Public Colleges as ‘Engines of Inequality’ - NYT editorial

November 23, 2006
Editorial
NY Times
Public Colleges as ‘Engines of Inequality’
Democrats who ran for Congress this fall made the cost of college a big campaign issue. Now that they’ve won control of the House and Senate, they can prepare to act swiftly on at least some of the factors that have priced millions of poor and working-class Americans right out of higher education. The obvious first step would be to boost the value of the federal Pell Grant program — a critical tool in keeping college affordable that the federal government has shamefully ceased to fund at a level that meets the national need.

But larger Pell Grants can’t solve this crisis alone. Policy changes will also be required in the states, where public universities have been choking off college access and upward mobility for the poor by shifting away from the traditional need-based aid formula to a so-called merit formula that heavily favors affluent students. The resulting drop in the fortunes of even high-performing low-income students — many of whom no longer attend college at all — is documented in an eye-opening report released recently by the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation devoted to education reform.

The public universities were founded on the premise that they would provide broad access in exchange for taxpayer subsidies. That compact has been pretty much discarded in the state flagship campuses, which have increasingly come to view themselves as semiprivate colleges that define themselves not by inclusion, but by how many applicants they turn away, and how many of their students perform at the highest levels on the SAT, an index that clearly favors affluent teenagers who attend the best schools and have access to tutors.

The flagship schools compete for high-income, high-achieving students who would otherwise attend college elsewhere, while overlooking low-income students who are perfectly able to succeed at college but whose options are far more narrow.

In recent years, aid to students whose families earn over $100,000 has more than quadrupled at the public flagship and research universities. Incredibly, the average institutional grant to students from high-income families is actually larger than the average grant to low- or middle-income families.

Partly as a result, high-performing students from low-income groups are much less likely to attend college than their high-income counterparts — and are less likely to ever get four-year degrees if they do attend.

These are ominous facts at a time when the college degree has become the basic price of admission to both the middle class and the new global economy. Unless the country reverses this trend, upward mobility through public higher education will pretty much come to a halt.

