According to a new Gallup-Lumina Foundation poll, many Americans feel that college is no longer affordable. Just 17 percent of white Americans polled believe that “education beyond high school is affordable to anyone in this country who needs it” and only 19 percent of black people polled believe the same.
Hispanics are far more optimistic in their view of college affordability. By way of the Gallup poll, more than 50 percent of Hispanics polled responded that college is affordable to those who live in America.
Separated into three categories of white, black, and Hispanic, the gulf between how Hispanics feel about the cost of higher education compared to whites and blacks is staggering. That may mesh with how some view the outlook and direction of the country.
But this study also mentions the rising cost of tuition and the copious amount of debt that students are saddled with upon exiting college. According to Gallup, tuition at a “public four-year college has increased by more than 250% over the past three decades.”
That’s likely why many students carry an average of $30,000 in student loan debt and why some in the federal government want to extinguish student loan debt when filing for bankruptcy.
This new study is another in a long line that show just how un-affordable higher education has become for some. With the rising cost of tuition and student fees, many students are being priced out of the ability to attain a college degree.
The cost is also turning off some students as they are afraid of amassing thousands of dollars in debt and ruining their financial future. If anything, this shows just how dire the situation has become and why the federal government needs to act on fixing the problem.
The University of Central Florida may not immediately be associated with being the premier institution of higher education in its state, but that’s all part of its underdog appeal.
In the past two decades, the University of Central Florida has tripled its enrollment numbers to 63,000 students this fall, quietly becoming the largest undergraduate institution in the country. UCF has one of the most diverse college campuses, too. With community college partnerships, UCF boasts a thriving first-generation college alumni and is also expected to reach Hispanic Serving Institution status (at least 25 percent of the student population of Hispanic heritage) in the next few years.
Overall, UCF has a racial/ethnic minority enrollment of around 45 percent. I spoke with UCF’s Chief Diversity Officer Karen Morrison about the great strides this rapidly growing public university is making in the state of Florida, and beyond.
Question: How does being in a metropolitan setting influence diversity?
Answer: At UCF we like to talk about being “of the community” not just “in the community.” Orlando is very diverse and one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S. That growing, changing community contributes to UCF’s diversity and effort to build an inclusive culture.
Q: How is UCF finding ways to make college affordable for minorities and other under-served populations?
A: We continue to hold our tuition and fees at very affordable rates and are listed in US News and World Report’s Top 50 most affordable in the nation. We have regional campuses that allow working students to pursue degrees in their own communities.
Q: How hard does the university work to bring in diverse populations?
A: UCF has grown to the largest undergraduate institution in the country by making college affordable, accessible and a rewarding experience. We have grown our student services for under-represented populations and developed pipeline programs in local schools to encourage minority students to pursue college and professional careers. We have a Veterans Resource Center, LGBTQ+ Center, Multicultural Academic Support program, and many other initiatives to help students achieve their collegiate goals.
Q: What minority mentorship programs are in place at UCF?
A: There are many – some are college based, some offered by the Student Development and Enrollment Services Division, and one offered by our office called Legacy. Here are a few of those programs and their descriptions:
First Generation Program – This program assist first generation students by providing guidance and resources to promote their self-esteem, confidence and academic achievement at the University.
Brother to Brother Program – B2B is intended to increase the retention and graduation rates of multicultural and first generation males at UCF. Workshops, rap-sessions and social events are planned in order to help this population become academically successful.
Multicultural Transfer Program – Multicultural Transfer Students with a healthy entry to university life, where they can take advantage of opportunities to network and learn strategies that will help alleviate the cultural stress of acclimating to a new environment.
Knight Alliance Network – Provides Foster Care alumni students with a healthy transition to become successful students here at UCF. This program will demystify the college experience, assist you with navigating through the university landscape, and help you prepare to succeed here at UCF and anywhere thereafter.
College Prep Day – College Prep Day is a day dedicated to helping Multicultural and/or First Generation students better understand the steps necessary for admission into a college or university.
Q: Talk about the importance of diverse faculty members at UCF.
A: Under our new Provost we have established programs to specifically recruit minority faculty and we have just instituted a cluster faculty program that encourages interdisciplinary teams and hires. Last year UCF hired some 200 faculty and we are working to hire another 200 this year. The Provost’s office offers hiring incentives by paying the first few years’ costs of a minority faculty hire.
