How our universities can compete in the world
What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?
I took the SAT a grand total of one time when I was in dipshit prep school. This was 1993. Like any other kid, I wanted to do well on the test, primarily so that I would NEVER have to take it again, but also because kids at my school were real dicks about their SAT scores. You'd hear through the grapevine about other kids who aced the test, and all that test gossip resulted in an great deal of fear and paranoia about your own performance. It was horrible. If you can, avoid going to high school altogether.
They administered the test at a nearby public high school and herded us into the classrooms. Every classroom had a test monitor, a stack of test booklets, and a large box of sharpened No. 2 pencils. My friend Darren sat in front of me. Thirty minutes into the test, he had to go pee. The monitor denied him a trip to the bathroom. Darren ended up getting a 900 out of 1600. That monitor was a dick.Shockingly, little about the SAT has changed since I set foot in that classroom. Most students still have to take the test using bubble sheets and a No. 2 pencil, which is insane to me. They've managed to digitize VOTING, for shit's sake. And yet here's the SAT, still feeding test sheets into the Scantron machine like it's 1982. Maybe the only differences with today's SAT are the essay question (barf), the higher maximum score (2400), and the hugely metastasized frenzy over the test. Wired reports that as recently as 2009, the test-preparation industry had earnings of over $4 billion. Private tutoring from a Kaplan expert to study for the test can cost you close to $5,000, an expense plenty of nutjob helicopter parents are happy to throw down. Read more...
Debt, Race and Ph.D.s
By Scott Jaschik. Colleges and universities -- not to mention many businesses -- have been pushing for gains in the numbers of black and Latino students who earn doctorates, especially in STEM or social science fields. A new study may point to one hindrance in making progress toward this goal. Black and Latino graduate students are more likely to borrow and more likely to borrow larger sums to earn a Ph.D. than are white or Asian graduate students. The figures are particularly striking for African Americans and for STEM fields. Read more...
Merit Consideration
By Kevin Kiley. In pursuit of both prestige and tuition revenue, often to make up for declines in other forms of income, many four-year colleges and universities are making it more difficult for students from low-income backgrounds to afford a college education, according to a report released today by the New American Foundation. The report, which looks at data from the 2010-11 academic year, found that at about two-thirds of the 479 private, nonprofit colleges and universities analyzed, students with annual family incomes of $30,000 or less had tuition bills that averaged more than $15,000 a year even after all forms of scholarship and grant aid were factored in. Read more...No Easy Answer on Private Loans
By Libby A. Nelson. A federal agency released a report Wednesday examining ways to help borrowers of private student loans, but the agency made few clear-cut recommendations on helping borrowers refinance private loans or lower monthly payments. Since it was established in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has devoted time and resources to student debt, particularly private student loans. The bureau issued a report to Congress in July that compared the loans to subprime mortgages and urged Congress to reconsider laws barring borrowers from discharging student loans in bankruptcy. Read more...Win for Disabled Students
By Ry Rivard. College students with disabilities across the United States are likely to benefit from a settlement signed this week by the University of California at Berkeley. The university will do more to make homework and research material accessible to students with visual and learning disabilities, an effort that may provide a model for disability rights advocates and university officials elsewhere. Berkeley, an early battleground in the disability rights movement five decades ago, agreed to the steps following complaints by a disability rights group on behalf of three students with print disabilities. Such disabilities include blindness, paralysis that makes turning pages impossible and mental disabilities, like dyslexia, that require special software to help students do their work. The 18-page out-of-court settlement with Disability Rights Advocates now binds Berkeley to make library materials accessible. Read more...Reaching Alumni
By Zack Budryk. Two-year colleges are typically not known for their alumni relations. But as state cutbacks leave many of them with major shortfalls, more community colleges are turning to alumni outreach to make up the difference.
The Wake Technical Community College Foundation is part of this trend. Read more...
Not Staying the Course
By Chris Parr for Times Higher Education. The average completion rate for massive open online courses is less than 7 percent, according to data compiled by an Open University doctoral student as part of her own MOOC studies. Katy Jordan, whose Ph.D. research focuses on online academic social networks, took time out from her doctorate to gather information on the number of people completing a range of free web-based courses. So far, she has tracked down information on the percentage of students completing 29 MOOCs. Read more...
New Procedures for Verifying Student Visas
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has outlined new steps for verifying international students' visas at immigration checkpoints, according to an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press. The changes are a response to the fact that a student from Kazakhstan charged with destroying evidence related to the Boston Marathon bombings was allowed to reenter the U.S. Jan. 20 despite the fact that he had been academically dismissed from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and his visa terminated. Read more...