With crazy amounts of psychic energy being spent on getting teenagers into college, too many students and their parents think getting admitted is the hard part of the college process.  Actually, it’s not. Squeezing as much value out of the college experience once you’re a student is far more important.

Unfortunately, however,  many students are graduating from college without learning much. From a parent’s perspective that’s a lot of wasted money. And, of course, there are serious ramifications for students who have spent their college years living in a Bud Lite commercial.

Here are a pair of  college blog posts that I’ve written in the past about this problem:

Do Undergrads Learn Much in College?

Expecting More Out of College Students

Today I’m  sharing with you a professor’s thoughtful column in The Chronicle of Higher Education that attempts to explain why so many college students seem impervious to learning. While professors should certainly take some of the blame for student underachievement, William Pannapacker, an associate English professor at Hope College in Michigan, explains the harsh realities of educating undergrads in the 21st century.  You can read his column here:

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I

I am sharing just three of Pannapacker’s observations:

1. Many students are poorly prepared academically when they arrive in college. With rampant grade inflation, earning “A’s” in high school doesn’t guarantee success in college.

2. Untenured professors don’t want to grade too hard or challenge students too much because they might receive poor students evaluations which could hurt their prospects for tenure. Here is an excerpt of what Pannapacker said:

The common wisdom, for the untenured, at least—whether it is true or not—is to find ways to keep the students happy: Expect little, smile a lot, gesture freely, show movies, praise them constantly, give high marks, bring cookies on evaluation day.

3. Demoralized professors. Professors believe they are unappreciated by non-academics and they are discouraged that they make far less than Americans with comparable educations.

What I found curious is that Pannapacker didn’t blame higher ed’s obsession with research as part of this widespread problem.  I wrote about this reality for my college blog for CBS MoneyWatch a year ago:

Why Don’t Professors Like To Teach?

My Son’s Experience

Make sure that your high school students are truly prepared for college. I’d suggest that if your child’s GPA is far higher than his or her standardized tests, there is a problem. Consider tutoring or possibly community college classes  if the “A’s” your child are getting  are simply because the high school classes are too easy.

Our family followed that advice. My son’s high school — High Tech High — was philosophically opposed to AP classes, which was fine. The charter school, however, required all the students to take the same math courses. Students who were struggling with math along with those who hoped to eventually major in engineering and math all took the same classes, which had to be watered down. Ben was getting easy “A’s,” but under the circumstances the grades were meaningless.

My husband, son and I considered this arrangement a disaster so Ben trotted off in the evenings to take community college math classes for five semesters. My son could not have hacked advanced math in college without these extra classes. Ben, a college sophomore at Beloit College, recently declared himself to be a math and art major with a physics minor.

Read more:

25 Colleges With the Best Professors

25 Colleges With the Worst Professors

College Where Professors Are Easy Graders

Searching for the True Price of a University

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of a workBook, Shrinking the Cost of College.  Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

What is the best way to ace your final exams?

This is a timely question as millions of high school and college students are taking their final exams.

You might assume that reading textbooks and notes over and over again is the best way to study, but researchers from Purdue and Washington University insist that it’s not the best approach.

Listen Up Test Takers

Here’s a better way to improve test scores:

You should practice retrieving as much information as you can from memory just as you would have to do on test day. You can do this by writing down what you absorbed — without consulting your notes or book — or you can review what you know out loud. And you should do this several times.

Even if you think you know it, the research shows retrieving it about three or four more times can achieve big gains in learning.

What the Experts Say

In contrast, simply reviewing your notes or textbook can provide you a false sense of confidence. In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, here’s what one of the researchers, Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue, had to say about this phenomenon:

“When you’ve got your chemistry book in front of you, everything’s right there on the page, it’s all very familiar and fluent,” says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University and lead author of a paper in the May issue of Memory about students’ faulty intuitions about effective study habits.

“So you could say to yourself, ‘Yeah, I know this. Sure, this is all very familiar,’” Mr. Karpicke continues. “But of course, when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book’s not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning.”

Learn More Here

To learn more, here is a press release from the Purdue study about the research on performing better on tests and here is the final exam article from The Chronicle.

Who ever thought that hitting the books might not always be the best strategy to acing your finals?

I also found some great advice from a professor writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education on how to take an exam after the studying is complete:

How to Take a Final Exam (Part 1)

How to Take a Final Exam (Part 2)

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow her on Twitter.

Learn more:

Last week our son Ben called the house wanting to know if we wanted to Skype. We usually call him every Sunday to find out how he’s doing so whenever he contacts us it’s a big surprise.

His primary reason for calling was to share with us how hard he was studying for his math final exam. He ended up having three hours to complete 10 problems and it was a brutal test.

Ben flew home yesterday afternoon and will probably sleep until noon today. I’m mentioning my son, who is a sophomore at Beloit College, because it’s providing me with an excuse to share a fascinating story that I stumbled across last week in Time Magazine about the study habits of South Korean students. In South Korea, students treat every day as if they were cramming for finals.

Students there study so much after school that there are laws against excessive studying. Here is how the article begins:

One student was quoted in the story as saying, “All we do is study, except when we sleep.”  The typical student begins classes at 8 am. and stops between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.

Seventy four percent of all South Korean students participate in private after-school instruction. In South Korea there are more private tutors than their school teachers and the most popular ones make millions of dollars of year in online and in-person classes.

Cramming is an entrenched tradition in Asia where typically grades and test scores are what counts to succeed professionally.

