Is Prestige Worth It?

by Thomas Sowell

The obsession of many high school students and their parents about getting into a prestige college or university is part of the social scene of our time. So is the experience of parents going deep into hock to finance sending a son or daughter off to Ivy U. or the flagship campus of the state university system. Sometimes both the student and the parent end up with big debts from financing a degree from some prestige institution. Yet these are the kinds of institutions that many have their hearts set on.

Media hype adds to the pressure to go where the prestige is. A key role is often played by the various annual rankings of colleges and universities, especially the rankings by U.S. News & World Report. These rankings typically measure all sorts of inputs-- but not outputs. The official academic accrediting agencies do the same thing. They measure how much money is spent on this or that, how many professors have tenure and other kinds of inputs. What they don't measure is the output-- what kind of education the students end up with.

A new think tank in Washington is trying to shift the emphasis from inputs to outputs. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity is headed by Professor Richard Vedder, who gives the U.S. News rankings a grade of D. Measuring the inputs, he says, is "roughly equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses." His approach is to "review the meal"-- that is, the outcome of the education itself.

The CCAP study uses several measures of educational output, including the proportion of a college's graduates who win awards like the Rhodes Scholarships or who end up listed in "Who's Who in America," as well as the ratings that students give the professors who teach them. Professor Vedder admits that these are "imperfect" measures of a college's educational output, but at least they are measures of output instead of input.

Some academic institutions come out at or near the top by either input or output criteria but there were some large changes in rankings as well. Among national universities, the top three are the same-- but in different order-- whether ranked by U.S. News or by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. They are Harvard, Yale and Princeton, according to Professor Vedder's think tank, and Princeton, Harvard and Yale in the U.S. News rankings.

Among the liberal arts colleges, however, there were some big changes. Although Williams and Amherst were the top two in both rankings, Washington & Lee moved up from 15th to 6th when ranked by Professor Vedder's group and Barnard climbed from 30th to 8th. Whitman College, which was ranked 37th by U.S. News on the basis of the college's inputs, jumped to 9th when evaluated on its output by Vedder and company. Wabash College jumped from 52nd to 10th. West Point rose from 22nd to 7th.

One of my own favorite measures of output-- the percentage of a college's graduates who go on to get Ph.D.s-- was not used by either set of evaluations. Small colleges dominate the top ten in sending their alumni on to get doctorates. Grinnell College, which was not among the top ten on either the U.S. News list or on Professor Vedder's list, sends a higher percentage of its graduates on to get Ph.D.s than does either Harvard or Yale.

No given criterion tells the whole story. In fact, the whole idea of ranking colleges and universities is open to question. To someone who is making a decision where to apply, what matters is what is the best institution for that particular individual, which may not be best-- or even advisable-- for that applicant's brother or sister.

"Choosing the Right College" is by far the best of the college guides, partly because it does not give rankings, but more because it goes into the many factors that matter-- and which matter differently for different people.

What Professor Vedder's study does is provide yet another reason for parents and students not to obsess over big-name schools or their rankings-- or to go deep into hock over them.

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A third of British secondary schools have a sex clinic

Nearly 1,000 secondary schools are providing `sexual health services' for their pupils. It means a million youngsters can get contraception, morning-after pills, pregnancy tests and tests for sexually transmitted diseases without any possibility that their parents will be told. A high proportion of secondary pupils are under 16 - the legal age of consent.

The rapid spread of sex services through schools with pupils as young as 11 has been hailed by campaigners who want sex education made compulsory and extended to primaries. Parents can find, however, that their children have not just been given contraception without their family's knowledge. In 2004 there was an outcry after it was revealed that 14-year-old Melissa Smith was given abortion pills without her mother being told. She was encouraged to have the termination by a 28-year-old health worker at her school sex clinic.

The survey of schools was carried out by the Sex Education Forum, an organisation run by the National Children's Bureau, a œ12million-a-year campaign group largely funded by taxpayers. Researcher Lucy Emmerson said: `We are encouraged to find that so many schools are providing sexual health services on-site. This is key to reducing teenage pregnancy rates and improving sexual health.' The survey was made public after a week which saw abortion hit record levels, with a 21 per cent rise among girls of 13 and a 10 per cent increase among under-16s.

