Student's Mailing List 06-30

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Watermelon Tea Pot 06-28

A watermelon is not only refreshing and delicious to eat, but also makes a great centerpiece for any table, no matter what the celebration. Be the first one on the block to invite your friends over for an afternoon tea party, with a centerpiece that is the Teapot. Serve watermelon grapefruit shooter, watermelon crab cups, and watermelon in a blanket for a delicious watermelon tea party. For a child's party, serve a refreshing water melon yogurt mint smoothie that is sure to please.

Using an oblong or round watermelon, slice off a piece approximately 1 ½ inches down on the stem end.

Cut the small, round cover handle out of the center of this piece by using a small round cookie cutter, or cut by hand.

Place the remaining larger "ring" on the serving plate to act as a base and place the whole watermelon on top of it, cut side down.

Slice off approximately 4 inches (10.2 cm) from the other end of the watermelon and set aside.

Scoop out the watermelon flesh using a melon baller, and set aside.

Slice the 4-inch thick watermelon piece in half, lengthwise, making two 2-inch round pieces.

Use the round end piece for the Teapot cover. Make decorative cuts in the rind with a melon baller and fill holes with melon balls.

Lay the remaining melon slice down and cut in half, making the handle and spout out of each half.

Scoop out the red flesh. Make decorative cuts in the rind of the handle piece with a melon baller and fill with melon balls. You may need to trim the spout and handle pieces so they fit flat against the melon.

Attach with sturdy, round toothpicks  

Tips

• Don't waste the watermelon, eat the fruit. 

Things You'll Need

• Oblong or round watermelon 

• Melon baller 

• Small sharp knife 

• Round toothpicks 

• Small cookie cutter (optional)

How to Carve a Watermelon Tea Pot

America is no longer a land of opportunity 06-27

June 25, 2012 7:19 pm

America is no longer a land of opportunity

By Joseph Stiglitz

US inequality is at its highest point for nearly a century. Those at the top – no matter how you slice it – are enjoying a larger share of the national pie; the number below the poverty level is growing. The gap between those with the median income and those at the top is growing, too. The US used to think of itself as a middle-class country – but this is no longer true.

Economists have justified such disparities by citing “marginal productivity theory”, which explains higher incomes through greater societal contributions. But those who have really transformed our society, by providing the knowledge that underpins the advances in technology, earn a relative pittance. Just think of the inventors of the laser, the Turing machine or the discoverers of DNA. The innovation of those on Wall Street, while well compensated, brought the global economy to the brink of ruin; and these financial entrepreneurs walked off with mega-incomes.

One might feel better about inequality if there were a grain of truth in trickle-down economics. But the median income of Americans today is lower than it was a decade and a half ago; and the median income of a full-time male worker is lower than it was more than four decades ago. Meanwhile, those at the top have never had it so good.

Some argue that increased inequality is an inevitable byproduct of the market. False: several countries are reducing inequality while maintaining economic growth.

Markets are shaped by the rules of the game. Our political system has written rules that benefit the rich at the expense of others. Financial regulations allow predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices that transfer money from the bottom to the top. So do bankruptcy laws that provide priority for derivatives. The rules of globalisation – where capital is freely mobile but workers are not – enhance an already large asymmetry of bargaining: businesses threaten to leave the country unless workers make strong concessions.

Textbooks teach us that we can have a more egalitarian society only if we give up growth or efficiency. However, closer analysis shows that we are paying a high price for inequality: it contributes to social, economic and political instability, and to lower growth. Western countries with the healthiesteconomies (for example those in Scandinavia) are also the countries with the highest degree of equality.

The US grew far faster in the decades after the second world war, when inequality was lower, than it did after 1980, since when the gains have gone disproportionately to the top. There is growing evidence looking across countries over time that suggests a link between equality, growth and stability.

There is good news in this: by reducing rent-seeking – finding ways of getting a larger share of the pie, rather than making the pie larger – and the distortions that give rise to so much of America’s inequality we can achieve a fairer society and a better-performing economy. Laws that tax speculators at less than half the rate of those who work for a living or make the innovations that are transforming our society, say something about our values; but they also distort our economy, encouraging young people to move into gambling rather than into more productive areas. Since so much of the income at the top is derived from rent seeking, higher taxes at the top would discourage rent-seeking.