I’d like to thank Ms. Morrison for her time and for giving more insight on the ways diversity is helping the lives of students and faculty at the University of Central Florida. I look forward to the many great things this university will continue to do in coming years.
In order for colleges and universities to truly prepare students for the real world, these places of higher learning need to cultivate diverse populations. There is a lot of attention placed on the changing face of college students but I feel that for college campuses to truly remain effective long term, diversity in faculty needs to be a paramount concern.
Why is Diversity Important on College Campuses?
Student bodies are no longer composed of primarily male, white students. Some estimates show that half of America’s current workforce now passes through college first and 75 percent of students in high school spend at least some time studying in a higher education setting. That number is up from an elite four percent in 1900. What’s more – the numbers of college students from low-income and minority families continues to rise. More Americans from every color and creed are now earning college educations so college faculty should reflect that. While students can certainly learn from people outside their own sex, ethnicity and belief system, faculty with similar backgrounds provide stronger role models.
Diversity in faculty should not only be sought out for the students’ advantage though; the college legacy as a whole benefits when many different perspectives are represented. Yes, it is important to have diversity in student populations but those groups are temporary college residents. Faculty members have the long-term ability to shape the campus culture and make it more in sync with the rest of the real world.
How Diverse are College Campuses Today?
The short answer is “not very.” A report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that full-time faculty on college campuses heavily favors white candidates (at just over 1 million) over black (not even 100,000), Asian (86,000) and Hispanic (under 60,000) faculty. These numbers may not mean much out of context however, so let’s take a closer look at why they matter.
While nearly 30 percent of undergraduate students around the nation are considered minorities, just over 12 percent of full-time faculty are minorities. That number drops to around 9 percent for full-time professors of color. Though half of all undergraduate students are women, roughly one-third of full-time professors are women. In 1940, the number of women faculty was at 25 percent, showing just how slowly this particular minority group is climbing. The numbers are going in the right direction, but not quickly enough.
So, What’s the Problem?
Faculty positions are extremely competitive. Colleges and universities often value professors that have publishing ability, or a strong past of publication, over actual teaching methods. This is not to say that there are not women and minorities with high qualifications but rather to point out that sometimes sex and race are simply not part of the hiring equation. Facts and figures on a resume are tangible ways to show what a particular candidate can bring to the job. It is more difficult for higher education decision makers to gauge the benefit of a person’s background or life experience on the students that pay good money to learn at a particular institution.
That being said, many colleges are stepping up their diverse hiring games. Schools like the University of California, Harvard and the University of Washington both study faculty diversity issues and try to piece together the most well-represented group of educators possible. Even Historically Black Colleges and Universities are trying to bring in students and faculty members outside the traditional population, especially since the original mission of those schools has changed. Certainly there are strides being made but in order to best serve each generation of college students, the push for faculty diversity needs to continue on an upward path.
Note: Today’s op ed comes to you courtesy of George M. Johnson, an advocate for change in Higher Education. He is the Former Director of Student Accounts at Virginia Union University and counsels students properly preparing for college. He has been published in HBCUDigest.com and blogs at iamgmjohnson.com. Follow him on twitter @iamgmjohnson
Yesterday, a tweet from @Med_School12 took Social Media by storm that stated “A 4.0 at a HBCU is not equivalent to a 4.0 at a rigorous PWI. Sorry, but it’s the truth”. Immediately twitter swarmed this tweet as the thousands of retweets with comments ranged from a question mark to all out fury. I too, took my frustrations out tweeting how my multiple degrees from HBCU’s have in no way made me less that of a person who received their degrees from a PWI. After the initial shock and awe of the situation, I decided to sit down, gather my thoughts, and really think about what she actually wrote.
The tweet, although less than 140 characters is much layered in contradiction and furthermore should have been sold as her opinion not truth.
Issue 1: What differs a PWI from a Rigorous PWI
At first read, the tweet all but diminishes the worth of attending an HBCU in comparison to going to a PWI. But upon further analysis, she actually does compliment and offend all in the same sentence. Based on her teeth, she agrees that a 4.0 at an HBCU is equivalent or better than that of one from a normal PWI, just not a rigorous PWI. So the true question that needs to be answered is “what is a rigorous PWI”. Is it a top 20 ranked college? Is it a private school as opposed to a public school? Is it based on the college’s endowment? Either way, the determination of what makes one college rigorous compared to another is purely subjective to the student that attends. Some students probably thought Harvard was easy as compared to those who may have struggled at Rutger’s. There is no true way of determining the “rigors” of one college over another.
