Friday, December 20, 2019



Three Encouraging Takeaways from the State of College Admissions

From Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policy to the Lori Loughlin admissions scandal, higher education admission policies have been second-guessed and re-evaluated for much of the year. But a National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) survey of over 447 four-year institutions offers some insight into the trends governing these policies. Three trends in particular offer some encouragement on the elusive and sometimes controversial college admissions process.

1. High School Grades Matter Most

Want to get into college? Get good grades. According to the NACAC survey, 75 percent of colleges attributed “considerable importance” to high school grades when making admissions decisions. That’s up from 52 percent of colleges in 2008.

This is encouraging, especially in light of research showing that high-school grades consistently predict college performance. In 2018, an American Enterprise Institute report found that among students with similar SAT or ACT scores, those with higher high-school GPAs are more likely to graduate from college. This makes sense, the authors note, because earning good grades in high school requires the same disciplines—showing up to class, turning in assignments on time, taking quizzes, etc.—that students need in college.

Another study evaluated the relationship between high-school grades and college completion for 17,753 Chicago Public School students. The study found that grades strongly related to rates of college graduation. Students with high-school GPAs less than 1.5 had a 20 percent probability of graduating, but students with GPAs of 3.75 or higher had an 80 percent probability of graduating.

These findings suggest that colleges are right to focus on high-school grades when making admissions decisions and that students looking to attend college should pay attention to high-school performance.

2. Tests Still Matter, But to Fewer Schools

According to the NACAC, fewer colleges depend on SAT/ACT scores when making admissions decisions than in years past.

In 2011, most (59 percent) of schools reported that standardized test scores were an important part of their admissions process, according to the NACAC. Since then, the number of schools holding that view dropped to 54 percent in 2016, to 52 percent in 2017, and to 46 percent today.

These drops are consistent with research questioning the predictive power of ACT/SAT tests. A 2014 study, for example, examined the performance of 122,916 students at 33 colleges and universities. The study found that students with strong high-school GPAs generally performed well in college despite moderate standardized test scores. However, students with weak GPAs and strong test scores earned lower college GPAs and graduated less often. Researchers concluded that high-school GPA thus strongly and consistently correlates to college cumulative GPA, while standardized test scores are much less consistent predictors of performance.

Another study found that SAT scores can be misleading. The study found that at 16 percent of colleges, performance predictions based on SAT math scores proved inaccurate. Similarly, when researchers compared black and white applicants’ scores on SAT critical reading, they found predictions were wrong at about 20 percent of colleges.

The NACAC’s findings suggest that while many schools still rely on standardized tests, they are rightfully becoming less popular.

3. Race/Ethnicity Not as Significant As You Might Think

Despite recent controversy around Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies, NACAC’s survey revealed that most colleges (58 percent) do not consider race as a factor in admissions.

This position is not only popular—73 percent of Americans believe that colleges should not make admissions decisions based on race—but also reasonable in light of the challenges race-based policies have introduced. Law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr. found, for example, that affirmative action policies have resulted in minority students enrolling in colleges and universities where their academics put them toward the bottom of the class. As a result, they earned lower grades, avoided challenging subjects like science or engineering, and lost self-confidence, causing them to abandon their career aspirations.

Affirmative action policies have also triggered questions around self-worth. In his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote:

I simply took it for granted that Yale [Law School] was giving me a break because I was poor (and especially since that poverty was in part due to racial discrimination), in the same way that other students were given preference because they came from wealthy families or had parents who’d gone to Yale.

But before long, Thomas wrote, “I realized that those blacks who benefited from affirmative action were being judged by a double standard. As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it.”

While college admissions policies continue to be questioned, the NACAC’s findings suggest that, at least in some ways, higher education is learning from its mistakes and is improving its admissions processes for tomorrow’s applicants.

SOURCE 






Blood-sucking bureaucracy at universities

An extraordinary student campus protest happened the other day at my school (Ohio University), one quite unlike any other I have attended in six decades of hanging around college campuses. A fairly large group (at least 200) of students were protesting—nothing new there. Student protests happen multiple times each year, and my university is fairly typical in that regard. But usually the issue is unhappiness over some national policy (ranging, over my lifetime from the Vietnam War to some of Donald Trump’s rather maladroit statements) or some unpopular university rules constraining student behavior.

What was unique was what the students were protesting: the downplaying of academic matters and the critical role of the faculty in university life, as manifested in proposed budget reductions. Amidst a period of enrollment decline and necessary budget downsizing (also rather commonplace in academia these days), students were protesting the projected dismissal of many popular professors, while the administrative staff is largely untouched. A second source of student irritation is the over $20 million my university spends subsidizing intercollegiate athletics (about $1,000 for each student on the main university campus) –an amount roughly equal to the size of immediate budget reductions. The students’ message in summary was “college is firstly about education and learning.”

