students. Generally, the students with the best chances for need-based aid come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Often, however, scholarship funds are so limited that they go to only the most talented or qualified needy students.

Here’s how to maximize your chances at getting need-based aid:

1) Analyze your own finances. Does your fiancé/fiancée have a good job, some savings, and/or a house? If so, delay the wedding! Many schools consider a spouse’s income when deciding who gets need-based aid.

2) Do your parents have good jobs or a nice home? If so, you’ll want to focus on schools that don’t consider income of the student’s parents. That means focusing on schools that ask only for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Schools that ask for additional forms typically expect parents to help pay your graduate school bills.

3) No matter what your financial situation is, you should fill out a FAFSA as soon as possible. Don’t wait to fill out your tax forms first. You can estimate your income now and correct the numbers later. The federal government’s free financial aid application generally asks for financial information only from graduate students and their spouses. It does not require information about the grad student’s parents. Even if the FAFSA doesn’t get you a scholarship, it will qualify you for cheap federal student loans like Staffords, which are capped at 6.8 percent (plus fees).

4) See if any of your target schools or the charities that offer scholarships in your field ask financial aid applicants to fill out the College Board’s CSS Financial Aid Profile. This application asks for financial information about an applicant’s parents and spouse. The College Board charges $25 to send a financial aid application to one school and $16 for every school after that.

5) See if any of your target schools ask financial aid applicants to fill out the Need Access form. This form is free. It also asks for financial information about your parents and spouse.

6) Seek out schools more likely to give need-based aid. That includes schools that require the Profile or the Need Access forms, many public universities with state-funded programs, and private schools with the biggest endowments. U.S. News’s lists of the most generous schools can be found here. A chart of the wealthiest schools can be found here.

7) Call your department head or graduate school financial aid office and ask for help in tracking down other financial aid opportunities.

Try for grants and scholarships awarded for reasons other than pure financial need such as by field of study or by competition.Also, try creating a bidding war over yourself. See if your employer will help pay for your education. Search for other financial aid opportunities.

Source : US News.

At least 40 percent of grad students get some free money. They get it by:

1) Creating a bidding war for themselves by applying to several graduate schools, including at least a couple for which their grades, test scores, or other qualifications are above average. Schools are more likely to add a financial lure for applicants who bring up the school’s statistics, rankings, and prestige.

2) Filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and, if their prospective schools ask for it, the CSS/Profile or the Need Access forms to see if they qualify as low-income enough to receive need-based aid.

3) Asking their university department or grad school adviser for help in finding aid.

4) Tracking down and applying to charities and government agencies that fund graduate study in their fields. This is a great option for those in the sciences, education, and languages.

5) Getting their employers to contribute to their education. This is a great option: At least half of all workers receive education benefits from their employers.

6) Even if they don’t get free money, many students lower their out-of-pocket costs by taking advantage of tax benefits, loan repayment programs, jobs, or grad school bargains.

Source : US News.

Of course, there are plenty of students—those in, say, social work or the humanities—for whom an investment in grad school returns little financial profit. But, says Kevin Murphy, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who has studied returns on education, money shouldn’t always be the deciding factor. “I hate to see people get discouraged,” says Murphy, who won a MacArthur “genius” prize in 2005. “Education gets you a lot more than earnings…. You should go for a master’s in poetry if you enjoy it.”

source : US NEWS.

Alas, there is such a shortage of grants and high-paying campus jobs that most grad students have to borrow, often massively. Almost 60 percent of all grad students have some education debt, and the average such debt is more than $40,000. Those attending professional schools should expect to rack up far more than that. More than 90 percent of all medical and dental students borrow, and their typical debt load exceeds $90,000. Debt loads of $200,000 are not unusual.

Point shaving. With those kinds of numbers, students who shop around for loans that waive fees or knock a couple of points off the interest rate can save thousands of dollars. Grad students say one way to save big bucks is to stick with federal loans even when private loans seem to offer lower terms, since the federal loans can be deferred or even forgiven. That was a happy discovery for Cathi Blair, who started spending down her family’s savings to fund her pursuit of a master’s in education at Eastern Kentucky University. Blair, who has worked more than 20 years as a scientist for the state, is preparing to launch a second career as a science teacher. One of her fellow students pointed her to a program that will repay up to $17,500 worth of federal education loans for science teachers. So she borrowed to pay tuition instead, preserving the family nest egg. After five years of teaching, most of her debts will be canceled. “It would have been extremely hard on my family” to pay all the costs out of pocket, she says.

