A debt-free college degree? It’s possible

My husband and I have been sneaking high fives because, come this fall, all three of our children will be in college. And, here’s the sweetest part: They’re all going to school with no debt.

We don’t come from money. We didn’t inherit cash because a relative died. There were no lottery winnings or strike-it-rich stock picks.

My husband and I were raised in low-income households. We’re first-generation college graduates. But as important as college was in pushing us up economically, we felt strongly about avoiding student loans for our children. Debt is a cuss word in our house.

Yet, I understand that, for many families, our pact of no student loans may not be realistic. There’s not enough money left over after the necessities to save for college. I get it that they see no other way than to take out loans.

Mass. students borrowing more to attend public universities

Once upon a time in Massachusetts, students looking for an affordable path to earning a college degree turned to the state’s public colleges and universities.

Read: You got into college. Congratulations! Here’s the bill

But right now I’m appealing to the folks who have more than enough and whose children are still young. You know you earn too much, like we do, to qualify for need-based aid. And despite your hoping, it’s not guaranteed that your child will get a full ride to college based on merit.

You can experience what it’s like to get the college-account statement at the end of the summer and not have to sweat about where the money is coming from to pay it. You have time on your side.

You don’t have to be crazy rich to send your children to college debt-free. Here’s how we did it:

We lived well below our means. My husband and I are first-generation career professionals — he’s a manager in the federal government. As our income rose, we didn’t sacrifice saving for college (or our retirement) by elevating our lifestyle. We didn’t stretch our budget to get into the biggest house the bank said we could afford. We didn’t sink a lot of money into upgrading to new cars. We limited our eating out. We didn’t use shopping as a form of entertainment.

We used a tax-advantaged savings vehicle. Our first child was born in 1995, and two years later the 529 plan was created. We could set up an account, maintain ownership, and reap tax-free earnings as long as the money was used for qualified educational expenses.

When we started investing for college, our older daughter was 5, our son was 2, and we had a baby girl.

With $7,500 we pulled out of savings, we set up three 529 plans, putting $2,500 in each account to start.

We were dogmatic about saving. Using a college-savings calculator offered by Vanguard, we figured we would have just enough for a state school if we put away a little over $200 a month for each child. (For the oldest, since we started later than we should have, we made a one-time lump-sum contribution a few years after opening her account.)

After that, however, for the last 18 years we stuck to the calculated contributions for all three kids, never missing any payments. In fact, to make it easy for us, the 529 contributions were automatically withdrawn from our account twice a month.

We invested for growth. We knew the cost of college was increasing faster than inflation, so we couldn’t park money in a simple savings account.

Within the 529 plans we used age-based portfolios, which meant in the early years the money was invested aggressively (more stocks than bonds), and our investments became more conservative (shifting to more bonds and cash) as the children got closer to starting college.

By the way, as soon as they were old enough, the kids got summer jobs and were required to save their earnings to cover their books and most of their personal expenses.

We didn’t view in-state schools as a backup plan. Our children weren’t limited to where they could apply to college. However, we made it clear they couldn’t take out any loans and we weren’t going to either.

Our youngest is an incoming freshman at Towson University in Baltimore. She wants to be a special-education teacher. As she was applying to colleges, she told us that she didn’t see the point of spending all that money to go out of state when there were so many good colleges in Maryland that could train her to be a teacher.

Our son is returning to the University of Maryland-Baltimore County as a junior math major. And our oldest completes her social-work graduate program next May at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. A year and a half ago, she graduated from the University of Maryland-College Park. She wants to go into therapy helping troubled children.

We recently attended the new-student orientation at Towson. And when the administrators got to the financial-aid session, the discussion was dominated by questions concerning student loans. I teared up. I was just so grateful. It felt incredibly liberating to be free from that worry.

SOURCE 






Medical students are skipping class in droves — and making lectures increasingly obsolete

The future doctors of America cut class. Not to gossip in the bathroom or flirt behind the bleachers. They skip to learn — at twice the speed.

Some medical students follow along with class remotely, watching sped-up recordings of their professors at home, in their pajamas. Others rarely tune in. At one school, attendance is so bad that a Nobel laureate recently lectured to mostly empty seats.

Nationally, nearly one-quarter of second-year medical students reported last year that they “almost never” attended class during their first two, preclinical years, a 5 percent increase from 2015.

The AWOL students highlight increasing dissatisfaction and anxiety that there’s a mismatch between what they’re taught in class during those years and what they’re expected to know — or how they’re tested — on national licensing exams. Despite paying nearly $60,000 a year in tuition, medical students are turning to unsanctioned online resources to prepare for Step 1, the make-or-break test typically taken at the end of the preclinical years.

