I remember how it was -- JR
Sunday, November 13, 2022
More Colleges Offering Admission to Students Who Never Applied
It sounds too good to be true: Get into college, with a guaranteed scholarship, without ever applying. This fall, tens of thousands of students will receive such offers from schools around the country.
Direct admissions, as the approach is often called, allow colleges to send offers to students based just on their GPAs or a few other criteria, such as intended major or geographic location, without the hassle of essays, recommendation letters and months of uncertainty.
More than 85% of four-year schools admit at least half their applicants, federal data show. They just make those candidates jump through hoops first. The aim with direct admissions, participants say, is to make the process less cumbersome, show low-income and first-generation students that college is within reach, and funnel more prospects toward institutions desperate to meet enrollment goals.
“There has to be a bit of a redistribution of the power dynamic from the college to the families right now,” said Luke Skurman, chief executive and founder of Niche.com Inc., which offers profiles and ratings of hundreds of thousands of schools and towns. Niche piloted a direct-admission program with two colleges last spring and is now working with 14.
Within the past year, the Common Application, private-college scholarship program SAGE Scholars, the state of Minnesota and Concourse—purchased in September by enrollment-management consulting firm EAB—have also launched or expanded direct-admit programs in conjunction with colleges or universities.
The process for most is fairly straightforward: Students looking to learn more about colleges, or who are interested specifically in joining the direct-admit pool, register on a website with their biographical information and basics such as GPA and areas of academic interest. Most students don’t know which schools are even participating. The platform then screens students based on schools’ requested criteria and, after coordinating with the schools, sends out admission offers.
Upon running its screens, Niche first notifies eligible students who expressed interest in a school, for instance by opting into receiving mailings—they are most likely to be receptive to an offer. The next set of students they reach out to may have shown interest in similar schools.
Claire Gaber was only considering large public schools close to her home in Portland, Ore., until an email in February, bearing the logos of Niche and Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, threw her off that path. “Congratulations, Claire!” it read in part. “Based on your Niche profile you’re being offered admission for the fall 2022 semester. No application is necessary.”
“My first question was, ‘Is this real?’” said Ms. Gaber, now 19 years old. “Then I read it.”
Swayed by a campus visit, talks with the rugby coach and a $25,000 annual scholarship that brought the total cost below state universities in Oregon, she is now a freshman at Mount St. Mary’s.
Under this model, a student’s file goes into the official applicant pool only if they accept the school’s overture and agree to be contacted further. Then it is up to the school to woo the student.
“The dating metaphor, you can’t escape it,” said Joe Morrison, founder of EAB’s Concourse platform, likening the process to having both parties swipe right on an app.
Concourse’s Greenlight Match started last year as a pilot with 10 colleges focused on low-income and first-generation students in Chicago, mainly through community-based organizations. It now has more than 70 partners on the domestic front, including Auburn University and Southern Methodist University.
The colleges participating in direct-admission pilots so far include big and small institutions, public and private. Some more selective schools say they have begun discussions about signing up, at least for students interested in particular academic disciplines or for international students.
“Any project, opportunity, initiative that helps remove friction from students looking to go to college is something that lands on my radar,” said Jordanna Maziarz, director of undergraduate admissions at Montclair State University in New Jersey, which is working with the Common Application and EAB. “Why do we have to make it so hard for them?”
Last year the Common Application offered spots to about 3,000 candidates based on Montclair State’s GPA criteria. Thirty one put down deposits, and 27 actually enrolled.
Miguel Popoca Flores, a senior at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, said he didn’t realize he had so many options until learning about Minnesota’s direct-admission program. Based on his GPA, he is guaranteed admission to schools including the University of Minnesota Duluth, Dunwoody College of Technology and Minnesota State University, Mankato.
He is still applying to others, but if they don’t pan out, “You always have this college as a backup,” he said. “You’re not stuck in limbo.”
Augsburg University in Minnesota is participating in direct-admission pilots with the Common Application and with the state of Minnesota, and cut its own application to be completed in an average of seven minutes.
Nearly all applicants with an unweighted GPA of at least 2.75 are admitted. Online offer letters come in a few days, including details about guaranteed scholarships.