About 80 percent of schools allow students to shop around for Stafford and Grad plus loans. Many of these will steer students to loans offered by “preferred lenders.” While those are no longer simply the lenders that pay the biggest kickbacks to the school, they are not necessarily the lenders that offer the best deal. Students can save thousands of dollars if they spend a few hours checking out deals on websites such as SimpleTuition or Graduate Leverage or from nonprofit lenders such as the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. MOHELA lends to students around the country and cuts 2 percentage points off many loans. A list of nonprofit lenders can be found at efc.org. Some private lenders may offer similarly low-sounding terms. But most private loans have variable rates, which means payments may rise in the future.

Students who move on to low-paid or public-service professions can get many of their federal—but not private—student loans forgiven. Among the advantages of federal loans:

• Income-based repayment. Starting in 2009, graduate students who consolidate their federal loans with the federal government can apply for an income-based repayment plan that caps monthly payments at 15 percent of family income. Some borrowers can have their remaining debts canceled in as little as five years.

• Public-service forgiveness. A host of programs will repay educational loans for teachers, healthcare workers, and other public servants. Some of the programs, however, are designed with so many loopholes that most students won’t get much benefit. Last year, for example, Congress congratulated itself on agreeing to repay Grad plus loans for those who work at public-service jobs of almost any type for 10 years and who make 10 years’ worth of on-time payments on their plus loans. Since standard plus loans last only 10 years, students won’t get any advantage from this program unless, as soon as they finish school, they apply for the federal government’s 25-year income-based repayment plan.

source : US NEWS.

A bachelor’s degree is becoming passé in the job market. Those who really want to set themselves apart need a graduate degree. Unfortunately, the educational ticket to the top is expensive. Annual tuition and books alone at a run-of-the mill public university are reaching $9,000 a year. Anyone who aims at a private school should prepare to cough up $25,000 to $30,000 a year. And that’s before living expenses, which usually add at least $8,000 a year to a student’s budget.

Compounding the sticker shock is the dismaying reality that students can’t count on the kinds of scholarships that helped them through their undergraduate years. Fewer than 4 percent of graduate students get a federal or state grant. Fewer than 20 percent get any kind of scholarship from their school. Fully 60 percent of grad students get no free money of any kind and have to borrow or otherwise raise the entire cost of their advanced degree themselves.

Luckily, a little financial help appears to be coming to students’ rescue. The federal government is offering new and potentially lower-cost educational loans. A growing number of communities and government agencies are offering to repay loans for workers who agree to spend several years in lower-paying public-service jobs such as teaching. And more employers are subsidizing employees’ tuition.

Most important, employers continue to reward better-educated workers with bigger paychecks, making the investment of time and money a good bet. While the average worker with a bachelor’s degree makes a comfortable $42,000 a year, master’s degree holders make about 25 percent more. And those with professional degrees earn, on average, more than twice the income of those who stopped at a B.A.

That’s a key motivator for thousands of grad students like Doug Spencer, who is working on a Ph.D. in jurisprudence and social policy at the University of California-Berkeley. Spencer owes more than $100,000 in educational debt and says it sometimes feels like “a foot on top of my head pushing me deeper and deeper into the mud.” But Spencer loves school, and as a law professor (his goal) he could start at $150,000 a year. “Maybe I’m just blindly optimistic,” he says, but he’s convinced that the education will pay off in a financially secure life for him, his wife, and their new child.

Of course, not all grad student optimism is blind. Financial aid for graduate students is much more decentralized, and thus more complicated, than aid for undergraduates, says Karen Klomparens, the dean of Michigan State University’s Graduate School. But three types of grad students can be reasonably optimistic about getting some free money to ease school bills, she says:

• Science, math, or technology specialists can shoot for funding from foundations or government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health.
• Very low-income students can qualify for need-based aid.
• Top students who apply to several schools can hope schools will compete for them by bidding up financial aid packages.

Extra perks. Students who aren’t showered with grants can turn to one of the fastest-growing sources of free money for school: employers. Today, half of all workers are eligible for tuition benefits, up from 38 percent in 2000. And many employers focus on graduate training. Several big ones, for example, have signed on to California’s new EnCorps program, which funds up to $15,000 of the educational costs for retiring workers who want to launch second careers as teachers. Even employers without formal programs can write off as a business expense any worker’s tuition for a class that is job-related but doesn’t qualify the worker for another job, says Bob Scharin, senior tax analyst for Thomson Tax & Accounting. It takes little more than a one-page description of an education plan for a business to take advantage of Section 127 of the IRS code and pay as much as $5,250 a year in tax-free tuition benefits for workers taking just about any course, Scharin says.

Many employers say education benefits pay corporate dividends by attracting and retaining top workers. UTC, the conglomerate that owns Sikorsky helicopters and Pratt & Whitney, has found that the workers who take advantage of its generous tuition program are retained at a 4 percent higher rate than those who don’t. They also get about 4 percent more promotions than those who don’t.

source : US NEWS