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Quick reminder: August 22 is the late registration deadline for the ACT given on September 13.

Newsweek reports that a growing number of college students seem to be facing mental health issues, and colleges are struggling to meet their needs.

CEO mum offers advice on choosing extracurricular activities:

1. Truly enjoy what you do
2. Excel at it
3. Choose an unusual extracurricular
4. Take important life lessons from it
5. Think outside the box

According to CNN, the University of Florida Gators have been named the #1 party school.

Talk about unexpected! The Yo Momma Vocabulary Builder helps you learn vocabulary:

“A typical entry, for ‘emaciated,’ first presents the word as a joke (’Yo momma’s so emaciated, she can hula hoop in a fruit loop.’). The pronunciation is then given, along with a detailed, humor-inflected definition (’too skinny . . . skeletal’) that invokes pop culture phenomena like supermodels, the Olsen twins, Gollum from Lord of the Rings, and Ally McBeal.”

TheU.com is an awesome resource for getting a taste of a college. Each college has short, polished videos on specific topics like “Academics” and “The Food,” plus a wide variety of user-uploaded videos.

For example, here are two Harvard videos–one about “The Crowd” and another featuring Stewie from Family Guy giving a commencement speech.

With recent fee hikes of around 10%, the University of California (UC) system now charges about $8,000 per year, while the California State University (CSU) system now charges about $4,000.

Including room, board, and books, they cost around $22,000 and $16,000, respectively.

Read more from the LA Times.

Educated Nation examines the pros and cons of attending Community College vs. University:

• Class size
• Campus Housing
• Expense
• Caliber of Instruction
• Architecture
• Transition Issues
• Degrees Obtainable
• College Life

While community college might not offer the ideal social experience, the academic experience shouldn’t be underestimated. Community colleges have small class sizes and teaching-focused instructors who actually want to be working with students.

An article in SF Gate offers a useful reminder that parents and students may have different approaches to visiting colleges:

“Lots of people think the college visitation phenomenon has become a costly, time-consuming practice that may well yield minimal if not counterproductive results. ‘It’s impossible to get more than a cursory feel by visiting a campus,’ says Lloyd Thacker, founder of the Portland, Ore., Education Conservancy and a leading voice for restoring common sense to the escalating college arms race. Admissions directors and high school counselors acknowledge the risk of false positives (when the weather’s good and the tour guide charming) and false negatives (no breakfast, snooty admissions clerk). ‘At 17,’ says Palo Alto college consultant Irena Smith, ‘you do tend to glom onto first impressions and generalize.’”

“The details that I was fixing on didn’t interest [my daughter] Phoebe much….Phoebe was doing what most students seem to do. She was ’seeing’ herself - or not seeing herself, as the case may be - on a campus. She was instinctively testing the place, like a garment, for its ‘fit.’”

Fees for that California State University (CSU) system will be increasing by $276 per year. Chancellor Charles B. Reed reports that the neediest students will receive financial aid to make up the difference, and reiterates that “the total fee, which is just a little more than $3,000 a year, is one of the best bargains in America.” Read the interview.