Augsburg already connected with 184 students through the Minnesota pilot, nearly half of whom weren’t on the school’s radar, according to Robert Gould, vice president for strategic enrollment management. And as of Nov. 7, it received 1,581 applications via the Common Application and its website, up 44% from that time the prior year. It admitted 1,094 of them.
The path to direct admission may actually be long for some students, as a number of schools are requiring that those flagged for acceptance still complete applications. Critics warn that could scare off prospects and undermine the goal of simplifying the process.
SAGE Scholars, a tuition-rewards program for private colleges, now offers something founder James Johnston likens to a mortgage preapproval—subject to verification, and potentially more paperwork, if schools so choose.
More than 30 schools have signed up for its “FastTrak” program this fall.
******************************************************
Biden and Activist Allies Push Taxpayer-Funded Voter Registration on College Campuses
In the run up to the 2022 midterm elections, professional activists were desperate to drive up voter registration rates everywhere they could, particularly on college campuses. And they wanted taxpayers to fund it, too.
One-Two Punch
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden’s Department of Education instructed universities that they must engage in voter registration campaigns in order to receive further federal student aid grants, a major source of revenue for higher education institutions. That includes using Federal Work-Study funds—monies meant to encourage part-time campus jobs to help cover tuition—to pay students who register their classmates, both on and off campus.
Add to that the activists at ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, which rewards faculty and students for launching registration and “voter education” efforts at their schools in order to boost “participation in American democracy.” To date, ALL IN has targeted hundreds of universities for mass registration drives.
ALL IN—like all nonprofit groups—is legally nonpartisan, meaning it isn’t aligned with either political party. But it boasts about its “theory of change,” which aims to achieve a “more representative American democracy” through “civic learning,” “political engagement,” and “voter participation”—fuzzy buzzwords that translate to greater Democratic Party turnout and political power.
Overtly Partisan
One member, Florida’s Miami Dade College, posted a “2022 Democratic Engagement Action Plan” on ALL IN’s website detailing how it plans to pay students to register their peers. Partial funding came from the New Jersey–based Andrew Goodman Foundation, which funds “social justice initiatives” and boasts about its “plan to mobilize the youth vote in the 2022 midterm elections.”
The Goodman Foundation even offered to directly employ six paid Miami Dade College interns working weekly to register new college voters, using $1,000 stipends and $500 “in funding for voter engagement activities.”
The college plans include sending faculty-wide emails “with [a] clear message re: voter registration and voter education” and voting locally, as opposed to voting in students’ home states. The college even invited activists from the far-left group Engage Miami to make “nonpartisan voter engagement presentations” in classrooms.
“Nonpartisan” is pushing it for a self-described coalition of “Gen Z, millennials, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrants, women, men, queer, trans, and nonbinary” activists that offers a partisan voting guide that endorses Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections.
Civic Nation
ALL IN is itself a front for Civic Nation, a “progressive” activist hub that runs similar initiatives such as the feminist United State of Women and Michelle Obama’s voter registration group When We All Vote. Civic Nation is listed as one of the groups working to boost turnout among women, ex-felons, and “lawfully present noncitizen New Yorkers” to create a “more just and equitable democracy” in New York.
We’ve traced grants to Civic Nation from Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the Carnegie Corporation (a foundation despite its name), Environmental Defense Fund, and the Joyce Foundation, which once included then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on its board.
Civic Nation’s board is dominated by ex-Obama administration officials, including senior advisor Valerie Jarrett; Tina Tchen, who tried to discredit accusations of sexual harassment against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021; and Cecilia Muñoz, who now advises the liberal think tank New America.
*****************************************************
Australia: Bosses demand better literacy, uni degree reforms
Employers have scolded schools for churning out semiliterate students, and demanded a new “degree apprenticeship” model to better train professional workers.
Traditional three-year university degrees are losing popularity, with early applications to start a degree in 2023 slumping as mature-age students learn on the job and more school leavers head straight to work.
The decline in domestic student enrolments has triggered a tertiary turf war, as regional universities accuse big-city sandstone institutions of “poaching’’.
The Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), representing 60,000 employers of 1 million workers, has warned that poor literacy and numeracy skills among workers is affecting three quarters of businesses.
It has told the Productivity Commission workers need to upskill through short courses known as “micro-credentials’’, which will qualify for student loans under federal government reforms.
