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Florida: New College Board Chooses DeSantis Crony as President

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2023 //
2

Since Governor Ron DeSantis engineered the hostile takeover of Florida’s progressive New College, the interim president was Richard Corcoran. Corcoran was a hard-right Speaker of the House of Representatives and Dtate Commissiober of Education, in which role he led the state’s attacks on public schools and the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. His wife founded a charter school and is now associated with the Hillsdale College Barney charter schools.

After a few months of deliberation, the hand-picked, stacked board decided to hire Corcoran as the permanent president of New College.

To be clear, he has no academic or scholarly credentials to be a college president.

He dropped out of the University of Florida and enrolled in St. Leo University, a Catholic college. After graduating, he received his law degree from Regent University, a private Christian university.

He has no previous experience as a professor, a college administrator, or a scholar. He is uniquely unqualified for a college presidency. Since he took charge of New College, one-third of the faculty has resigned, faculty have been denied tenure without reason, and students have protested the decisions of the board.

He has been successful in rightwing politics.

The original New College was founded as a school for creative, free thinkers, educated by faculty who were highly credentialed. The new DeSantis board intends to turn New College into the Hilllsdale of the South.

Corcoran claims to have boosted enrollment, which he did by recruiting athletes, not aesthetes or free thinkers.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Florida, Higher Education, Vouchers

North Carolina: Legislature Mandates Creation of a School for Conservative Thought at UNC

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2023 //
14

The North Carolina General Assembly took a highly unusual step by mandating the creation of a center for conservatives values on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Typically, new programs or centers are instituted by the institution or the faculty, not the legislature. Apparently the Republican supermajorities think that conservative college students are snowflakes who must be protected from divergent views and carefully indoctrinated.

When the General Assembly’s Republican majority revealed and passed a new budget in a whirlwind 48 hours last week, it set an aggressive timeline for an unprecedented new school at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The budget provides $2 million in funding in each of the next two fiscal years for the new School of Civic Life and Leadership, described as early as 2017 by its supporters and architects as a “conservative center.” The budget provision also dictates a few specifics:l

  • UNC-Chapel Hill’s Provost Chris Clemens must name the school’s first dean by Dec. 31, 2023 — just over three months from now.
  • The school must hire, with that dean’s approval, “at least 10 and no more than 20 faculty members from outside the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill” — all with permanent tenure or eligibility for permanent tenure.
  • The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees must report to the legislature’s Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee and the Fiscal Research Division on progress made toward establishing the School of Civic Life and Leadership and factors affecting the long-term sustainability of the new school.

It is already unprecedented for a new school at a UNC System campus to be instigated not by the faculty or administration — but rather by the legislature and its political appointees on the system’s board of governors and board of trustees — faculty representatives told Newsline this week. They said they had never heard of state government mandating the number of faculty members, whether they will be tenured and how and when they will be hired.

“It’s demoralizing, to be honest,” said Beth Moracco, a professor in the university’s Department of Health Behavior and chair of the faculty. “In my experience it’s very unusual, for a number of reasons, to have that level of direction in legislation for hiring at the university. I haven’t ever seen anything quite like it. And it’s concerning.”

Open the link to read the rest of the article.

Categories Education Reform, Higher Education

Michael Hiltzik: The Republican Plan to Dumb Down America’s Youth

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
24

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.

Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.

He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.

He writes:

For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.

Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”

In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”

The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.

Then there’s West Virginia, which is proposing to shut down nearly 10% of its academic offerings, including all its foreign language programs. The supposed reason is a huge budget deficit, the harvest of a systematic cutback in state funding.

In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”

In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”

I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.

Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.

Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.

One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”

This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”

Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”

But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”

Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.

PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.

As for New College, its travails under the DeSantis regime have been documented by my colleague Jenny Jarvie, among many others.

In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.

Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.

Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.

More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”

Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.

But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”

The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.

When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.

Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”

(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)

These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.

Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Higher Education, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Stupid, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Biden’s Struggle to Reduce Student Debt

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
102

President Biden has repeatedly tried to reduce the debt that college students incurred and that remains a financial burden for years after they finish college. Republicans have adamantly opposed any effort to relieve millions of students of their college debt, which some have been paying off for decades.

I can’t help but remember my visit to Finland, where I learned that all education, at every level, is tuition-free. How is this possible, I asked. I was told that education is a human right, and no one should pay for a human right. From an economic point of view, the entire nation benefits when more people get a college education. Yet over the past few decades, state governments have reduced their support of public higher education, shifting the burden to individual students.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the political dimensions of the student debt issue:

Rising costs of college and cuts to government support for education mean that more than 45 million people across the country owe more than $1.6 trillion in federal loans, an amount equal to the size of the Australian economy. That debt absorbs money people at the lower end of the economic scale would otherwise invest in homes, consumer goods, and so on, and the Biden administration has made it a priority to relieve some of that debt.


When she was the California attorney general, Vice President Kamala Harris took on predatory for-profit colleges and won $1 billion for defrauded veterans and students, and when he ran for office, Biden promised to forgive federal student debt for those earning less than $125,000.


