The Impossible Math of College Admissions

Colleges say they want more low-income students. So why are they admitting so many wealthy ones? The NYT article excerpted below tries to answer that. 

And for most colleges the answer is simple.  To meet their costs they need to charge high prices for their services and the children of poor families just cannot  afford those prices. So to get poor students on campus colleges have to slash what they charge.  But they can't do much of that or they would go broke.

So for most colleges economic necessity dictates that only a small percentage of admissions will be of students from a poor background, no matter how smart they may be.

But what about really rich schools such as Harvard who could afford to charge no fees at all if they chose?  So they have a lot of students from poor backgrounds, right?  Wrong.  Such schools tend to have the fewest poor students of all.  So why?  To put it crudely, admitting many poor students would lower the "tone" of the college -- and tone is a big part of their identity.

So how is "tone" enforced?  Via the "holistic" system of admissions. "Holistic" judgements are used to admit a few blacks and sportsmen but their main function is to keep out those awful poor people.  If you spend a year doing the grand tour of Europe or "helping" blacks in Botswana, your tone score is high.  If you spent similar time flipping burgers your tone score is prohibitive. You are just not "suitable"


Over the last decade, two distinct conversations about college admissions and class have been taking place in the United States. The first one has been conducted in public, at College Board summits and White House conferences and meetings of philanthropists and nonprofit leaders. The premise of this conversation is that inequity in higher education is mostly a demand-side problem: Poor kids are making regrettable miscalculations as they apply to college. Selective colleges would love to admit more low-income students — if only they could find enough highly qualified ones who could meet their academic standards.

The second conversation is the one that has been going on among the professionals who labor behind the scenes in admissions offices — or “enrollment management” offices, as they are now more commonly known. This conversation, held more often in private, starts from the premise that the biggest barriers to opportunity for low-income students in higher education are on the supply side — in the universities themselves, and specifically in the admissions office. Enrollment managers know there is no shortage of deserving low-income students applying to good colleges. They know this because they regularly reject them — not because they don’t want to admit these students, but because they can’t afford to.

There is a tiny minority of American colleges where tuition revenue doesn’t matter much to the institution’s financial health. Harvard and Princeton and Stanford have such enormous endowments and such dependable alumni donors that they are able to spend lavishly to educate their students, with only a small percentage of those funds coming from the students themselves. But most private colleges, including Trinity, operate on a model that depends heavily on tuition for their financial survival. And for many colleges, that survival no longer seems at all certain: According to Moody’s Investors Service, about a quarter of private American colleges are now operating at a deficit, spending more than they are taking in.

In public, university leaders like to advertise the diversity of their freshman classes and their institutions’ generosity with financial aid. In private, they feel immense pressure to maintain tuition revenue and protect their school’s elite status. The public and private are inevitably in conflict, and the place on each campus where that conflict plays out is the admissions office.

When Angel Pérez arrived at Trinity and took a close look at the way the admissions office had been making its decisions, what he found left him deeply concerned. “We were taking some students who probably should not have been admitted, but we were taking them because they could pay,” he told me. “They went to good high schools, but they were maybe at the bottom of their class. The motivation wasn’t there. So the academic quality of our student body was dropping.”

At Trinity, Pérez’s predecessors had been able to capitalize on a pattern that admissions officers say they often see: At expensive prep schools, even students close to the bottom of the class usually have above-average SAT scores, mostly because they have access to high-octane test-prep classes and tutors.

“O.K., you’re not motivated, you’re doing the minimum at your high school,” Pérez explained, describing the students Trinity used to admit in droves. “You have not worked as hard as your peers. But you did the test prep, and you learned how to play the SAT game.”

If you work in admissions at a place like Trinity was before Pérez arrived, SAT scores can provide a convenient justification for admitting the kind of students you might feel compelled to accept because they can pay full tuition. It’s hard to feel good about choosing an academically undeserving rich kid over a striving and ambitious poor kid with better high school grades. But if the rich student you’re admitting has a higher SAT score than the poor student you’re rejecting, you can tell yourself that your decision was based on “college readiness” rather than ability to pay.

The problem is, rich kids who aren’t motivated to work hard and get good grades in high school often aren’t college-ready, however inflated their SAT scores may be. At Trinity, this meant there was a growing number of affluent students on campus who couldn’t keep up in class and weren’t interested in trying. “It had a morale effect on our faculty,” Pérez told me. “They were teaching a very divided campus. The majority of students were really smart and engaged and curious, and then you’ve got these other students” — the affluent group with pumped-up SAT scores and lower G.P.A.s — “who were wondering, How did I get into this school?”