Flag is raised on admissions_USA Today article

Flag is raised on admissions
Updated 10/25/2006 1:09 PM ET
By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
Shortly after Harvard announced last month that it was ending its early-admission policy, admissions dean William Fitzsimmons got a thank-you e-mail from a woman with a story to tell.
She and her best friend had applied to the same school. The friend got in, she didn't. And that was the end of the friendship.
Now, as Fitzsimmons prepares to conduct Harvard's last review of early-admission applicants (the deadline is Nov. 1), he worries that the admissions "rat race" is destroying "the quality of the social fabric" in high schools.
"It creates a pressure cooker," he says. And it's one reason Harvard is ending its early deadline.
With each admissions season comes new stories of a process gone haywire. And this year is no different.
Except for this: For years, high school counselors — those on the front lines working with college-bound students — mostly were the ones who complained. Now, perhaps more than ever before, the problems associated with college admissions are being acknowledged by a wider array of influential voices.
It's not just that big-name schools such as Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia will drop early-application deadlines next year. This month alone, a pediatrics group sounded alarms about the stress of this rite of passage on teens. And Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who shepherded her daughter through the college search a few years ago, says she wants the process to be less confusing and frustrating.
These and other prominent voices have the potential to help calm the frenzy surrounding contemporary college admissions. It won't happen overnight or without turmoil. But momentum for change does appear to be building.
Redefining 'best'
Though the admissions process was not a central focus of a higher-education commission created by Spellings, its September report noted a lack of data on the educational performance of colleges and universities. It says students and parents who are comparison shopping for colleges are limited to information that focuses almost exclusively on a school's reputation, defined by such measures as average SAT or ACT scores, selectivity (the percentage of applicants offered admission) and yield (the percentage of admitted students who enroll).
The bid for prestige has helped stoke a billion-dollar-a-year industry with test-prep firms that promise to boost student scores, enrollment management firms that help colleges target desirable students and guidebooks and magazines that tout "best" colleges.
And the arms race has led to gamesmanship, both by students looking for an edge and colleges hoping to rise in the rankings.
Now, Spellings is looking for ways to evaluate colleges using other factors, such as how many students graduate and how much students learn.
Colleges don't relish the idea of federal oversight. But the commission in a way reinforces other recent efforts to steer the conversation away from what is the "best college" toward what college is best for a particular student.
For Ken Fox, a counselor at Ladue Horton Watkins High School in St. Louis, that has been a struggle. "What I care about is helping students understand that the list of good schools out there is really big," he says. "That's an education process, helping families understand that a school they may not have heard of may be exactly the right place."
Now, more key players are joining the conversation. One of the most prominent is the Education Conservancy, a fledgling non-profit in Portland, Ore., that convened a closed-door meeting last summer aimed at reforming admissions.
It's too soon to say what the group will come up with, although its vision differs from the one Spellings outlined. She wants a database that tracks performance; conservancy founder Lloyd Thacker says the "benefits and predictors of a good education are ... virtually impossible to measure."
What's notable is that his meeting included presidents of 11 colleges (Swarthmore, Williams and Amherst, to name three) that all benefit from the prestige factor.
That's important because presidents have the most influence with their trustees, alumni and other constituents who have an interest in rankings. And collective goodwill is critical, Thacker says, because colleges generally have been reluctant to make big changes unless others do, too, for fear it would hurt their ability to compete.
"Higher education has not been good at looking at (admissions) as a systemic issue," says Christopher Allen, admissions dean at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., whose president participated in the summer session. "Part of this has to be educating the right people."
Thacker's premise has doubters. "The new truth about the college admission process is that decisions to admit students ... are business decisions that reflect institutional values," Peter Van Buskirk, former dean of admission at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., writes in an essay for online magazine insidehighered.com. He blames society's "neurotic obsessions with having or being the 'best' ... the best appliances, the best cars, the best vacations — and the best colleges, often at the expense of good values that would be more appropriate choices."
A boost from doctors
Van Buskirk's comments are echoed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Noting an increased campus demand for mental health services, it declared in a report this month that adolescents "may have learned that the endpoint goal — the best school or the best job — must be reached at all costs."
Now, more college admissions officials also appear to recognize their role in causing stress. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, is mailing admission notices on only two dates this year rather than notifying each student as soon as a decision is made. That "caused a lot of anxiety in other students," says assistant admissions director Gregg Perry. "They would (try) to figure out why (they had not) heard yet. They would discuss the issue with their counselors, call admissions, talk to their friends. ... Just when the anxiety would die down, another friend would get a notice and start the angst all over again."
Colleges don't always change their ways by choice. The National Association for College Admission Counseling, a non-profit membership group, this month put the kibosh on "deadline creep," as some call it, because it was concerned that some colleges were pressuring students to apply even before their senior year, and in some cases waiving application fees or promising priority housing.
High school counselors have long been concerned that binding early deadlines were rushing teens. Though early deadlines can simplify the process for students who are certain where they want to go, many students aren't sure but think they should apply anyway.
"Middle adolescence is characterized by exploring, changing and rethinking likes, dislikes, interests, values — their identity — and then imagining in what milieu this morphing identity will best belong," says Patty Kovacs, a college counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. "For an early-decision applicant, it means locking into that future identity."
Even in high schools where few students apply early, the autumn deadlines can cast a long shadow. No more than a handful of the hundreds of seniors at North Hollywood High School in California are applying early this year, yet "there's an energy there (that) makes other kids nervous, too," counselor Eileen Doctorow says. "They say, 'Maybe I'm too late.' "
The fairness factor
The often-daunting admissions process is especially confusing for families who have never navigated it before. A push by the Spellings commission, along with lawmakers and policymakers, to improve access to college promises to remove some of the barriers — and the complexity.
Already, a number of mostly wealthier selective colleges have removed loans from financial aid packages. That's important because income disparities are especially striking at the nation's 146 most selective universities, says the Century Foundation, a New York think tank. Its analysis found that 3% of students at those schools came from the lowest socioeconomic quarter of the population; 74% come from the top quarter.
But the savviest applicants tend to be the most affluent. So, as colleges seek to enroll more low-income students, some also are revising admission practices that, as it turns out, contribute to the angst.
In announcing last month that Princeton would end its early-decision policy, for example, president Shirley Tilghman said the "ultimate test of any admission process for Princeton is whether it is fair and equitable." But she also said the policy change would "reduce some of the frenzy."
Similarly, testing critics have long argued that standardized admission tests are unreliable and discriminate against poor students, who have lower average scores. Since the new SAT began in March 2005, about 20 schools, mostly small liberal arts colleges, have dropped or de-emphasized the SAT or ACT college entrance exams.
The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, Cambridge, Mass., now lists 732 such schools.
There's no indication tests are on the way out. A survey by the admission-counseling group finds that 59% of colleges say test scores are of "considerable importance" in admissions; 6.2% say they are of no importance.
And, there has been no stampede to drop early-admission deadlines. In fact, some admissions professionals suggest it may backfire.
Here's why: Students who might otherwise have applied early to one of those schools will apply to more colleges to hedge their bets. More colleges will then see an uptick in applications, which makes them appear more selective but also makes it harder to predict their yield. Then, to maintain high yields, colleges will rely more on wait lists — putting more students in limbo later in the season.
"There may be nice opportunity to calm counselors and claim a moral high ground, but in the end, I think more of a mess may lie ahead," says Bruce Poch, admissions dean of Pomona College in California.
Other have argued that dropping early-admission programs won't increase overall access so much as it will shuffle around a few high-achieving low-income students.
That may be, says Brad MacGowan, a college counselor at Newton North High School in Newtonville, Mass. But he was one of the many college counselors to applaud Harvard's announcement.
"I'll settle for the little victories," he says.






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Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools? WSJ article

Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?
School Standards Are Probed Even as Enrollment Increases;
A Bias Claim at Princeton
By DANIEL GOLDEN
November 11, 2006; Page A1

Though Asian-Americans constitute only about 4.5% of the U.S. population, they typically account for anywhere from 10% to 30% of students at many of the nation's elite colleges.

Even so, based on their outstanding grades and test scores, Asian-Americans increasingly say their enrollment should be much higher -- a contention backed by a growing body of evidence.

Whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake is becoming a big concern in college-admissions offices. Federal civil-rights officials are investigating charges by a top Chinese-American student that he was rejected by Princeton University last spring because of his race and national origin.


Meanwhile, voter attacks on admissions preferences for other minority groups -- as well as research indicating colleges give less weight to high test scores of Asian-American applicants -- may push schools to boost Asian enrollment. Tuesday, Michigan voters approved a ballot measure striking down admissions preferences for African-Americans and Hispanics. The move is expected to benefit Asian applicants to state universities there -- as similar initiatives have done in California and Washington.

