Jesse Singal

So the story of the Georgetown sophomore searching for a personal assistant to do laundry, fill up his car with gas, and complete various other menial tasks has reached the pages of The Washington Post. Readers of the original Georgetown Voice blog post on the subject quickly figured out his name, and he responded to […]

Inside Higher Ed: After several years of experimenting with “hybrid” Spanish courses that mix online and classroom instruction, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has decided to begin conducting its introductory Spanish course exclusively on the Web. Spanish 101, which had featured online lessons combined with one classroom session per week, will drop […]

This isn’t particularly surprising: At community colleges, an underperforming high school graduate studying computer science is much more likely to see an earnings increase than a well-prepared high school graduate studying literature. That is the conclusion of a new analysis designed to explore the factors that predict which community college students will gain the most […]

Via Consumerist, CampusGrotto.com has up a list of the country’s most expensive colleges. The top 10: 1. Sarah Lawrence College – $54,410 2. New York University – $51,991 3. The George Washington University – $51,730 4. Bates College – $51,300 5. Skidmore College – $51,196 6. Johns Hopkins University – $51,190 7. Georgetown University – […]

Emily, a student at Princeton, commented on my post from yesterday: I mean, it is surprising and it isn’t. As I said when I first saw that article, it definitely bucks convention to think that Yale would be behind the trend on something sociosexual, and that Princeton would have gotten there first. But there are […]

Speaking of incoming freshman who aren’t ready for a rigorous college curriculum, the Las Vegas Sun reports on UNLV’s attempts to figure out why this is such a commonplace occurrence: In 2008, more than a third of the Nevada high school graduates who enrolled at the state’s universities and colleges required remedial classes in English […]

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education has an important article about remedial education. It highlights the story of Kafayat Olayinka, a student at the University of the District of Columbia. Olayinka graduated from a D.C. school with a 3.5 GPA, but did very poorly on the battery of tests given to all incoming freshmen at UDC. […]

The Washington Post highlights a different part of the College Board report I mentioned earlier: Tuition and fees for public four-year colleges are now $7,020 on average and for private colleges $26,273, the College Board reported Tuesday, with prices rising faster in the public sector. Colleges and universities have not slashed sticker prices in response […]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The volume of private student loans plunged by 52% in 2008-2009 as recession-battered lenders tightened credit standards for borrowers and many abandoned what had been a fast-growing sector of the financial-aid market. Students and their families took out an estimated $11 billion in private student loans for the 2008-2009 school […]

Apparently, every Ivy League school other than Yale has gender-neutral housing. For Yale, not yet, but apparently the school’s upper brass are all on board with going that route eventually and are working out a few logistical hiccups. Gender-neutral housing may still be fodder for social conservatives, maybe, but it’s no longer a controversial issue […]