Hidden away among the wealthy masses on the Trinity campus was a small cohort of low-income students. When Pérez arrived, about 10 percent of the student body was eligible for a Pell grant, the federal subsidy for college students from low-income families, and many of those were students of color. Academically, Trinity’s low-income students were significantly outperforming the rich kids on campus; the six-year graduation rate for Pell-eligible students at Trinity was 92 percent, compared with 76 percent for the rest of the student body. But Trinity’s low-income students — at least the ones I spoke to during my visits to campus in 2017 — were often miserable, struggling to find their place on a campus where the dominant student culture was overwhelmingly privileged and white.

But perhaps the most startling fact about the pre-Pérez admissions strategy at Trinity was that it was not doing much to help the college stay afloat financially. As Pérez saw it, this was mostly a question of demographics. The pool of affluent 18-year-old Americans was shrinking, especially in the Northeast, and the ones who remained had come to understand that they had significant bargaining power when it came to negotiating tuition discounts with the colleges that wanted to admit them. As a result, paradoxically, Trinity was going broke educating an unusually wealthy student body.

More HERE 






6-Year-Old Girl Arrested For ‘Battery’ After Throwing Tantrum

This is what happens when school discipline is neutered.  Teachers are no longer allowed to do much with unruly students so the cops have to be called in

A 6-year-old girl in Florida was arrested after she threw a tantrum in her Florida classroom.

The girl’s grandmother, Meralyn Kirkland, said the girl suffers from sleep apnea and was sleep deprived when she threw the tantrum, and shouldn’t have been arrested. She told NBC affiliate WFLA-TV that she was told of the arrest after the fact.

“What do you mean she was arrested, he said ‘there was an incident and she kicked somebody and she is being charged and she is on her way,'” Kirkland told the outlet.

She said police officers were not persuaded by her granddaughter’s medical condition.

“She has a medical condition that we are working on getting resolved and he says, ‘what medical condition, she has a sleep disorder, sleep apnea,’ and he says, ‘well I have sleep apnea and I don’t behave like that,” Kirkland told WFLA.

The outlet reported that Kirkland’s granddaughter Kaia, a first grader at Lucious and Emma Nixon Elementary charter school, was handcuffed and taken to the police station in a squad car to be fingerprinted and have her mug shot taken.

“They told us we had to wait a few minutes because Kaia was being fingerprinted, and when she said fingerprinted it hit me like a ton of bricks,” Kirkland told WFLA. “No six-year-old child should be able to tell somebody that they had handcuffs on them and they were riding in the back of a police car and taken to a juvenile center to be fingerprinted, mug shot.”

Kirkland added that Kaia “was charged with battery!” because she kicked a staff member at her school during her tantrum. Kirkland told Click Orlando that Kaia was sent to the head office after throwing a tantrum. Once there, a staff member tried to calm her down by grabbing her wrists, which is when Kaia kicked the staff member.

Kaia said Friday that she “felt sad that my grandma was sad, and I really missed her."

The outlet also reported that another child at the school, an 8-year-old, was also arrested that day. Orlando Police Department officials told Click Orlando that department policy dictates school resource officers must seek watch commander approval before arresting children under the age of 12, but this particular officer did not do that in either case. That officer, Dennis Turner, is now facing an internal investigation for the arrests.

Kirkland told the outlet that Kaia has an upcoming court date related to her arrest.

Kaia is not the only Florida child whose arrest caused national outrage. In 2017, a 10-year-old boy with autism was arrested after an outburst in class. CNN reported at the time that John Haygood, a student at Okeechobee Achievement Academy, was throwing paper balls at students. His paraprofessional told him to take a time out, but he refused, and kicked and punched the paraprofessional instead. In a previous incident, Haygood allegedly threatened to kill the paraprofessional.

Haygood was expelled from the Academy but returned months later to take a test. He was arrested after refusing to take the test and “not being compliant.” The arresting officer told Haygood’s mother that the 10-year-old had an active warrant because the paraprofessional had filed charges. He was arrested.

SOURCE 






Trump Administration to UNC and Duke: Quit Promoting Islam on Our Dime

Will the Trump Administration move against the radioactive wastelands of far-Left indoctrination and Islamic proselytizing that our nation’s colleges and universities have become?