If the same measure is passed in coming years in Illinois, Missouri and Oregon -- where opponents of such preferences say they plan to introduce it -- Asian-American enrollment likely would climb at selective public universities in those states as well.

During the Michigan campaign, a group that opposes affirmative action released a study bolstering claims that Asian students are held to a higher standard. The study, by the Center for Equal Opportunity, in Virginia, found that Asian applicants admitted to the University of Michigan in 2005 had a median SAT score of 1400 on the 400-1600 scale then in use. That was 50 points higher than the median score of white students who were accepted, 140 points higher than that of Hispanics and 240 points higher than that of blacks.

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, said universities are "legally vulnerable" to challenges from rejected Asian-American applicants.

Princeton, where Asian-Americans constitute about 13% of the student body, faces such a challenge. A spokesman for the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights said it is investigating a complaint filed by Jian Li, now a 17-year-old freshman at Yale University. Despite racking up the maximum 2400 score on the SAT and 2390 -- 10 points below the ceiling -- on SAT2 subject tests in physics, chemistry and calculus, Mr. Li was spurned by three Ivy League universities, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Office for Civil Rights initially rejected Mr. Li's complaint due to "insufficient" evidence. Mr. Li appealed, citing a white high-school classmate admitted to Princeton despite lower test scores and grades. The office notified him late last month that it would look into the case.

His complaint seeks to suspend federal financial assistance to Princeton until the university "discontinues discrimination against Asian-Americans in all forms by eliminating race preferences, legacy preferences, and athlete preferences." Legacy preference is the edge most elite colleges, including Princeton, give to alumni children. The Office for Civil Rights has the power to terminate such financial aid but usually works with colleges to resolve cases rather than taking enforcement action.

Mr. Li, who emigrated to the U.S. from China as a 4-year-old and graduated from a public high school in Livingston, N.J., said he hopes his action will set a precedent for other Asian-American students. He wants to "send a message to the admissions committee to be more cognizant of possible bias, and that the way they're conducting admissions is not really equitable," he said.

Princeton spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said the university is aware of the complaint and will provide the Office for Civil Rights with information it has requested. Princeton has said in the past that it considers applicants as individuals and doesn't discriminate against Asian-Americans.

When elite colleges began practicing affirmative action in the late 1960s and 1970s, they gave an admissions boost to Asian-American applicants as well as blacks and Hispanics. As the percentage of Asian-Americans in elite schools quickly overtook their slice of the U.S. population, many colleges stopped giving them preference -- and in some cases may have leaned the other way.

In 1990, a federal investigation concluded that Harvard University admitted Asian-American applicants at a lower rate than white students despite the Asians' slightly stronger test scores and grades. Federal investigators also found that Harvard admissions staff had stereotyped Asian-American candidates as quiet, shy and oriented toward math and science. The government didn't bring charges because it concluded it was Harvard's preferences for athletes and alumni children -- few of whom were Asian -- that accounted for the admissions gap.

The University of California came under similar scrutiny at about the same time. In 1989, as the federal government was investigating alleged Asian-American quotas at UC's Berkeley campus, Berkeley's chancellor apologized for a drop in Asian enrollment. The next year, federal investigators found that the mathematics department at UCLA had discriminated against Asian-American graduate school applicants. In 1992, Berkeley's law school agreed under federal pressure to drop a policy that limited Asian enrollment by comparing Asian applicants against each other rather than the entire applicant pool.

Asian-American enrollment at Berkeley has increased since California voters banned affirmative action in college admissions. Berkeley accepted 4,122 Asian-American applicants for this fall's freshman class -- nearly 42% of the total admitted. That is up from 2,925 in 1997, or 34.6%, the last year before the ban took effect. Similarly, Asian-American undergraduate enrollment at the University of Washington rose to 25.4% in 2004 from 22.1% in 1998, when voters in that state prohibited affirmative action in college admissions.

The University of Michigan may be poised for a similar leap in Asian-American enrollment, now that voters in that state have banned affirmative action. The Center for Equal Opportunity study found that, among applicants with a 1240 SAT score and 3.2 grade point average in 2005, the university admitted 10% of Asian-Americans, 14% of whites, 88% of Hispanics and 92% of blacks. Asian applicants to the university's medical school also faced a higher admissions bar than any other group.

Julie Peterson, spokeswoman for the University of Michigan, said the study was flawed because many applicants take the ACT test instead of the SAT, and standardized test scores are only one of various tools used to evaluate candidates. "I utterly reject the conclusion" that the university discriminates against Asian-Americans, she said. Asian-Americans constitute 12.6% of the university's undergraduates.

Jonathan Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, said most elite colleges' handling of Asian applicants has become fairer in recent years. Mr. Reider, a former Stanford admissions official, said Stanford staffers were dismayed 20 years ago when an internal study showed they were less likely to admit Asian applicants than comparable whites. As a result, he said, Stanford strived to eliminate unconscious bias and repeated the study every year until Asians no longer faced a disadvantage.

Last month, Mr. Reider participated in a panel discussion at a college-admissions conference. It was titled, "Too Asian?" and explored whether colleges treat Asian applicants differently.

Precise figures of Asian-American representation at the nation's top schools are hard to come by. Don Joe, an attorney and activist who runs Asian-American Politics, an Internet site that tracks enrollment, puts the average proportion of Asian-Americans at 25 top colleges at 15.9% in 2005, up from 10% in 1992.

Still, he said, he is hearing more complaints "from Asian-American parents about how their children have excellent grades and scores but are being rejected by the most selective colleges. It appears to be an open secret."