America used to be thought of as the land of opportunity. Today, a child’s life chances are more dependent on the income of his or her parents than in Europe, or any other of the advanced industrial countries for which there are data. The US worked hard to create the American dream of opportunity. But today, that dream is a myth.

We can once again become a land of opportunity but it will not happen on its own, and it will not happen with a politics that focuses on cutting public education and other programmes to enhance opportunities for the bottom and middle, while cutting taxes for those at the very top. President Barack Obama’s support for these investments, as well as the “Buffett rule” that asks those at the top to pay at least as much in tax as a share of their income as those who are less fortunate, are moves in the right direction. Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s suggestion that we cut back on public employees is worrisome; as is his silence on whether capital gains on speculation should be taxed at a lower rate than income derived from hard work.

The country will have to make a choice: if it continues as it has in recent decades, the lack of opportunity will mean a more divided society, marked by lower growth and higher social, political and economic instability. Or it can recognise that the economy has lost its balance. The gilded age led to the progressive era, the excesses of the Roaring Twenties led to the Depression, which in turn led to the New Deal. Each time, the country saw the extremes to which it was going and pulled back. The question is, will it do so once again?

The writer is a recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics and the author of the forthcoming ‘The Price of Inequality’


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Should Student Test Scores Be Used to Evaluate Teachers? 06-25

How much to credit—and blame—teachers for student performance is an issue that continues to confound the education field. To what extent is each student's progress directly attributable to the teacher's efforts? What other factors can determine a student's success? Is there a way to measure each factor separately, including the teacher's influence?

These are just some of the questions that surround the issue of whether student test scores should be used to evaluate teacher performance.

Some say it's unfair to base teacher personnel decisions on student test scores. Students have different levels of ability and commitment, and different experiences outside the classroom. No two students get exactly the same amount of parental support.

Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research, argues in favor of using test scores in evaluating teachers. Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun professor of education and faculty co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, Stanford University, argues against.Others say that student test scores give an incomplete view but provide a starting point, a basic means of comparison. Combined with reports from trained classroom observers and surveys of how students rate their teachers, supporters say, the test scores may be very useful indeed.

Yes: As One of Several Measures

By Thomas Kane

Across the country, school systems are reinventing the ways they evaluate and provide feedback to teachers. Although I don't believe student test scores should be the sole factor in teacher evaluation, I believe just as strongly that they have an important role to play.

Adam Crowley

THOMAS KANE: The right approach is to combine student achievement gains with other measures.

Clear evidence for that conclusion comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project, which I lead. The project has been working with 3,000 teacher-volunteers in six school districts to test different forms of feedback for teachers, including their students' gains on test scores. Ours and other recent studies confirm that achievement-gain measures provide valuable information and should not be ignored.

To clarify: We should focus on gains in test scores, not end-of-year scores. Any estimate of how much the student has improved while in the teacher's class must take into account the fact that students start at different points. We want to know how much a teacher contributes to student growth during the time students are in that teacher's classroom.

While such student-achievement gains are imperfect measures, the same is true of all measures.

The Teacher's Impact

First, critics say student test scores reflect many things other than the teacher's ability. Other things do matter for a child's achievement gain besides the teacher. But so far, the existing research confirms that individual teachers do have a large impact on student gains.

Harvard University economist Raj Chetty and colleagues studied what happened when teachers with strong or weak records of student-achievement growth either left or joined a school. When the teachers with strong track records left, student achievement in that grade level fell. When they joined a school, achievement rose. (Moreover, achievement remained stable in grades and subjects other than the one where the teacher entered or left.) If the student-achievement gain measures simply reflected the unmeasured traits of students, achievement gains or losses would not have followed the teacher.

Second, despite some fluctuation from year to year, we have found that a teacher's record of promoting achievement remains the strongest single predictor of the achievement gains of their future students. In such a ratings system, a teacher's average may vary from year to year, but so do the batting averages of professional baseball players. In each case, the measure provides a glimpse (albeit imperfect) of future performance.

Third, although the current state tests focus too heavily on easy-to-measure skills and need to be improved, it's not true that the teachers with larger gains on such tests are simply coaching students for the state tests. In our Gates Foundation study, the students with the largest gains on the state tests also tended to have larger gains on other tests which probed students' conceptual understanding in math and their writing skills. These students also were more likely to report high levels of effort and enjoyment in class.