South Koreans kicks American kids’ butts on standardized testing and, in fact, beat almost all other nations, but they are paying a price:

This story reminded me of an article I read several years ago in The New York Times about South Koreans’ desire to  get into Ivy League institutions. It highlights residential academies whose focus is to get students into top American universities. Their days begin at 6 a.m. and for some they don’t end until 2 a.m. when the dorm lights are turned off.

President Obama has talked longingly about the South Korean educational system and the South Koreans have talked about Americanizing their system. Too bad we couldn’t combine the American and South Korean systems of education.  Now that would be impressive.

In the meantime, if you child complains about his or her exam schedule, pull out this post.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of a workBook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. She also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter.

I’ve often wondered why colleges and universities are so fixated on admitting students with extremely high SAT or ACT scores.

Some of these teenagers only excel at taking tests and earning top grades, which can lead to awfully uninspiring young adults. I’ve heard admission folks privately lament that kids with high test scores can be duds.  If I was an admission officer, I wouldn’t be interested in some of the “brilliant” kids that I’ve met.

That’s why I wanted to share a wonderful op-ed piece from the Washington Post that Robert J.  Sternberg, a former Yale professor and a past dean at Tufts, wrote. Sternberg, who is now the provost at Oklahoma State University, was involved with Tufts’ innovative (and admirable) approach to measuring students beyond test scores and GPA’s.

Looking Beyond Test Scores and Grade Point Averages

Here’s an excerpt of what Sternberg wrote:

By and large, our best schools don’t always pick the best people in the first place. Many students who appear to have tremendous potential at age 17, based on their SAT scores and GPAs, don’t look so wonderful 20 years later.

An executive at a major investment bank told me awhile ago, looking back on his 25 years on Wall Street, that he had found that SAT scores predicted quite well who would be good analysts at his bank – that is, they predicted the technical skills needed to evaluate investments.

What they did not signal, he said, is who would be able to take the next step, who would have the capacity to envision where various markets are going, to see larger trends and to make decisions that go beyond individual stock or bond picks.

We can do a much better job of college admissions if we start thinking about student abilities differently than we have for the past century. We should assess and value analytical, creative and practical skills and wisdom, not just the ability to memorize or do well on tests. And we should admit people on the basis of their potential for leadership and active citizenship – people who will make a positive, meaningful and enduring difference to the world.

Three cheers for Tufts for attempting to shake things up with its admission process. Here is the link to the entire op-ed: To Get the Real Star Students, College Admissions Should Look Beyond SATs.

And if you want to learn more, read Sternberg’s book, College Admissions for the 21st Century.

Read more on The College Solution:

Do You Know the Difference Between a College and a University?

What Is a Research University?

What Is a Small College?

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

A website that focuses on college issues recently asked me a few questions that parents and teenagers commonly ask or wonder about. I decided to share the questions and my answers with you today. Here goes:

At what stage should you prepare for college?

Teenagers can start preparing for college at the beginning of high school — really before that – by being the best students they can. When colleges give out money, they most value the students who earn good grades and take challenging classes. Grades are more important than standardized test scores. If you need help in high school with your classes, find a tutor or go online to take advantage of great free tutoring resources such as Khan Academy.

What are students’ biggest concern?

Will I get into the schools that I want?  This isn’t going to be an issue, by the way, for most students. Seventy nine percent of college freshmen the country get into their No. 1 choice. So take a deep breath.

What are biggest mistakes teen make?

They are unimaginative when selecting schools. Most kids attend college within 100 miles of their home and never really explore their options. Sometimes schools that are far away can be a better deal — after scholarships are deducted from the price – than state schools close by.

Students also fail to understand the difference between a college and university. These institutions have very different missions and I think colleges are generally superior for undergrads.

Low-income students, particularly non-traditional students, make the mistake of going to for-profit colleges, which have higher student loan defaults and poor graduation rates. For nontraditional students, I’d recommend the non-profit Western Governors University.

Best advice about applying?

Apply to solid match schools. Students generally shouldn’t aim for reach schools unless their parents can pay full price. That’s because colleges have a finite amount of money for financial aid and merit awards and they want to reserve the bulk of it for the students they covet. Those students are often in the top 25% to 33% of the freshmen class.

What can parents do to help kids?

They need to focus on the finances of college and understand how much they can pay and how much will be the responsibility of their children.

They need to be involved with helping to evaluate whether schools are going to be generous to their children. An excellent way to do this is to use the net price calculator that every college must install on their websites by Oct. 29. These calculator will give every family a personalized estimate of what the cost will be for teenager after scholarships and grants are subtracted.

Tell me about your workbook.

I wrote Shrinking the Cost of College as a blue print that parents can use to determine how to find the most generous schools for their children based on their own finances and their teenager’s academic profile. Most teenagers apply to college without having any idea if the schools on their list will give them any money. That shouldn’t be happening!

How did you get into the college field?

I kind of fell into the whole college admission scene. I was a former Los Angeles Times reporter who ended up freelancing when my husband and I moved to San Diego many years ago. I had to figure out what to do with my 401k and pension money from the newspaper and that’s what led me to be a financial journalist since the mid 1990s.

When my daughter was in high school, I decided to explore the best way to cut our college costs, which led me to eventually ditch my personal finance journalism and to switch to covering college issues.

Where did you attend college?

I earned a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia.

My favorite college experience?

I enjoyed discovering my passion in college, which was journalism. I had originally been a history major, but I fell in love with journalism.