349. College Access and Success News

Here are links to recent news on college access and success.

by

Joe Rottenborn

Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. How colleges use, misuse social media to reach students, by Umika Pidaparthy - #cnn - http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/20/tech/social-media/universities-social-media/index.html -"For universities competing to attract top students, it's no longer enough to have a glossy brochure and a sleek website. Schools like Johns Hopkins are reaching out to engage with applicants on Facebook and Twitter. They're also finding that a robust social media campaign, along with such creative features as student-run blogs, can lure prospective students while a stale online presence can turn them off. College admissions officers are indeed learning to interact with students where they hang out: online. According to a recent study by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, 100% of universities surveyed use social media to communicate with students, up from 61% in 2007-08. The study found that 98% of the responding colleges have a Facebook page and 84% have a Twitter account."

2. Law aims to give more accurate tally of college costs, by Brandon James Smith – http://usat.ly/plFaea via @USATODAY - "Now, due to a federal law that kicks in on Oct. 29, there's an online tool required on college websites — a net price calculator — intended to to help give students and families a more accurate estimate of real costs."Universities all cost different amounts, so it's hard to know what the family might be responsible for until much later in the process and after they've applied for financial aid. This helps them to find what the real final cost will be early in the process," said Nanci Tessier, vice president of enrollment management of the University of Richmond."

3. Are Too Many Americans Earning Four-Year Degrees? by Rebecca R. Ruiz - http://nyti.ms/pDUsO7 - "The debate, held by Intelligence Squared in Chicago as part of that city’s Ideas Week, featured Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and entrepreneur, and Charles Murray, a political scientist, arguing that the college market is flooded with too many students. Arguing against them were Henry S. Bienen, president emeritus of Northwestern University, and Vivek Wadhwa, a director of research at Duke University."

4. Questions for The Times's Adam Liptak on the Future of Affirmative Action, by Jacques Steinberg and Adam Liptak - http://nyti.ms/oQmbUD - "As things stand now, under the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, admissions officers may take account of race and ethnicity as one factor among many in a “holistic review” of applications. A hypothetical decision overturning Grutter might forbid direct consideration of those factors but continue to allow consideration of, say, economic hardship or knowledge of a second language."

5. More Applications, More Waiting Lists, by Scott Jaschik - Inside Higher Ed - http://bit.ly/qiXSU0 via @AddThis - "Most four-year colleges saw an increase in applications in 2010, and more colleges used waiting lists than they did the year before, with smaller proportions of students admitted off the waiting lists, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. . . . The average selectivity rate (the percentage of applicants who are offered admission) at four-year colleges was 65.5 percent for fall 2010, down about one percentage point from the previous year. So all those reports about the few elite colleges with single-digit selectivity rates (while true) are about as unrepresentative as you could get."

6. Reframing the 'Stem Shortage' Debate, by Doug Lederman - Inside Higher Ed - http://bit.ly/mVCM3B via AddThis - "The country is still producing lots of workers with what the report calls "STEM competencies," including investigative and problem solving tendencies, the authors state. But those skills are increasingly in demand in other non-STEM fields such as health care management and professional and business services, and because those fields typically pay more and often offer some rewards that core science and engineering jobs may not -- such as social or entrepreneurial interests, or a chance to manage other people -- workers with STEM skills are increasingly being "diverted" to non-STEM jobs."

7. STEM full report, by Anthony Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton - http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/stem-complete.pdf - "We find that the disagreement between those who argue thatSTEM workers are undersupplied and those who argue theyare oversupplied can be resolved by the fact that large numbersof people with STEM talent or degrees divert from STEMoccupations either in school or later in their careers."

8. Lastest Trends in College Admissions: 15 Things You Should Know, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://moneywatch.bnet.com/spending/blog/college-solution/lastest-trends-in-college-admissions-15-things-you-should-know/6967/ via @cbsmoneywatch - "14. The average public high school counselors spend just 23% of their time on college counseling, while the average private school counselors devote about 55% of their time to college issues.15. Only 26% of public schools have at least one counselor who works exclusively on college counseling issues. In comparison, 73% of private schools have a dedicated college counselor."

9. New report: Dropout rates five times higher for poor students, by Nick Pandolfo - http://p.ost.im/p/eMn2Hx - "According to the report, the “event dropout rate,” which estimates the percentage of high school students who left school between the beginning of one school year and the beginning of the next, is five times greater for low-income teenagers than it is for those from affluent families. The difference in the dropout rate between white and minority teenagers also remains stark. The rate is twice as high for black teens (4.8 percent) as it is for white teens (2.4 percent). It is even higher for Hispanics, at 5.8 percent."

10. Illinois high school test scores fall to a new low, by Diane Rado and Tara Malone - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-state-test-scores-1020-20111020,0,5375024.story - "About half of Illinois public high school students flunked state exams in reading, math and science this year, the worst performance in the history of the 11th-grade Prairie State Achievement Examination, statewide test results show. The record-low results, scheduled to be released Thursday, come after Illinois closed loopholes that kept academically weak juniors from taking the exams, a practice revealed in a 2009 Tribune analysis. Some local school officials attributed their declines in part to the larger testing pool that included less-prepared students."