Issue 2: Is the statement based on where you were educated or where you teach?
This is one I had to think about. Let’s say the PWI is made up of 5 professors that all were educated at HBCU’s. The school they are being compared to is an HBCU that is made up of 5 professors that were all taught at PWI’s. There is probably no need to go any further as you can probably see where I am going with this. The statement does not take into account the people that are actually doing the instruction. Based on the statement, your professors could have come from community college and HBCU’s, but as long as they are “worthy” enough to teach at a “rigorous” PWI, the learning will be greater. But if you attend an HBCU with all professors with Harvard Education, your learning will not be equivalent because the perception of the HBCU as a whole is less than the standard. The patriarchy and privilege in that statement alone is disappointing.
Issue 3: The final issue, which was also my initial reply, “whose truth”?
In this age of social media, people are very quick to make accusations, assumptions, opinions, and poorly executed statements and claim that they are truth as if some actual research had been done. Her claiming that the PWI she is attending is rigorous for her is “her truth”. This should not be generalized and projected on others as a factual statement about the university that she attends. My truth is that I have never attended a PWI, and any statement made about the rigors of one would solely be my opinion. And to play devil’s advocate, there are many people whose truth is that they attended a PWI and an HBCU and found the HBCU to be more rigorous than the PWI. That statement vice versa is someone else’s truth.
Living in the age of social media can be quite fun and intriguing, but it can also be dangerous when we begin spreading our truth’s as facts and making them the beliefs of others. Rather than arguing if a 4.0 at an HBCU is equivalent to that of a 4.0 at a PWI, we should be praising and commending anyone that receives a 4.0 at any institution of Higher Education. For that takes “rigorous” work.
**The Edvocate is pleased to publish this guest post on stealth assessment as a way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**
A guest post by Dr. Larry Walker
Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) offer comprehensive graduate and professional programs that prepare students to compete in the global economy. After graduation students are equipped with essential skills to challenge economic, political and social issues. For example, Thurgood Marshall the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court Justice was a graduate of Howard University’s School of Law. Today, HBCUs continue to produce students with strong critical thinking and logical reasoning skills committed to important topics including social justice. Moreover, HBCUs offer a rigorous curriculum, student centered environment and communal approach that fosters learning.
HBCU administrators, faculty and staff support the efforts of first generation students seeking to defy societal stereotypes. Despite the odds, students from low and moderate-income families thrive at HBCUs because they don’t consistently encounter micro and macro aggressions. Eliminating environmental stressors allows students to focus on completing their academic requirements and develop secure relationships with peers. Several HBCUs offer graduate and professional programs including Howard University, Jackson State University and Morehouse College that consistently outperform institutions with similar student populations. However, their accomplishments are rarely acknowledged.
Recently, I co-edited a book titled “Graduate Education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs): A Student Perspective” (Routledge, anticipated Summer 2016 release), which includes personal narratives from alumni. Authors shared personal and professional experiences that shaped their graduate education. Their stories highlight the important role HBCUs play in the lives of students from diverse backgrounds. While attending a HBCU is not for everyone. Students’ benefit from the following:
Feeling connected- Students enrolled in S.T.E.M. programs and Medical School have the opportunity to work with students and professors from similar backgrounds.
Communal approach- Graduate and professional programs are extremely competitive. However, HBCUs seek to bring students together to ensure every student succeeds.
Alumni network- Students are introduced to alumni who mentor students. The relationships continue after graduation to assist with employment opportunities.
Developing a global perspective- Traditionally HBCUs enroll students from countries throughout the world. The experience allows students to learn about different cultures and dispel stereotypes.
Working with the local community- Frequently HBCUs emphasize the importance of working with schools, health clinics, community centers and social service programs. Students gain invaluable experiences while helping the community.
Research focus- Students are encouraged to examine issues that impact communities of color. In addition, students can work with classmates and faculty members with similar interests.
Discuss the contributions of diverse researchers- Students are introduced to preeminent scholars from different ethnic and racial backgrounds that made contributions to medicine, science and law.
Attending an institution with a historic mission- HBCUs continue traditions that ensure Black students complete their graduate or professional degree.
Social experience- Students develop relationships with classmates with shared experiences.
Consistent support during turbulent times- Occasionally students encounter academic or personal challenges that hinder efforts to complete their degree requirements. Faculty members and staff play an instrumental role encouraging students to continue despite the obstacles.
