It's not that the title if faulty, of course. Many of us believe that a liberal arts education is not only valuable but essential.
But it doesn't take long to turn into a bonafide NYT Education piece.
Why that word, seven words in? Does it only matter that "elite" (which I've said before just means "uncluttered by low-income students) really make the point any better?
Or are they literally the only colleges announcing re-opening plans?
Ah, perhaps this is why. We're focusing on that 15% to 18% of all college students who a) go to college right after high school, live in a residence hall, go full-time, and graduate four years later from the same college they entered.
Did Ms. Senior get her picture of college life from watching movies made in the early 1950's?
What we need, it always seems in articles like this, is a return to how things were a few centuries ago.
Because, I presume, that was the hey-day of liberal-arts education? Or do we long for small pox and cholera and child labor, too?
I guess I'm prescient.
This is something in the article I agree with, and in fact, I've said it. Every generation has its moment, and missing prom or graduation or internships is the defining moment of this generation. Not just COVID-19, either: BLM, political unrest, and political interest.
If George Bernard Shaw were alive today, he could drop this zinger of a paragraph right into the mouths of one of the characters in "Major Barbara."
Ah well, pity. Back to Xanadu.
I understand the readership of the NY Times, I guess, and I understand why things like this get printed.
But is this the hottest take on students managing this crisis as we can find?
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Thread: If people want to talk about public universities going out-of-state to generate revenue, just remember public education used to be adequately funded and mostly free for residents until this guy convinced people in California that was a bad idea.
And remember that access to high quality public education was most likely at the core of an amazing ramp up of educational attainment in the US (in 1940, only about 4% of adults had college degrees).
And that led to an amazing rise in wealth, GDP, and other economic measures in the US, post WW II. If Median Family income had risen just at the rate of inflation since 1953, it would have been at $44.6K instead of $92.7K in 2021.
Thread: We're hearing about male college enrollment again. And yes, it's going down. Is it a crisis? Maybe.
But there are stories beneath the data.
First, people often equate "enrollment" with "first-time, full-time enrollment of 18-year-olds." They are decidedly not the same. Let's take a look at my institution, Oregon State as an example.
Our total enrollment will be about 38,000 next month (we've not started classes yet, as we're on the quarter system). Traditional freshmen? About 4,600, or roughly 12% of the total.
Counselors are not happy with @CollegeBoard who seems to turn a deaf ear, and who seems to want to force high schools' hand to offer more free labor and space via School Day Testing, all in service to the Highly Rejectives. (used with permission and redacted for privacy).
This is what our HS colleagues go through to give the highly rejectives a teeny, tiny little more confidence in allocating their precious admissions slots.
Those institutions and College Board hoist the entire cost of their demands onto high schools and volunteers.
As indicated, it seems absurd when College Board (a nominally not-for-profit) had positive bottom lines averaging about $125M in the last two years available.
Thread: It seems I'm spending more time telling people why I'm not too interested in the Dartmouth decision than it would take to just put it here. So here goes. I hope this is the last I'll say about it.
First, I've long said that if a college finds value in the SAT, they would be foolish not to use it. I just ask that they do the research, which Dartmouth did. And the lowest-scoring students at Dartmouth end up with a GPA of 3.1 or something like that. Horrible.
I am--frankly--a little suspicious of analysis that shows the SAT is better than HS GPA, because you know damn well if College Board or ACT could make that claim, they'd have done so long ago. They've never even whispered it.
This is the result of the DOJ investigating the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice, which would have allowed this if the student had not withdrawn, but would have forbidden it if the student had notified the offering school that they had deposited elsewhere.
The DOJ treated college just like any other consumer purchase: Suppose car dealers agreed the Subaru dealer could not call you while you were on the way to the Ford dealer to buy the car you had agreed to buy, and offer you a better deal?
Thread: When someone tells you about the big drop in high school graduates, remember 2014. Because by 2037, we'll be back to numbers like we saw in 2014.
What's really compelling is the mix: America will be more diverse, and because different ethnic groups have different college participation rates, that's the big thing going on behind the numbers.
And, of course, New England has known this for a long time.