Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Private colleges in more demand than ever

California's private colleges are printing more rejection letters and limiting admissions to students with higher test scores, making it tougher to get accepted, according to a Bee analysis of federal data. As a result, applicants who once would have slipped into schools ranging in size from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, which has a student body of about 1,400, to the University of Southern California, which has around 33,000 students, are getting turned away.

Referring to applicants with similar grades, Tom Rajala, associate provost for enrollment at University of the Pacific, said, "Families are coming back and saying, 'Her brother got in five years ago, and she didn't. You've got to tell them, 'It's a very different profile now.' "

At California's private, four-year colleges that require the SAT test and have more than 1,000 students, almost 60 percent of fall 2006 applications were denied. That's up from 55 percent in fall 2001, The Bee's analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics found.

Some of the trend is due to a rise in applications from students who never had much of a chance of admittance in the first place. But a lot of it is due to higher standards that reflect more competitive applicants. The Bee determined what combined math and verbal SAT score was needed to be among the top 25 percent of each college's newly enrolled students. (A new writing section was added to the SAT in 2005. In order to compare scores for 2001 and 2006, The Bee did not include data for that section.)

At 17 of the 33 private colleges in the newspaper's analysis, the SAT score needed to be in the top 25 percent rose by at least 20 points from 2001 to 2006. Only three of the colleges saw SAT scores drop at least 20 points. The trend also showed up in California's public colleges, but was not as pronounced.

High school guidance counselors and college admissions officers see a few factors at work. When a school gets more applicants, it can be choosier, admitting only the best and expecting more of them to show up. It's like an auction -- the more bids, the higher the price. "There are a very large number of applicants for a very limited number of openings," said Ralph Robles, head counselor at the Elk Grove Unified School District.

At the same time, as a group, today's applicants look better than their peers did five years ago, Robles said. Parents and students are aware that acceptance rates are down, so youths are studying harder and taking more honors classes. "ACTs, SATs, GPAs are higher," Robles said. "More students are qualified to apply."

All the while, the general availability of financial aid has emboldened some smart students from poorer backgrounds to go for the expensive, private college...

Another factor in colleges' pickiness: Students and parents are not as willing to settle for any school. In other words, it's not just about going; it's about where you go, counselors said. A student with a 1200 combined SAT math and verbal score five years ago might have settled for the state school near home but now wants to land in the best college possible, which raises the bar for everyone else.

"It used to be, 'Just get a college degree,' " said Jerry Lucido, vice provost for enrollment at the University of Southern California. "But the public is starting to view where you go as clearly tied to what will happen to them or their children later in life."

Source




Don't count on osmosis to impart written language skills

A leading Australian legal academic laments that his A-grade university students are deficient in basic literacy and English grammar

ANY disinterested observer would say that the world is better today, on average, than it has ever been. People are living longer, much longer. They have more to eat. They can travel more. They have more leisure. They have more interesting jobs. A far, far smaller percentage of them are stuck as subsistence farmers. And however much things have improved for men in the past century or two, they are three or four times better again for women, at least in the Western world. If anyone seriously wanted to debate that basic claim with a straight face, I'd be happy to do so, preferably for lots of money. I mention it simply because normally it is just out and out false to paint former times - 30, 40 or 50 years ago even - as some sort of golden age when things were so much better than today.

Most jeremiads, or doleful laments about the failings of the here and now, are fairly implausible, to put it as kindly as possible. Rarely do these mournful denunciations of the present stand up to comparative testing. And yet there is one area of life I am intimately aware of where the falling standards grievance appears to be clearly correct. I am talking about university students and their basic grasp of literacy and grammar.

And let me be abundantly clear that I am talking about some of the best university students in the country. These are not just any students. They are what can properly be described as elite students, the very top high school students in all of Queensland who have managed to pass through a winnowing process that the vast preponderance of their fellow high school students fails to get through. It is extremely difficult to get into the law school at my university and the students who manage to do so have some of the best marks, and minds, in Australia.

Yet lots and lots of these highly intelligent tertiary students lack basic grammar knowledge. Forget gerunds or the subjunctive. They cannot cope with basic sentence construction. They use semicolons and colons without the faintest idea of how they should be used, and on a seemingly random basis. The possessive apostrophe is either wholly absent, is regularly confused with the abbreviating apostrophe, is sprinkled around in the hope of getting it correct once in a while (giving the reader such treats as the possessive its'), or all of the above. Definite and indefinite articles are regularly omitted. Run-on sentences are commonplace. And it's not even an exaggeration to say that a few of them don't seem to realise that you need a verb to make a sentence, that "Being the prime minister" doesn't quite cut it.

Quite simply, my elite law students, or a good many of them at any rate, have been provided with almost no technical writing and English grammar skills. One must assume that the same is true of virtually all Australian school leavers. Nor are these particularly challenging skills to acquire. All of my students have the intelligence to learn them in two or three weeks, in my view. They have quite literally, or so I hear on occasion, never been taught these things. Why not? It could be, I suppose, that these skills are no longer considered important. More crucial, on this view, is the fostering of children's (or should we now say childrens?) creativity and self-esteem. But if that, or some similar notion, is one of the reasons so many tertiary students seem to have atrocious writing skills, let me give you the other side of the story.

No one can think at all without language and its labels, categories and generalisations. It follows that no one can think clearly unless they can use language clearly. To make a subtle point or introduce a fine distinction, one needs the tools that a complex and sophisticated language offers. Nor does a knowledge of these complexities and sophistications curtail creativity. Jane Austen was a master of English grammar. And what would Winston Churchill's speeches have been had he not had a superb grasp of the language?

Of course, one might think clarity, precision, irony, humour and even a fully developed capacity for self-expression must bow down before the need to foster students' self-esteem or creative urges. Personally, though, I've never come across any very creative writers - be they political commentators, authors of fiction, historians, what have you - whose grasp of basics was deficient.

Worse, or at least ironically, the absence of sound writing skills may well, in adult life, serve to lessen one's self-esteem. It may make it harder to get a job or a promotion, or may make one feel inarticulate and dumb. Take law, my profession. Lawyers spend their working lives manipulating language. They draft contracts, wills, articles of incorporation and myriad sorts of letters. They argue in court. They interpret statutes. They pick over the words of judges in past cases. Their job revolves around the expert use of language. Of course a solid grounding in basic English skills is a huge advantage to them, and to many, many others.

Alas, a more depressing possibility in getting basic grammar skills taught today may be that a sizeable chunk of our recently graduated teachers may not know these skills themselves. Years of the osmosis school of learning to write, where you just cross your fingers and pray that by reading enough some ineffable and mysterious process will kick in and people will magically pick it up, may be coming home to roost. That wouldn't be much of a surprise, would it? Merely to state the osmosis approach shows how ridiculous it is.

(The author above, James Allan is a professor of law at the University of Queensland, has taught at universities in New Zealand, Canada and Hong Kong)

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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