Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

How Tech is Changing College Life

More than 90% of college students use email to communicate with professors and 73% say they cannot study without technology. Seven in 10 take notes on keyboards instead of paper, virtually all students who own an ereader read textbooks on it and most use digital tools when preparing a presentation. All that tech has caused something of a dependency too — 38% of students can’t go more than 10 minutes without checking their smartphone or other device. All told, students spent $13 billion on electronics in 2009.

Source: Mashable
http://mashable.com/2012/05/06/tech-college-infographic/

 

92% of College Students Have Lied on Résumés

If you want a more accurate picture of a job candidate’s experience, take a gander at his or her LinkedIn page. According to researchers at Cornell University, people are less likely to lie about their past experience on the social network than they are in a traditional résumé.

But lying is still common among job seekers, with 92 percent of respondents saying they’ve lied at least once on a résumé. The study, published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, followed 119 college students ages 18 to 22.

The study says that websites such as LinkedIn can lead to greater honesty when it comes to résumé claims such as experience and responsibilities. That’s because claims are more easily verified in a public, online setting, so liars are more likely to get caught.

Source: PRDaily
http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/11143.aspx

Population of Needy College Students is Exploding

A higher education official from Wisconsin who attended the recent Council of Independent Colleges conference in Florida made a remarkable statement during a question-and-answer session.

There is a group of students who enter college with such dire financial need that the amount the federal government expects their families to contribute to college is effectively zero. In Wisconsin, that zero-pay population has grown by half in a single year: from 42,641 students in the 2008-09 academic year to 65,800 in 2009-10.

The data come from Rolf Wegenke, president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, and surely they mirror a national trend.

Incoming college students have grown markedly more needy since the 2008 economic downturn.

“The precipitous increase in student need represents a genuine crisis for these students and their families—a crisis which is replicated across the country,” said Wegenke.

It’s also a crisis for colleges. The federal government, through its Free Application for Federal Student Aid, has determined that many more students bound for Wisconsin colleges should have their expenses covered entirely through aid: Their “expected family contribution” is zero. But the federal government doesn’t stipulate where that aid will come from.

Source: Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/population-of-needy-college-students-is-exploding/2012/01/11/gIQARRaLrP_blog.html

Canadian Boomerang: 51% of Young Adults Live with Parents

You may know members of Generation Boomerang.

They’re 20 to 29 years old and still living at home — or they had to ‘boomerang’ home due to money, job or personal problems.

The global trend — probed in Sharon Bartlett’s documentary premiering Thursday on CBC — shows 51 per cent of young Canadian adults still live with their parents.

“It’s global. We went to Italy where 70 percent are living at home,” said the filmmaker who made Generation Boomerang, and other docs, with Maria LeRose.

“It’s a new life stage, in the same way society accepted adolescence,” Bartlett said. “It’s here for the long haul, and won’t go away when the economy gets better. Some youths are quite comfortable being at home — in many cultures it’s the norm.”

Source: bclocalnews
http://www.bclocalnews.com/entertainment/133495083.html

Average Student Loan Dept Tops $25,000

Students are graduating from college with an ever-increasing amount of student loan debt, a study from a nonprofit education group shows.

Two-thirds of all students who graduated college last year owed money for loans, and those that did held an average loan debt of $25,250, according to data from the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success. That represents a 5% increase over the average student loan debt in 2009.

The average student loan debt shot up by 5% in 2010 and is now approaching the $30,000 mark in several states.

As bad as that may sound, the actual average debt per student might be even higher, as the report factors in only data from four-year public and private nonprofit colleges and not from for-profit institutions, which often have higher tuition costs.

The Street
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11301888/1/average-student-loan-debt-tops-25000.html

College Students Are Connected...to Their Cellphones

Survey says: College students are very connected to their cellphones. Duh.

Created by: HackCollege

Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2015

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. Mindset List websites at Beloit College and at mindsetmoment.com, the media site webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million hits annually.

This year’s entering college class of 2015 was born just as the Internet took everyone onto the information highway and as Amazon began its relentless flow of books and everything else into their lives.  Members of this year’s freshman class, most of them born in 1993, are the first generation to grow up taking the word “online” for granted and for whom crossing the digital divide has redefined research, original sources and access to information, changing the central experiences and methods in their lives. They have come of age as women assumed command of U.S. Navy ships, altar girls served routinely at Catholic Mass, and when everything from parents analyzing childhood maladies to their breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, sometimes quite publicly, have been accomplished on the Internet.

Andre the Giant, River Phoenix, Frank Zappa, Arthur Ashe and the Commodore 64 have always been dead.

Their classmates could include Taylor Momsen, Angus Jones, Howard Stern's daughter Ashley, and the Dilley Sextuplets.

