Archive for November, 2014

Admission rates aren’t all they are cracked up to be

by pfadmin

As it becomes easier for prospective students to send out multiple applications, it may be time to de-emphasize acceptance rates as measures of prestige for institutions of higher learning.

Students are sending out more and more college applications, even as overall enrollment declines. Total estimated enrollment for degree-granting institutions in the U.S. dropped to 19.1 million students in the spring of 2013, down 2.3% from one year earlier, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The spring 2012 figure, 19.6 million, was down 0.3% from one year earlier.

But applications are on the rise in part because it’s much easier for students to apply to multiple colleges today, often through just a few mouse clicks, because of electronic forms and because colleges use uniform applications, as the New York Times points out. The most widely used application form, the Common Application, was accepted by 517 colleges and universities this year. Seven years ago, only 315 accepted it. Seven or more applications were sent out by 29% of students applying to college in 2011, up from 9% in 1990.

Two other factors contributing to the rise in applications are more troubling.

The first: Dropping acceptance rates feed the practice of students sending out more applications to improve their odds for success. The increased number of applications drive the rates down, and the cycle is perpetuated the next year.

The second: Because colleges know that acceptance rates are a factor in their prestige ranking on various lists, some of them seek to increase their applicant numbers through marketing blitzes.

As the news media focus on the selection/rejection rates, especially for the most selective schools, college admissions officers often lament that the numbers are given too much importance. But that doesn’t stop higher ed institutions from publicizing their applications and admissions numbers.

Another problem with focusing on acceptance rates is that schools define the term differently. The Washington Post notes that there is no universally accepted definition of “applicant,” and the federal definition of an applicant leaves wiggle room for differing interpretations.

The Post reported that, in 2011, the U.S. Naval Academy claimed an admissions rate of 7.5% — one percentage point better than Princeton University. The academy had counted 19,145 applications when calculating this super-exclusive rate, but only 5,720 applications were complete. The others were just partial applications, and were never seriously considered.

The applications total also included thousands of students who applied to the Naval Academy’s Summer Seminar — an event for 11th graders interested in the learning about the academy.

In 2013, the Post reported that Washington and Lee University had claimed 5,972 applications and a 19% acceptance rate, which boosted the university’s reputation by defining it as one of the most selective liberal arts schools.

But more than 1,100 of the counted applications were never completed and, like the Naval Academy example, were never seriously considered. If the incomplete applications had been subtracted from the total, the admission rate would have been 24%.

In some cases, colleges are so aggressive in trying to boost their applicant numbers that they waive all application fees and fill out just about everything on the application form except for the student’s signature — a practice known as the “fast app,” the Post reported.

This year, the most selective title went to Stanford University, at 5%, a new low for the school. The rates for Ivy League schools ranged from 5.9% at Harvard University to 14% at Cornell University. Some schools have been even more selective: IvyWise reported that the Curtis Institute of Music admitted just 2.9% of applicants for its Class of 2015.

But the more we learn about how the acceptance rates are influenced, the less impressed we are.

By

Find original article at : http://www.educationdive.com/news/admissions-rates-arent-all-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/250596/

Our crazy college crossroads

by pfadmin

Over recent days the notices have gone out, an annual ritual of dashed hopes.

Brown University offered admission to the lowest fraction ever of the applicants it received: fewer than one in 10. The arithmetic was even more brutal at Stanford, Columbia, Yale. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a record number of students vying for its next freshman class — 31,321 — and accepted about one in six who applied from outside the state. Notre Dame took about one in five of all comers.

And right now many young men and women who didn’t get in where they fervently longed to are worrying that it’s some grim harbinger of their future, some sweeping judgment of their worth.

This is for them. And it’s intended less as a balm for the rejected than as a reality check for a society gone nuts over the whole overheated process.

If you were shut out of an elite school, that doesn’t mean you’re less gifted than all of the students who were welcomed there. It may mean only that you lacked the patronage that some of them had, or that you played the game less single-mindedly, taking fewer SAT courses and failing to massage your biography with the same zeal.

A friend of mine in Africa told me recently about a center for orphans there that a rich American couple financed in part to give their own teenage children an exotic charity to visit occasionally and mine for college-application essays: admissions bait. That’s the degree of cunning that comes into this frenzy.

Maybe the school that turned you down ranks high in the excessively publicized “College Salary Report” by PayScale.com, which looks at whose graduates go on to make the most money.

What a ludicrous list. It’s at least as imperfectly assembled as the honor roll that U.S. News & World Report puts together every year. And even if you trust it, what does it tell you? That the colleges at the top have the most clout and impart the best skills? Or that these colleges admit the most young people whose parents and previously established networks guarantee them a leg up?

Maybe it tells you merely that these colleges attract the budding plutocrats with the greatest concern for the heft of their paychecks. Is that the milieu you sought?

About money and professional advancement: Shiny diplomas from shiny schools help. It’s a lie to say otherwise. But it’s as foolish to accord their luster more consequence than the effort you put into your studies, the earnestness with which you hone your skills, what you actually learn. These are the sturdier building blocks of a career.

