Paying for College

How to Cut College Costs by $5,000

Colleges that lock tuition at the freshman rate can save parents thousands

As many colleges announce painful tuition hikes for the coming academic year—about $2,500 at UCLA, about $1,000 at the universities of Virginia, Georgia and Washington—students and parents at a few dozen other colleges don't have to worry about tuition inflation.

[Read about other ways to protect against tuition inflation.]

That's because all public universities in Illinois and at least nine private colleges around the countryguarantee entering freshmen that their tuition prices won't rise during their four years. Of course, these schools do typically raise other fees or costs, such as dorm and cafeteria charges, every year. Plus, they raise the tuition they charge each successive freshman class.

Colleges typically offer "tuition guarantees," "tuition locks," or "truth in tuition" programs to to attract students and parents worried about paying for college.

But guaranteeing not to increase prices, when professors want annual raises and health insurance premiums keep jumping, can be costly to colleges. The College of St. Joseph, in Rutland, Vt., which launched a tuition guarantee program in 2009, figures the college gives up—and parents save—about $5,000 in tuition increases over a student's four years.

As the economy and investment markets tanked in recent years, some colleges decided they couldn't afford to give up that revenue, and scrapped tuition guarantee programs. (Colleges are honoring commitments made to previous classes, of course.) After just three years, public universities in Georgia stopped offering flat tuition to freshmen entering in the fall of 2009, for example. Pace University andCentral Michigan University decided they could no longer afford to shield students from tuition price hikes in 2007.

Fixed-price colleges often try to make up the costs of the no-price-increase guarantee in other ways. Tony Pals, spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents private colleges, notes that many fixed-tuition colleges "have to increase tuition for each subsequent freshman class at a higher-than-average rate."

In addition, there are typically a few strings attached to limit colleges' losses. Most only guarantee flat tuition for entering freshmen for four years, for example, so students who take extra time eventually have to pay higher rates.

Some of the fixed-tuition colleges are also some of the most expensive. George Washington University, for example, has been one of the nation's priciest colleges for years. Its 2009 tuition of about $40,000 was about $15,000 higher than the average private college's tuition last year. The total cost of attendance, including books, living expenses and travel, for freshmen entering in 2010 is nearly $56,000 for those who receive no financial aid. (That scenario applies to only about half of GW students. GW reported to the federal government that 53 percent of its undergraduates receive grants, averaging a little more than $22,000 apiece.)

Other fixed-price colleges, such as the public universities in Illinois, however, remain comparatively affordable. And parents can hope that more colleges will consider adding the option. Susan Englese, admissions dean at the College of St. Joseph, said her college adopted the program in part because a few other small, private colleges that made similar promises, such as Hiram College in Ohio, believe the guarantee attracts more students. "Families are becoming really good consumers" about college now, Englese says. She has noticed parents of prospective students touring the campus often ask how much they should expect tuition to rise. The guarantee that parents won't have to worry about tuition increases for four years "helps us stand out," she says.
[See the list of colleges that  guarantee level tuition for a fee].
Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of America's Best Colleges.

Reader Comments
 

practical reality
 

Advice to Parents

Do not waste your money paying for your kids education, instead set them up in a business, and when they are financially self-suportive let them decide if they want to go to college. There are many online degree programs that will save you money, you do not have to live on a college campus to become educated.Look at multi-millionaire business owners who never completed college and ask yourself what do they know that you do not? Bill gates, Micheal Dell, Steve Jobs and others must know college degrees are not a requirement to succeed in business.

Put your kids financial success and ability to survive as the first priority not the last priority. Degrees no longer guarantee jobs

justshootme

Big deal! what they give you with one hand they take away with the other! Example: what good does it do to quarantee tuition rates when in Calif. school system they are constantly revising the requirements and curriculum so they can milk more money out of the students! Turn regular 4 yr degrees into 6 yr degrees! Even commercial schools like DeVry do this all the time. No one is going to give you a guarantee that your college costs will be reasonable, predictable and affordable. I recommend you do a nationwide search and find the cheapest school possible, because no-one is going to give the students a guarantee of finding a job after they rack up over $100k in debt. Schools are now catering to foreign students because they know that they can return to their countries and find jobs unlike USA students who have to deal with job markets where no employer wants to pay American wages.Why else do you think Wally's world is the biggest employer but they only pay minimum wage. They are now exporting engineering jobs to China. Wake up and smell the bandini in this economy a college degree is no longer a guarantee of a good paying job.

Social Media Explained In 2 Minutes (10 Key Facts)

Social media is in the limelight and the topic of conversation in your office and with your friends.  You can read about it everywhere.  However, there are still people who do not quite understand what it is, and what its relevance is in our professional and personal lives.  The majority of people still do not know how it impacts our businesses, and how it can help with our campaigns.

There are times when we are asked to explain social media, and many times, we have a hard time. This especially happens when the person we are speaking to has not had the chance to experience the power of social media first hand. Most of my work deals with explaining this phenomenon and its impact on business growth and/or brand awareness. We use several methods to effectively explain social media, especially to our clients. There are two ways that are most effective in my experience. One is to use case studies and the other is to use facts and statistics. People can relate these to what they experience on a day-to-day basis.

Whenever I am asked to join a meeting to explain digital and social media, I find it easy to do. This is mostly because I am a blogger, a Twitterholic and a FaceBook user. Also, I use a lot of online tools which I personally test. However, what if you do not have the same experience that I have yet you want to start a conversation with your own clients or business partners? I have found a video that explains social media in 2 minutes using facts that explain why it is growing and why you and your brand should be a part of the social media experience.