Related: NYU says it will cover tuition for all its medical students — both now and in the future
These self-guided med students are akin to a group of American tourists wandering through Tokyo without a map. Like a tour guide hired on the street, the online learning tools — including memory aids, videos, and online quizzes — can enhance the educational journey, or send the students down a dead end.

Lawrence Wang, a third-year M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Institutes of Health, said he relied heavily on these resources during his first two years of medical school.

“There were times that I didn’t go to a single class, and then I’d get to the actual exam and it would be my first time seeing the professor,” he said. “Especially, when Step was coming up, I pretty much completely focused on studying outside materials.”

Wang isn’t alone. According to 2017 data from the Association for American Medical Colleges, 1 in 4 preclinical students watches educational videos — like those on YouTube — on a daily basis. And according to two video developers, tens of thousands of medical students subscribe to their products — one of which costs $250 for two years, the other $370 for one year.

Leaders in medical education have begun to scramble. Some medical schools, like Harvard, have done away with lectures for the most part. Instead of spending hours in an auditorium, Harvard students learn the course content at home and then apply the knowledge in mandatory small group sessions.

Other institutions, like Johns Hopkins, are moving in the same direction, but have yet to make a full switch. Hopkins cut down on lectures and boosted sessions that require active student participation. Preclinical lecture attendance hovers around 30 to 40 percent, according to Dr. Nancy Hueppchen, associate dean for curriculum.

For many students, she said, licensing exam prep begins on day one of medical school: “They have this parallel curriculum going along with what we’re teaching them.”

Step 1, an eight-hour multiple choice test, is a big deal. Performance on the exam, though it’s taken before most students even begin training in a hospital, heavily influences which medical specialties they can eventually pursue after school and at what hospitals they can pursue them.

With medical schools grading pass-fail, the Step 1 score is an increasingly significant piece of information that’s used to sort through residency applications, Hueppchen said. When she took the exam, it was only used as a pass-fail test. Today, residency programs rely on the score more heavily; students and faculty suspect that it’s used as a cutoff for making admissions decisions.

Ryan Carlson, a third-year M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, said that his school focused on teaching “what they thought was important for a physician to know.” But medical students have to know more than what is relevant to a practicing clinician to succeed on Step. The exam focuses on rare diseases and other minutiae, said Carlson, who now tutors for the test.

Hueppchen acknowledged that students at Hopkins and elsewhere “express some distrust that they’re getting everything they need — or that we’re being meticulous in pointing out what they need — to study for and excel on the Step 1 exam.”

SOURCE 






US College Scraps Math and Physics Majors for Unclear Reasons

A Maryland college scrapped math and physics majors Wednesday to cut costs, but denied that it did so out of financial need.

Goucher College described its move to phase out math, physics, music, Russian studies, and four others as part of an “academic revitalization,” The Washington Post reported. The private school has slightly fewer than 1,500 students.

“A small college can’t just keep adding majors,” Goucher President Jose Bowen told The Baltimore Sun. “Sometimes we need to move resources from one to another and subtract too.”

The president reassured alumni that the school does not face financial ruin, citing an A-minus bond rating it received from Standard & Poor’s in a Wednesday email.

“Student interests change, partly in response to how the world changes,” Bowen said. “One-hundred years ago, Goucher (like most colleges) offered (or even required) Latin, Greek and theology courses, and there were no computer science or environmental studies courses.”

Bowen said a faculty team approved the cuts and the plan would allow Goucher to transfer resources away from disciplines that had decreasing enrollments and toward those that were sparking more interest.

But alumni who obtained degrees in the majors to be eliminated, as well as other community members, were not appeased. “How could mathematics be on the cutting block?” former Goucher math professor Robert Lewand said to The Post. “I don’t think Goucher can any longer be called a liberal arts college in the traditional sense of that term.”

“My math degree enabled me to weather the entire Great Recession really, really well,” Goucher graduate Ben Lawrence said, noting that it his major enabled him to find a job as a Baltimore math teacher.

“I’m extremely disappointed,” fellow math graduate Shana Lieberman told The Post, noting that while her class did not have many math majors, “we were the little engine that could.”

The Maryland school is not the only one to cut STEM fields to save money. Seven Texas universities scrapped their physics programs from 2010 to 2018. Bachelor degrees in that field, as well as marketing, economic and finance, fell by the wayside at the University of the District of Columbia in 2013.

“The decision to phase out some majors and minors was not based exclusively on student interest,” Bowen told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The Internal Review Team also examined the overall health of the programs, reviewing both quantitative and qualitative data about each major and minor. … We did not look at salary data for jobs in various fields.”

“Thirty three academic majors were too many to be sustained by a college the size of Goucher,” the president noted. “By phasing out the least viable programs, we will be able to strengthen the 25 that remain and invest in new programs that are in line with evolving student interests. We believe this is an opportunity for existing programs to come together in new configurations that speak in exciting ways to Goucher College’s ideals of social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and international studies.”

SOURCE