Critics say giving out contraception in schools increases pregnancy and abortion by signalling that it is all right for young teenagers to have sex. Jill Kirby, of the centre-right think tank Centre for Policy Studies, said: `This is the normalisation of sex for pupils without the consent of parents.'

The survey was carried out among 2,185 schools, two-thirds of the secondaries in England. It found that 29 per cent had an `on-site sexual health service' - defined as distributing condoms and testing for pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. One in six of these schools gave pupils the morning-after pill, while one school in 20 offered contraceptive options, with prescriptions available for the Pill, injections or implants.

Sexual advice and the distribution of condoms by schools is a key plank of the Government's 138 million pound Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, which was intended to halve the number of pregnancies among under-18s between 1998 and 2010 but is acknowledged to be failing.

Miss Emmerson said parents should not worry about what their children might be offered at school. She said: `Parents with children in those schools will know that the support services will involve sexual health advice and what the range of services on offer are. Also, health professionals always encourage the young person to talk to their parents about any problems.'

Patricia Morgan, a researcher and author on family matters, said: `There is no evidence that giving out condoms works. Children have sex, you get pregnancies and abortions and the spread of infections. If you want progress you should start by telling children not to have sex.'

Government guidelines say that where children under 13 are thought to be having sex, police should be brought in. But opponents say that breaches the children's privacy and makes them less likely to seek help.

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Top students' gains found mediocre

Teachers pay more attention to low achievers, report says

The nation's gifted and talented students have not made the notable academic gains the lowest-performing students have made in recent years, and teachers are pay more attention to struggling students than high achievers, a new report has found. The report, made public Wednesday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, examined test scores and teacher opinion before and after the implementation of the 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which requires states to bring students, including the lowest-performers, to grade-level proficiency in reading and math.

The study found that while the bottom 10 percent of students made notable gains in reading and math over several years, gains made by the top 10 percent have been less impressive - a pattern that bodes poorly for global competitiveness, some experts said. "If we want to compete with the rest of the world, we need our best and brightest to be making progress also," said Mike Petrilli, vice president for national programs and policy at the Fordham Institute.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Assocation, said NCLB is "particularly problematic" for high achievers because it forces teachers to focus on lower performers to avoid law's penalties. Mr. Weaver, whose group is a lead critic of NCLB, said it is "time to usher in a new era" in which schools have enough resources to be able to focus equally on education of all children.

But NCLB is not to blame for the slower improvement of the top students, since the study found the students were essentially making the same minimal gains before NCLB as they were making during it, said Tom Loveless, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who conducted research. And while low-achieving students made bigger strides during the NCLB era than they did before the law , he said, the study couldn't determine whether NCLB played a role. Teacher training, textbooks or other state initiatives could have been involved in the improvement.

His study found the lowest-performing fourth-grade students gained an average of 16 points in reading from 2000 to 2007, while those in the 90th percentile gained an average of only three points, according to an analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In eighth-grade math, the bottom 10 percent of students gained an average of 13 points over that time, while the highest-performers improved by an average of five points. Both groups made notable gains in fourth-grade math while neither improved in eighth-grade reading, the study found.

It also found states with school testing and accountability in place in the 1990s showed a similar pattern of narrowing achievement gaps between high and low performers, with low performers making stronger gains. Mr. Loveless suggested lawmakers should add incentives to NCLB that encourage teachers to raise high-performers' scores, too.

The report also included a survey of 900 public school teachers who were asked about academic gains and their students. Researchers at the Farkas Duffett Research Group , which conducted the poll, found that 60 percent said struggling students are a top priority at their school and 23 percent said the same of academically advanced students.

The survey also found that 81 percent said low performers are more likely to get one-on-one attention while five percent said the more advanced students were more likely. The survey also found 86 percent said all students deserve equal attention, and 77 percent said the recent focus on getting low performers to proficiency has crowded out high performers.

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