Moreover, Dr. Chetty and his colleagues found that students whose teachers had high achievement gains on state tests had higher earnings as adults. According to the study, taking aggregate results and comparing classes of similar size, an elementary school class with a teacher in the top 5% of achievement gains is estimated to earn $250,000 more in the students' lifetimes than a class led by a teacher with average achievement gains.

Other Feedback

Teaching is complex. The right approach to feedback and evaluation is to combine student achievement gains with other measures, such as systematic classroom observations and student surveys. We found that trained observers can identify specific aspects of a teacher's practice that turned out to be associated with greater student achievement.

Moreover, we learned that students as young as fourth grade could reliably identify effective practice, by agreeing or disagreeing with specific statements such as, "In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes," or, "When I turn in homework, I get useful feedback which helps me improve."

No information is perfect. But better information should lead to better decisions. Currently, high-stakes personnel decisions in K-12 education are primarily based on two factors: experience and graduate degrees. In the recent recession, thousands of teachers were terminated based simply on their seniority. As imperfect as the current measures of effective teaching are—and they must be improved—using multiple measures provides better information about a teacher's effectiveness than seniority or graduate credentials.

A high-quality system of performance feedback for teachers requires money, roughly 2% of teacher payroll costs. Given tight budgets, school systems will have to reallocate resources to cover the cost. But there is no other investment a school leader could make that would offer more bang for the buck.

Dr. Kane is a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

No: Teaching Is Too Complex

By Linda Darling-Hammond

Imagine if your child were graded in the same way that New York City teachers were earlier this year.

Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE)

LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND: Perhaps we should look at what high-achieving nations do’ to evaluate teachers.

The system used to rate the teachers purported to compare teachers' performance against one another. But the scores featured huge margins of error—exceeding 50 percentile points in English language arts and 30 points in math. Thus, if a teacher's rating in English was pegged at the 90th percentile, it might actually have been as low as the 40th, or vice versa.

The ratings were based on students' test scores, analyzed using "value-added" statistical techniques. As in other states, researchers who looked at the data found the ratings were enormously unstable: Teachers who scored low in one year or class were often rated high in another, and vice versa. Teachers working with a large contingent of new English learners or special-education students scored lower than when they taught more-advantaged classes of students. Even teachers of gifted classes were penalized, because their students had already maxed out on the tests.

Clearly, if the scores were measuring a teacher's actual ability, these wild swings would not occur.

What's Really Measured?

Proponents of using test scores concede that such measures are imperfect but argue that they still are useful in the same way batting averages are—as an approximate indicator of performance. But at best, teachers' value-added ratings in one year predict only 25% of the variance in ratings in the next year, leaving 75% or more to be explained by factors such as who is assigned to a teacher's class and what conditions he or she teaches under.

Enlarge Image

The National Research Council and the Educational Testing Service, among other research organizations, have concluded that ratings of teacher effectiveness based on student test scores are too unreliable—and measure too many things other than the teacher—to be used to make high-stakes decisions. Test-score gains can reflect a student's health, home life and attendance; schools' class sizes and curriculum materials; and the influence of parents, other teachers and tutors. Because these factors are not weighed, individual teachers' scores do not accurately reveal their ability to teach.

Nonetheless, New York City's value-added ratings will soon be used to determine continuation and dismissal of teachers there. And a recently passed state law will extend the practice to all public-school teachers in New York state, not just those teaching reading and math, requiring a dramatic increase in the amount of testing for children.

One-third of the state's principals have signed a letter protesting the new system because they believe it will mismeasure teachers, undermine collaboration and create disincentives for teaching the neediest students. Further, the principals worry that greater focus on teaching to multiple-choice tests will reduce the time for the research, writing and complex problem-solving students need to succeed in today's society.

The Poor Suffer

Proponents of test scores often rightly favor an evaluation method that combines measures of teachers' classroom practice with evidence of student learning, including tests. But for this to work, the test-score measures must be appropriate for the particular students and the curriculum being taught. Unfortunately, federally imposed teacher-evaluation policies insist on using state tests that do not measure growth, are poor measures of higher-order thinking skills and penalize teachers of the neediest students.

Among other things, the tests administered each spring ignore the differences in summer learning between more- and less-advantaged students. More affluent students have enriched summer experiences, so when they return each autumn, they start school further ahead of where they were in June. Poor students, by contrast, have few opportunities for summer learning. Most actually lose ground between June and September. Value-added measures wrongly attribute this loss to their teachers, further distorting the teacher-evaluation process.

