Online Art School

Yesterday I described how you can use College Results Online to help you generate a promising list of college. If you missed it, here it is:

Heres another idea:  Head to The Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which is the think tank that generates Forbes magazines annual college rankings.

On the centers site you can find the schools that Forbes thinks are the best, as well as other lists that are broken down by region, type of schools and more. Forbes ranks 650 colleges and universities.

The Forbes rankings measure these five areas:

•   Student satisfaction (A big factor is RateMyProfessor.com evaluations.)
•   Post-graduate success (Graduates salaries compiled by PayScale.com.
•    Student debt (How much students owe upon graduation.)
•    Four-year grad rate (Most students dont graduate in four years.)
•    Student competitive awards (Includes Rhodes, Fulbright, Watson and more.)

Here is where you can find an exhaustive explanation of the methodology.

What I like about the magazines rankings is it can help you uncover colleges that you didnt know exist. When you look at the master list, lots of prestige schools rise to the top, but so do little-known institutions that do extremely well. In contrast, some hot brand names like Cornell, USC,  Penn, NYU and Washington University in St. Louis dont fare nearly as well as youd expect if you believe that the rankings over at US News are gospel. (Please dont!)

Schools that fared better in the Forbes rankings than some of those heavy hitters included such institutions as:

• Centre College (KY)
• St. Michael’s College (VT)
• Transylvania University (KY)
• St. Norbert College (WI)
• Westmont College (CA)
• University of Redlands (CA)
• St. Olaf College (MN)
• Hobart and William Smith Colleges (NY)
• University of Minnesota at Morris

By the way, the University of Minnesota at Morris is a public liberal arts college which gives in-state tuition ($12,o91) to all students! The school in Morris edged out the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Here are all the ways the Forbes slices and dices the master list. This is a screen shot so you will have to go to the site to access these lists.

The lists that I particularly like are the ones broken down by region because most students do not stray outside their region. Im using the Midwest list as example because these schools are often a better value than those on the coasts. Also, there isnt as much competition to get into wonderful schools in the Midwest because few families outside the region even know about them! Its the same story in the South.

I bet it didnt take you long to stop recognizing the Midwestern schools on this list. And thats why I shared it. There are amazing schools in this country that just need discovering. What you should resist doing is believing the No. 1 is better than No. 19 and No. 25 has to be than No. 50. Just use these lists as idea generators!

If youre a real numbers person, you might also want to check out the centers component rankings list, where you can tease out such things as the schools where the students are happiest with the teaching, earn the highest salaries upon graduation and more.

“A 20-percent increase in tuition would make higher education for a student like me nearly impossible. If financial aid was to be opened up to middle-class white students, it would make education for me a lot easier than packing on the loans and having a second job. Right now I work as much as possible and I take out as much as I can in unsubsidized loans.”

Justin Nygard

Sophomore, undeclared

“The hope is that I’ll gain a scholarship. My plan used to be to do a ROTC scholarship, but now ROTC has stopped doing all of their scholarships. They won’t do that until next year, and by next year, we won’t have the money to put me through school. As it is, I’ve got a transfer degree, but if tuition increases I won’t be able to finish up my education.”

Timothy Vo

Sophomore, Chinese

“It just means a lot more student loans. I’m already going to try to graduate as fast as humanly possible, so I’m probably going to be taking as many credits as I can without having to pay the extra tuition for credits. I’m going to try my hardest to get out by summer of next year instead of doing a senior year, because I cannot afford to keep going to this school.”

Keena Bean

Junior, undeclared

“It would be a big impact. It’s disappointing that our state isn’t prioritizing education more, and that the school has to pass the burden of everything that they have to buy to the students because that’s the only way that they can pay for it.”

Bradford Walzer

Junior, political science

From Nessa Careys Epigenetics to J-Pop, heres our list of new titles now available:

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance Nessa Carey

Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop Michael Bourdaghs

Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (With a new Afterword by the Author) Dennis Dalton

Psychosocial Capacity Building in Response to Disasters Joshua Miller

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (Now available in paper) Lillian Faderman

Trading currencies has gotten a bad rap from some people, and it hasn’t deserved most of it. While some people think that trading currency pairs is “unsafe” or “too risky,” generally these are a different kind of investor than the type who would even be interested in laying down the cash for currency pairs in the first place.

While Forex trading is potentially lucrative, it isn’t for everyone, and you need to respect that different people are going to have differing opinions about how to grow your wealth. If you try to listen to everyone, you might end up never doing anything.

Image via Flickr

Your Trading Platform is Important

In years past, the only method anyone had for investing was to trade through a broker. You’d call up your broker and instruct him to buy this or sell that. Fortunately, in the computer age, your options have opened up considerably. Regardless of what kind of asset you want to invest in, you can get into Forex currency trading online with UFXmarkets or another wholesale investing platform in this day and age. Your options are generally now limited only by how much you want to invest and when you want to start. But choosing one that allows you to invest in your own way is crucial.

They Aren’t All the Same

Your choice of trading platform is very important to how ultimately successful you become. While many people end up with the first company they see online, you should take the time to check out plenty of different platforms, to make sure the one you choose is the best one for you. While many Forex trading platforms allow you to change up your view of the trading window and other screens, finding one that offers all of the features you want is even more important. Make sure every currency pair that interests you is featured in any company you choose to work with.

Image via Flickr

The Work Should be the Research

Researching currencies can take a lot of twists and turns. You may research the country and its GDP to determine its currency’s relative value, or you may be more technically inclined, and look for trends along the candlesticks. No matter what method you use to pick your currencies, picking your trading platform shouldn’t be anywhere near as difficult. If you have to work harder negotiating the interface than you do in your research, you’ve got a real problem.

Searching for things can take on a philosophical base, but most of the time it isn’t that deep. For a lot of people, searching is all about finding a particular thing that will make their life better. While any given thing probably won’t improve your life all that much, finding it sure can make your day. Of course, context-based searching is all the rage these days because every experience a person has needs to be as customized as humanly possible. But why is that? Why do experiences, even down to searching, need to be so custom they’re almost unique to the individual?

Image via Wikipedia

Uniqueness Counts

When you cruise around with Zugo Bing, you can find almost anything you might be looking for. When you hit up a particular website, you can check out their best deals, and even have deals pop up on your screen based on things you looked for weeks or months ago. While in the old days people used to search for deals and have to compare manually, nowadays, one can call a few years ago “old” and act like it’s inconvenient to look at deals in two or three different browser windows. This is a spoiled generation.

The Real Advantage of Finding What You Want

Courtesy of Google Images

There are a lot of interpretations for almost anything. For some people, the biggest advantage to having great deals and special offers sent right to them is the convenience of it all. Why would you want to waste the time looking around for a great deal, when it can do everything and literally fall into your lap? Of course, the economy also benefits, since more buying by consumers equals more jobs and a faster flow of money. Of course, the ability to deliver coupons and other types of deal that a person is likely to use is also great for businesses themselves, so this level of customization is great all around.

But Is There a Downside?

For the most part, there aren’t too many downsides to having custom deals delivered to you wherever you happen to go. However, there is the downside that having deals put in your face immediately upon arriving at a site can lead to being lazy. While laziness is a major part of the modern experience, it does lead one to wonder how lazy human beings can get before it becomes critical.