Category Archives: Colleges and Universities

Elite college admission practices

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Last year, two Princeton sociologists (T.J. Espenshade and A.W. Radford) published a book titled No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life. The book has drawn a number of comments in the blogosphere.

The book was mentioned in the New York Times this past Sunday as Ross Douthat wrote about “the roots of white anxiety.” Douthat summarizes the book’s findings:

Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

According to Douthat, these decisions have consequences: “This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike” and “Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland.”

Granted, this study was restricted to eight elite universities. But many Americans have an image of liberal academia that bears little relation to average lives of shopping at Wal-Mart, living in suburbia, and going to church.

Cutting writing tests to save money

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The Chicago Tribune reports on Illinois’ plan to cut down on state writing tests for 2010-2011 to save $3.5 million. From the article:

[L]ate last month, the Illinois State Board of Education decided to eliminate the writing exam given to students in grades three, five, six and eight for the 2010-11 school year.

The 11th grade writing test still will be given because some universities require a writing exam of applicants, said state board spokesman Matt Vanover.

I wonder if this is a cut intended to draw outrage from citizens…who might then be willing to pay more toward education.

Additionally, federal statutes focus on reading and math and do not require a writing test. The article also notes that Illinois’ writing scores are typically poor.

Discussing academic cheating

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The New York Times holds a discussion about the epidemic of cheating that includes two teachers (one college, one high school) and a recent college graduate. Interesting perspectives.

More from the college professor in the discussion at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

More evidence: start school day later for teens

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It seems like I have been reading for years about studies that say that teenagers perform much better in school when the starting time is pushed back. Here is another study that suggests starting the day 30 minutes later leads to “stunning” results.

It raises a question: why don’t more schools respond by changing their starting times? I’ve heard arguments about this interfering with after-school activities, particularly sports. It may conflict with schedules for siblings in schools with different starting times or may lead to a shortage of buses since early high school times mean the buses can be used again for elementary students. And there are more reasons that get thrown around, many probably legitimate.

But: if the real goal of educators (and the supporting parents) is to help students succeed in school (specifically: boost learning), isn’t this something that needs to change?

Not simply deriding suburban life

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An AP story discusses a supposed movement to take the suburbs more seriously and move beyond common negative stereotypes. One scholar accurately notes:

“Change your mind about what the suburbs are,” said Robert Puentes, a suburban scholar at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not just bedroom communities for center-city workers. They’re not just rich enclaves. They’re not all economically stable. They’re not all exclusively white.”

“These are not your father’s suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Efforts toward this end include a new museum in Johnson County, Kansas and several academic centers.

These stereotypes will take time to overcome. Common stereotypes, dating back to at least the 1950s, include: bland homes and people, desperate housewives, whites only, lifestyles centered all around children, wealthy people only, conservative, low-brow, garish (from strip malls to shopping malls to McMansions).

The story cites two academic centers for suburban studies. For much of the last 100 years, academics have often led the way in deriding suburbia. To fight some of these stereotypes, more academics would need to be able to move beyond knee-jerk reactions and acknowledge suburbia’s complexities.

Searching for skilled factory workers

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The New York Times reports on a problem for some factories: finding workers that have enough skills to operate more complicated machinery. An anecdote from a company outside Cleveland illustrates the issue:

All candidates at Ben Venue must pass a basic skills test showing they can read and understand math at a ninth-grade level. A significant portion of recent applicants failed, and the company has been disappointed by the quality of graduates from local training programs. It is now struggling to fill 100 positions.

“You would think in tough economic times that you would have your pick of people,” said Thomas J. Murphy, chief executive of Ben Venue.

Many factory jobs today aren’t just manual labor jobs. An education is not just for office jobs; it is helpful or required for most sectors of the economy.

Overvaluing a college degree

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How to measure the value of a college degree is an interesting question: should it be measured in dollars, experiences, things learned? If one is measuring in terms of future monetary value, Businessweek reports on a new study suggesting a college degree has been overvalued:

Over the course of a working life, college graduates earn more than high school graduates. Over the past decade, research estimates have pegged that figure at $900,00, $1.2 million, and $1.6 million.

But new research suggests that the monetary value of a college degree may be vastly overblown. According to a study conducted by PayScale for Bloomberg Businessweek, the value of a college degree may be a lot closer to $400,000 over 30 years and varies wildly from school to school. According to the PayScale study, the number of schools that actually make good on the estimates of the earlier research is vanishingly small. There are only 17 schools in the study whose graduates can expect to recoup the cost of their education and out-earn a high school graduate by $1.2 million, including four where they can do so to the tune of $1.6 million.

The article goes on to list the best colleges for a return on one’s investment and mentions that some schools have taken issue with the methodology of the study. The top 10 schools for returns are what you would expect: MIT, CIT, the Ivys plus Harvey Mudd and Notre Dame. Just looking at the top 10 and their list of the best return in each state, most of these schools are quite expensive.

A question based on this report: if many colleges are getting increasingly expensive, particularly private schools and flagship public universities, and their pay-off is not as much as previously thought, will people stop attending them? Is taking on a decent amount of debt worth it for most schools? Elite schools provide extra wealth but the average student is far from this report’s top 10 schools. If more sources corroborate this sort of evidence, the college landscape might change dramatically.

“The Triumphant Decline of the WASP”

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A NY Times opinion piece from Harvard law professor Noah Feldman makes this argument: “The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.” Feldman explores the changes in the Supreme Court (the appointment of Kagan would make it 6 Catholics, 3 Jews) and Princeton (“As late as 1958, the year of the “dirty bicker” in which Jews were conspicuously excluded from its eating clubs, Princeton could fairly have been seen as a redoubt of all-male Protestant privilege).

So what changed? Feldman provides some reasons: “the anti-aristocratic ideals of the Constitution,” education was an important defining trait for WASPs so opening up universities was a big step, and the American value of fair play. The result:

Together, these social beliefs in equality undercut the impulse toward exclusive privilege that every successful group indulges on occasion. A handful of exceptions for admission to societies, clubs and colleges — trivial in and of themselves — helped break down barriers more broadly. This was not just a case of an elite looking outside itself for rejuvenation: the inclusiveness of the last 50 years has been the product of sincerely held ideals put into action.

These may be accurate reasons. But they seem to ignore the historical context: something happened in the 1960s that changed institutions like Ivy League schools and led to a very different looking Supreme Court. In that decade, the Civil Rights Movement plus an explosion in higher education for the burgeoning US population plus higher rates of immigration from non-European locales plus cultural change (rock ‘n’ roll, television, more open questioning of authority, etc.), changed, or at least began to change, the socioeconomic status of WASPs.

An argument for reducing the amount of poor research

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Several academics  make an argument in The Chronicle for Higher Education for reducing the number of published research articles in order to limit low-quality publications. The measure of “poor research” is linked to the idea that later science should build upon previous findings:

Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

The authors go on to say that uncited articles are akin to “useless information.” This seems a bit premature: uncited articles might be the result of studies in new fields or new approaches to old problems. Graduate students are often told to specialize and perhaps this article glut is due to very specific knowledge and more recent articles that have less of a broad appeal. Regardless, good journals are still publishing these pieces, indicating that somewhere in the peer review process, editors and reviewers thought the authors made a scientific contribution.

Some of the proposed solutions include a greater emphasis on citation and journal impact scores.

Intentional grade inflation

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A story in the NY Times describes how at least 10 law schools have deliberately made their grades more lenient. The reason? To have their students appear more attractive in a weak job market.

[Loyola Law School Los Angeles]  is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.

The article also discusses other interesting measures including abandoning traditional grades and paying students to take unpaid internships.