Everyone agrees that teacher evaluation in the U.S. needs to change. But how? Perhaps we should look at what high-achieving nations do. In Singapore, for example, teachers are evaluated by trained observers based on how they support the whole child, from social and emotional development to academic learning; how they strive to improve their practice; and, most important, how they work with other educators to improve practice across the school.

There are also some effective systems in the U.S. that train evaluators to review teachers' instruction based on professional standards, and that look at classroom practice alongside student work. Studies find that frequent feedback from this process increases student achievement, because it helps teachers improve.

Such systems are more complex than test-based evaluation, but they work. For the sake of our children, we should develop thoughtful and accurate measures that support teachers in educating students well.

Dr. Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun professor of education and faculty co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, Stanford University. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

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Strong Jet Streams across Saturn 06-25

Strong Jet in False Colors

A particularly strong jet stream churns through Saturn's northern hemisphere in this false-color view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Clouds associated with the jet stream can be seen in the upper right about a third of the way down from the top of this image. The jet stream clouds appear like a thin, bright orange line here. Moving west and closer to the center of the image, the feature drops south. Farther to the west of this discontinuity, or drop, a blurrier form of the jet stream clouds continues to move along the latitude circle.

See PIA14917 for a closer view and to learn how eddies, or rotating storms, give the jet stream its shape and speed.

The winds of Saturn's jet streams are zonal, meaning they move eastward or westward at particular latitudes. This jet stream is located at about 42 degrees north latitude, and has been visible on Saturn since the days of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft (see PIA00027). In the Voyager days, this jet stream had an undulating appearance, leading scientists to dub it the "ribbon wave" (see PIA01378). The planet's atmosphere is always changing, and the jet stream now looks nothing like a ribbon.

Saturn's atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false color composite made from three images taken in near infrared light through filters that are sensitive to varying degrees of methane absorption. Red and orange colors in this view indicate clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Yellow and green colors, most noticeable near the top of the view, indicate intermediate clouds. White and blue indicate high clouds and haze.

The white clouds of the equatorial region appear oversaturated because the image was specially processed to bring out the wave.

The rings, in the upper left and lower left of the image, appear bright blue because they are outside of the atmosphere and not affected by methane absorption. This view looks toward the northern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 36 degrees above the ring plane.

The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 13, 2008 using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. The image filtered at 890 nanometers is projected as blue. The image filtered at 728 nanometers is projected as green, and the image filtered at 752 nanometers is projected as red.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 810,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 55 degrees. Image scale is 46 miles (74 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. 

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A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College 06-22

Degrees of Debt

The implications of soaring college costs, and the related indebtedness of students, and their families.

A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College

 

ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

Multimedia

 “If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.

Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.

About two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients borrow money to attend college, either from the government or private lenders, according to a Department of Education survey of 2007-8 graduates; the total number of borrowers is most likely higher since the survey does not track borrowing from family members. 

By contrast, 45 percent of 1992-93 graduates borrowed money; that survey included family borrowing as well as government and private loans. 

For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports. Average debt for bachelor degree graduates who took out loans ranges from under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Here at Ohio Northern, recent graduates with bachelor’s degrees are among the most indebted of any college in the country, and statewide, graduates of Ohio’s more than 200 colleges and universities carry some of the highest average debt in the country, according to data reported by the colleges and compiled by an educational advocacy group. The current balance of federal student loans nationwide is $902 billion, with an additional $140 billion or so in private student loans.

“If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.

Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise. But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government.

The roots of the borrowing binge date to the 1980s, when tuition for four-year colleges began to rise faster than family incomes. In the 1990s, for-profit colleges boomed by spending heavily on marketing and recruiting. Despite some ethical lapses and fraud, enrollment more than doubled in the last decade and Wall Street swooned over the stocks. Roughly 11 percent of college students now attend for-profit colleges, and they receive about a quarter of federal student loans and grants.

In the last decade, even as enrollment at state colleges and universities has grown, some states have cut spending for higher education and many others have not allocated enough money to keep pace with the growing student body. That trend has accelerated as state budgets have shrunk because of the recent financial crisis and the unpopularity of tax increases.

Nationally, state and local spending per college student, adjusted for inflation, reached a 25-year low this year, jeopardizing the long-held conviction that state-subsidized higher education is an affordable steppingstone for the lower and middle classes. All the while, the cost of tuition and fees has continued to increase faster than the rate of inflation, faster even than medical spending. If the trends continue through 2016, the average cost of a public college will have more than doubled in just 15 years, according to the Department of Education.

