How’s this for keeping college affordable: Excelsior College just rolled out a program that guarantees a bachelor’s degree for $10,000.

Excelsior is a nonprofit college in Albany that specializes in helping mid-career adults finish their studies. The school consolidates college credits in the same way a debt-relief service consolidates bills, helping returning students clean up their transcripts and finish their degrees.

The average -- average --Excelsior student arrives with credits from five different colleges. The typical Excelsior student is around 40, with a job and a family and about half a college education.

Excelsior helps students finish their degrees by cobbling together past credits, online coursework and course-credit exams.

The $10,000 degree initiative, announced Jan. 23, takes advantage of a new resource: free online college courses. Here’s how it works:.

The Great Quake, as captured by a seismograph at Washington and Lee University. (Courtesy of Washington and Lee) Catholic University may hold the distinction of being the first educational institution in Washington to hold an earthquake drill.

Tuesday morning at 11:15, denizens of Catholic in Northeast Washington put down what they were doing, scuttled under desks and held on tight. It was a test of earthquake etiquette that nearly everyone in Washington failed last August, when the city was visited by an actual earthquake.

Catholic was the only school in the Mid-Atlantic to participate in an international event called ShakeOut, held annually since 2008 to raise awareness of earthquakes. Participation has spread from California to earthquake-ignorant regions of the Midwest and, now, to the nation’s tectonically illiterate capital.

Probably no one in the DMV had thought of gauging their institutional earthquake preparedness prior to the August quake, which sent Washington into violent convulsions and reverberated all the way to New York.

The following is an excerpt from the “ The Neurotic Parent’s Guide to College Admissions,”a forthcoming book by J.D. Rothman, an Emmy-winning screenwriter and lyricist and recent veteran of two rounds of college admissions with her sons.

Q: What does "SAT" stand for?

A: It used to stand for Scholastic Achievement Test, but in 1947, the name of the exam was changed to Scholastic Aptitude Test. Then the folks at the College Board used their Critical Reasoning skills and came to the conclusion that a coachable exam could not be called an "aptitude" test. So officially, SAT stands for nothing, although at least one college refers to it on its Web site as the Scholastic Assessment Test.

 Q: What time does Staples close, in case your kid can't locate his TI-183 calculator the night before the SAT exam?

A: Luckily, the Staples in our neighborhood closes at 9 p.m., as we discovered the night before our son’s exam. (Our son, who had "just had" his calculator the day before, volunteered to pay for the new one, which should add up to about a week of his summer wages.)

Cadets gather on the parade ground at 7 a.m. at VMI for the raising of the flags and roll call in this 2009 file photo. (Stephanie Gross - The Washingotn Post) Some cadets at the storied Virginia Military Institute are outraged over a series of caustic personal attacks posted to a photo-caption Web site and directed at female students, minorities and college administrators.

The posts are on the site quickmeme and appear to target several VMI cadets, as well as top brass. The site’s format allows users to create captions within portrait photos, much like the formula of lolcats, except that many of these captions are vulgar and personal.

Many of the posts amount to inconsequential grumbling about daily life at the institute, a state-funded military school with a 170-year history and a punishing routine.

One is a portrait of General J.H. Binford Peay III, superintendent of the institute, with the accusatory caption “1600 lonely males . . . blocks all porn.” A thread of comments on Deputy Commandant Lieutenant Colonel Gary Levenson includes the barb, “one does not simply approve permits.”

All of the college admissions community took note last month when leaders of Claremont McKenna College, an elite California liberal arts school, acknowledged their admission dean had inflated the school’s SAT numbers for years.

Much has been made of how this modest bit of fraud might affect Claremont McKenna’s rankings. One ranker, Kiplinger, went so far as to pull Claremont from its “value” rankings. (That seems ironic: does a slightly lower SAT average make the school a lesser value?)

But dropping the school from the list is about the worst penalty a ranker can inflict on a college. What about Claremont McKenna’s accreditor? What about the Department of Education? Claremont McKenna must have reported inaccurate SAT numbers to them, too. Either of those agencies could conceivably inflict real penalties— such as suspension of accreditation, or of student aid — on a school that breaks the rules.