Google Rolls out its New Web Indexing System: Caffeine

Google began its work on a new search index last year that was expected to launch somewhat in the beginning of this year. While that did not happen, the search giant has finally rolled out its latest and much anticipated Caffeine web indexing system.

Google boasts about its search indexing technology as capable of providing 50 percent fresher results for web searches than the last index, and that it is the largest collection of web content ever offered by the company.

“Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before,” read the Google statement on the official blog.

Google outlines the motives for its next iteration to search products as efforts to cope up with the growing size of the content on the web and fully satisfy the customer demands of faster ways to find the latest relevant content.

Wish to know how it works? Here’s how Google explains its efficient Caffeine:

“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

You may not experience the changes in your search results immediately but within some period of time. Also Google promises to bring more improvements in months to come when these modifications may become more prominent. Google is the most loved search engine across the globe and if continues to offer more enhanced search technology, it will easily sustain the lead against its rivals.

Is Facebook Getting Bigger Than Google? [STATS]

According to the analysts at Hitwise, social networks in general are more popular than search engines in some parts of the world.

In fact, networks such as Facebook have been pushing hard against the biggest names in web search, including Google, for several months now. As Hitwise reported recently, Facebook’s overall web traffic pulled ahead of Google’s for the first time in the U.S. in March of this year.

Now, we’ve learned that in the UK, people are visiting social networks more than they’re visiting search engines. Facebook dominates the current crop of social networks, accounting for the majority (55%) of all social site visits. When compared to the wider web, Google gets around 9.3% of all web traffic, while Facebook captures just over 7%.

But when UK stats for all search engines were stacked up with data from all social sites, social networks accounted .55% more traffic than search engines. This is a first-time occurrence, but as you can see from the charts below, it’s a trend that’s likely just starting to take off.

Compare that graph with these long-term stats from Alexa showing global pageviews for Facebook and Google; we can clearly see that at least one social network is on the rise.

While social networks such as Facebook don’t pose an immediate threat to search engines for their core functionality — organizing the web and helping people find content — they do pose a large threat to search engines’ largest revenue source: advertising.

If you were Google, would these kinds of numbers be worrying to you? Do you think that search engines are, in some ways, on the decline? Or is Facebook’s meteoric rise simply changing the paradigm a bit more than we expected?

I am proud to go to India: Obama

Washington: U.S. President Barack Obama says he has to go to India to experience "all that India and its people and its incredible ancient culture have to offer."

Announcing his plans to visit India in early November at a reception hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna at the state department, Obama cited a quote from a European scholar who travelled to India more than a century ago. 

"Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language or religion or mythology or philosophy, whether it be law or customs, primitive art, or science, you have to go to India, because some of the most valuable and instructive material of the history of man are treasured up in India, and India only," he quoted the scholar.
"So I look forward to advancing our partnership, to experiencing all that India and its people and its incredible ancient culture have to offer," Obama said.

"So when it comes to the sphere of our work, building a future of greater prosperity, opportunity and security for our people, there is no doubt; I have to go India.

"But even more, I am proud to go to India, and I look forward to the history that we will make together, progress that will be treasured not just by this generation but by generations to come."

Earlier Krishna said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recalled very warmly his meeting with Obama in April. "He and over one billion citizens of India look forward to welcoming you and your family later this year."

"A very warm and heartfelt welcome awaits you and the family," he said. 

Intel announces new 'Canoe Lake' innovation platform at Computex

Intel rolled out a slew of new product plans at Computex this weekend, all packaged together in one announcement. But the one of the standout innovations is the ultra-slim Canoe Lake platform on the "world's thinnest netbook."

The Canoe Lake innovation platform was debuted at a keynote speech on the sharp-looking, 14-millimeter thin netbook pictured above. According to Intel, it is 50% thinner than any other netbook around at the moment. Capable of supporting single and dual-core Atom processors, the system is a prototype/reference of sorts, but we could be seeing something like this available by the holiday season.

Canoe Lake wasn’t the only Intel and netbook-related news. Acer’s CEO Gianfranco Lanci stated that future Acer netbooks and tablets powered by Intel Atom processors will be operating on the MeeGo open software platform.

While the MeeGo strategy is interesting, I can’t take my eyes off of that ridiculously-thin netbook above. Given that we don’t know any other stats about the machine combined with its groundbreaking portable frame, it’s probably going to end up on the pricey end. How much would you be willing to pay for such a computer?

Finding a cure for Indonesia's sick river

1. Collecting rubbish on the banks of the Citarum river outside the village of Sukamju, on the outskirts of Bandung, Indonesia. It is the world's most polluted waterways.

2. The river supplies Indonesia's capital, Jakarta with 80 percent of it's drinking water. In the village of Sukamaju a man cleans plastic bags in it's waters because he says the strong chemicals help him do his job more effectively.

3. Rice plantations in the area rely on the untreated water from the Citarum river for irrigation. The river supplies 30 million people with water.

4. Water, black from chemical pollution, runs down a channel outside a textile plant. Dozens of textile factories line the banks of the river by Sukamaju and toward the city of Bandung.

5. The village of Sukamaju have no filter system. While they boil the water to drink, they wash and clean in the untreated water. The lack of sanitation means reddish and effluent goes directly into the river.

6. Four-year-old Wildan has spots covering his face and neck that his family delves are caused by the polluted water of the river.

7. The Asian Development Bank has committed $500 million over the next 15 years to clean up the river and support the communities that rely on it.