You may have seen the AP story repeated dozens of times, one of which I caught on newsobserver.com about the marine who’s taking bids on the right to re-name him. It seems Sgt Cody Baker, who will be leaving the Marine Corps in a year and a half to pursue a college degree, has hit upon an outrageous, yet effective idea to raise funds for college.

All it takes is one Idea

You can read all about it on his website, choosemyname.com, but the gist of it is that Baker – who’s married and has a baby – is looking for a way to support his family yet spend time with them too. He’s looking for college money to help him do so. He’s also pledged a part of the proceeds to an orphanage in Thailand, the Im Jai House which he has helped to support for 6 years.

The bidding has already topped $26,000 and if the current bidder wins, on January 1, 2007, Cody Baker will legally change his name to Finest Freshest Fastest, which is the slogan of an online coffee vendor.

Make the Decision

Baker, 29 is making the rounds of the talk shows and according to him, having a lot of fun with this. His mother is praying for him he says. If she continues to pray for him, she’ll likely be praying for a college graduate because Baker has what all of us need. Sheer determination and creativity. He’s decided he’s going to college. No matter what it takes.

The Poughkeepsie Journal ran an AP article today, “Investing in Youth,” that reports a trend among “art” buyers. It seems that more and more are being turned onto student work.

Once upon a time fancy buyers only hit the fashionable galleries where “new” and “upcoming” A-list artists would fidget nervously not far from their work. But the newest “new” and “upcoming” is the student circuit, so to speak.

Perhaps a sign of the times is Princeton trying to beef up its arts programs by intentionally accepting more student artists.

The times they are a-changin’ for artists as well. Nowadays student artists have the added benefit of online advertising; they can market upcoming shows and even preview their work. Students may collaborate via blog, MySpace and with big moblogging events and even hacker fests.

In an age where Vh1 has had to step in and “Save the Music,” it’s worth wondering if this generation of artists would have been even more influential a force had their growing years not been so devoid of public school arts programs, as gutted as they were by federal budget cuts. Thankfully the system is now celebrating the precocious and determined among them who found the voice and tools by which to create.

There has always been the snubbing of community colleges. And in the past they may have offered the equivalent of a blue-plate-special “college” education, but not any more. The international influx of students from abroad is laying bare the reality that international students are realizing the benefits of our own community colleges and that what these schools have to offer is not at all what we expected.

Each year more than 98,000 international students from all over the world are studying at community colleges. Houston Community College has 3500 international students. Seminole Community College, in Florida, has 1600 international students which is 20% of the total student enrollment.

It seems that international students prefer jump-starting their college careers at the community colleges particularly for their English as a Second Language programs. Outside of this unique offer the other attractions should be just as beneficial to American students, so in the interest of free and open information here’s our “Why YOU should Consider Community College:”

• The value for the cost of the education. Tuition at a community college is generally a quarter that of a private school and half that of a public university. International students have the inside track on saving money their first two years and then they jump into their final two years on a traditional campus all revved up and ready to go.
• Complete your degree at your own pace and if you’re heading to a four-year program, your credits are just as good there.
• You get hands-on experience, a more community-oriented environment and serious devotion to career development. There are some top-notch programs, especially in the technical sector, that provide graduates with immediate access to very well-paying jobs in careers that are going nowhere else but up. And for technical equipment, most community colleges are wired for sound and offer the cutting edge systems often out of reach of many other institutions.

According to the article, No Average Student, Dr. Kay McClenney, the head of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement says:

Community college enrollment is exploding…These colleges receive more respect now…than ever before and in some ways can serve as models of superior ‘education delivery’ to four-year universities.

The new Community College Survey of Student Engagement provides an up close and personal view of the current environment of community colleges in America.

I commented on a NYT article that reinvigorated the old concept of student housing co-ops, but I’ve been digging around a bit on the subject I’ve come to realize that student cooperatives have many faces. There are the food co-ops, healthcare co-ops and even bike co-ops.

How about the educational co-ops that are providing students willing to participate with an exclusive fusion of class work and real work experience? RPI and Purdue do it:

Co-op provides students with the opportunity to gain practical experience in their field as an undergraduate. The department’s slogan says co-op is the “competitive edge” because it combines the reputation of a Purdue education with real-world experience…

If educational co-ops work so well, then how come everybody ain’t doin’ it? Actually there are a lot of programs that utilize the concept. Apparently the more technological the program the better-suited students are to the concept, but that’s only because it’s been a traditional option for technology students from the start. Educational co-ops are offered along the rest of the curriculum spectrum they are just not as popular or widespread. But why?

Internships are different. An internship offers a fantastic opportunity for a student to typically spend a semester working in their field of study. But it’s a one-time thing. A co-op is as close to an educational mash-up as you can get, a splicing together of chunks of classroom learning with episodes of practical in-the-workplace experience applying what has already been learned.

It’s really a true example of: “Tell me and I will forget; show me and I will remember; involve me and I will understand.”

In today’s hyper-competitive world it’s surprising more fields of study are not engaged on a cooperative level, and why it’s not risen to the level of Amazing New Movement. It could do so much more for business and for education.

A generous number of college students these days are falling from their oversized suburban nests onto college campuses and finding out that their dorms are extensions of what they just left- typically exclusionary and solitary. It’s easy to get trapped in front of your computer or video game, Facebooking or MySpacing-out for hours and not even notice you’re alone in your dorm room.

But trends are afoot—the new college housing movement is looking oddly like that which inspired the 60s communes. Maybe college kids have heard of “that” era, but few would recognize it. According to a new story in the NYT, students are not only giving campus co-op living a chance for financial reasons, but it’s becoming the latest and hippest living arrangement:

The current interest in co-ops stems in part from the economic imperative that rising housing costs have wrought. But more than anything else, students suggest, it has grown up in reaction to the alienating aspects of modern campus life.

Co-ops on most campuses are budget digs for college kids who either can’t afford off-campus apartments and the accoutrements that come attached to that responsibility, or don’t have the stomach for the isolation of big dorms, some of the same that they had at home.

Ala Real World? Does the newest installment of the co-op movement have roots in reality TV? While we watch, isolated in front of our televisions, real world individuals are forced to live in close quarters and survive in the company of each other; we watch them negotiate, argue, rant and rave and eventually find some common ground. We watch. I think we are finally longing to be participants. We’ve disengaged long enough from lengthy and uninterrupted periods of human interaction that now there is a new desire to be present in that which we have removed ourselves.

Maybe the move to the co-ops, for some students, began as financial. Certainly the very first student housing co-ops were created in the 1930s in answer to the hordes of students whose families were wracked financially by the Great Depression. For some today, financial is just an excuse to participate in the company of others or the traditional hippie alternative that’s been functioning all along especially in places like California. When we enter our phase of digital isolation we did it so frenetically, so celebratory, but celebration is about group and Facebook and MySpace don’t get it.

More and more college students are shunning the dorms in favor of co-ops and other alternative living quarters; spaces where they have to cook together and share milk and wash dishes and wear deodorant and arrive at democratic understandings or else pay the price for their inability to function in the company of others.