<p>Great article. Especially, the part about the honors college, etc.</p>
<p><a href=“http://shine.yahoo.com/event/backtoschool/10-reasons-to-skip-the-expensive-colleges-2518407[/url]”>http://shine.yahoo.com/event/backtoschool/10-reasons-to-skip-the-expensive-colleges-2518407</a> </p>
<p>Very true and very relevant information.</p>
<p>Great article! Thanks for sharing!</p>
<p>*8. High-powered athletic programs drain money from academics.</p>
<p>Only a handful of athletic departments actually pay for themselves. The rest rely on your tuition and fees to help pay for coaches, trainers, equipment, and travel and lodging expenses for the players. Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama has more football coaches (seven) than it has professors in its history department (four). “If you didn’t have football, you could hire more history professors,” Hacker says. The other problem is that once colleges get into big-time sports, corruption tends to follow. Even Princeton recently had an alumnus who paid tuition for a tennis player in violation of NCAA rules, Hacker says. (The student agreed to repay the money to charity.) He acknowledges that some teenagers love the excitement of painting their faces in team colors and cheering for the home team. “How can I argue with that?” he says. “Except to say that you should recognize the trade-off: It’s depleting the quality of your education.”*</p>
<p>^^^
Bama does NOT have that problem. It’s football team is funding all the sports. Crimson Tide Athletics is a money-making endeavor. After the tornadoes hit, CT Athletics donated a $1M to relief efforts. Only a profitable entity could do that.</p>
<p>*</p>
<ol>
<li>Going to an elite university does not guarantee success.</li>
</ol>
<p>To prove this point, Hacker and Dreifus tracked the 900-odd students who graduated from Princeton in 1973 to see if the school was delivering on its promise “to prepare students for positions of leadership,” whether in business, public service, or the arts, which Princeton administrators claim as their goal. “We were very disappointed,” Hacker says. “There were only a handful of recognized names in that class of 900. What that tells us is simply this: In America, if you put your talents to their best use, by the age of 35 or 36, you’ll be passing people from Princeton, no matter where you went to school.” Sure, the authors acknowledge, a designer degree might help you get into medical school or law school at Harvard, Stanford, or Yale. That’s a nice bonus if you can pay the full sticker price, they say, but not enough of an edge to saddle your child with many thousands of dollars in debt.*</p>
<p>^^^
So true…my friend’s son graduated in 09 from Cornell (with some debt), and still does not have a job. 
The funny thing is…if he had gone to school in Alabama (UA, UAH, etc), he would have gone for free (NMF) and would have had a job in Cummings Research Park upon graduation.</p>
<p>*10. Honors colleges at public universities can offer as fine an education as the Ivy League.</p>
<p>The honors colleges at City University of New York, Arizona State, and the University of Mississippi, to name a few, offer the intimacy of a liberal arts college at state-school prices. “These students get first pick of classes and have special classes to themselves, and at Arizona State, they have their own dorms,” Dreifus says. “We met students in those honors colleges who got into Harvard and other elite schools, but they said they didn’t want to burden their parents with that kind of expense. Now that’s a smart kid.”*</p>
<p>^^^
What I like about Bama’s Honors College (it needs a NAME!!), is that the school understands that these kids are special (I know, all kids are special!). What I mean is that it understands that in order to attract/keep these kids it has to offer a level of competitive experience that they would have at a more elite school. They want these kids to have the research experience, the awards, the internships, the co-ops, etc…that can lead to acceptance into top grad/med/law schools and successful careers.</p>
<p>^^^How about Sharpe-Witt Honors College? :)</p>
<p>BTW, when we met with Dr. Witt last year he informed us that Bama’s athletic program is one of a handful of self-sustaining intercollegiate programs in the nation and routinely returns a million dollars to the university general fund annually after paying for all sports.</p>
<p>Sharpe-Witt----LOL!</p>
<p>Oh my…what a great name/combo that would be…and so sharp and witty! :)</p>
<p>Way too funny!! Malanai, you truly have a way with words.</p>
<p>FWIW, it’d likely be the Witt-Halli Honors College. Of course, for a large donation, you can name parts of the Honors College after whomever/whatever you want.</p>