Mr. Li, who said he was in the top 1% of his high-school class and took five advanced placement courses in his senior year, left blank the questions on college applications about his ethnicity and place of birth. "It seemed very irrelevant to me, if not offensive," he said. Mr. Li, who has permanent resident status in the U.S., did note that his citizenship, first language and language spoken at home were Chinese.

Along with Yale, he won admission to the California Institute of Technology, Rutgers University and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He said four schools -- Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania -- placed him on their waiting lists before rejecting him. "I was very close to being accepted at these schools," he said. "I was thinking, had my ethnicity been different, it would have put me over the top. Even if race had just a marginal effect, it may have disadvantaged me."

He ultimately focused his complaint against Princeton after reading a 2004 study by three Princeton researchers concluding that an Asian-American applicant needed to score 50 points higher on the SAT than other applicants to have the same change of admission to an elite university.

"As an Asian-American and a native of China, my chances of admission were drastically reduced," Mr. Li claims in his complaint.

Write to Daniel Golden at dan.golden@wsj.com1

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Amid Rising Costs and Criticism,Some Colleges Cut Back Merit Aid WSJ article

Amid Rising Costs and Criticism,Some Colleges Cut Back Merit Aid
By ROBERT TOMSHO
October 11, 2006; Page A1

As colleges and universities consider whether to join Harvard and Princeton in abandoning early-admissions programs, some are also trying to roll back another popular recruiting tool: merit aid.

Colleges offer merit aid, which is typically awarded on the basis of grades, class rank and test scores, to students who ordinarily wouldn't qualify for financial help. Because merit aid can be a deciding factor in these students' choice of schools, it has become a major weapon in the bidding wars among colleges for high achievers who can help boost their national rankings.

The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators says merit awards accounted for $7.3 billion, or 16%, of all college financial-aid grants in the U.S. for the 2003-2004 academic year, the latest for which data are available. That's up sharply from $1.2 billion, or 6% of the total, in 1993-1994.


But the cost of such programs has mounted as their use has expanded and tuition has risen. Meanwhile, criticism has grown that they disproportionately benefit students from wealthier communities with better school systems, siphoning resources away from lower-income students with greater financial need. In some cases, students who qualify for neither need- nor merit-based aid end up paying even more to cover a college's costs. As a result, a small but growing number of schools and university systems are trying to reduce their merit offerings.

The University of Florida recently slashed the value of its four-year scholarships for in-state scholars who qualified under the National Merit program by 79% to a total of $5,000.

Last year, Illinois eliminated funding for a statewide merit program. Since 2004, the state of Maryland has been phasing out one merit program and flat-funding another while nearly doubling need-based college aid, to about $83.3 million a year.

Many highly selective private schools like Harvard and Stanford universities don't offer merit aid, but some colleges that do are paring back sharply.

Allegheny College, in Meadville, Pa., where annual tuition and fees total about $28,300, gave its $15,000-a-year merit scholarships to 15% of this year's freshmen, down from about 33% three years ago. To free up funding for more need-based aid, Rhode Island's Providence College scuttled its smaller merit scholarships and raised the eligibility requirements for its larger ones: A grade-point average of about 3.7 on a 4.0 scale used to be good enough; now it takes around a 3.83. Providence's merit scholarships can run as high as full tuition, which is $26,780 this year.


Private-college associations in Pennsylvania and Minnesota are also taking early steps that could lead to broader cutbacks. They have been gathering data and weighing whether to ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption so their members can discuss joint action to reduce merit aid. With many colleges fearful that unilateral cuts will drive talented applicants into the hands of competitors, "it's going to take a group effort," says David Laird, president of the Minnesota Private College Council.

But many college administrators fear that even discussing collective action will trigger an expensive repeat of 1991, when the Justice Department sued the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and eight Ivy League schools, charging them with antitrust violations for agreeing to adjust their financial aid offers so that a family's out-of-pocket price would be the same at every school. The suit was eventually settled, and a subsequent federal law permits 28 elite universities to agree on standards for granting financial aid but bars them from trading data on individuals.

Efforts to cut back on merit aid also risk setting off a backlash from middle- and upper-income families who don't qualify for need-based aid but are finding the rising cost of a college to be a daunting stretch. "Family income isn't keeping pace with the things driving higher-education costs," says Jim Scannell, a partner at Scannell & Kurz Inc., a Pittsford, N.Y., consulting firm that works with colleges on enrollment issues.

QUESTION OF THE DAY


Vote: What should be a bigger factor in determining aid, merit or need?1Some high-achieving applicants target schools that have merit-aid programs, hoping to win a tuition break. With tuition and fees at many private schools surpassing $40,000 a year, small private liberal-arts colleges that lack the cachet of the Ivy League but whose tuitions far exceed those of state colleges could have the most to lose from any cutbacks in merit aid.

For many parents, merit aid "has become more of an expectation," says David Hawkins, public policy director for the National Association for College Admissions Counseling. James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, an advocacy group, adds that, "From a political standpoint, its difficult to take away."

Indeed, efforts to contain the cost of statewide merit programs have sparked legislative battles in Georgia and other states. Despite the rising costs of aid, Georgia and Michigan have bet on merit-based scholarship programs as an economic-development tool, hoping to attract and keep academic talent and ultimately to spur research and innovation.

Many institutions have no intention of cutting back on merit aid. Baylor University, a Baptist college in Waco, Texas, recently increased the value of the merit awards it gives to all incoming freshmen who score at least 1,300 points out of a possible 1,600 on SAT reading and math exams. The awards, which rise in value in tandem with a student's SAT scores, range from $2,000 to $4,000 a year.