Much like the mortgage brokers who promised pain-free borrowing to homeowners just a few years back, many colleges don’t offer warnings about student debt in the glossy brochures and pitch letters mailed to prospective students. Instead, reading from the same handbook as for-profit colleges, they urge students not to worry about the costs. That’s because most students don’t pay full price.

Even discounted, the price is beyond the means of many. Yet too often, students and their parents listen without question.

“I readily admit it,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, who has also served as president of Vanderbilt and Brown, among others. “I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.”

Of course, economists and many parents say that the only thing worse than graduating with lots of debt is not going to college at all, since study after study has shown that graduates earn more over a lifetime. And most college students in the United States manage to eventually pay back their student loans.

To that end, the Obama administration has given out more grants and loans than ever to more and more college students with the goal of making the United States first among developed nations in college completion. The balance of federal student loans has grown by more than 60 percent in the last five years. And in 2007, Congress made sure the interest rates on many of those loans were well below commercial rates; currently, a debate over keeping those lower rates from doubling in July is roiling lawmakers.

But even if student loans are what many economists consider “good debt,” an increasing number of borrowers are struggling to pay them off, and in the process becoming mired in a financial morass.

Education Department data shows that payments are being made on just 38 percent of the balance of federal student loans, down from 46 percent five years ago. The balances are unpaid because the borrowers are still in school, have postponed payments or have stopped paying altogether.

Nearly one in 10 borrowers who started repayment in 2009 defaulted within two years,the latest data available — about double the rate in 2005.

Economists do not predict a collapse of the student loan system, which would, in essence, mean wholesale default. And if there were one, it would be unlikely to ripple through the economy with the same devastating impact as the mortgage crash. Though now larger than credit card and other consumer debt, the student loan balance remains smaller than the mortgage market, and most student loans are issued by the federal government, meaning banks wouldn’t be affected as much.

Still, economists say, growing student debt hangs over the economic recovery like a dark cloud for a generation of college graduates and indebted dropouts. A study of recent college graduates conducted by researchers at Rutgers University and released last week found that 40 percent of the participants had delayed making a major purchase, like a home or car, because of college debt, while slightly more than a quarter had put off continuing their education or had moved in with relatives to save money. Roughly half of the surveyed graduates had a full-time job.

“I’ll be paying this forever,” said Chelsea Grove, 24, who dropped out of Bowling Green State University and owes $70,000 in student loans. She is working three jobs to pay her $510 monthly obligation and has no intention of going back.

“For me to finish it would mean borrowing more money,” she said. “It makes me puke to think about borrowing more money.”

‘Nothing Is Free’

Christina Hagan is an Ohio lawmaker who says students need to understand that attending college is not an entitlement. Last year, she was appointed to fill a seat once occupied by her father in the Ohio House of Representatives.

Ms. Hagan, 23, is also a college student.

She will graduate shortly from Malone University, an evangelical college in Canton, Ohio, with more than $65,000 in student debt (among her loans is one from a farm lender; she had to plant a garden to become eligible). Though she makes $60,000 a year as a state representative, she plans to begin waiting tables in the next few weeks at Don Pancho’s, a Mexican restaurant in Alliance, Ohio, to help pay down her student loans and credit cards. She pays about $1,000 a month.

“I placed a priority on a Christian education and I didn’t think about the debt,” said Ms. Hagan, who says she takes responsibility for her debt and others should do the same. “I need my generation to understand that nothing is free.”

While Ms. Hagan’s perspective is unusually personal, it is a common view among lawmakers here in Ohio and many states. Across the country, elected officials are increasingly unwilling to assume a large share of the bill for public colleges and universities, which seven out of 10 students attend. The change has contributed to sharp increases in tuition and more fund-raising — and the need for students to borrow more.

From 2001 to 2011, state and local financing per student declined by 24 percent nationally. Over the same period, tuition and fees at state schools increased 72 percent, compared with 29 percent for nonprofit private institutions, according to the College Board. Many of the cuts were the result of a sluggish economy that reduced tax revenue, but the sharp drop in per-student spending also reflects a change: an increasing number of lawmakers voted to transfer more of the financial burden of college from taxpayers to students and their families. (Local funding is a small percentage of the total, and mostly goes to community colleges.)

