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Texting in the Park (Photo credit: JPott)

A recent study published in the journal New Media & Society found that the relationship between text messaging on adolescents’ grammar skills is nothing to lol about.

Texting is a big part of life for most teenagers. American adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 send more text messages than any other demographic group, with an average of 3,339 a month, the researchers report. In case you were wondering, that breaks down to about 111 a day or one each 13 minutes throughout a 24-hour day.

And while fingers and thumbs fly furiously over QWERTY keyboards and touchscreens, most teenagers are dabbling in a new form of English called “techspeak,” which the researchers describe as a language that:

[T]akes normal English words and modifies them (what we call ‘word adaptation’), using conventions of abbreviation, such as initialisms (lol for laughing out loud), omission of non-essential letters (wud for would), and the substitution of homophones (gr8 for great)… In addition, techspeak adapts standard conventions of structure by de-emphasizing proper punctuation and capitalization (what we call ‘structural adaptation’), all in the interest of quickness.

And techspeak lives not only on the homescreens of teens around the country; it’s making its way into school work. Using a sample of 228 students between the ages of 10 and 14, the researchers found that the negative association between texting and grammar increased with the frequency of text messages sent and received.

But not all grammar shortfallings were equally associated with texting. The average sent word adaptation had a significant effect on students’ grammar scores — the more students shortened and adjusted words, the lower their score. The effect was so large, it was more consistently linked to students’ scores than even their grade level. But the number of structural adaptations used in texting didn’t make a significant difference in students’ grammar skills. The researchers wrote that the latter may be “due to a push in younger grades to ensure that students know a good sentence starts with a capital and ends with a period.”

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Stamford Advocate File Photo

Newsweek ranked Sacred Heart University in Fairfield as the nation’s “least affordable” college in the 2012 edition of the magazine’s annual ranking of American colleges.

According to the rankings, attending the $50,000 a year university leaves 99 percent of students in debt after they graduate, with the average debt incurred adding up to $40,865. That’s a lot of money, and it may feel like even more to Sacred Heart alums, whose median salary upon graduation is barely more than the red number in their bank accounts at $44,800.

Here’s how Newsweek explains its affordability rankings:

For this year’s college rankings, we considered affordability on a college-by-college basis as a metric of long-term affordability. In other words, the schools that landed atop of our most affordable list may not have the lowest sticker price, but when measured through a lens of the potential earnings with a degree from each institution as well as the average debt level of graduates, these are the schools where students are most able to shoulder the cost of their degree—and where the education has a proven record of being a valuable investment relative to other schools.

According to that methodology, Sacred Heart is a less affordable school than nearby powerhouse Yale University, which frankly makes little sense.

While Sacred Heart was named the costliest college in America, Yale was ranked at the No. 14 most affordable school, despite the fact that Yale’s sticker price is about $8,000 more a year than Sacred Heart’s. And only 66 percent of Yale students receive financial aid, compared with 92 percent at Sacred Heart.

But Yale students can expect higher earnings upon graduation, with a starting median salary of $50,700 (a figure that does not even cover one year of tuition for the 28 percent of Elis graduating with debt).

While Yale’s financial aid package offers more of a boost to the students who receive help, with an average package of slightly more than $36,000, it might be the legacy of wealth attached to the Ivy League institution that leaves a relatively privileged class of graduates debt-free.