HBCUs provide enriching academic and social experiences that cannot be duplicated. Professors challenge students to investigate issues that are important to communities of color. Funding HBCUs is linked to increasing the number of Black students with graduate and professional degrees. Without HBCUs first generation, minority and underserved students would not have the opportunity to improve their socio-economic status.
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Dr. Larry J. Walker is an educational consultant focused on supporting historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). His research examines the impact environmental factors have on the academic performance and social emotional functioning of students from HBCUs.
The face of higher education is rapidly evolving as more middle- to low-class young people find ways to obtain a college degree or technical training. The Hispanic population in the U.S. is no exception as the number of college applicants and enrollees increase every year. While these strides benefit this specific group of students, everyone stands to benefit from Hispanic higher education success. Let’s look at why:
Hispanics are the largest (and fastest-growing) minority in the United States. The U.S. Census reports that the estimated Hispanic population in the nation is 52 million – making residents of Hispanic origin the largest minority in the country. In fact, one of every six Americans is a Hispanic. That number is expected to rise to over 132 million by 2050 and Hispanics will then represent 30 percent of the U.S. population. Children with Hispanic roots make up 23 percent of the age 17 and under demographic — making future higher education legislation critical for this growing and thriving minority group.
Many Hispanic college attendees are first-generation college students. Young people of Hispanic origin face specific challenges when it comes to higher education. Many prospective students are first-generation Americans, or even undocumented residents, and do not have the first-hand experience or guidance from parents regarding the college experience in the U.S. Like all other ethnic groups, Hispanic youth face financial difficulty when trying to determine if college is a possibility. Many young Hispanics may feel overwhelmed by the social and financial pressure associated with college attendance and are in need of the right guidance. While higher education initiatives are changing to address these issues, only 13 percent of the Hispanic population over the age of 25 had a bachelor’s degree or higher in the 2010 Census.
The DREAM Act is giving undocumented immigrants opportunities to thrive here in the United States. The Obama administration recognizes the rapid growth of the Hispanic community, specifically as it impacts higher education, and has put several pieces of legislation into motion including the DREAM Act. First introduced in the U.S. Senate in August 2001, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act was designed to reward children in good standing that came to the country illegally. Temporary residency is granted for a six-year time frame for young people that seek out higher educational pursuits with an option for permanent residency after completion of a bachelor’s degree or beyond.
The bill went through several iterations before President Obama announced in June 2012 that his administration would stop deporting undocumented immigrants meeting DREAM Act criteria. While this legislation applies to more than Hispanic immigrants, they are the group that stands to benefit the most from its enactment. With no fear of deportation, Hispanic youth with higher education aspirations are free to pursue them and work toward a better individual and collective future.
Helping the Hispanic community succeed means helping America succeed. Increasing higher education opportunities for Hispanics has obvious positive benefits for the demographic itself, but the influence will be felt even further. Think of it as a ripple effect, where the Hispanic community represents the initial splash and all other ethnic groups feel the impact too. The Obama Administration has made known its goals to make the U.S. the leader in college degrees earned in proportion to population. In order for this goal to be met, Hispanics (specifically those of Latino descent) will need to earn 3.3 million degrees between now and 2020. The economic success of geographic areas, specifically urban areas, is directly affected by the number of college graduates that study and stay there. In states like Texas, this is an especially poignant point where a one-point college graduate rate increase can result in $1.5 billion more in annual economic activity for cities like San Antonio. Without the help of Hispanic youth, these numbers are difficult, if impossible, to achieve.
Legislation like the DREAM Act is just the start of changing the culture of higher education to be more welcoming to Hispanic youth. Individual colleges and universities must also step up and offer academic and financial aid programs with specific Hispanic needs in mind. The future achievements of higher education in the U.S. are dependent upon the inclusion and success of Hispanic students and the same is true of a stable economic climate. The sooner federal and state initiatives, along with colleges and universities, embrace these inevitabilities, the better.
A scientist can spend several months, in many cases even years, strenuously investigating a single research question, with the ultimate goal of making a contribution – little or big – to the progress of human knowledge.
Succeeding in this hard task requires specialized, years-long training, intuition, creativity, in-depth knowledge of current and past theories and, most of all – lots of perseverance.
As a member of the scientific community, I can say that, sometimes, finding an interesting and novel result is just as hard as convincing your colleagues that your work actually is novel and interesting. That is, the work would deserve publication in a scientific journal.