“To say that tuition goes up because the state doesn’t pay enough money, well, that is the taxpayers’ money,” said Ohio’s governor, John Kasich, a Republican elected in 2010 whose budget included cuts to higher education because of the end of federal stimulus money.

Donald E. Heller, an expert on higher education, said elected officials in both parties had figured out that colleges were one of the few parts of state government that could raise money on their own. If lawmakers cut state financing, the schools could make it up by raising tuition.

“It lets legislators off the hook and makes universities look like the bad guy,” said Mr. Heller, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.

Ohio’s flagship university, Ohio State, now receives 7 percent of its budget from the state, down from 15 percent a decade ago and 25 percent in 1990. The price of tuition and fees since 2002 increased about 60 percent in today’s dollars.

The consequence? Three out of five undergraduates at Ohio State take out loans, and the average debt is $24,840.

If any state is representative of the role government has played in the growth of student debt, Ohio makes a good candidate. While other states have made steeper cuts in recent years because of the recession, Ohio has been chipping away at it far longer. It now rankssixth from the bottom in financing per student, at $4,480.

In the late 1970s, higher education in Ohio accounted for 17 percent of the state’s expenditures. Now it is 11 percent. By contrast, prisons were 4 percent of the state’s budget in the late 1970s; now they account for 8 percent. Federal mandates and court orders have compelled lawmakers to spend more money on Medicaid and primary education, too. Legislators could designate a greater percentage of the budget to higher education by raising taxes, but there is no appetite for that. Governor Kasich has signed a pledge not to raise taxes, as have about two dozen legislators.

Some Ohio elected officials say state colleges and universities have brought the debt problem upon themselves.

They suggest, for example, that state schools are bloated, antiquated and don’t do a good enough job graduating students or training them for the work force. Some complain about the salaries of football coaches and college presidents, like Mr. Gee, who has a compensation package of $2 million a year as president of Ohio State. Mr. Kasich questions why all state universities need to offer every major, like journalism or engineering, instead of parceling those programs among the schools.

“It’s not just inefficiencies,” said the governor, an Ohio State graduate. “It’s, ‘I want to be the best in this.’ It’s duplication of resources. It’s a sweeping change that is needed across academia.”

There is an ideological and political tug of war as well. State Representative John Patrick Carney, a Democrat, said if legislators were serious about financing higher education they could find a way, like eliminating tax breaks for corporations. He noted that even as funds for higher education were being reduced, Mr. Kasich and the Republican-controlled Legislature eliminated the state’s estate tax, which will cost the state an estimated $72 million a year.

Mr. Carney said he worried that the constant tuition and fee increases would limit access to college for lower- and middle-income students — a founding principle of public universities. At least two-thirds of Ohio lawmakers attended public colleges or universities, including Mr. Carney, an Ohio State graduate.

“It’s hard to say it’s affordable when students leave with that much debt,” he said.

The new financial reality for colleges has left administrators scrambling to maintain academic quality and all-important rankings with diminished state resources. That puts an even higher premium on attracting top-tier students — the rankings depend on them — and playing down the burdens of college debt.

Buy Now, Pay Later

At Ohio State, “college can be a reality for everyone, no matter your income or background,” its Web site says, while at Ohio Northern, future students are urged to get over the “sticker shock,” and focus instead on “return on investment.”

Oberlin College’s Web site tells prospective students that its financial aid policy is simple: “We meet the full demonstrated financial need of every admitted student.” The University of Dayton declares itself “one of the most affordable private Catholic schools in the country” and a “lifetime investment, appreciating over the course of time.”

The costs for these colleges? At Ohio State, about $25,000 a year for tuition and fees, room and board and living expenses; at Ohio Northern, about $48,000; at Oberlin $60,000; and at Dayton $48,000.

Colleges are aggressively recruiting students, regardless of their financial circumstances. In admissions offices across the country, professional marketing companies and talented alumni are being enlisted to devise catchy slogans, build enticing Web sites — and essentially outpitch the competition.

Affordability, or at least promising that the finances will work out, is increasingly a piece of the pitch.

Almost all colleges promote the money they give away in financial aid, though generally only the most elite schools — like Oberlin in Ohio — are able to provide enough in grants and scholarships to significantly keep student debt down.

