Month: March 2019

Paying student loans in your 60s

~ Catherine ~ 2 Comments

GoogleMaster found a passage re: college debt that I hadn’t seen:

Frotman said older consumers need to be better informed about their fiscal responsibility when they cosign student loans. “Quite often we hear from older borrowers that it was never made clear to them that they were essentially co-borrowers,’’ he said. “Many thought they were merely acting as references.”

The whole college funding set-up needs fixing.

Until very recently, I wasn’t aware that with college loans, parents and their children can borrow as much as they like. There’s no need to demonstrate an ability to repay. If you’re a housekeeper who wants to spend $50 to $60K a year to send your child to Syracuse, no problem. 

The sky’s the limit.

Admissions fraud and extra time

~ Catherine ~ 3 Comments

In the Wall Street Journal ($):

The number of students getting accommodations, which help them get more time on the SAT and ACT, has more than doubled from 2009 to 2016, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data. Students in affluent school districts are much more likely to get extended times than students in poorer districts, the data showed.

When colleges receive the students’ scores, they don’t know that the students had additional time to take the exam.

“It’s a loophole that some people know how to use and a lot of people don’t,” said Miriam Freedman, a lawyer who has represented public schools in special-education and disability law and has written several books about accommodations. “The system is rigged.”

Mr. Goldberg of the College Board said, “We are not aware of any prior incident where someone has attempted to take advantage of our accommodations policy to evade our test security systems.”

Not aware of any prior incident?

That doesn’t track.

We raised our kids in an affluent school district. Tonight, over dinner, when I read the boldfaced line about parents wangling accommodations for their nondisabled college-bound kids, C. instantly said “That’s how so-and-so went to Columbia.”

Cheating on extra-time accommodations is an open secret in these parts. Last I checked, College Board still has headquarters in Manhattan, which is pretty much the epicenter of extra-time mongering as far as I’m concerned.

They know.

And see:
Admissions fraud, take 1
Admissions fraud, take 2
Admissions fraud and extra time

Admissions fraud, take 2

~ Catherine ~ 6 Comments

One of the topics Ed and I enjoy being mutually scandalized over is the fact that people are willing to pay upwards of $70K/year to send their kids to college. Even worse: a fair number of people are willing to go into debt for that amount just to underwrite four years of undergraduate education.

Go to school four years, spend 40 years paying the bill — mind blowing. 

But the admissions fraud story has reactivated our family motto. It’s always worse than you think. 

Never did it cross our minds that there were parents who, in order to get their children into a good college, were willing to risk going to jail.

I feel wet behind the ears.

And see:
Admissions fraud, take 1
Admissions fraud, take 2
Admissions fraud and extra time

Admissions fraud, take 1

~ Catherine ~ 5 Comments

Take 1: they should have hired me to tutor their kids.

Except for the part about bribing coaches, of course. 

I know that’s a flippant reaction, but flippant or no, it was one of the first thoughts I had.

If you want your child to have higher scores, it’s much safer to hire a good tutor than to pay people to take the test for him or her. 

And see:
Admissions fraud, take 1
Admissions fraud, take 2
Admissions fraud and extra time

Do gifted readers exist?

~ Catherine ~ 4 Comments

With math, giftedness is obvious (I think).

Is it the same thing with reading and writing? 

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born, the last of three children, on Sept. 15, 1890, to the former Clarissa Boehmer (known as Clara), who was susceptible to fads and spiritualism, and Frederick Miller, a jolly idler whose death in 1901 left the family in reduced circumstances. This being an era when cutting back, for the middle-class Millers, meant renting out their Torquay house and decamping to Paris and Cairo. Childhood education was sporadic. Clara disapproved of formal schooling and of children learning to read before the age of 8, so her daughter taught herself. “I’m afraid Miss Agatha can read, ma’am,” the nanny announced apologetically when the girl was just 4.

Agatha Christie’ Review: The Queen of the Cozy by Anna Mundow | Wall Street Journal |  3/2/2018