Outsourcing Non-Academic Functions
Everybody is talking about the rising cost of college tuition and the resulting student loan debt that America’s college students are accumulating. Parents and students are wringing their hands and complaining loudly, while many politicians are placing blame and passing the buck.
College Parents of America, Weekend Reading Room (5/16/14)
image by flickr user utah state library (cc license) Looking for an early jump on your Sunday paper? College Parents of America recommends that you try these recent stories about higher education.
My Kid Graduated College – Who Pays for Health Insurance Now?
Do we ever stop paying for our kids, even after they reach adulthood? Many parents ask themselves this question, and now health insurance gets added to that list.Healthcare reform now lets post-college adults use their parents' health insurance, as long as the parents are willing to pay. The dependent age has been raised to 26 to cover the large number of uninsured young adults, many of whom are unemployed due to a slowly recovering economy.
Tufts’ new strategy for encouraging students to take a gap year
Approximately 55,000 students took a gap year before their freshman college year to volunteer, intern, travel and work. For those who would like to supplement their collegiate academic experience with a cross-cultural experience, this is a welcome statistic. And gap years seem to pay off in the long run, as gap years seem to correlate with increased employability, higher GPA, higher wages, higher motivation and much more (see the American Gap Association's list here). For some families, though, the reaction to a gap year is likely to be: that sounds great, but who has the extra money for that? And that’s what makes what Tufts has recently announced so appealing.
