Daily Aid 89: Job search data, scholarship caps in Arkansas

Student Financial Aid News

From Inside Higher Ed:

Davenport, Iowa is one of a number of cities along the Mississippi River that brands itself as a gateway to the West. After a special election Tuesday, some of the city’s leaders hope it will be known throughout the region as a gateway to free college tuition. The city’s voters decide today whether to approve Davenport Promise, a program which would provide college tuition to all local high school graduates starting this spring. To qualify, students would need only be Davenport residents and complete 400 hours of approved community service in the area. Private, parochial and home-schooled students would also qualify.

The program would provide students with about $20,000 – an award based on the cost of attending a local community college for two years and a state university for two more. Students, however, would not be limited as to where they could attend college and would be able to attend any institution – in- or out-of-state, private or public. Those who choose vocational training would receive an amount up to the tuition rate at the local community college, while those who enter the military would receive a $7,500 homestead grant upon returning home.

Commentary

An intriguing idea. If the city is able to make ends meet and keep the program affordable, it may well be a model to be copied to other towns and cities.

File under, huh? From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Arkansas legislature is taking a different approach to reining in soaring tuition costs: Today it sent a bill to the governor’s desk that would cap the amount of money public colleges can spend on scholarships.

Increases in scholarship aid lead to higher tuition costs, State Rep. Bill Abernathy, who shepherded the Senate-passed bill through the House of Representatives, told Associated Press. “You almost have the reverse Robin Hood scenario,” said Mr. Abernathy, a Democrat. “You’re taking from the poor and giving it to the rich in some cases.”

Commentary

That’s got to be the most baffling idea I’ve ever heard. There’s some truth to the idea that the more financial aid available, the more colleges will charge – we saw that two years ago, when an increase to subsidized Stafford loan limits was followed literally the next day by an increase in tuition at some for-profit colleges for the exact dollar amount of the tuition increase. Even still, the idea of giving away fewer scholarships as a tuition control makes no sense.

If you wanted to rein in tuition, especially at public colleges, why not just legislate a cap on tuition increases indexed to inflation, and leave it at that? Or, as one commenter in the article points out, end merit-based scholarships and redirect the funding to need-based scholarships.

The proposal in Arkansas is really confusing, to say the least.

Scholarship Update

Recession relief scholarship. We give four $500 scholarships annually to help students hampered by debt to continue their studies, and you can apply online now. We created the award in 2003 as a once-a-year award, but based on the number of great applications we’ve received, we now grant four awards. We also send the check directly to you, not your school. To be eligible for the scholarship, you must be attending or planning to attend a college, trade school, technical institute, vocational program or other post-secondary education program in the 2009-2010 academic year.

Details at our free college scholarship search site.

Jobcast

Do you know who’s hiring in your area? If you were to focus on an industry or a field, how would you know where to focus your efforts?

Here’s a helpful way to determine just who’s hiring in your region. You’ll need a text editor, a spreadsheet capable of doing subtotals, and your local Craigslist. I’ll be doing mine with BBEdit for the Mac, Microsoft Excel, and Boston’s Craigslist.

Step 1. Create a new text file and open up the general Craigslist jobs, which lists everything.

Step 2. Mass copy and paste several days of listings into your text file. I’m using a week’s worth.

Step 3. Extract the fields from the rest of the file. I typically do this by doing find/replace and process lines containing, followed by a sort. This gives me a nice text file to import into Excel.

Step 4. Open up in Excel and do subtotals by count. This will give you a nice summary of what’s happening in your market. In Boston, we’ve seen 2,400 jobs open up in the area.

Step 5. If you’re an Excel wizard, you can of course slice and dice your results to make pretty charts.

So what’s all this mean and why is it important? Simple. Two takeaways:

1. If you work in a portable role – accounting, sales, marketing, etc., – roles that nearly all companies need, this method of finding which industries are growing in your geographic area will help you focus your job search.

2. If you work in a very industry specific role, doing this for several cities might reveal in which part of the country your best chances for employment lie. For example, in the Boston graph above, we see that government is at the bottom for jobs, which means that if you’re looking to work in government, Boston might not be the place for you. On the other hand, if you’re in healthcare or hospitality, Boston appears to very much be the place to be.

The other thing this sort of data mining does is help confirm or dispel gut feelings about the job market in your city with real data, data that hopefully illuminates where and how you should be job searching.

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Reminders

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