This thread is for parents of teenagers. I have something for you: the first chapter of @ronlieber’s THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR COLLEGE. Because ye gods, here’s what we and our kids are facing.

Beyond obvious changes, like $$$ tuition prices, the system has changed from when we were in school. Nearly all colleges use so-called “merit-aid” to pay kids for good grades.
https://t.co/vyVlfUN4wO
This is NOT need-based financial aid, and it’s not about expanding college access for the poor... it's an arms race by schools scrambling for US News rankings.
Tuition list prices are misleading at this point. College seats are more like airline seats, and your kid's actual price is calculated based on everything from his zip code... SAT scores... how much interest he and his cohort have shown in school X (yes they can figure that out.)
Ron has seen NYC high school classes in which three kids were offered admission to the same small school at three different prices-- and *none* of them had applied for need-based financial aid!
Colleges are rarely transparent about this, even though this is one of the biggest financial decisions of our lives.
Ron, a personal finance columnist for decades, spent years researching how this really works and how to navigate. What's worth paying for re college and what's a total ripoff. How to deal with the feelings of guilt and snobbery that come up.
How to evaluate whether SUNY at 25K a year makes more sense than Tulane at 40k a year or Brown at 75k a year. What college presidents really make of all this-- Ron interviewed a ton of them-- and how to get more information so you're not left feeling like a pawn.
On a personal note, this book also helped me rethink what to look for in a college, because there is ONE thing Ron found makes a bigger difference in the value of an education than anything else. (Not spoiling it here.)
And join us tonight if you can, with @priyaparker and @AnandWrites, on Zoom: https://t.co/VkIjCPJenW
Thank you for sharing this info, and particularly that first chapter. Not just for book sales reasons. Because this system is brutal and @ronlieber (my husband) is passionate about getting this guidance to anyone who might need it.

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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