The Contract for College

Rising college costs, combined with major policy changes in financial aid, have made college less affordable for today's generation of young people. The Contract for College would unify the existing three strands of federal financial aid--grants, loans and work-study--into a coherent, guaranteed financial aid package for students

Keeping Students Enrolled: How Community Colleges Are Boosting Financial Resources For Their Students

Available financial aid covers only a fraction of what community college students pay for their education. To finance their studies, many of them enroll in school only part time and/or work more than 20 hours per week, strategies that increase their likelihood of dropping out. To help address this problem, this report highlights strategies adopted by higher education institutions to increase the financial resources of their students. The practices outlined either help students access existing financial aid or provide students with new types of aid.Demo

Psychotherapists\u27 Experiences of a Therapeutic Alliance with Children on the Autism Spectrum

The therapeutic alliance has been identified as especially important to positive therapeutic outcomes in child psychotherapy, yet few studies have focused on the meanings of an alliance with children with autism and how the alliance develops and is maintained. Using phenomenological qualitative methodology, this study aimed to increase an understanding of the meanings of an alliance with children with autism for therapists working with them in the context of psychotherapy. Eleven therapists with therapeutic experience with children with autism were interviewed and yielded the following description of the essential meanings of an alliance: the patient feels safe and emotionally close to the therapist, feels motivated to go to therapy, safe and comfortable enough to share or begin to explore their feelings and concerns, is more willing to “buy into” challenging tasks and is amenable to therapeutic interventions. Participating therapists described gauging their alliance through observation of these characteristics, behavioral cues in their patients, and their feelings during interactions with them, noting that being aligned with their patients feels less effortful and rewarding. Participants also identified the following components to be present to varying degrees in the process of forming an alliance across patients with autism: joining patients in their interests; learning and accommodating patients’ developmental differences; identifying the meaning of patients’ behaviors and communications; being non-judgmental, validating, respectful and having positive regard for patients; creating a positive, non-demanding and predictable therapeutic environment; having a reflective process and supervision; and caregiver engagement

Florida’s Great Cost Shift: How Higher Education Cuts Undermine Its Future Middle Class

State support for higher education has decreased considerably over the past twenty years, while financial aid policies have increasingly abandoned students with the greatest financial need. As a result students and their families now pay—or borrow—a lot more for a college degree that benefits all of us. This report examines how state disinvestment in public higher education over the past two decades has shifted costs to students and their families. The report outlines how such disinvestment has occurred alongside rapidly rising enrollments and demographic shifts that are yielding more economically, racially, and ethnically diverse student bodies. This fact sheet, produced jointly with the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy at Florida International University, highlights Florida’s funding for higher education trends over the last twenty years.DemosResearch Institute on Social & Economic Polic

Synthesis and styrene copolymerization of novel dibromo and dichloro ring-disubstituted isobutyl phenylcyanoacrylates

Novel dibromo and dichloro ring-disubstituted isobutyl phenylcyanoacrylates, RPhCH=C(CN)CO2CH2CH(CH3)2 (where R is 2,5-dibromo, 3,5-dibromo, 2,3-dichloro, 2,4-dichloro, 2,5-dichloro, 2,6-dichloro, 3,4-dichloro, 3,5-dichloro) were synthesized by the piperidine catalyzed Knoevenagel condensation of ring-disubstituted benzaldehydes and isobutyl cyanoacetate and characterized by CHN analysis, IR, 1H and 13C NMR. The acrylates were copolymerized with styrene in solution with radical initiation at 70C. The compositions of the copolymers were calculated from nitrogen analysis