From my reading of national data, Ohio University seems pretty typical. Forty-five years ago when I was new minted as a full professor, there were over two faculty members for every campus administrator –defined as persons with some managerial or professional responsibilities but who do not teach. Today, the number of administrators exceeds the number of faculty members. If we went just one-half of the way back to the faculty-administrator ratio of 1974, we could easily eliminate the immediate $20 million budget problem and run a wealthy budget surplus to help deal with likely future declines associated with falling enrollments.

Ohio University (OU) spends $200,000 annually for an administrator, highly competent to be sure, to oversee a relatively modest portfolio of real estate investments. A generation ago, OU had nearly as large a real estate portfolio, but somehow someone was able to handle those investments as part of broader administrative duties. OU has a new “office of strategy and innovation” with multiple six digit salaried administrators, to teach how to think about the future. Like most schools, while OU shows indifference or contempt for God, it worships at the feet of the diversity and sustainability deities, employing a double digit number of administrators concerned with those matters. It inefficiently runs a host of enterprises having little or nothing to do with learning, everything from a movie theater to a print shop and, of course, multiple sports teams who entertain usually very modest numbers of spectators at a gargantuan cost.

The statistics on administrative staff actually understate the trend. Virtually all self-respecting universities hire consultants for any slightly non-routine matter. Not only do we use consultants when we hire the university president, but also when we hire deans and other factotums. My university’s performing arts series hired a consultant to decide how it could change its program of cultural offerings, on a campus filled with creative people in the arts, theater, business, etc. Administrators hire consultants not only to reduce their workloads, but also to provide employment insurance: if the result is a disaster, administrators blame the consultant for the failure. Somehow a generation ago we did a better than decent job of hiring administrators through advertising and internal search committees. Why not now? Partly, because we are lazy: on my campus hardly anyone worked the day after Thanksgiving, and virtually no one will work between December 24 and January 2—why not? They do in the Real World.

Why has this happened? The answer is simple: outside (third party) money made it possible. The biggest culprit nationally has been the explosion of federal student assistance in the form of grants but most importantly loans. The higher tuition fees that occurred has funded all sorts of things at the periphery of learning more than learning itself. Presidential candidates seem to try to outbid each other throwing more money at higher education (“free college”), rather than reforming a system that is highly inefficient, with few incentives to achieve excellence and efficiency.

SOURCE 






When the Battle Is Feelings Vs. Facts, Feelings Win on Campus

The mainstream press has not shown much interest in the struggle of college journalists to report accurately on free-speech and free-press issues on campus. On November 13, The New York Times weighed in with a long news article on student coverage of a speech at Northwestern University delivered by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Some students, apparently eager to disrupt or cancel the speech, forced their way past police and were photographed by Colin Boyle, student photographer for the Daily Northwestern, the campus newspaper. Later, one student, Ying Dai, complained to Boyle on Twitter: ‘’Can we stop this trauma porn? I was on the ground being pushed hard by the police. You don’t have to intervene, but also you didn’t have to push a camera in front of me, top-down.”

Boyle deleted the photo and editors of the Daily Northwestern apologized for posting photos of students on social media and for using the school directory in attempts to contact students.

[Are Colleges Turning Out Our Most Self-Absorbed and Fragile Generation?]

The Times story says the newspaper’s response set off a national firestorm: “Professional journalists derided the apology and weighed in to note, often incredulously, that the “Northwestern journalists had been doing some of the most basic, standard work that reporters have always done—watching public events, interviewing people, and describing what they saw.”

That’s an accurate description of what professional reporters do, but The Times spends a lot of time describing “empathic” reporting and leaving the impression that two valid reporting systems are now in conflict, a humane one in sympathy with marginalized individuals and groups generally on the left, the other marked by cold professionalism and absence of human feeling.

Ying Dai, the complaining student, resented being photographed while in a painful position and did not reflect the fact that she hadn’t sought national attention for her role in the protest. Was she entitled to a more flattering photo while breaking through a police line to disrupt the speech? The student demand for more sensitive reporting is often a request that other sides of an event not be heard. At Harvard, students protesting the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency bristled when they learned the Harvard Crimson wanted to get a response to the protest from the agency. The Crimson editors stood their ground, and the protesters launched a boycott of the paper, joined by, among others, the Harvard College Democrats. The protesters argued that allowing the agency to comment might endanger undocumented students in the crowd. But it amounted to a demand for more favorable coverage or outright censorship.

Demands for “empathic” reporting often seem like arguments against exposing members of vulnerable groups to normal and fair reporting methods. One worry is that student journalists may take these demands with them as they graduate and become mainstream journalists. If so, what will keep reporters from building sympathy around feelings they happen to have for people in the news?

SOURCE 



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