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The $10 College Fund

bruges I recently started a college fund for my kids. With my oldest getting ready to turn 10, this was a late start. However, when he was born, we were in no position to set aside anything extra.

At least, we didn’t realize we were at the time.

When our oldest son was born, I was 20 years old. I was working in a factory and hadn’t gone to college myself, yet. That’s a situation that makes it hard to justify a college fund. Financial planning and responsibility was to come at a later date.

So, how much do we have in this shiny new college fund? [Continue Reading…]

Filed Under: Finance, Parenting Tagged With: 529 plan, college, college educations, college fund, college funding, colleges, education, Finance, Financial Planning, funding, intimidate, kids, Links, Links, Money, new college, Parenting, planning, start, start college, starting a

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Homeschooling for Free with Khan Academy

By Jason 17 Comments

If you are a parent who is planning to home school your children or if you are already involved in homeschooling and seeking additional resources, using Khan Academy online is highly recommended regardless of the type of material you are trying to teach or learn. Learning with Khan Academy is possible for students of all ages as well as individuals who are simply seeking new methods of learning without having to pay for the education.

What is Khan Academy?

Bug Report screenshot for Khan Academy (Photo credit: syvwlch)

Khan Academy is a free online resource for anyone interested in learning new material in a wide range of subjects. Whether you are a parent who is planning on homeschooling your children or if you simply have an avid interest in science, mathematics or even art history, using Khan Academy can ultimately give you the knowledge you need for any reason.

Khan Academy operates as a non-profit organization and offers all courses and materials absolutely free of charge. Using Khan Academy is ideal if you are actively seeking out new lesson plans for your own children but you are stumped for ideas and material yourself.

Courses Available From Khan Academy

When you sign up for Khan Academy you can immediately dive into various lessons depending on what you want to learn. Whether you are seeking out assignments in math, science, humanities or even economics and finance, there are plenty of courses in different areas of education. You can also learn all about computer programming and various levels of specific subjects based on whether you are teaching your children or looking to learn something new for yourself.

Why Learning Online From Home Works

Learning online from home is a way for you to incorporate well-developed lessons into your everyday homeschooling lesson plans at any time. When you choose to use an online community such as Khan Academy there are also no deadlines or restrictions on the lessons you want to teach or learn more about yourself.

You can also hand pick specific lessons to help with individualizing each one of your children’s educational outline and plans. Depending on the age of your children and their own interests you can choose from a variety of lessons for beginners and those seeking more advanced work.

Teaching your children new material with the use of the online Khan Academy is a way for you to ensure they are truly understanding the lessons before moving on. Additionally, using Khan Academy is ideal if you are seeking educational content that is sourced, referenced and completely free of charge. Khan Academy lessons and content is and always will be free as this is one of the main missions of the academy itself.

Knowing the benefits of using Khan Academy and how it can help you or your children grow educationally is a way to truly take advantage of the services and lessons being offered. Using Khan Academy when homeschooling brings expansive lessons into the home regardless of your own knowledge and areas of expertise when you begin to teach your children.

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: education, Homeschooling, K through 12, Khan Academy, Lesson plan

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Insane Incentives

By Jason 6 Comments

Spring is in the air.

Standardized Test (Photo credit: biologycorner)

At my son’s school, that means it’s time for the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment tests. These are the standardized tests created by the No Child Left Behind Act that determine if a school is doing its job in educating children. If too many kids have lousy scores, the school gets put on the “Adequate Yearly Progress” list and will eventually get penalized financially.

That creates a perverted incentive in the school system. The main metric for a publicly-funded school’s success in Minnesota is the MCA. If a school can churn out illiterate trench-diggers, they will get increased funding as long as the test scores are good.

For a full two weeks before this test, the school effectively shut down the education program to prepare for the MCA test. That’s two weeks of studying for a set of standardized tests that focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic. I’m a fan of schools prioritizing the three Rs over other subjects, but that’s not what they did.

They spent two weeks studying testing strategies, not the material contained in the test.

In science class, they covered essential scientific elements like “Answer all of the easy questions first, so you can go back and spend time on the hard ones later.”

Spanish class covered verb usage similar to “When the time is almost out on the test, answer ‘C’ for all of the hard questions you have left, que?”

They weren’t being educated, they were learning the most effective way to solve a test to gain funding for next year.

For 2 weeks.

That’s not reading practice, or reviewing the parts of speech, or covering the necessary math skills. It’s “This is a #2 pencil. This is a circle. Practice until lunch.”

Is this really what NCLB was trying to accomplish? Standardized tests to measure school proficiency should be a surprise. Let’s randomly send in test proctors to take over a school for a day and see what the kids have actually learned.

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: Adequate Yearly Progress, education, Minnesota, No Child Left Behind Act, Standardized test

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Universities Won’t Pass Online Enrollment Savings onto You but You’re Still Saving Money

By Jason Leave a Comment

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There’s a very good reason why the majority of universities across the country and the world are starting to embrace students getting their educations and degrees exclusively through online means. It has little to do with the overwhelming ease and obvious perks of getting to study at home or wherever you wish which has been part of the construct of online college for more than a decade, and everything to do with universities becoming increasingly strapped for cash, and their realization that it’s cheaper for both the university and the student to obtain a degree digitally.

Why pay for a professor to devote her whole week to lecturing when you can pay her 25% less by having her do 25% less work? Why greenlight the go-ahead to build a new multi-million dollar wing of the science building if introductory courses can be put online and the preexisting space made available for labs? Printing costs will be lowered. Enrollment rates could be doubled, tripled, even quadrupled, if limited space is no longer a concern.

You’d think universities would therefore make online education cheaper, since it saves them a lot of money. You’d think wrong though. The truth is the average online degree is going to cost about as much as the typical degree gained through traditional enrollment. Part of the reason is simply - because they can get away with it since most people don’t stop to consider the economics of the situation. Another contributing cause of their lack of discount degrees is that doing so can cheapen the degree itself, at least seemingly so. If online degrees cost far less than traditional ones, there would be accusations that the education is inferior.

That’s a bit of a self-serving excuse for most universities, but it makes sense. They also need to protect the role of traditional academia. Marking down online schooling will mean everybody will opt out of real life classrooms, which might be devastating to the schools ability to acquire government subsidies or other entitlements and donations.

But it doesn’t mean getting your degree online doesn’t save you money. It most certainly does. You won’t need to worry about transportation expenses, whether it be the cost of petro, the price of bus fare or the strains of train ticket purchases. Room and board are added burdens of existing inside of a traditional university environment that are removed when you get educated over the Internet. Also, additional expenses justified by your use of equipment (i.e. lab fees) are eradicated as well.

Online university options are quickly becoming accepted by the majority of society as worthy ways to get degrees. No longer are people afraid of the stigma of an online education nor are academic institutions afraid of investing in an unproven tactic. It’s abundantly clear that those who learn online wind up just as qualified as those who learn in traditional settings. It’s also abundantly clear that online MBA programs save money for all parties involved.

Brought to you by Strayer University.

Filed Under: Finance Tagged With: Distance education, education, Online degrees

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The $10 College Fund