But, prior to publication, any investigation must pass the screening of the “peer review.” This is a critical part of the process – only after peer review can a work be considered part of the scientific literature. And only peer-reviewed work will be counted during hiring and evaluation, as a valuable unit of work.
What are the implications of the current publication system – based on peer review – on the progress of science at a time when competition among scientists is rising?
The impact factor and metrics of success
Unlike in math, not every publication counts the same in science. In fact, at least initially, to the eye of an hiring committee the weight of a publication is primarily given by the “impact factor” of the journal in which it appears.
The impact factor is a metric of success that counts the average past “citations” of articles published by a journal in previous years. That is, how many times an article is referenced by other published articles in any other scientific journal. This index is a proxy for the prestige of a journal, and an indicator of the expected future citations of a prospective article in that journal.
For example, according to Google Scholar Metrics 2016, the journal with the highest impact factor is Nature. For a young scientist, publishing in journals like Nature can represent a career turning point, a shift from spending an indefinite number of extra years in a more or less precarious academic position to getting a university tenure.
Given its importance, publishing in top journals is extremely difficult, and rejection rates range from 80 percent to 98 percent. Such high rates imply that sound research can also fail to make it into top journals. Often, valuable studies rejected by top journals end up in lower-tier journals.
Big discoveries also got rejected
We do not have an estimate of how many potentially groundbreaking discoveries we have missed, but we do have records of a few exemplary wrong rejections.
For example, economist George A. Akerlof’s seminal paper, “The Market for Lemons,” which introduced the concept of “asymmetric information” (how decisions are influenced by one party having more information), was rejected several times before it could be published. Akerlov was later awarded the Nobel Prize for this and other later work.
It might seem surprising to those outside the academic world, but until now there has been little empirical investigation on the institution that approves and rejects all scientific claims.
Some scholars even complain that peer review itself has not been scientifically validated. The main reason behind the lack of empirical studies on peer review is the difficulty in accessing data. In fact, peer review data is considered very sensitive, and it is very seldom released for scrutiny, even in an anonymous form.
So, what is the problem with peer review?
In the first place, assessing the quality of a scientific work is a hard task, even for trained scientists, and especially for innovative studies. For this reason, reviewers can often be in disagreement about the merits of an article. In such cases, the editor of a high-profile journal usually takes a conservative decision and rejects it.
Furthermore, for a journal editor, finding competent reviewers can be a daunting task. In fact, reviewers are themselves scientists, which means that they tend to be extremely busy with other tasks like teaching, mentoring students and developing their own research. A review for a journal must be done on top of normal academic chores, often implying that a scientist can dedicate less time to it than it would deserve.
In some cases, journals encourage authors to suggest reviewers’ names. However, this feature, initially introduced to help the editors, has been unfortunately misused to create peer review rings, where the suggested reviewers were accomplices of the authors, or even the authors themselves with secret accounts.
Finally, there is a another problem, which has become worse in the last 15-20 years, where academic competition for funding, positions, publication space and credits has increased along with the growth of the number of researchers.
Science is a winner-take-all enterprise, where whoever makes the decisive discovery first gets all the fame and credit, whereas all the remaining researchers are forgotten. The competition can be fierce and the stakes high.
In such a competitive environment, experiencing an erroneous rejection, or simply a delayed publication, might have huge costs to bear. That is why some Nobel Prize winners no longer hesitate to publish their results in low-impact journals.
Studying competition and peer review
My coauthors and I wanted to know the impact such competition could have on peer review. We decided to conduct a behavioral experiment.
We invited 144 participants to the laboratory and asked them to play the “Art Exhibition Game,” a simplified version of the scientific publication system, translated into an artistic context.
Instead of writing scientific articles, participants would draw images via a special computer interface. And instead of choosing a journal for publication, they would choose one of the available exhibitions for display.
The decision whether an image was good enough for a display would then be taken following the rule of “double-blind peer review,” meaning that reviewers were anonymous to the authors and vice versa. This is the same procedure adopted by the majority of academic journals.
Images that received high review scores were to be displayed in the exhibition of choice. They would also generate a monetary reward for the author.
This experiment allowed us to track for the first time the behavior of both reviewers and creators at the same time in a creative task. The study produced novel insights on the coevolution of the two roles and how they reacted to increases in the level of competition, which we manipulated experimentally.
