Education

Here are two ways to think about the price of college tuition:

1. Sticker price is the full price colleges list in their brochures and on their websites.

2. Net price is the price students actually pay. Net price accounts for the fact that many students receive grants or scholarships. So it can be considerably lower than sticker price.

English teacher Eleanor Terry started a Facebook page last fall for the High School for Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn. She uses it for the school's college office to remind seniors about things like application deadlines. The seniors use it to stay in touch with each other.

"There was a student who got into the University of Chicago," she says, "and the way we found out about it was that they scanned their acceptance letter and then tagged us in it."

Some Indiana third graders are already planning for summer school. They're preparing to retake a new statewide test, which they'll need to pass to go on to 4th grade. Host Michel Martin speaks with StateImpact Indiana reporter Kyle Stokes and NPR's Tovia Smith about the effects of these tests on kids and implications for states across the country.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Mitt Romney laid out his education agenda on Wednesday. In a speech in Washington, he compared the American public education system to that of a third world country. But Romney's plan to deal with what he called a national education emergency does not appear to be a major departure from the policies that have been in place since 2001, under both Presidents Bush and Obama. NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports.

Medical marijuana is legal in 16 states, and that number is expected to grow. But these state laws put colleges in a bind. That's because under federal law, marijuana is still illegal. So colleges that let students make use of their pot prescription on campus risk losing their federal funding.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Hundreds of pages of evidence were released today in the hazing death of a Florida A&M band major. Last November, Robert Champion was beaten to death on a bus after a football game. Thirteen people have been charged in the case.

NPR's Kathy Lohr reports the documents released today provide an unsettling look at the hazing ritual that took place that night.

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

We're going to stay on campus for another minute or two, to hear a sampling of advice from this year's class of commencement speakers, including President Obama and Mitt Romney.

MITT ROMNEY: Sometimes, as Dr. Victor Frankel observed in his book for the ages, it's not a matter of what we're asking of life but rather, what life is asking of us. How often the answer to our own problems is to help others with theirs.

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish. Now to the sentencing of Dharun Ravi. He's the Rutgers University student who was convicted in a high profile cyber-bullying case on charges including a hate crime.

Ravi could have faced as much as 10 years in jail. Today, he was sentenced to far less: 30 days. He first got into trouble for using a webcam to spy on his gay roommate at Rutgers and then tweeted about it. The roommate, Tyler Clementi, killed himself soon afterwards.