Years Of College

The first tuition increase at Anne Arundel Community College in five years is looking inevitable."I think it is time for a tuition increase," County Executive Janet S. Owens said yesterday.Owens and some County Council members say the college's board of trustees will probably have to raise tuition because the county cannot continue to pour money into the college and also fund a huge school board budget."I am trying to address the [kindergarten through grade 12] problem," Owens said. "It's not that I don't care about the community college.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton, keeping active in the election year tax-cut derby, yesterday proposed a tax credit worth $3,000 during the first two years of college for students from families earning less than $100,000."

IT HAS BEEN, clearly, one of the most gut-wrenching decisions that I've ever faced in my life. And it's not one of those decisions that I would recommend making alone, which is reason why over the past two weeks I've sought the guidance from my family and some of my closest friends.Go for it, they told me almost unanimously. And so on Tuesday I called Teri Washington, in the media relations office of the National Basketball Association."Teri, this is Jerry Bembry," I said. "And I'm officially letting you know that I'm making myself eligible for the 1996 NBA draft."

They may be the best high school senior baseball players in the state, but that doesn't mean pro baseball will be their next step.Most of the players selected for the Crown High School All-Star Game are bound for college. And that, in the estimation of longtime Arundel High and sandlot coach Bernie Walter, is as it should be."The difference in lifetime income between a person with a college education and one with only a high school degree is $600,000," said Walter, a South coach, after the Crown game at Camden Yards that was to follow yesterday's Orioles-White Sox game was postponed when a drizzle caused fear of damaging the field.

Certain numbers just seem right. Nine innings of baseball. Seven deadly sins. Four years of college.Better strike that last one off the list. Because of the ever-growing cost of education and lifestyle choices, most students earning their undergraduate degrees this spring from four-year colleges and universities will not have graduated in four years.In Maryland, slightly fewer than one-quarter of all full-time students at the state's public colleges graduate in four years. The numbers are only a bit higher nationally for all campuses.

The National Basketball Association holds its draft in three weeks and three college sophomores, including Maryland's Joe Smith, are expected to be top picks. Seven college juniors are also registered for the draft, and Kevin Garnett, a high school senior in Chicago.It would actually make more sense for the 18-year-old prep player to be selected than the college underclassmen. At least that wouldn't constitute the culmination of a farce. Colleges that enroll gifted athletes do so knowing education is often the least of what many of them want.

After four years of college, a $40,000 tuition bill and a B.A. in psychology, Lauren Hider can answer a lot of questions about Carl Jung's theory of the personality. But nobody is asking her about that."They all ask me, 'What are you going to do now?' " said the 22-year-old from Severna Park, now a hostess at Buddy's Crabs and Ribs Restaurant in Annapolis. "There's so much pressure. I don't know what I want to do right now."Two months have passed since the most recent batch of college graduates tossed their caps into the air and said goodbye to undergraduate schooling.

Many of the women in Kim Sutter's classroom have had the luxury, the privilege, the good fortune, the determination, the support to stay at home for a time and focus on raising their children.Then, when the kids are in first grade, the first year of high school or the first year of college, these women find themselves trying very hard to find themselves.Kim Sutter, who teaches "Developing New Horizons" at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, helps in the search.Often, the women finish the 16-week course knowing more about what they don't want to do with the rest of their lives.

Between 1990 and 2005, 19.8 million college graduates will enter the labor force. What does their future look like?Although education is essential in a workplace with rapidly changing technology, a government study has reached the alarming conclusion that 30 percent of those graduates may have to settle for jobs that do not require a college degree.The leader of the study, Kristina J. Shelley, emphasizes that 70 percent of college graduates will find jobs in which they can apply their educational backgrounds.

If it hadn't been for a war, Helen Reeve might have ended up in a college classroom a little bit sooner.But just at the time that Mrs. Reeve entered high school, World War II began. Suddenly, working, not going to college, was the patriotic thing to do."The No. 1 priority was to win the war," Mrs. Reeve recalls. "All the women worked. It was the way of life. There were no men to work on the home front except older men or those who were frail. You'd go to the seashore, and all the lifeguards were female.

