256. Review of College News

Here are some links to this week's stories about college access and success.

by

Joe Rottenborn

Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. Ivy League: The best route to Wall Street, by David A. Kaplan - http://t.co/BBeOd2B via @FortuneMagazine--"Confirming so many suspicions about Wall Street hiring, Lauren Rivera -- a 32-year-old sociologist who teaches management and organizations at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management -- has concluded it's still where you went rather than what you did there that makes the difference. . . . She says "elite professional service employers" rely more on academic pedigree than any other factor. For recruiters, it's prestige that counts, rather than "content" like grades, courses, internships, or other actual performance. That's because if you got into a "super-elite" school -- which essentially means Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), and Stanford -- you must be smart. Plus, time spent at those bastions in turn will make you "polished" and attractive to corporate clients."

2. The importance of music education in schools, by Vince DiFiore - http://www.cnn.com/2011/SHOWBIZ/Music/05/31/music.education.cake.difiore/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9"What is necessary in the microsociety of high school is a sturdy vessel in which to navigate a safe and fulfilling journey to the next transition. In high school, music programs are that vehicle."

3. For-profit colleges may face aid cuts, by Mary Beth Marklein - http://usat.ly/lv6snM via @USATODAY - "The Obama administration is set to release a controversial rule Thursday that will cut federal aid to for-profit colleges if students in particular programs graduate with too much debt and worthless degrees. Under the plan, schools will be required to demonstrate that short-term vocational programs, such as those offering certificates in the culinary arts, automotive technology or medical support, prepare students for 'gainful employment in a recognized occupation.'
Schools would lose access to billions of dollars of federal student aid if they fail to meet minimum requirements three times in a four-year period. The first year that a program could become ineligible would be 2015."

4. Concessions or a Cave-In? by Libby A. Nelson - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/jxaQL4 -

"The rules require programs at for-profit universities and certificate and vocational programs at nonprofit institutions to show that at least 35 percent of their students are repaying their loans or that the annual loan payment does not exceed 30 percent of a typical graduate’s discretionary income or 12 percent of total income. An institution need meet only one of the three requirements to stay eligible for federal aid."

5. Hechinger Report Some Pell grants not going toward education, by Nancy Marshall Genzer: http://t.co/Fo5zQsI - "The maximum Pell Grant is about $5,500. The government pays the money directly to the school. The school takes out tuition and fees. Then it gives anything left over to the student — usually a few weeks into the semester. Some students like Harris, at more expensive schools, don’t get anything back. Those who do are supposed to spend the money on books or living expenses. But there’s no way to enforce that. Some students drop out after getting their checks. Teachers on some campuses say they know when the checks come in because it’s a lot easier to find a parking space."

6. SEC Addresses Oversigning High School Athletes for Scholarships, by Bryan Toporek - http://bit.ly/l3GSLi - "If coaches oversign and end up short on scholarships, they'll often ask some of their newly signed recruits to "grayshirt," or pay their own way through the fall semester with the promise of a scholarship that next January. Those recent high school grads who don't wish to grayshirt can request a release from their school."

7. Education Department Increases Its Regulation of For-Profit Colleges, by Tamar Lewin - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/education/02gainful.html?hpw - "Under the new rules, programs would lose their eligibility to dispense federal student aid — and as a practical matter, be shut down — if, over the next four years, their graduates fail to meet new benchmarks for loan repayment and ratio of debt to income. But amid intense lobbying by the for-profit college industry and pressure from Republican lawmakers, the department significantly eased the rules from an earlier draft: officials said, for example, that no program would lose eligibility until 2015."

8. Only 5 Colleges Do Well by Low-Income Students, Report Says, by Beckie Supiano - http://chronicle.com/article/Only-5-Colleges-Do-Well-by/127735/ - "Five colleges. That's how many are doing a good job of serving low-income students, according to a report released Wednesday by the Education Trust, a research and advocacy group. All five of the colleges are public, and none of them are flagships.The report, "Priced Out: How the Wrong Financial-Aid Policies Hurt Low-Income Students," doesn't look only at cost. Four-year colleges had to cost no more than $4,600 a year after all grants for students in households earning up to $30,000 a year. The colleges also had to have at least a 50-percent six-year graduation rate, and at least 30 percent of their enrollments had to be Pell Grant recipients."