344. College Access and Success News

Here are links to recent news on college access and success.
by
Joe Rottenborn
Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. Colleges Fail U.S. Financial Test, by Doug Lederman - Inside Higher Ed - http://bit.ly/pAKXuh via @AddThis - "Institutions that score above 1.5 (on a scale of 3.0) are considered to be financially responsible; those below 1.5 but above 1.0 require some additional oversight, while those below 1.0 must post a letter of credit and face cash monitoring requirements from the department. An initial review of the list shows slightly more than 180 private nonprofit colleges with scores below 1.5, and about 100 of those with scores below 1.0. About 200 for-profit colleges -- many of them in fields such as cosmetology -- fall below the 1.5 threshold. A spreadsheet containing the institutions' scores can be downloaded here."

2. Speaker Madigan to block Quinn's veto on legislative scholarships, by Monique Garcia and Ray Longhttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-speaker-madigan-to-block-quinns-veto-on-legislative-scholarships-20111012,0,3654355.story - “The governor feels strongly that the political scholarship program is in disgrace,” Anderson said. “It’s past time to abolish the political scholarships, which are ripe for abuse.” Lawmakers are allowed to award two four-year scholarships to public universities each year. They often break them apart into eight, one-year tuition waivers. They come with just one legal requirement: that recipients live in the same district as the lawmaker who doles them out. While some lawmakers form committees to award the scholarships, the program has been long abused, with waivers going to relatives, family members of campaign contributors and the offspring of lobbyists."

3. 25 Colleges With the Unhappiest Freshmen, by Lynn O'Shaughnessy - http://moneywatch.bnet.com/spending/blog/college-solution/25-colleges-with-the-unhappiest-freshmen/6888/ via @cbsmoneywatch - "How do you measure if a freshman is unhappy? An easy way is to look at a school’s freshmen retention rate, which indicates how many first-year students return for their sophomore year. The schools on this list have the lowest freshmen retention rates of the 650 top colleges that the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, an education think tank, used when compiling the college rankings for Forbes Magazine."

4. Mixed reactions to the new NCLB bill, by Nick Pandolfo - http://p.ost.im/p/eMkxwE -"Senators Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Michael Enzi (R-Wyoming) announced new legislation to revamp the 2001 No Child Left Behind law yesterday, garnering some strong reactions from the education policy world."

5. Chicago Schools Slow to Embrace Longer School Days, by Julie Rasicot - http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/10/13/08chicago.h31.html via @educationweek -"In the 405,000-student Chicago school system, the expanded-day initiative is driven by the fact that public school students in the nation’s third-largest district spend 15 percent less time in the classroom than the average American public school student, according to school district officials. Public schools nationwide provide an average of 6½ hours of instruction time per school day; Chicago offers about 5½. The district also struggles with a persistent achievement gap between African-American and Latino students and their white counterparts and a graduation rate below 60 percent."

6. State Puts Pressure on City Schools Over English Language Learners, by Sharon Otterman - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/education/13ell.html?hpw - "As a measure of the problem, he said, in 2010 only 7 percent of the city’s English language learners were found to have graduated on time and ready for college and careers. In the lower grades, 12 percent were proficient in English and 35 percent in math, well behind city averages. “These numbers are not acceptable,” Dr. King said. “We can’t leave so many students behind academically without access to college and career opportunities.”

7. For Colleges, Location Matters, by Jeff Selingo -http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2011/10/12/for-colleges-location-matters/ - "Like real estate, location matters in higher ed. But unlike many homeowners, colleges looking for a better neighborhood can’t simply hang a “For Sale” sign and move to a more desirable place. That’s problematic for colleges in struggling small towns and declining manufacturing cities. It’s sometimes difficult for them to attract prospective students and faculty members, or keep entrepreneurial young alumni around to build new businesses. And as the economies of those towns deteriorate further, local officials have few employers to turn to for help. Often colleges are asked to take on demands well beyond their mission."

8. The problems with the PSAT and National Merit program, by Valerie Strauss - The Answer Sheet - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-problems-with-the-psat-and-national-merit-program/2011/10/10/gIQA7w0pfL_blog.html?tid=sm_btn_twitter via @washingtonpost - "About 50,000 students qualify based on their PSAT scores, and that number is whittled down to about 16,000, who become semifinalists (the 34,000 others get letters of commendation). About 8,500 are named finalists, eligible for a scholarship of varying amounts, based on test scores as well as other criteria including academic performance. But here’s something you might not expect: the initial cutoff scores separating the possible winners from the definite losers are not the same in each state."

9. Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t), by Diane Ravitch - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-why-finlands-schools-are-great-by-doing-what-we-dont/2011/10/12/gIQAmTyLgL_blog.html?tid=sm_btn_twitter via @washingtonpost - "What makes the Finnish school system so amazing is that Finnish students never take a standardized test until their last year of high school, when they take a matriculation examination for college admission."

10. The 10 Colleges That Receive the Most Applications: US News List - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/13/the-10-colleges-that-rece_n_1008663.html - "7 California schools appear on US News and World Report's list of the 10 colleges that receive the most applications. UCLA tops the list. St. John's University (a rare east coast contender) came in second."