 1. There has always been an Internet ramp onto the information highway.
 2. Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents.
 3. States and Velcro parents have always been requiring that they wear their bike helmets.
 4. The only significant labor disputes in their lifetimes have been in major league sports.
 5. There have always been at least two women on the Supreme Court, and women have always commanded U.S. Navy ships.
 6. They “swipe” cards, not merchandise.
 7. As they’ve grown up on websites and cell phones, adult experts have constantly fretted about their alleged deficits of empathy  and concentration.
 8. Their school’s “blackboards” have always been getting smarter.
 9. “Don’t touch that dial!”….what dial?
10. American tax forms have always been available in Spanish.
11. More Americans have always traveled to Latin America than to Europe.
12. Amazon has never been just a river in South America.
13. Refer to LBJ, and they might assume you're talking about LeBron James.
14. All their lives, Whitney Houston has always been declaring “I Will Always Love You.”
15. O.J. Simpson has always been looking for the killers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
16. Women have never been too old to have children.
17. Japan has always been importing rice.
18. Jim Carrey has always been bigger than a pet detective.
19. We have never asked, and they have never had to tell.
20. Life has always been like a box of chocolates.

To view the entire list of 75 items, click the source link below.

Source: Beloit College
http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2015/

Four in Five College Students Sext

A recent survey from the University of Rhode Island has put some numbers on how widespread sexting is among College students. Seventy-eight percent of students in the survey say they've received sexually suggestive messages and 56% say they have received intimate images. Two thirds of the students said they sent salacious messages. Before we call a national epidemic of Weiner -itis, we should note that 73% of texts were sent to a romantic partner. Almost like a romantic old love-letter, but shorter and with more emoticons.

And, it seems, with more staying power. Almost a fifth of the people who received the racy messages then forwarded them onto somebody else. And 10% of all the explicit messages sent were relayed without permission from the original author. (Those statistics should be put on a label and stuck on cellphones everywhere.)

Source: Time
http://healthland.time.com/2011/07/25/how-many-college-kids-sext-four-out-of-five/

Amazon Launches Kindle Textbook Rental Service

Amazon is now allowing students to rent textbooks on their Kindle and Kindle apps. The e-commerce giant is launching Kindle Textbook Rental today, which allows students to save up to 80% off textbook list prices by renting textbooks from the Kindle Store.

Amazon says that students can customize rental periods between 30 and 360 days, so students only pay for the specific amount of time they need a book. And students can extend the rental time if they need more time to use the textbook. The company says that “tens of thousands of textbooks” are available for the 2011 school year from publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.

The company is also extending its Whispersync technology so that students can get to keep and access all of their notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, even after a rental expires.

Savings, says the company, amount to up to 80% off the print list price on a 30-day rental. For example, an accounting textbook costs $109.20 to buy the actual book, but starts at $38.29 to rent the textbook.

Kindle Textbooks can be read across both the Kindle devices and Amazon’s free Kindle Reading Apps for PC, Mac, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android-based devices.

Source: TechCrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/amazon-launches-kindle-textbook-rental-service-allows-students-to-store-notes-in-the-cloud/

Are College Freshman Overconfident?

Among academics who track the behavior of young adults and teens, there's a touchy debate: Should the word 'entitled' be used when talking about today's younger people? Are they overconfident in themselves? San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge says new research proves that's the case. Her study, published online and in the British journal Self and Identity, investigates why college-aged kids may be more self-centred and narcissistic than past generations.

Among other things, Ms Twenge and her colleagues found that a growing percentage of incoming college freshmen rated themselves as 'above average' in several categories, compared with college freshmen who were surveyed in the 1960s. When it came to social self-confidence, about half of freshmen questioned in 2009 said they were above average, compared to fewer than a third in 1966. Meanwhile, 60 percent in 2009 rated their intellectual self-confidence as above average, compared with 39 percent in 1966, the first year the survey was given.

In the study, the authors also argue that intellectual confidence may have been bolstered by grade inflation, noting that, in 1966, only 19 per cent of college students who were surveyed earned an 'A' or 'A-minus' average in high school, compared with 48 percent in 2009. Ms Twenge said: "Students might be more likely to think they're superior because they've been given better grades."

Many bosses and others in the workplace have long argued that recent college students often arrive with unreasonably high expectations for salary and an unwillingness to take criticism or to pay their dues.

Janelle Mills, who'll be a junior this fall at Stetson University in Florida, says she and her peers get tired of their elders 'ragging' on them about being entitled or lazy - or just labelling them in general. But she also thinks there's something to this study about over-confidence. "Kids are being encouraged to be the best that they can be. I think that this can create a superiority complex for those who begin to think that their best is better than everyone else's," she said. "Modesty and humility are no longer common and are becoming harder to find."

Source: Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004530/Are-college-freshman-overconfident-Study-shows-year-students-feel-average.html