How does peer review work on a creative task? (The image is for illustrative purpose and does not represent the actual experiment.) Catalyst Open Source, CC BY-SA
In one condition, all the images displayed generated a fixed monetary reward. In another condition – the “competitive condition” – the reward for a display would be divided among all the successful authors.
This situation was designed to resemble the surge in competition for tenure tracks, funding and attention that science has been experiencing in the last 15-20 years.
We wanted to investigate three fundamental aspects of competition: 1) Does competition promote or reduce innovation? 2) Does competition reduce or improve the fairness of the reviews? 3) Does competition improve or hamper the ability of reviewers to identify valuable contributions?
Here is what we found
Our results showed that competition acted as a double-edged sword on peer review. On the one side, it increased the diversity and the innovativeness of the images over time. But, on the other side, competition sharpened the conflict of interest between reviewers and creators.
Our experiment was set up in a such a way that in each round of the experiment a reviewer would review three images on a scale from 0 to 10 (self-review was not allowed). So, if the reviewer and the (reviewed) author chose the same exhibition, they would be in direct competition.
We found that a consistent number of reviewers, aware of this competition, purposely downgraded the review score of the competitor to gain a personal advantage. In turn, this behavior led to a lower level of agreement between reviewers.
Finally, we also asked a sample of 620 external evaluators recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk to rate the images independently.
We found out that competition did not improve the average level of creativity of the images. In fact, with competition many more works of good quality got rejected, whereas in the noncompetitive condition more works of lower quality got accepted.
This highlights the trade-off in the current publication system as well.
What we learned
The experiment confirmed there is a need to reform the current publication system.
One way to achieve this goal could be to allow scientists to be evaluated in the long term, which in turn would decrease the conflict of interest between authors and reviewers.
This policy could be implemented by granting long-term funding to scientists, reducing the urge to publish innovative works prematurely and giving them time to strengthen their results in front of peer review.
Another way could imply removing the requirement of “importance” of a scientific study, as some journals, like PLoS ONE, are already doing. This would give higher chances to more innovative studies to pass the screening of peer review.
Discussing openly the problems of peer review is the first step toward solving them. Having the courage to experiment with alternative solutions is the second.
A recent article via Forbes.com asks a fairly interesting question regarding financial aid for students attempting to attain a higher education.
Does financial aid help colleges more than students?
The article is based on a report via the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that shows how well financial aid works for students.
“Students pay an extra 55 cents in tuition for every dollar of Pell Grant they receive, meaning they only save 45 cents in terms of out-of-pocket costs. Colleges gain even more than the 55 cents from each dollar of new Pell Grants because they collect the extra tuition from all their students, including all the ones who do not receive Pell Grants.”
Basically students can’t seem to catch a break.
The study goes further by stating that student loans make the situation worse as “college tuition goes up by 70 cents for every extra dollar of student loans.”
So basically, if the federal government truly wants to help drive down the cost of higher education and help students, making student loans and Pell Grants more available to students isn’t the best route to take.
The other part of that is how may students attain capital in order to attend college without help from the federal government? Is there a way to place caps on the tuition charged to students who receive loans and grants? If so, then that would make the playing field uneven for everyone.
Certainly a study worth looking further into, the government has to find ways to ensure that colleges aren’t unfairly profiting off of programs meant to help students.
Individualism makes America unhealthy and unequal, and college admissions offices have the power to do something about it. So argues a short but important report, Turning the Tide, released last week by the Making Caring Common (MCC) Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
College admissions offices send messages to students about what society values. To change the message that individual achievement matters most, the report recommends admissions practices that balance intellectual and ethical engagement. It advises strategies for assessing community service and diversity experiences. Ultimately, it wants to redefine achievement to reduce pressure on students and improve access for low-income students.
Is this report part of a sea change in higher education?
As a professor whoseresearch examines merit and diversity in academic gatekeeping, I think the answer to this question is a clear yes.
The question is, will their recommendations work?
The report is on the right track
For years, guidance and college counselors have prodded students to apply to colleges with the right fit, not just the best ranking. And educators have pushed to align preferences in admissions offices with higher education’s public mission.
In 2003, Harvard law professor Lani Guinier proposed that admissions consider both academic and democratic merit. She argued that if colleges’ mission includes preparing leaders for an increasingly diverse democracy, then admissions should reward potential for such leadership.