In “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell makes the case that a less exclusive university may enable a student to stand out and flourish in a way that a more exclusive one doesn’t. The selectiveness of Gladwell’s science doesn’t nullify the plausibility of his argument.

Corner offices in this country teem with C.E.O.s who didn’t do their undergraduate work in the Ivy League. Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin went to the University of Alabama. John Mackey of Whole Foods studied at the University of Texas, never finishing.

Your diploma is, or should be, the least of what defines you. Show me someone whose identity is rooted in where he or she went to college. I’ll show you someone you really, really don’t want at your Super Bowl party.

And your diploma will have infinitely less relevance to your fulfillment than so much else: the wisdom with which you choose your romantic partners; your interactions with the community you inhabit; your generosity toward the family that you inherited or the family that you’ve made.

If you’re not bound for the school of your dreams, you’re probably bound for a school that doesn’t conform as tidily to your fantasies or promise to be as instantly snug a fit.

Good. College should be a crucible. It’s about departure, not continuity: about turning a page and becoming a new person, not letting the ink dry on who, at 17 or 18, you already are. The disruption of your best-laid plans serves that. It’s less a setback than a springboard.

A high school senior I know didn’t get into several of the colleges she coveted most. She got into a few that are plenty excellent. And I’ve never been more impressed with her, because she quickly realized that her regrets pale beside her blessings and she pivoted from letdown to excitement.

That resiliency and talent for optimism will matter more down the line than the name of the school lucky enough to have her. Like those of her peers who are gracefully getting past this ordeal that our status-mad society has foisted on them, she’ll do just fine.

By Frank Bruni
Find original article : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/bruni-our-crazy-college-crossroads.html

Go West, Young people! And East!

by pfadmin

By Nicholas Kristof
Photo of Nicholas Kristof on top of a train in Sudan in 1984 during his graduate school studies.

I’M delighted to announce that the winner of my 2014 “win-a-trip” contest is …

Oh, hang on. Maybe I should first exhort students to travel on their own — and cite Utah.

Utah may well be the most cosmopolitan state in America. Vast numbers of young Mormons — increasingly women as well as men — spend a couple of years abroad as missionaries and return jabbering in Thai or Portuguese and bearing a wealth of international experience.

More than 130 languages are spoken daily in commerce in Utah, according to the University of Utah, and that’s one reason it sometimes tops the Forbes list of best states to do business. The state is a center for trade and for global companies.

American universities should also be sending people abroad, but they are still quite insular. The number of Americans studying abroad has tripled over the last 20 years, but, still, fewer than 10 percent of college students study overseas during undergraduate years. Three times as many foreigners study in America as the other way around.

(A shout-out goes to Goucher College in Baltimore, which requires students to study abroad. Others should try that.)

All young Americans should learn Spanish — el idioma extranjero de mayor importancia en los Estados Unidos — partly because growing numbers of seniors will finance retirement by moving to cheaper countries like Mexico, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Yet it makes no sense to study Spanish on a college campus when it is so much cheaper and more exhilarating to move to Bolivia, study or get a job and fall in love with a Bolivian.

It’s also more effective. I have a one-question language test that people who have lived abroad do better on than those who studied in a classroom. Try my test yourself: In a foreign language you’ve studied, how do you say “doorknob”?

As you’re looking blank and thinking of those four wasted years studying French (poignée de porte) or Spanish (pomo), consider this joke: If someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, and a person who speaks four languages is quadrilingual, what is a person called who speaks no foreign language at all?

Answer: An American.

One of the aims of higher education is to broaden perspectives, and what better way than by a home stay in a really different country, like Bangladesh or Senegal? Time abroad also leaves one more aware of the complex prism of suspicion through which the United States is often viewed. If more Americans had overseas experience, our foreign policy might be wiser.

That’s partly why I started my win-a-trip contest. I wanted to encourage American students to engage more with the world and with the issue of global poverty. So I’m pleased to announce that my win-a-trip winner, from the University of Notre Dame, is … But wait! First, a personal aside.

I took a gap year myself after high school and worked on a farm near Lyon, France. I stayed with the Vallet family, picked and packed fruit, and discovered that red wine can be a breakfast drink. That led to further travel as a university student. I slept on the floor of Indian temples and rode on the tops of Sudanese trains, and the experiences changed me by opening my eyes to human needs and to human universals.

Nicholas Kristof working on a farm near Lyon, France during a gap year in 1978.

Gap years are becoming a bit more common in the United States and are promoted by organizations like Global Citizen Year. Colleges tend to love it when students defer admission to take a gap year because those students arrive with more maturity and less propensity to spend freshman year in an alcoholic haze.

Here’s a suggestion: How about if colleges gave students a semester credit for a gap year spent in a non-English-speaking country?

There’s a misconception that gap years or study-abroad opportunities are feasible only for the affluent. There are lots of free options (and some paid ones) at idealist.org, which lists volunteering opportunities all over the world. It’s also often possible to make money teaching English on the side.