College marketing firms encourage school officials to focus on the value of the education rather than the cost. For example, an article on the cover of Enrollment Management, a newsletter aimed at college admissions officials, urged writers of admissions materials to “avoid bad words like ‘cost,’ ‘pay’ (try ‘and you get all this for...’), ‘contract’ and ‘buy’ in your piece and avoid the conflicting feelings they generate.”

“There are direct marketing ‘words’ that can make or break your piece,” the article, published in 2009, added.

The financial aid award letters to newly admitted students can also be a minefield for students and parents sorting through the true costs of a school. Some are written in a manner that suggests the student is getting a great deal, by blurring the line between grants and loans or not making clear how much the student may have to pay or borrow.

A quick reading of an award letter from Drexel University, received by a New Jersey applicant in March, implied that the student would owe nothing and might actually walk away with money. The expected payment to Drexel, it said in highlighted bright yellow, would be a negative $5,900. The calculation presumed grants, student loans and a $42,120 loan taken out by the parents toward the $63,620 estimated cost — figures also included in the letter but not highlighted.

A Drexel spokeswoman said that the letter was not misleading and that it had not received complaints about it. But for many students, the financial realities of attending a college conflict with the optimistic rhetoric of campus tours, financial aid materials and salesmanlike admissions officers. And many of them don’t realize it until it is much too late.

“The overall message was, ‘It’s doable and normal to go into that much debt,’ ” said Jillian Potter, 23, who grew up in Ohio and attended Anderson University, a nonprofit private Christian school in neighboring Indiana.

Ms. Potter figured she would have to borrow about $10,000 a year. But the tuition increased every year, and because she didn’t declare a major until her junior year, she needed five years to graduate.

A social worker, she now owes $80,000. “I try not to think about it because it’s really depressing,” she said.

For Evan Frank, Ashland University, a nonprofit private school in Ohio, dangled the possibility of a sports scholarship, he said. Mr. Frank liked the campus and was promised a spot on the football team. His high school guidance counselor encouraged him and so did his family, though they couldn’t help financially.

Ashland offered to knock about $12,000 off the costs, and when Mr. Frank called financial aid to ask for more, they suggested he keep applying for scholarships. No one at the time said to consider a cheaper alternative, he said. Ashland costs about $42,000 a year.

“Maybe at the time I was a little naïve,” said Mr. Frank, 22, a senior who owes $80,000. “Everyone was like, ‘You can get grants, you can always get loans.’ I wanted to play football really bad, and I hoped eventually I’d get a football scholarship.”

Many students and parents don’t have a firm understanding of the cost of attending college, or the amount of debt they will incur. And most colleges aren’t much help. Student debt is not their primary concern in the end — the loan money usually gets deposited directly with the colleges, so they get paid either way — and the main job of the admissions staff, after all, is to admit students.

“Ultimately with everything in financial aid, from start to finish, the student and their family need to take responsibility and monitor their aid,” Melanie K. Weaver, the director of financial aid at Ohio Northern, said in an e-mail. “With over 3,000 on aid it is difficult for our office of 10 staff members to stay on top of every student.”

While there are standardized disclosure forms for buying a car or a house or even signing up for a credit card, no such thing exists for colleges.

Instead, college pricing is complicated by constant tuition increases, a vast array of grants and loans and a financial-aid system that discounts tuition for most students based on opaque formulas. “No one has a vested interest in simplifying the process but families,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the founder of FinAid, a Web site devoted to explaining college financial aid. “It obscures the price of a college and makes the choice of college not depend on the price but other factors.”

Federal regulations require financial aid officers to counsel students when they take federal loans and again when they graduate. The counseling typically consists of making sure they complete a brief online course about student loans and repayment.

Beyond that, it is up to the college to decide what, if any, debt counseling to provide. With a few exceptions, their track record is not very good, according to students and experts on college finance. Until Congress banned the practice a few years ago, some colleges outsourced counseling to private lenders, the same ones offering loans. Now many colleges do little beyond what is required by law, experts say.

Ohio Northern administrators said they were trying to come to grips with the growing debt of their students — an average of $48,886 for borrowers — at a time when enrollment is down slightly, as it is at many of the small nonprofit private colleges with which it competes.

Financial aid officers have not yet told any prospective students that they cannot afford to attend, school administrators said. But Ms. Weaver, the director of financial aid, noted, “We are having that conversation.”

Mr. Frank, at Ashland, said he did eventually receive financial counseling — on the day he arrived for football camp as a freshman.