How to recognize and measure that leadership potential, like other so-called noncognitive factors, is still up for debate. But MCC’s call to consider “authentic” experiences with diversity and “ethical engagement” fits with a more democratic notion of merit.
Admissions officers strive for holistic review. But does it work? COD Newsroom, CC BY
Around the country, educators are huddling to develop, test and refine models of holistic review that honor students’ diverse strengths. Administrators and faculty are hungry for strategies that will help their student bodies reflect the country’s demographic diversity.
There’s a spirit of experimentation in admissions today that the strategies in Turning the Tide can support.
Here are my concerns
I applaud MCC’s initiative and support their goals in principle. However, I have at least three concerns with their recommendations:
First, it’s not clear that they align with evaluation practices in admissions offices.
Second, the strategies it will take to enroll more low-income students in selective colleges are not the same ones needed to reduce achievement pressure.
Everyone worries about the lack of transparency in college admissions, but concerns about pressure are largely coming out of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.
In many low-income high schools, where the real college access problem is, the concern is obtaining access to rigorous courseworkand college preparation generally.
Third, even in systems that tend toward greater equity, the wealthy usually find ways to protect their privilege.
One way they do so, sociologists have shown, is by investing their resources in keeping up with the changing terms of access to high-status social institutions, including educational ones.
Or take my college-frenzied city of Ann Arbor: Less than three months after 80 selective colleges announced they would develop a shared online application with a digital portfolio, the city’s community education provider started offering US$49 workshops titled “How to Apply to Elite Universities.”
It is telling that they marketed the workshops to parents, not teens.
The fact is that “ethical engagement” could easily become the next dimension of merit through which privileged families preserve their competitive advantage.
Redefining ‘good colleges’
The final recommendation of Turning the Tide – broadening students’ ideas about what makes a good college – is perhaps the most important and difficult one.
Parents, employers, and graduate programs also need to take a broader view on college pedigree if they want to persuade students to do so.
Parents need to know how mixed the research record is (see here, hereandhere) on the link between selective college attendance and later earnings. They need to know that going to a selective college doesn’tnecessarily lead togreater life and job satisfaction, even if colleges market themselves that way.
Looking to how graduate programs judge what makes a good college, my own research has revealed how faculty in top-ranked graduate programs think about college affiliations when admitting Ph.D. students. I interviewed 68 professors across 10 programs and observed admissions meetings in six of them.
Faculty routinely assessed college GPA based on the perceived quality of the institution where grades had been earned. They felt this enabled them to distinguish among the many applicants with high grades.
Across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, professors in every program described being “impressed,” “excited” and “dazzled” by affiliations with the Ivy League, as one might expect.
Beyond a belief in the superiority of their training, professors admitted being drawn into the cultural mystique surrounding elite higher education. A few noted that students from elite institutions were “presocialized” or “confident enough” for programs like their own.
One waxed eloquent about the brilliance of his own undergraduate peers at Yale, while others assumed that students who had survived the gauntlet of elite undergraduate admissions must truly be “better.”
They also looked favorably on less prestigious institutions with respected undergraduate programs in their discipline. They admitted to me or revealed in committee that they had a hard time trusting applicants from unfamiliar institutions and ones with mediocre reputations.
Like the messages that parents send their children, how professors read college affiliations in graduate admissions sends messages to young people about what makes a good college.
MCC is right that updating admissions is a great strategy for cultural change. Admissions priorities subtly coerce adolescent behavior. A growing number of families organize their children’s time and very lives to put them on a trajectory that (they think) will land them in college.
But to really alter the messages about achievement that students hear, change shouldn’t be limited to the admissions office. Parents, employers and those of us who work in education also need to lead by example.
University of Michigan doctoral student Kristen Glasener contributed to this article.
The SAT, the test that many schools require to check for college readiness, has recently gone through a makeover. Perhaps the most significant change is to the writing portion of the SAT, which presents students with new and more complex reading and and writing challenges.
College Board, the nonprofit that administers the test, had earlier announced that the essay in the writing section would be optional. However, many schools in the U.S. require their students to take the writing exam.
Connecticut, New Hampshire and Michigan are examples of such states, where the SAT, including its writing exam, is required, not optional. What’s more, scores from these tests are critical beyond their acceptance and placement in some colleges.
The SAT serves as the measure of the educational progress for all students in each state that adopts the SAT for that purpose. In such cases, the SAT is more than a bridge between high school and college. SAT has become a “high-stakes” K-12 assessment. In fact, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
But are schools preparing students adequately to take the new SAT?