Ai Group education and training director Megan Lilly said many school leavers – and even university graduates – have “inadequate skills’’ to work.
“There are definitely people who come from vocational and university education who lack the foundational skills they need to function properly in the workforce,’’ she said.
“We have a lot of very well-educated young people these days but we still have a considerable number who have literacy and numeracy deficits that impact … getting a job and maintaining a job. Apprentices often need to get literacy and numeracy support to enable them to complete their apprenticeship.’’
Ms Lilly said more businesses want a return to on-the-job training, combining work with short industry courses or part-time tertiary study.
She said “degree apprenticeships’’ were popular in Europe and would work well in Australia, for school leavers keen to “earn while they learn’’.
“There are such acute skills shortages that young people can pick up jobs and earn good money, so some companies are employing people directly and building a training program for employees,’’ she said.
“There should be more high-level apprenticeships and cadetships across the economy, like they do in Europe.
“We need a model of learning that is more relevant to the modern economy.’’
The Australian Information Industry Association, representing tech companies, also criticised the quality of some traditional university degrees.
“Graduates from IT (information technology) degrees are not job-ready,’’ AIIA chief executive Simon Bush said on Friday.
“It takes six to 12 months to train a graduate on the job to get productive and on the tools.’’
Mr Bush said IT employers were hiring Certificate III and Certificate IV vocational training graduates, who study for a year or two. “They’re not necessarily taking graduates with three- and four-year undergraduate degrees from university,’’ he said.
BAE Systems, a global engineering firm that specialises in defence, cyber security and virtual-reality technologies, will launch the first “degree apprenticeship’’ in systems engineering in 2024.
The Melbourne-based degree will involve Apprenticeships Victoria and Engineers Australia, although the partner university has yet to be revealed. Participating employers will include Dassault Systemes, Advanced Fibre Cluster, Air Radiators, Navantia Australia, Memo and Systra.
BAE Systems Australia has also partnered with the University of South Australia to kick off a degree apprenticeship in software engineering.
“It’s important that we look for new ways to work across industry and academia to collectively develop solutions that benefit the nation and provide alternatives for students who might not otherwise consider tertiary studies,’’ the company’s chief people officer, Danielle Mesa, said on Friday.
The push for work-based tertiary education comes as universities suffer a slump in enrolments for 2023. Applications to universities in NSW are the lowest in four years, with those lodged through the Tertiary Admissions Centre down 4.6 per cent from the same time last year. Victoria’s applications have dipped less than 1 per cent, but in Queensland mature-age applications have fallen 11.3 per cent and school-leaver applications are down 3.7 per cent.
Former Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven claimed prestigious universities are “plundering’’ disadvantaged students from regional and suburban universities to meet equity quotas for students.
“They are poaching socially marginal students from the regions and underprivileged suburbs, with scholarships and other sweeteners only rich institutions can afford,’’ Emeritus Professor Craven writes in Inquirer.
“They do not actually want these students, given their historic rationale for existence has been to invite only the elite. These newly privileged students will be academic cannon fodder. Sandstones have neither the interest nor the learning structures to cater for students beyond the north shore or the eastern suburbs.’’
Regional Universities Network executive director Alec Webb warned of a “hollowing out’’ of regional communities if city universities lure local students.
“While we respect student choice, regional universities are concerned about metro-centric solutions, and short-term incentives that could see a further hollowing out of regional communities,’’ he said.
“Taking the best and brightest from regional areas hollows out our regional workforces and obviously will have an impact on Australia’s economic prosperity.’’
The Group of Eight, representing the elite “sandstone” universities, said its academic success rate for disadvantaged students was “well above the national average’’.
“Allowing students to choose the university course that best suits their aspirations and skills is a core tenet of Australia’s approach to university study,’’ Go8 CEO Vicki Thomson said.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare will require all universities to do more to help disadvantaged students as part of the University Accord, to be launched next week.
“I want more people from poor families, from regional and remote parts of Australia, more Indigenous Australians and more Australians with a disability going to all our universities,’’ he told The Weekend Australian.
The federal government allocated all 20,000 of its bonus university places in last month’s budget to disadvantaged students.
***********************************
My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*******************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment