Jacklynn Blanchard is a recent graduate from University of Colorado Boulder. We’ve had the pleasure of working with Jacklynn as an outstanding intern and now a new hire at LifeBound. After hearing the tragic news of the new graduate Marina Keegan’s senseless death, she was inspired to reflect on her own feelings about graduation and life after college. 

The death of Marina Keegan, a recent graduate from Yale, resonated for me in a way that felt almost as if a bit of myself had also perished on that Cape Cod highway on Saturday afternoon, albeit an idealized self that has yet to come to fruition and perhaps never will. Still I felt, and continue to feel, this deep sense of sadness at the loss of such a young life on the cusp of something great. I couldn’t help but see the parallels between my aspirations for myself and what Marina had achieved. I had once dreamed of being an Ivy League graduate who would live in New York City and work for the New Yorker, and that was exactly what Marina was about to do. She was a recent Yale graduate who had graduated Magna Cum Laude, had been the President of the Yale College Democrats and a writer for the Yale Daily News, and had landed an editorial assistant job at the New Yorker and an apartment in Brooklyn that she would have moved into in June.

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A new report shows aggressive efforts to lower the high school dropout rate between 2001 and 2009, only made a 3.5 percentage increase. The organization America’s Promise Alliance has a goal to raise the high school graduation rate to 90% by 2020. In 2009, 75% of students graduated high school, which translates to one in four, according to the CBS story “Report: US Makes Modest Gains in Graduation Rate.”

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Can you remember what it felt like learning new concepts in your college lecture classes? How many new concepts did you master in the duration of a one-hour lecture? How much did you remember about those concepts a week later? A year later? A decade later?

Cognitive researchers began making breakthroughs in understanding how the human brain processes and retains information in the 1970s and 80s, according to the article “Don’t Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn.”  When studying how much students learned in a lecture, they found people had very limited short-term memory that didn’t allow them to process all the information presented in a typical lecture. However, it’s 2012 and many college students are still attending lecture-based classes that require them to memorize facts, not understand concepts.

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If you or someone you know is in debt, has a foreclosed home, or is struggling to pay the bills due to unemployment, you may have wondered how life would be different had lessons in financial literacy been handed out instead of endless lines of credit.
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