I have been working for a number of years with K-12 writing teachers in Michigan on designing more effective approaches to learning in writing as part of my research. I believe the new writing test is complex and requires skills that U.S. schools are not teaching students.
The new SAT
First, let’s take a look at what’s different about the new writing assessment.
In a break from most standardized writing assessments, the new essay task is not designed to elicit students’ subjective opinions. Rather, its aim is to assess whether students are able to comprehend an appropriately challenging source text and craft an effective written analysis of that text.
For years, the formula for success on high-stakes writing assessments has been to craft a five-paragraph structure: thesis paragraph, three supporting paragraphs and a concluding paragraph. Within that structure, students are more or less free to say anything, and the more creative and engaging that “anything” is, the better.
Les Perelman, the former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, who helped create MIT’s writing placement test, summed it up, when he said:
It doesn’t matter if [what you write] is true or not…In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.
As Perelman noted, “in relaying personal experiences, students who took time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives were at a disadvantage.”
The revised SAT, therefore, is a major shift from “subjective opinion” to an analysis based on a real-world nonfiction persuasive passage.
The table below provides a quick overview of what the revised SAT asks of students. The five paragraph structure is still there, but the intellectual work required of students is vastly different.
Students read a nonfiction argument that may be in the form of speeches, opinion editorials or articles that tend not to have simple for or against arguments but convey more nuanced views. Students are expected to marshal evidence about how the author builds a persuasive argument.
What makes the test challenging?
The first significant challenge is that the new prompt asks students to read rhetorically. Rhetorical reading is a form of analysis that is different from more literary forms of analysis that are likely taught in schools.
For example, the new SAT prompt asks students to notice how an author achieves a purpose, shapes a text for an audience and organizes information to achieve a goal. Students need to be able to analyze an argument pulled from topics across the disciplines.
For students to be able to do this, teachers need to help students become better rhetorical readers and better writers. This new way of reading and teaching reading must be layered into already overloaded existing curricula.
The second significant challenge, of course, is the writing itself.
In the past, success on “high-stakes” writing tests like the SAT could be achieved by following a highly structured formula.
That will no longer work. Instead, students will be asked to make arguments based on their own analytical reasoning. They will be required to marshal real evidence – not made-up events – drawn from the passage to be analyzed.
And students will be required to do this quickly, within a time frame in which they will already be engaged in more complex reading practices.
Writing instruction in schools
The reading and writing required by the new SAT will be new for students and many teachers. Rhetorical reading requires “reading like a writer” and answering questions such as “Why did the author do it this way?” Students will then have to write up that analysis in a way that makes evidence-based arguments.
Any examination of English Language Arts curriculum in U.S. middle and high schools will reveal a nearly complete focus on literary forms and genres with relatively little writing. The basic values and focus that give us our “English” curriculum date back to a 19th-century shiftfrom classical modes of education toward the study of literary texts. It was a shift from Latin and Greek models of discourse, and, most importantly, instruction in speaking and writing, to a shift to literature in English and a focus on reading and analysis.
The curriculum that resulted from these broad changes over time is “English,” and direct instruction in writing has never recovered. The National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges, a project to help improve the teaching of writing, argues that writing is the “neglected R” in education. That same report notes that little time is spent on writing instruction – at best less than three hours a week. In a recent survey, 82 percent of teens report that their typical school writing assignment is a paragraph to one page in length.
[T]he actual writing that goes on in typical classrooms across the United States remains dominated by tasks in which the teacher does all the composing, and students are left only to fill in missing information, whether copying directly from a teacher’s presentation, completing worksheets and chapter summaries, replicating highly formulaic essay structures keyed to high-stakes tests, or writing to “show they know” the particular information the teacher is seeking.
Let’s not teach to the test
I work with teachers and schools quite anxious about how to respond.
Anxious parents – mostly parents of students who struggle with language or have learning disabilities – have asked me questions about the revised SAT.
Teacher preparation programs have historically provided little to no preparation in teaching writing to new teachers, though this is slowly changing. Surely, good teachers and attentive schools will develop well-designed approaches to the new SAT. But I believe responding to the exam is the wrong approach and misses the point.
What is required is a comprehensive change in how we value writing and writing instruction. If that were to happen, then more complex writing exams would be taken in stride because our approaches to learning in writing would exceed the demands of any high-stakes test.