Jackie Diaz, Baylor's assistant vice president for student financial services, says the average SAT score for this fall's freshmen was 1,213, up from 1,196 a year ago. "I certainly think the financial-aid awarding has something to do with that," says Ms. Diaz, whose university gave merit packages valued at an average of $6,880 a year to about a third of last year's freshmen class.

For some smaller schools, merit aid is less about boosting rankings than adding revenue by swelling enrollment. In most cases, students are still paying substantial sums for tuition even after receiving a scholarship. "I think in many cases it's misleading to call it merit aid," says Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, a Chicago-based educational research group. "It's 'get 'em in the door' aid."

At private Wilkes University, Wilkes Barre, Pa., where tuition and fees are about $23,000 a year, only 81 of this year's 580 incoming freshmen didn't get merit aid. To land a scholarship, which starts at $6,000 a year, students have to have graduated in the top half of their high-school class and to have scored a combined total of at least a 900 on the SAT reading and math exams, not much above average.

Mike Frantz, Wilkes's vice president for enrollment and marketing, concedes that the school's minimum requirement for merit aid "isn't incredibly high" but says the offers are necessary to persuade many cost-conscious students to seriously consider Wilkes.

Most institutions, meanwhile, have shied away from cutting athletic scholarships, which often come out of a separate pocket. The University of Florida, for example, while downsizing the value of its National Merit scholarships, hasn't tinkered with its athletic awards. University officials say the $6.9 million in athletic scholarships it awarded last year were entirely funded by private donations and that revenue generated by the athletic program contributed more than $1 million to Florida's budget for need-based aid last year. Athletic scholarships at many schools are funded at least in part by private donors.

During the 2003-2004 academic year, according to the most recent federal data, about half of the nation's students received need- or merit-based grants, averaging about $4,000 each, and about a third took out student loans averaging $5,800, with those groups, in some cases, overlapping.

Colleges that have whittled down their merit offerings have generally not raised income caps for need-based aid eligibility or otherwise altered their formulas for determining who qualifies for financial aid. With most schools unable to meet the existing demand for such aid, "they are not looking for ways to generate new measures of need," says Sandy Baum, an economist at Skidmore College.

Although families with earnings of $100,000 or more might qualify for need-based aid, depending on factors such as how many college-aged children they have, college administrators say many such families usually don't bother to apply for need-based aid because they presume they won't get it.

Several studies have shown that merit aid benefits a disproportionate number of more-affluent students. During the 2003-2004 academic year, colleges gave about 30% of their merit aid to students from families with incomes above $92,400; about 20% went to families with incomes of $33,350 or less, according to a recent study by Donald Heller, an education professor at Penn State.

Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@wsj.com2

Why Is High School The New College? WSJ article

Test Question:
Why Is High School The New College?
By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
October 6, 2006; Page W13

When school officials in the ritzy suburb of Scarsdale, N.Y., announced last week a proposal to drop Advanced Placement courses from the high-school curriculum, parents throughout the land breathed a sigh of relief. At last, they must have thought, the rat race is coming to an end.

"Rat race," of course, is a phrase that used to describe the daily grind of corporate lawyers and investment bankers. It is now shorthand for the pressure-filled lives of their children -- and the children of all professionals, from Beacon Hill to Beverly Hills. Parents, teachers and students have been observing this frenzy of activity for some time and have now joined their voices in a chorus of complaint: students take too many classes; they participate in too many extra-curricular activities; they suffer nervous breakdowns from the stress and back problems from the overloaded schoolbags.

The experts are worried too. The past few months have brought us books like "Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child," "The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids" and "The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids."

With such tomes piled high on their nightstands, it's no surprise that Scarsdale's grown-ups are wondering whether to let AP courses go. These courses were once intended to earn high-school students college credit by offering "advanced" (e.g., college-level) instruction in everything from calculus to German literature. Now they are mostly used as a learning credential: An AP course on a résumé means that a student actually knows something in a particular subject area.

The "rat race" complaint is that AP courses put a strain on students -- too many facts to memorize, too much reading. And teachers complain, too. They say that AP courses force them to "teach to the test." In this case, though, the test is a pretty good one.

Conceived in the early 1950s by educators from three prep schools (Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville) and three universities (Harvard, Princeton, Yale), the AP curricula demands that students acquire real knowledge. Unlike the SAT's, which measure mental aptitude, the AP tests ask students hard questions about content. Even the essay questions on the history exam require students to place quotations and documents in their correct context and to identify events, dates, historical figures and ideas.

This is exactly the sort of knowledge that is often said to be in short supply among college graduates these days, and not without reason. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, conducting a survey of college students over the course of the past year, has just issued a report on college learning. One major conclusion: Four years in college classrooms don't seem to make much of a difference. When students were asked a series of questions -- like what is the source of the sentence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," -- seniors scored an average of 53.2 and freshmen earned a 51.7. But it's worse than that. The report concludes that "at many schools" -- in U.S. history, foreign affairs and the economy -- "seniors know less than freshmen."

Why? Because college increasingly offers a crazed social experience at the expense of rigorous study. But high school does better: It is often the last time that students are forced to learn something. Parents make their kids show up at school. More than a few teachers convey basic skills and knowledge. After-school life centers on burnishing a college application, not binge drinking. AP courses, where they exist, exploit these structured years for maximum learning.