Malcolm Graham Vinzant Jr., a founding faculty member of what is now the Community College of Baltimore County at Catonsville and who later rehabilitated houses and owned a popular Cross Street Market cheese stall, died Thursday from complications of a stroke at a Winter Park, Fla., assisted-living facility. The Federal Hill resident was 78. Mr. Vinzant, the son of a federal government worker and a homemaker, was born in Laredo, Texas, and moved to Catonsville shortly after his birth.

Not long after midday on a recent Monday, on the track at Western High School's Lumsden-Scott Stadium, Latosha Wallace noticed a drastic difference about a surface she once dominated, a surface she once called home. Four years ago, when the 22-year-old sprinter from Baltimore last ran here, she had capped a high school career that Division I college recruiters could not ignore. Wallace lettered all four years in track and field and cross country at Western. From 2001 to 2003, she earned All-City and All-Metro honors in indoor and outdoor track, and cross country.

Amid all the late posturing and trade proposals that will inevitably take place in the final hours before Tuesday's NBA draft, there appears to be one certainty. Shortly after NBA commissioner David Stern announces the first overall selection, he'll be joined on the Madison Square Garden stage by a player who honed his game in college basketball last season. With the top pick, the Milwaukee Bucks will likely select either North Carolina forward Marvin Williams or Utah center Andrew Bogut.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - If youth really is wasted on the young, Orioles vice president Mike Flanagan has a chance to do something about it. Flanagan was a solid basketball and baseball prospect at Manchester (N.H.) Memorial High School in the late 1960s and went on to play two years at point guard at the University of Massachusetts before making himself available for the baseball draft after his sophomore year. That might seem like a long time ago, but Flanny still has two years of college eligibility left - a fact that was not lost, even after all this time, on a New Hampshire company that runs college scouting camps.

Dr. Nicholas Varga, whose career as an educator, archivist and author at Loyola College spanned nearly four decades, died from complications of neurological surgery Tuesday at Good Samaritan Hospital. He was 79. Dr. Varga's areas of expertise were the history of Maryland and the politics of Colonial New York. In an autobiographical sketch, he wrote that he adhered to the theory that teaching history was more than "merely the facts and interpretations of history" but more importantly "how to draw valid conclusions from the available evidence and also how firmly such conclusions were to be held."

"MEN 18 -- 25 YEARS, you can handle this," claims the Selective Service in its registration brochure. Simple cartoons on the cover urge young patriots to "Read it. Fill it. Mail it." Currently, the Selective Service's only threat to teens is a potential paper cut while filling out the postcard. But a growing number of the nation's youths fear a revival of the draft after the November election because of a shortage of troops to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else the war on terrorism might take Americans.

When the members of the freshman class at New Era Academy walk through the school's doors today, they won't just be starting high school. The next years of their lives will be like four years of college orientation. "It's not like we're going to talk about college once a month and then move on to other things," said the new school's principal, John Davis. "We want this to be a part of their lives. We want them to see college in everything that they do." Many high schools focus their students on college preparation; the New Era Academy takes it one step further - college expectation.

Parents and others signing up for Maryland's prepaid tuition plan may be in for sticker shock, with the price of contracts this year going up as much as 30 percent for four years of college. Officials with the Maryland Prepaid College Trust blame the price jump on tuition inflation. "We're in line with what the other states have been doing," said Ed Crawford, chairman of the Maryland Higher Education Investment Board, which oversees the plan. Crawford said the higher prices this year have nothing to do with last year's investment losses, which are largely responsible for the 4-year-old plan reporting its first actuarial deficit.

AS MY younger friends receive their college acceptance letters this time of year, I think about my senior year at Western High School in Baltimore City and the decision I made that changed my life forever: taking time off before college. In Britain, it's called a gap year - the sabbatical that most students take between high school and college. This is a time for young people to discover themselves before their devotion to another four years of intensive schoolwork. Not a bad idea, considering that a good number of college freshmen flunk out because of the overwhelming temptations of extracurricular college life.

NO MATTER what my boys tell you, I did not grow up in the technological "Dark Ages." Nor even the "Middle Ages." In fact, I grew up in the 1950s and headed off to college in 1965. In retrospect, it doesn't seem like I was missing very much. I drove to school in a comfortable, if monstrous, car along the very same highways I'll use a month from today to take my younger son to the same college. The new family bus gets better mileage than the old one, but the speed limits are lower today, so the trip will take a bit longer.