The NYT has some of the best education reporters in the country, but stories like this are why so many people who work in and around higher ed see it as a force for harm.
There are thousands of homeless college students. But they NYT thinks choice real estate is what this moment is about. Most students are not "renting giant houses with friends — sometimes in far-flung locales."
People are worrying that they will be evicted right now, but "groups of students have named their college houses and made them social media official, creating shared accounts where they plan to post about their lives together."
Schools mentioned in this piece:
Yale
Grinnell
MIT
Columbia
Harvard
GW
Dartmouth
Williams
UC, Berkeley
Princeton
UNC, Chapel Hill
Penn
UCSD
Brown
Duke
Stanford
Middlebury
Michigan, Ann Arbor
U of Ottawa (he's living with 3 friends in Ireland)
So what? It's just one story, and it is happening. Sure. But the weight of the NYT is heavy and what it chooses to write about will strike some readers as typical or representative.
Watch how this story gets shared on FB and people start talking about "what college students are doing now," when the reality is that the colleges and experiences mentioned here are far from typical or representative. Same for the demographics of those pictures.
Final note: the reporter who wrote this thing is not an education reporter. There are so many great higher ed reporters out there, some who have lost their jobs during this pandemic.
Can we leave the education stories to the experts please?
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This is such good reporting from the @harvardcrimeson:
There are about 27,000 high schools in the U.S.
Over the past 15 years, 1 in 11 students at Harvard have come from just 21 high schools.
So 9.1% of Harvard students come from 0.07% of US schools. @nytdavidbrooks
This is no accident. It's a stated priority of Harvard admissions.
The longtime dean of admissions said they're in the business of creating 100 year relationships with schools. He said this in a trial where Harvard was, believe it or not, trying to show it's fair.
Legacy, too, plays its role, as these are the kind of schools where wealthy alumni send their kids.
The most heavily weighted single factor in the Best Colleges rankings is Undergraduate Academic Reputation, which USN calls "Expert Opinion."
Here's the thing: there is absolutely no way the presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions they send the survey to can be qualified to answer the questions, let alone claim expertise.
Let's talk about some dumb stuff people say about test optional admissions. 🧵
This might take a sec, so here's the tl;dr:
TO policies, in and of themselves, are neither a cure-all for what's wrong with American higher ed nor the end of what's good about it, but the evidence points to their doing some good and no harm.
Let's define TO first.
A test-optional policy is one that allows applicants to decide whether they want their test score to be considered. It does not "get rid of tests" or "ban tests."
Almost every 4-yr college in the US is currently test optional.
For decades, colleges, med schools, and law schools have all made the point that standardized tests exist to show readiness to succeed in college or grad school.
Rankings were one of the incentives to focus on scores well beyond the readiness threshold and overemphasize tests. That emphasis has excluded lots of people who were highly qualified to become lawyers and doctors.