Critics will say that "rat race" kids no longer play soccer for the joy of the game or master the violin for the beauty of the music or study history for the love of learning. Maybe. But who cares? At least something worthwhile is going on. These kids have four years of college ahead of them during which they may take as few classes as they like in subjects that require no difficult exams. They can spend their time outside the classroom drinking and "dating." They can opt out of the rat race, and they do.

And there is no penalty. College-admissions officers go over high-school lives with a fine-tooth comb -- Why didn't she play a sport junior year? Why didn't he continue in Spanish? But most employers don't scrutinize a college courseload or a college GPA. The degree is all that matters.

So before the good people of Scarsdale move to end the rat race, they should reflect on its value. High school is the new college. Once those college-admissions letters arrive, their kids will stop learning and start living on easy street.

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As Tuition Soars, Federal Aid To College Students Falls - WSJ article

As Tuition Soars, Federal Aid To College Students Falls
By ROBERT TOMSHO
The Wall Street Journal
October 25, 2006; Page B1

At a time when employers say that almost every new job in the U.S. will require workers to have more than a high-school education, the chance that students at the bottom of the economic ladder can afford to finish college has taken a turn for the worse.

The College Board's latest annual reports on student aid and college pricing find that over the past five years tuition at public four-year universities has soared by a record-breaking 35% when adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, spending on Pell Grants -- the biggest source of federal aid for low-income students -- fell for the first time in six years.

"There is no question that the bulk of the impact of that is falling on lower- and lower-middle-income students," says Donald Heller, a Pennsylvania State University professor who has studied access to higher education. "They are getting killed on the aid side, and they are getting killed on the tuition side."


The number of students from all income levels pursuing post-secondary education continues to grow. But to stay in school, educators say, low-income students are taking loans, using high-interest credit cards to pay tuition, working more hours, and opting for two-year schools.

Low-income students are choosing two-year colleges for financial reasons even though studies show more of them are academically qualified for four-year schools due to efforts by school districts to push them into tougher, college-prep courses. But only 23% of community college students earn a bachelor's degree -- a vital credential in today's workplace -- within six years, as compared with 63% of students at four-year institutions, according to the College Board, a New York-based nonprofit that administers the SAT college admissions test and analyzes higher-education data.

The shrinking Pell Grant funding "doesn't give us the chance to attend college and get the degree we need to get the earnings that we should," says Kennel Etienne, a former Pell recipient from Revere, Mass. Mr. Etienne, 23, has been struggling to earn money to return to college since he dropped out of Mount Ida College, in Newton., Mass., for financial reasons two years ago.

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• College Tuition Rises More Than 6%1
10/25/06

Pell Grants are often used as an index of how accessible higher education is to lower-income students. About $12.7 billion in Pell Grants were awarded for the 2005-2006 academic year, down 3% from $13.1 billion the previous academic year. The average grant per recipient slipped to $2,354 from $2,474. The decline came after the Bush administration rejiggered the eligibility formula: It reduced how much money families in many states were assumed to be paying in state and local taxes, which increased their after-tax incomes and made many ineligible for the grants.

The vast majority of the 5.4 million students receiving Pell Grants come from families earning less than $40,000 a year. Despite much debate in Congress, the value of the maximum Pell Grant, $4,050, hasn't budged in three years even as the price tag for attending a four-year public university has soared. The maximum Pell grant met 33% of the average price of tuition, fees, room and board at a public four-year school in 2005-06, down from 42% in 2001-02.

The increase in tuition and fees at the four-year publics was a relatively moderate 6.3% last year, or 2.4% after adjusting for inflation. But College Board data shows that the overall 35% inflation-adjusted increase since 2001-2002 is the biggest five-year jump since it began gathering such data in the 1970s. It's also more than triple the 11% inflation-adjusted increase at private colleges. Private colleges face many of the same cost increases as their public-sector brethren. Over the past five years, utilities costs for colleges and universities have risen by 72%, according to the College Board, while costs for employee benefits are up 31%.

Neither "student-aid funds nor family incomes are keeping pace with college prices," Gaston Caperton, the College Board president, said yesterday. "This is a serious problem that must be addressed."

About 35% of the nation's 15.2 million undergraduates attend four-year public universities and about 16% go to four-year private schools, according to the College Board. About 41% attend two-year public schools, with most of the rest going to for-profit colleges, such as the University of Phoenix.

The steep tuition increases for public colleges come as many state legislatures, facing growing pressure to fund other priorities such as Medicaid, prisons and primary and secondary education, have reduced in recent years appropriations for higher education on a per-student basis. State and local government appropriations were $5,825 per full-time student in 2004-2005, down from $6,846 per student in 2000-2001 after adjusting for inflation, the College Board said.

To compensate for the pressure on appropriations, four-year publics have raised tuition, making bargains harder to find. At the University of Texas at Austin, once considered one of the sector's best buys, tuition has increased by 47% over the past three years. Meanwhile, at California public universities, where the cost of attending was minimal until the 1990s, tuition and fees have soared by 40% in the past five years, to as much as $7,000 a year at the University of California campuses, the state's most selective schools.

The College Board reports come amid increasing debate over higher education policies that appear to favor affluent students. Many universities, seeking to boost their standing in the college rankings, have increasingly used their own resources to award merit aid to top-ranking students who have no financial need.

According to one recent study, only 10.8% of undergraduates at 19 leading public and private universities come from families in the bottom 25% of annual income. In recent months, both Harvard and Princeton said they planned to drop early admissions, saying that such programs, which are commonplace among selective colleges, favor the already-advantaged.