So go west, young men and women! And go east! Y al norte y al sur!

Back to my win-a-trip contest: I’m delighted to announce that my winner is Nicole Sganga, a 20-year-old from Long Island and the University of Notre Dame. Nicole is a junior majoring in political science and film and has already worked for CBS News in Washington and London.

I’m not sure yet where we’ll travel for our reporting together on neglected issues. Perhaps Congo. Maybe Myanmar. I welcome your suggestions on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, for places to go and themes to cover.

Thanks to the Center for Global Development for helping screen applications, and to all the students who applied. If you didn’t win, I hope you’ll go out and win your own trip!

Save us from the SAT

by pfadmin

Photo Matt Dorfman
By Jennifer Finney Boylan

BELGRADE LAKES, Me. — I WAS in trouble. The first few analogies were pretty straightforward — along the lines of “leopard is to spotted as zebra is to striped” — but now I was in the tall weeds of nuance. Kangaroo is to marsupial as the giant squid is to — I don’t know, maybe D) cephalopod? I looked up for a second at the back of the head of the girl in front of me. She had done this amazing thing with her hair, sort of like a French braid. I wondered if I could do that with my hair.

I daydreamed for a while, thinking about the architecture of braids. When I remembered that I was wasting precious time deep in the heart of the SAT, I swore quietly to myself. French braids weren’t going to get me into Wesleyan. Although, in the years since I took the test in the mid-’70s, I’ve sometimes wondered if knowing how to braid hair was actually of more practical use to me as an English major than the quadratic equation. But enough of that. Back to the analogies. Loquacious is to mordant as lachrymose is to … uh …

This was the moment I saw the terrible thing I had done, the SAT equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster. I’d accidentally skipped a line on my answer sheet, early in that section of the test. Every answer I’d chosen, each of those lines of graphite-filled bubbles, was off by one. I looked at the clock. Time was running out. I could see the Wesleyan campus fading before my eyes.

I began moving all my bubbles up one line, erasing the wrong answers. The eraser on my No. 2 pencil hadn’t been at full strength when I’d started, and now I was nearly down to the metal.

Then there was a ripping sound.

I picked up the answer sheet. Through the gaping hole in the middle of it, I could see the hair of the girl in front of me.

That braid really was a remarkable thing.

I remembered this sequence, like something from a Hitchcock film, when the College Board announced this week that it was rolling out a complete do-over of the SAT. Starting in 2016, gone will be the tristful effect of arcane vocabulary words such as “tristful” and “arcane”; gone will be the penalty for guessing wrong instead of leaving the answer blank; and gone will be the short-lived mandatory essay section, a test that reportedly places a higher value on loquaciousness than logic.

All in all, the changes are intended to make SAT scores more accurately mirror the grades a student gets in school.

The thing is, though, there already is something that accurately mirrors the grades a student gets in school. Namely: the grades a student gets in school. A better way of revising the SAT, from what I can see, would be to do away with it once and for all.

The SAT is a mind-numbing, stress-inducing ritual of torture. The College Board can change the test all it likes, but no single exam, given on a single day, should determine anyone’s fate. The fact that we have been using this test to perform exactly this function for generations now is a national scandal.

The problems with the test are well known. It measures memorization, not intelligence. It favors the rich, who can afford preparatory crash courses. It freaks students out so completely that they cannot even think.

As the mother of two former SAT takers (one a sophomore in college, the other a senior in high school awaiting the result of his applications), I can also point out another problem with the test: It usually starts around 8:30 in the morning. I don’t know if the members of the College Board have ever met a 17-year-old at that hour, but I can tell you this is not the time of day I would choose to test their ability to do anything, except perhaps make orangutan sounds.

I sympathize with college-admissions deans who want a simple, accurate measurement of student potential. But no such measurement exists, as I can attest from 25 years as an English professor. Students flower or diminish unexpectedly, in ways unpredictable and strange. One of the great joys of teaching is that moment when a student makes a leap and creates something new. The possibility of that leap is unlikely to be measured by a test involving bubble sheets.

The only way to measure students’ potential is to look at the complex portrait of their lives: what their schools are like; how they’ve done in their courses; what they’ve chosen to study; what progress they’ve made over time; how they’ve reacted to adversity. Of course colleges try to take these nuanced portraits into account, but too often they’re overshadowed by the SAT. Our children, precious, brilliant, frustrating, confused souls that they are, are more than a set of scores.

On that long-ago test day, I scratched in the last of my bubbles and barely finished on time. I’d go on to take the test again, and in the end I got lucky — despite my somewhat gruesome scores, I squeezed off the wait list and into Wesleyan.

But this is what stayed with me from that day: When at last the sour proctor gave us permission to leave, everyone leapt to their feet, everyone except me and that girl with the French braid. I noticed, as I sat there, contemplating what I thought was my newly vanished future, that the back of her head was shaking.

When I finally got up to leave, I glanced down at her face. She was weeping.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a contributing opinion writer, a professor at Colby College and the author of “Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders.”