9. The Complexity of Counseling Transfer Students, by Eric Hoover - http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/the-complexity-of-counseling-transfer-students/28376 - "Transfer students are almost always poor, low-achieving, homogeneous, and unlikely to fit in, succeed, and graduate, right? Wrong. So said Andrew Flagel here on Wednesday at a conference sponsored by the National Association for College Admission Counseling . . . . “The reality is that transfer students are as diverse as all of higher education,” Mr. Flagel said. “When we start treating them as groups of students and not as individuals, that’s when I worry."

10. 5 Keys to Cracking the College Waitlist, by Andrew J. Rotherham - http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2075074,00.html - "The bad news? The more time passes, the lower the odds of getting off the list. But the good news is, if a student is on a waitlist, he or she is still in the game. Here are five things to know about this particularly mysterious aspect of college admissions."

11. WSJ.com - Score One for the Student Newspapers, by Hannah Karp and Darren Everson - http://on.wsj.com/iSHrNb - "Former Notre Dame film student Ellie Hall said she was fired from Notre Dame's independently funded student newspaper, the Observer, after writing a piece for the Huffington Post which quoted from a panicked message posted on Twitter by Declan Sullivan, the Notre Dame student who fell to his death in a windstorm last fall while videotaping football practice from a tower high above the field."

12. 10 Universities With The Highest Percentage Of Small Classes - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/31/10-universities-with-the-_n_869390.html#s285441&title=The_New_School - "Among the top 10 schools on the class size list, four are ranked in the atop U.S. News's rankings of best national universities, including top-ranked Harvard University and third-ranked Yale University."

13. How Do I Pack for College? by UNIGO - http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-admissions-experts/2011/06/01/how-do-i-pack-for-college - "While it might not be a strict admissions topic, we have received a surprising number of questions from students asking what they need to bring to college or forever regret leaving at home. Our experts had fun thinking about their own students, and you might never have thought of some of the items they recommend!"

14. Princeton News: Tilghman calls on graduates to close the educational achievement gap, by Ruth Stevens - http://j.mp/mjIBZv - "Calling education "our most powerful engine for social mobility," Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman implored this year's graduates to use their knowledge to improve the country's K-12 education system."

15. Your Guide to 'Gainful Employment', by Libby A. Nelson - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/lyViEs - "Compared to the proposed rule that the agency published last July to intense criticism (from for-profit colleges) and applause (from consumer advocates), the final version was widely perceived as more favorable to the institutions, especially among those who had pushed for greater regulation and who said they were disappointed that the administration had backed away from more stringent provisions."

16. Promoting 'Consumer Friendly' Transfer, by David Moltz - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/lTworI - "The average community college student earns 140 credits while pursuing a bachelor’s degree even though only 120 credits are typically necessary, according to a new CAP policy brief discussed at the event. For many students, these additional 20 credits repeat credits earned elsewhere or knowledge they may have gained outside the classroom."

17. Not Saving for College: The Ugly Triple Threat, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://t.co/l3pDVhb via @cbsmoneywatch - "Every $1 you stash away for college will save you from borrowing $3. Procrastinate and your college costs can easily triple.Obviously when you consider the high cost of borrowing, saving every dollar you can now is truly a no brainer."

18. In Chicago, a Mentoring Program Focuses on Role Models for Boys, by Rebecca Vevea - http://nyti.ms/iWHUWy - "Geraod does not need research to know that the odds are against him. “If you just sit on the corner all the time, you’re going to end up dead or in jail,” he said. “A black man’s life is the hardest life.”

19. Low-Cost Instructional Changes Can Cut Achievement Gap in Intro Biology, Scholars Say, by David Glenn - http://chronicle.com/article/Low-Cost-Instructional-Changes/127747/ -"When instructors at the University of Washington redesigned their introductory-biology course in a "highly structured" style, with active-learning exercises, daily quizzes, and weekly online essay assignments, all students' performance improved, but especially the performance of students whose high-school preparation was weak. The achievement gap between students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds closed by nearly half."