On Friday, it made a small, long overdue step in that direction: Associated Press reported that “the Trump administration is threatening to cut funding for a Middle East studies program run by the University of North Carolina and Duke University, claiming that it’s misusing a federal grant to advance ‘ideological priorities’ and unfairly promote ‘the positive aspects of Islam’ but not Christianity or Judaism.”

The U.S. Department of Education wrote to the UNC-Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies, no doubt interrupting these cosseted pseudo-academics as they swapped stories about how oppressed they are, and told them they had three weeks to revise their course offerings or else they could lose federal funds that were intended for instruction in foreign languages.

The Education Department letter came after Rep. George Holding (R-N.C.) noted that the UNC-Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies had held a taxpayer-funded conference featuring “severe anti-Israeli bias and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” which made it like virtually every other conference on Israel and the Middle East held in every college and university over the last few years, but never mind. The Education Department found that instruction in foreign languages (which, remember, the money was for) and national security had “taken a back seat to other priorities,” and that the Consortium was spending taxpayer money on courses that were “plainly unqualified for taxpayer support.”

The letter also observed that the Consortium was failing to offer – shocker! -- a “balance of perspectives” on religion. Instead, the Consortium was placing “considerable emphasis” on “understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East.” There were few, if any, courses discussing the persecution of non-Muslims in the Middle East, “including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yadizis, Kurds, Druze and others,” and pointed out that the grant’s rules require that students be given a “full understanding” of the region. Not, that is, one that could have been taught by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

AP, unsurprisingly, thought this was horrifying – not the course on Jew-hatred or the ones proselytizing for Islam, but the Education Department’s letter. It reported that “academic freedom advocates say the government could be setting a dangerous precedent if it injects politics into funding decisions.” These “academic freedom advocates” were not reported as saying anything at all about the dangerous precedent that academic institutions all over the country have already set by injecting politics – far-Left politics, of course, required, taken for granted, pervading everything – into academic discourse.

Henry Reichman, chairman of a committee on academic freedom for the American Association of University Professors, fumed: “Is the government now going to judge funding programs based on the opinions of instructors or the approach of each course?” Without any sense of irony, this man who has won honors and advancement because of his adherence to left-wing political correctness railed against the Trump administration’s letter, saying: “The odor of right-wing political correctness that comes through this definitely could have a chilling effect.” He said nothing about the chilling effect of indoctrinating a generation of young Americans into thinking that their nation and its history are evil, that murderous jihadi thugs are noble freedom fighters, and that “climate change” and “Islamophobia” are real things that they need to worry about.

Jay Smith, a history professor at UNC and vice president of its chapter of the American Association of University Professors, was outraged, charging the Department of Education with “ideologically driven harassment” and declaring that Education Department official Robert King, who signed the letter, “should stay in his lane and allow the experts to determine what constitutes a ‘full understanding’ of the Middle East.”

It is important to remember that Smith was raging against just one small expression of disapproval toward two of the universities where this proselytizing for Islam has been going on in universities and colleges for years. But the Education Department’s letter is at least some pushback. And it signals to other “institutions of higher learning,” as these Antifa/Muslim Brotherhood recruitment centers quaintly used to be called, that they may not continue to be able to get away with this indefinitely.

In a sane world, none of the academic institutions that have been little totalitarian fiefdoms in which Leftist politics are taken for granted and thrust upon every student, and Muslims ostensibly standing against the alleged abuses of the Israeli military themselves abuse and even sometimes brutalize Jewish and pro-Israel students should receive any taxpayer funding at all. The federal government should withhold all – yes, all -- funds from any university or college, no matter how great or insignificant, where only one point of view is allowed to be taught, and which train young people in little, if anything, other than a sense of grievance at perceived racism, “white supremacism,” and “cisgender hegemony.”

As it happens, I took a UNC/Duke graduate course on Islam back in 1985, when I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Even that many years ago, the violent aspects of Islamic doctrine were downplayed and whitewashed. There is no doubt whatsoever that in the intervening years, the impulse to absolve Islam of all responsibility for the crimes committed in its name and in accord with its teachings has only intensified.

Smith rages that the Department of Education should allow the “experts” to set the parameters of academic instruction. “Experts.” Sure. Everyone at this point should be wary of what historian Christopher Dummitt calls “the so-called proof presented by alleged experts.” He notes, in a fascinating article about his own promotion of currently fashionable gender fictions, that his “own flawed reasoning was never called out—and, in fact, only became more ideologically inflected through the process of peer review.” Yes, and that is happening in every academic department in virtually every university and college in the country. Untold millions of young people have had their heads filled with this destructive nonsense. If America is to have a future, this must stop.

SOURCE