Links for 1/18/11

DAN FROSCH

Nic Ramos, paid his entire spring semester tuition — all $14,309.51 of it — using dollar bills, a 50-cent piece and a penny…

[And the video interview.]

Martha Ann Overland

when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year…

the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges… has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges…

DANIEL HAMERMESH

sometimes my own papers are held by scholarly journals for a year, as the journal waits on reviews by one or more delinquent reviewers. David Figlio of Northwestern University has proposed a clever matching mechanism that seems to offer the right incentives on both sides of the market: The editor of scholarly journals can base the author/reviewer match in part on the author’s reviewing speed when s/he has reviewed...

Mark Kantrowitz

Federal law requires colleges to reduce a student’s need-based financial aid package when the student receives a private scholarship. This is referred to as an overaward. After all, receipt of a scholarship reduces the student’s financial need.

Most colleges will reduce their own financial aid funds to eliminate the overaward, rather than decrease the federal financial aid…

Colleges do have flexibility in how they reduce the aid package. Some colleges will substitute the scholarship for their own grant funds, yielding no net financial benefit to the student. Other colleges will let the scholarship replace the loans, effectively reducing the out-of-pocket cost to the student…

WINNIE HU

proposals, meant to introduce competition, choice and incentives to improve education performance — something he calls “market models of school reform” — are becoming more popular, attracting the support of the Obama administration and influential groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In New Jersey, as in other states, the teachers and their unions are resisting…