20. Student Debt for Life: New Government Rule Cracks Down on For-Profit Colleges, by Andréa Ford - http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2075324,00.html -"Under the gainful-employment rule, to qualify for federal financial aid, a program must meet one of three requirements: at least 35% of former students are repaying their loans; the estimated annual loan payment of a graduate does not exceed 30% of his or her discretionary income; or the estimated annual loan payment does not exceed 12% of his or her total earnings."

203. Unstack the Odds--Set at Birth? Part 2

Unstack the Odds: Help All Kids Access College—and Graduate!
by
Joe Rottenborn

Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. Are the odds being stacked at birth against some kids going to college and graduating?

According to the American Council on Education (ACE), the rates of degree attainment vary widely according to the racial and ethnic category of students. As stated in its Minorities in Higher Education: 2009 Supplement:
“As of 2007, 27.4 percent of young Americans aged 25 to 29 had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree, and an additional 8.1 percent had earned an associate degree. . . . These average rates conceal large disparities among subgroups. Asian Americans aged 25 to 29 are at the top, with 58 percent holding a bachelor’s degree, followed by whites (33 percent), African Americans (17 percent), Hispanics (11 percent) and finally, American Indians (9 percent). These large gaps are unlikely to change without reducing disparities at each transition point in the educational pipeline.” (Mikyung Ryu, Minorities in Higher Education: 2009 Supplement--Twenty-Third Status Report, American Council on Education, September 2009, p. 1.) http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=CAREE&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=34214

Furthermore, a gender gap is also evident in the matriculation data; simply put, women are more likely to enroll in college than are men. And this gender gap varies by racial and ethnic classification. Per the ACE 2009 Supplement, “As with high school completion, gender gaps widened in college enrollment rates. The proportion of young women enrolled in college
increased from 30 percent to 45 percent between 1988 and 2007, an increase twice as large as for young men (30 percent to 37 percent). Of all racial/ethnic groups, African Americans and Hispanics showed the largest gender gap in college enrollment rates.” (Ibid., p. 2.)

As Kevin Carey, policy director of the nonprofit Education Sector, stated in a recent posting, "All in all, this confirms what we already knew: College works well for the kind of student who has been going to college for a long time: white middle- and upper-class children of college graduates who enroll full-time directly after leaving high school." (“College Grad Rates Stay Exactly the Same,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2010.) http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/college-grad-rates-stay-exactly-the-same/29394)

By contrast, data on underrepresented U.S. students—including those of low income and minorities—continue to demonstrate their difficulty in going to college and in graduating. Indeed, Martin Haberman quoted Loeb (1999) as stating “If you’re in the top economic quarter of the population, your children have a 76% chance of getting through college and graduating by age 24. . . . If you’re in the bottom quarter, however, the figure is 4%.” (“Urban Education: The State of Urban Schooling at the Start of 21st Century,” 7/12/2010.) http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/104105.html).

As for minorities, in the state of California among community college matriculants, Joanne Jacobs posted that “only 26% of black students and 22% of Latino students had completed a degree or certificate or transferred after six years, compared to 37% of whites and 35% of Asian Pacific Islanders.” In her view, “Students fail because they're not prepared for college-level reading, writing and math. Many are juggling jobs and family responsibilities too, of course, but college readiness is the make-or-break issue." (“Unready and Unsuccessful,” The Huffington Post, October 29, 2010.) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joanne-jacobs/unready-and-unsuccessful_b_775668.html)

Even among matriculants to colleges and universities, a graduation gap exists by race. In a posting on The Hechinger Report, Sarah Butrymowicz pointed out this information:
“But a study released last summer by the Washington D.C.-based Education Trust, which analyzed data from 456 colleges and universities, found a disturbing gap in graduation rates when disaggregated by race. At private institutions, 73.4 percent of white students earned their degrees within six years, while only 54.7 percent of black students and 62.9 percent of Hispanic students made it through the schools they started.” (“Can universities keep the minority students they woo? The Hechinger Report, February 23, 2011.) http://hechingerreport.org/content/can-universities-keep-the-minority-students-they-woo_5239/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HechingerReport+%28Hechinger+Report%29