retention

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Gym Attendance as a Way to Boost your College GPA?

    A Michigan State University paper has taken the internet and other media by storm today by laying out the statistical case that gym attendance can boost a college GPA for freshmen and sophomores. 
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Research indicates the loss of a parent affects chances of obtaining a college degree

  image by flickr user lee morley, cc license For every two years of college, 1.7% of students can expect a parent to pass away. This statistic, from Balk, Walker and Baker's "Prevalence And Severity Of College Student Bereavement Examined In A Randomly Selected Sample," shows how common parent death is among college students. In numbers alone, 1.7% of students translates to roughly 360,000 college students in the U.S. over a two-year period.  Compounding this astounding rate of loss and heartbreak is the fact that losing a parent can effect educational attainment. 
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Report on students that leave high school reinforces what we know about students who leave college

  screenshot of gradnation.org/report/dont-call-them-dropouts Yesterday, America’s Promise Alliance and its Center for Promise at Tufts University released Don't Call Them Dropouts. This report discusses recent research that was tasked with understanding the experiences of young people who leave high school before graduation. This report emphasizes the resilience of students in the face of experiences that interrupt and challenge their access to education. Usually, College Parents of America doesn't discuss reports on high school students or their high school graduation rates. However, in reviewing this report, we've found that many of the challenges that high school students say interrupted their education have also been known to interrupt college education.
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Comparing Colleges on Retention and Graduation Rates

  (photo by flickr user Sean MacEntee)For families seeking to maximize their investment in college, it is wise to compare completion and retention rates for potential schools. Two recent U.S. News and World Report posts reflect upon important aspects of student progress toward completion: freshman retention rate and 4-year graduation rate.

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CBO: Federal Government Projects to Profit from Student Lending

   image by flickr user jparise (cc license) Over the past year, there have been multiple accounts of how much the federal government profits from its student lending. This week, the Congressional Budget Office announced that those profits project to continue through 2024. 
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Parents and Loans for Postsecondary Education, Wall Street Journal Article

As the costs of college have risen, so has the number of parent loans and the amount borrowed by parents. A recent Wall Street Journal article discussed this rise. Citing FinAid.org, "over 17% of graduates in the 2011-12 academic year had parent Plus loans borrowed for them, which are loans available directly from the federal government, each with an average $33,800." Just how big a rise is that from previous parent borrowing? "That's up from 13% with about $23,300 on average in the 2007-08 academic year." 
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Humor: Completing the FAFSA Comic

 The fourteenth comic in the College Parents of America Humor series is now available on collegeparents.org. This comic, a co-creation of College Parents of America and Hector Curriel, focuses on the pain that parents feel when looking at the result of FAFSA's expected family contribution calculation. 
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Student Health & its Impact on College Graduation

 Parents worry about their students in many ways.  We are worried about having the money to support their student, we worry about the risks that may interefere with the investment they make in college, we worry about the academic progress their student makes towards graduation and probably most frequnetly we worry about the health and well being of their college student.   What may surprize some families is how interconnected the health of their student is to their progress towards graduation.