At the same time, corporate leaders concerned about the nation's future competitiveness are calling for students from a broader range of backgrounds to attend college. "We think it's critically important," says Arthur Rothkopf, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "We think 90% of the newly created jobs in this country are going to require some post-secondary education."

Write to Robert Tomsho at rob.tomsho@wsj.com2

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College Admissions: the Sequel - WSJ article

Education
College Admissions: the Sequel
Ah, freshman year. The dorm, the dates -- the desperate attempts to get into the college that rejected you in high school. Why transferring is becoming a student obsession.
By ELLEN GAMERMAN
October 28, 2006;

Like a lot of teenagers, Neil Verma is practically obsessed with getting into the right college. He spends as many as four hours a night studying to make sure his grades impress the admissions office. He's researching the best teachers to ask for recommendations. And he's constantly checking his to-do list so he won't miss the application deadlines.

But Mr. Verma's not a high-schooler. He's already in college, attending the University of Miami as a freshman. He's putting himself through the admissions wringer all over again this year, hoping to be accepted as a transfer student at Dartmouth or the University of Chicago. Both schools were his top choices and turned him down last year. "I have to try," he says.

MOVING ON


• See transfer rates at 20 top colleges and universities.

• Podcast:1 Ellen Gamerman on college students who spend their freshman year trying to transfer to the school of their choice.

Applying for a transfer used to be mainly for students who concluded they weren't happy at their current college. But with competition for top schools so fierce, some students are approaching the transfer as simply an extension of the admissions process -- one more shot at getting into the best institution possible.

For these students, freshman year of college looks more like senior year of high school. They're focusing so intently on factors they think will boost their transfer applications -- touring campuses on weekends, getting tutors to help them refine their personal statements -- that some traditional freshman-year activities, like experimenting with new course subjects or simply acclimating to living on their own, are often sidelined. So high is the anxiety surrounding the name on the diploma that some kids are even making the switch from supposedly lesser Ivies to Harvard or Yale.

Just as soaring first-time applications are making it harder to get into college in the first place, an increase in transfer applications is upping the competition there, too. Brown University this year admitted 44 transfers out of about 1,100 applicants, compared with 283 admitted last year out of 823. Williams College has a message on its Web site saying it has been accepting fewer candidates in recent years. And in surveys of students who transferred into the University of Pennsylvania, 15% say they came because they were rejected as high-school seniors, three times the number who said that a decade ago. "Sometimes the second or third time's the charm," says Lee Stetson, the school's dean of admissions. "I give them credit for persisting like that."

With the contest tougher now, it bears knowing from one year to the next where the odds are best. Georgetown, for example, is on a four-year push to increase enrollment by a total of 375 students, including more slots for transfers. Harvard's transfer pool has widened by as much as 20 spots in recent years, thanks to an expanded study-abroad program leaving more dorm rooms vacant. Cornell has "guaranteed transfers," a little-known loophole that holds spots for the best of its rejected high-school seniors.


Transfer U.: Abigail Wright, top, switched to Harvard from Columbia
The number of transfers a school admits is typically based on a statistical formula, depending on how many students the campus anticipates losing for a semester or two to study-abroad programs and how many of the students admitted to the freshman class actually decide to attend. Transfers benefit when fewer freshmen accept the invitation.

Not long after the fall convocation at the University of Tulsa, when students gathered to hear President Steadman Upham praise the class of 2010 as lifelong learners and future leaders, Tom Fagan's thoughts started to stray. The freshman was thinking about the University of Michigan, which had rejected him in April. Within a few weeks of arriving at Tulsa, he'd set a transfer plan in motion.

Now, the highlights of his freshman year will make their way onto his transfer application. He joined the school's marching band as a trombone player -- which he thinks could appeal to Michigan, a Big Ten football school with a winning band. He's planning to work on his foreign-language skills by spending next summer with a host family in Berlin. He's volunteering in the Big Brother program and has added a fifth class to his roster, economics, when many freshmen stick with just four classes and save more specialized subjects for later. "It's a pain," he says.

To avoid another rejection by Michigan, the 18-year-old is researching how to increase his odds. Though he hopes to major in business, he's thinking of applying to the university's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts instead of its competitive Ross School of Business. Later, he says, he can move to the business school as a cross-campus transfer, which he thinks will be easier to do once he's already enrolled at Michigan. To keep his options open, he's considering applying to the University of Wisconsin, too.


University of Miami freshman Neil Verma hopes to transfer to the University of Chicago or Dartmouth.
Mr. Fagan's mother, Olga Fagan, says she's also feeling the stress all over again. "I'm worried that he's going to have his heart set on leaving and may not get into places he'd like," she says. Mr. Fagan, meanwhile, says he's open to the possibility of staying at Tulsa. The family will have a Thanksgiving summit about the issue when he goes home to Midland, Mich., and Ms. Fagan will encourage him to apply to at least four places so he can have some choices. "We just got him off to college," she says. "I'm just catching my breath."

Amy Sack, the president of Admissions Accomplished in Trumbull, Conn., which works with college applicants on everything from mock interviews to résumé polishing, offers a transfer package starting at $1,000 up to $5,000. The upper tier includes weekly one-hour meetings for up to 10 applications over a three-month period.

Ms. Sack says she recently helped get one student at Smith College a transfer to Brown, Cornell and the University of Chicago by having her retake the SATs (the student improved her scores by more than 100 points) and pushing her to keep a 4.0 grade-point average. "I always tell students, if you have a dream, don't give up on your dreams when you're 17," she says.