A financial aid adviser suggested Mr. Frank rethink his decision to attend “because the way it’s looking you are going to be looking at a high amount of debt if you are going to stay here,” he recalled. “I wanted to play football really bad, and I was already moving in for camp,” he said. “I wasn’t going to turn back then.” He never did receive a football scholarship.

Officials at both Ashland and Anderson Universities said they provided thorough financial aid counseling to incoming students.

Ms. Griffith, the Ohio Northern student whose mother is taking out life insurance on her — a precaution that might be unnecessary because some lenders forgive loans upon death — said she wished someone had been frank with her about the consequences of taking on so much debt. (She also received grants.) She is searching for a full-time job in marketing, her major, while earning $225 a week at two restaurants.

“When I was young, I wanted to get out of Putnam County, get out of the cornfields,” said Ms. Griffith, who is from rural Ottawa, Ohio. “I would love to get away. But it would be more financially responsible if I got a job near here and lived with my parents.”

The Shadow of For-Profits

Wanda McGill has stopped opening her student loan bills.

She isn’t sure how much debt she has accumulated, though she thinks it’s about $100,000. But Ms. McGill, a 38-year-old single mother, knows for sure she cannot pay it.

Ms. McGill said she dropped out of DeVry University, a for-profit college with a branch in Columbus, two years ago after she ran out of money — even with the loans. She now makes $8.50 an hour working for an employment training center in Florida.

“I was promised the world and was given a garbage dump to clean up,” she wrote in an online complaint at consumeraffairs.com. “Like my life was not already screwed up with welfare and all.”

The student loan crisis has spread from for-profit colleges to more traditional institutions, but the for-profit colleges continue to represent the worst of the problem. Students complain that they were misled about the costs of education and that their job prospects were exaggerated. Government reports and lawsuits have accused some for-profit colleges of outright fraud, including doctoring attendance records or peddling near-worthless degrees.

The result? Students at for-profit colleges are twice as likely as other students to default on their student loans. Moreover, among students seeking a bachelor’s degree, only 22 percent succeed within six years, compared with 65 percent at nonprofit private schools and 55 percent at public institutions. (For-profit students, however, tend to do better at obtaining associate degrees and certificates.)

Leaders of the for-profit industry defended themselves, saying they were providing higher education for lower-class students that traditional colleges had left behind. “The reality is the type of students we attract have no other opportunity,” said Steven Gunderson, head of a leading trade organization. “We are the ones that provide a path to the middle class.”

Still, the outcomes for many students have been so poor — and the reported abuses and misdeeds by the colleges so abundant — that the for-profit colleges have played another role in the worsening debt problem: drawing attention away from nonprofit private and public colleges and universities, which have been slow to face public scrutiny.

The situation has parallels to the mortgage crisis of a few years ago, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. The for-profit colleges are like the subprime lenders — attracting the limelight because they represent the worst of the problem, he said.

“Mainstream higher ed can really self-righteously look at the big problem out there and say, ‘The problem lies with the other guy,’ ” Mr. Nassirian said. “If you are looking at highway robbery and raping and pillaging, that is true. But there are all kinds of unfortunate practices in traditional higher education that are equally as problematic that are reaching the crisis point.” Last year, Congress approved regulations to curb abuses in the for-profit sector, but there has been less focus on establishing broader rules for traditional colleges and universities.

The Obama administration has tried to make college pricing easier to understand; as of last year, colleges and universities were required to post calculators on their Web sites that explain the net price after grants and loans, but critics say they can be confusing, misleading or hard to find. And the administration has proposed that colleges be required to offer a “shopping sheet” to make it easier for families to measure the true costs and benefits.

“We just have to get them much more information,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “If you’re going to college, you need to know not what the first year costs. You need to know what it’s going to cost for the long haul.”

But even with more information, students and their parents seem willing to pay the ever-escalating price of a college degree, which remains the key rung up the ladder of economic mobility.

Denise Entingh, 44, dropped out after two quarters at Columbus State Community College because she didn’t want to wait any longer to get into the nursing program. So she signed on at the Hondros School of Nursing, a for-profit college that advertises “No Waitlist!” on a billboard a few blocks from Columbus State.

Ms. Entingh said she expected to borrow about $45,000 to get a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Hondros, which costs more than three times as much as Columbus State.

“It scares the hell out of me,” she said of her debt load. “But I think it will be all right. I’m not going to worry about it right now. I had to take that plunge.”

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