Ridiculous advice for college students

Don't sleep on a new study by University of North Texas psychologists, which came up with a breathtaking finding: college students who are evening types had lower GPAs, while those who are morning types had higher GPAs.
Gee, I wonder if any of you can think of confounding factors to this conclusion?
Anyway, my favorite part of this whole thing is a news release that includes a list of suggested behavior for college students to improve their sleeping habits:

Advice only The Beav could follow.
• Establish a relaxing setting at bedtime. (Have these people ever lived in a dorm, or an off-campus apartment building?)
• Get a full night's sleep every night. (Good advice. But is it practical?)
• Avoid foods or drinks that contain caffeine, as well as any medicine that has a stimulant, prior to bedtime. (Yeah. This is going to happen.)
• Do not stay up all hours of the night to "cram" for an exam, do homework, etc. If after-school activities are proving to be too time-consuming, consider cutting back on these activities. (Got that? Don't have any fun or work a part time job in college. Hit the books and then go to bed at 9 p.m.)
• Keep computers and TVs out of the bedroom. (Yeah, that's the ticket. No Interwebs, you kids.)
• Do not go to bed hungry, but don't eat a big meal before bedtime either. (No late night pizza, either.)
• Avoid any rigorous exercise within six hours of your bedtime. (So if you're going to bed by 9 p.m., that means no exercise after 3 p.m. I suggest skipping an afternoon class to make your racquetball game.)
Have I been transported to the set of Leave it to Beaver? Look, as a former college student, I appreciate the well-meaning advice. But come on, people.

Money, Never Enough!

My dad always encouraged me to save money. “Even if it’s only five dollars a week, put it away and don’t touch it,” he’d tell me. Yeah, yeah, whatever, I thought. I have the rest of my life to save money. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any money to save. I worked after school and on the weekends. And during the summer I put in a lot of extra hours. But I could always find other ways to spend my money instead of putting it away in a savings account.
I had that same attitude whenever I received money as a gift. Take my high school graduation, for example. I ended up getting around $2,000 from family and friends. It probably would’ve been a good idea to save some for my college living expenses, especially considering I had decided not to work full time my first semester and I decided to get my own apartment. But other options were more enticing.
Let’s see, there were the nights out with my friends, new clothes, a new car, new stuff for my apartment, more clothes, money for the weekends. Saving was definitely an afterthought, to which I responded, “Don’t worry, you can always find babysitting jobs when you need extra cash.” That was my mindset as I began college.
Now as my freshman years is coming to an end (Hopefully it goes fast), that mindset has begun to change—mainly because I came to the understanding that it is harder to save money when you really don’t have any extra cash around..

Not headed back to school this fall?

Not headed back to school this fall? You could be, minus the exorbitant tuition and without even leaving your chair. The web has made it easier than ever before to get a free education, and you'd join the ranks of great thinkers in history who were also self-taught, like Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. You, too, can be an autodidact; the breadth of free educational materials available online is absolutely astonishing.
Note: Many colleges and universities offer free courses online in the form of podcasts, lectures, tutorials and full-blown online classes. Most of these courses, while extremely smart-making, will NOT award any college credits or degrees.
Free online college courses
Grab some larnin' from the University of Washington's free online courses; Greek mythology, American Revolution, Heroic Fantasy are just some of the offerings. If you get tired of that, you can study economics at the University of Nebraska.
Teach yourself sign language from Michigan State University. Browse through the vast treasures at the Library of Congress. View free videos on all sorts of subjects from Annenberg Media, a major supplier to most distance learning universities, or read the core documents of American democracy.
Feel like a little light reading? You can study theology at Covenant Seminary; course offerings are delivered via a combo of free downloadable .pdf files and podcasts, and include subjects ranging from Church History to the Modern Reformation.
Learn mathematics with this extensive list of free online math courses from Whatcom Community College. Visit Carnegie Mellon University and take Biology, Causal Reasoning, Statistics, and more, all for free.
Penn State University offers a free Swedish language course, in addition to a free Hungarian language course. Or, you can take an Italian language and culture course from Brooklyn College. California State also offers a free Conversational Mandarin Chinese course, and you can learn Turkish via the University of Arizona.
The University of Washington School of Medicine offers free CPR classes online, complete with video and instructional guides. You can also take health courses from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; anything from adolescent health to population science.
Prepare for the US citizenship test from the Missouri Southern State University. Learn linear algebra from the University of Puget Sound. Learn about bioterrorism (really) and other hazards from the University of North Carolina.
Get free online mathematics textbooks, videos, and lecture notes from New York University. Take advantage of Tufts University's open courses on dentistry, medicine, nutrition, and more. Learn about cognitive science from Hampshire College.
Take eight different courses via the Sofia Project, a collaborative effort between select California community colleges. Brigham Young University offers independent study in subjects such as Family History, Family Life, and Religious Scripture Study. Get access to ten free seminary courses from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Learn about human resources in 52 (!) different free courses from ERI. Browse a huge variety of materials in the University of Michigan's courses and seminars on Internet laws.
Ivy League
Take advantage of Stanford University's free CS education library. Go to college by taking free classes at MIT. Go to Berkeley with your iPod.The University of Pennsylvania has an extensive online library; over 25,000 books are listed here.
Just debuted, you can take free courses from Yale (funded by HP) on such diverse subjects as the Old Testament or Physics. Watch or read free online lectures in archival format from Princeton. Get a free Introduction to Probability text from Dartmouth.
Google tricks
Using the right keywords, find course syllabi (insert your own subject), lectures, tutorials, notes, podcasts, and various sorts of online books using Google.