Ms. Sack is telling clients Tulane in New Orleans is a good bet this year for transfers because of its decline in enrollment after Hurricane Katrina. (A Tulane spokesman says the school's quality is still high even though its numbers are down.) Stanford, says Ms. Sack, is a tough one -- the school admitted 10.9% of all its applicants for fall 2006, but just 5.1% of its transfer applicants last year. "There are schools that are more transfer-friendly than others," she says, "but that changes from year to year."

Chuck Hughes, a senior admissions officer at Harvard from 1995-2000 who now runs Road to College, a college counseling service, says he warns students about small liberal arts schools, since their transfer acceptance rates are low. Case in point: Middlebury College, which last year accepted one student as a transfer, despite receiving 230 applications.

James Corp has started his school shopping from scratch. The 18-year old is a freshman at the University of Michigan, but he doesn't plan on staying there long. One option is Cornell, where he was offered a guaranteed transfer -- a conditional acceptance to enroll a year later pending good grades -- after being rejected last year.

He says he thinks it would be exciting to be the first member of his family to attend an Ivy League school. But he's not stopping at Cornell -- he's also expanding the search, and recently added to his transfer application list the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

During study breaks between his English, lighting-design and intensive French classes, he's revising his application essays -- he may try to go to NYU in the spring, which means making an application deadline next month -- and is tracking down his high-school transcripts. All the while, he's trying to stay close to his 3.99 high-school GPA.

The teenager says some nights he gets less than five hours of sleep, going to bed around 1 a.m. after studying and working on his personal essay for his applications. While his friends have memorized the Michigan fight song -- "The Victors" -- and sing it at football games on the weekends, Mr. Corp says he only just learned the words. "I don't really feel like it's my school," says the freshman from Novi, Mich., who says he's been to one football game all year, didn't stay through the fourth quarter and wore the colors of the opposing team, Vanderbilt, by accident.

He's told a few of his friends what his transfer plans are, and some are starting to feel rebuffed: "They kind of feel betrayed, like you think you're too good for Michigan."

Mr. Corp's mother, Shawne Duperon, says she worries that he will get uprooted as soon as he starts to feel at home at Michigan, leaving him physically and emotionally exhausted. Despite her reservations, and the fact that her son would be giving up a scholarship at Michigan, she also says there's a part of her that wouldn't mind if he switched to Cornell. "Part of me would love to be able to say, 'I've got a kid at an Ivy League school,' " she says. "How cool would that be?"

Recruiters say they keep their eyes out for transfers as they review new graduates for positions. Jean Wyer, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting and consulting firm, says she'll always ask if she sees a student has transferred and she'll "listen carefully to the answer" to make sure the student wasn't simply trying to load his or her résumé for the sake of status.

Morgan Stanley's Vic Garber, managing director for fixed income, who also runs recruiting for that division, says often when he sees a transfer on an applicant's résumé, it shows the candidate has "hustle" and the drive to get to their dream school. "It shows a certain amount of dedication to a purpose."

But Thomas Caleel, director of M.B.A. admissions and financial aid at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says he expects transfer students to offer a compelling reason for their switch. "Take us beyond just the ratings game," he says.

Peter Van Buskirk, vice president of college-planning solutions at Peterson's, the education and career-guidance company, tours the country presenting an interactive workshop to high-school students and their parents entitled "Winning the College Admission Game." Where a decade ago, parents at the workshop would privately ask him about transferring so that other parents wouldn't hear, now they're openly inquiring about using transferring to get into the nation's top schools.

But part of the transfer pressure is coming from the students themselves. Carol Lunkenheimer, Northwestern University's dean of undergraduate admission, says parents often call to ask questions for freshman applications, while students call for transfer information. "They're doing their own work," she says. "It tells me they're really interested."

Historically, most transfer students go into the larger, state schools, often from community colleges. Many of the elite private schools have high retention rates and accept fewer transfers. But with the strategy increasingly common, the National Association for College Admission Counseling says that for the first time this year, it will include several transfer-related questions in its annual survey of 2,400 four-year institutions, asking about the criteria schools use to pick transfer candidates.

For some students, one Ivy acceptance isn't enough if the nod doesn't come from their dream Ivy. "I think for a lot of people, Harvard is a dream school -- for me it definitely was," says Abigail Wright, who arrived as a transfer to Harvard from Columbia last year. While more than 10 of her classmates from prestigious Milton Academy got into Harvard as seniors, she was waitlisted. "It didn't feel fantastic," she says. She had been pleased with her college applications -- she felt her essay, which she'd written over a couple of weekends about the epiphany she experienced after surviving a car crash, came out well -- but she was feeling burnt out.

At Columbia, she signed up for core classes in science and literature, as well as Latin and psychology. While she wrote for the school newspaper, she knew there were more activities she'd be interested in, like the radio station, that she didn't bother with -- she wasn't in the frame of mind to get too deeply embedded in the school.

She approached her Latin and literature professors -- teachers from her smallest classes who seemed to know her best -- for recommendation letters. "A lot of professors aren't necessarily familiar with the process. They ask you, 'Why would you want to transfer away from here?' "

Now at Harvard, the 20-year-old thinks it's ironic she transferred since she's realized she wants a career in broadcast news -- Columbia is known for its journalism school -- but she says her new school can enhance her career in the long run: "The name Harvard helps you get internships."



Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com2

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