Since the Supreme Court on June 30, 2023, rejected the administration’s plan to forgive more than $400 billion in student debt borrowed through government programs, the administration has turned to other approaches.


In April it began to fix the administrative errors that had kept borrowers from receiving relief through income-driven repayment plans and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program under which they borrowed the money. Those plans were always intended to offer a way to eliminate student debt, but the Government Accountability Office in 2022 found that poor record keeping meant that that promise had not been honored. On July 14 the administration announced that fixes to those programs would relieve more than 800,000 borrowers of more than $39 billion in student debt.

At the time, Biden did not mince words. “Republican lawmakers—who had no problem with the government forgiving millions of dollars of their own business loans—have tried everything they can to stop me from providing relief to hardworking Americans. Some are even objecting to the actions we announced today, which follows through on relief borrowers were promised, but never given, even when they had been making payments for decades. The hypocrisy is stunning, and the disregard for working and middle-class families is outrageous.”


Since then, the administration has provided relief to others caught in the system as well, including relief of $45.7 billion for 662,000 public service workers, $10.5 billion for 491,000 borrowers with a total and permanent disability, and $22 billion for nearly 1.3 million borrowers who were cheated by their schools, saw their schools close, or are covered by a related court settlement.


Today the administration released the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, a new repayment plan to bring order and relief to federal student borrowers. It is an income-driven repayment plan that is based on a borrower’s income and family size rather than their loan balance, prevents the balance from growing because of unpaid interest, and forgives the remaining balance after a number of years. “The benefits of the SAVE plan will be particularly critical for low- and middle-income borrowers, community college students, and borrowers who work in public service,” the White House said.


Relieving student debt helps those at the lower end of the economy, which will boost economic growth, but there is also a political payoff in these efforts for the administration. As Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller pointed out in the Washington Post in July, in the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, 32 million Americans have become eligible to vote. In the same eight years, as many as 20 million older voters have died.


Lake and Heller note that younger Americans are focused on issues, rather than individuals, and skew progressive (prompting some Republicans to talk about raising the voting age to 25). Fulfilling a campaign promise that overwhelmingly benefits those under 50—parents as well as students—is good politics, blending in with the members of Gen Z (the generation born between the mid to late 1990s and early 2010s) forming political PACs of their own and running for office.

Categories Biden, Education Industry, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

West Virginia U.: Students Angrily Protest Deep Cuts to Programs and Faculty

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2023 //
25

West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the nation, yet it has a billionaire governor (Jim Justice) and a billionaire senator (Joe Manchin), who pretend to serve their constituents by doing nothing for them. It is a deep red state. The legislature authorized charter schools and vouchers; the governor promised to veto both but he didn’t. Manchin continually blocks Biden programs that would help his constituents (like the Child Tax Credit) but protects the coal industry.

West Virginia University recently announced deep cuts to its programs and faculty, and students are angry.

Inside Higher Education reported:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va.—West Virginia University’s proposal to eliminate nearly a 10th of its majors and 169 full-time faculty positions from its flagship campus led hundreds of students to protest Monday, as a student union’s organizing power added volume to the online employee protestations and national media coverage that’s been buffeting the institution for more than a week.

Pressure on the administration to reverse its recommended cuts is growing as the WVU Board of Governors’ Sept. 15 vote on the proposals nears. The suggested cuts—not the first in recent years at West Virginia—were discussed around the end of the spring and through the summer, but WVU’s big reveal of how extensive the proposed layoffs and degree reductions would be didn’t come until Aug. 11.

“Stop the Cuts!” was students’ first chant outside the Mountainlair student union Monday, followed by “Hey hey, ho ho, Gordon Gee has got to go!”

Multiple chants, signs and a flame-bedecked “Fire Gee” banner that students held in front of the entrance to the Stewart Hall administration building all targeted Gee, the university’s two-time president whose current run has lasted nearly a decade. Chants and signs said, “Stop the Gee-llotine!” while other signs said, “Gee can take home 800K but we can’t take Spanish?” and “Cut Gee’s Pay, Not Our Programs!…”

WVU has proposed axing, among other degree offerings, its Ed.D. in higher education administration; Ph.D. in higher education; master of public administration; Ph.D. and master’s in math; bachelor’s in environmental and community planning; bachelor degree in recreation, parks and tourism resources; doctor of musical arts in composition; master of music in composition; and master’s in jazz pedagogy, acting and creative writing.

The university’s enrollment has declined 10 percent since 2015, far worse than the national average. In April, WVU leaders, projecting a further 5,000-student plunge over the next decade, said they needed to slash $75 million from the budget.

The university has pointed to low enrollments in certain programs to justify cuts, including a lightning rod proposal to eliminate the entirety of the department of world languages, literatures and linguistics. But Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian studies at West Virginia, has retorted that WVU isn’t counting all students who are double majoring in languages.

“Cost-to-deliver is one of the metrics considered in the preliminary recommendations,” Kaull wrote in an email. “The data reflect students’ primary majors as they are the best reflection of the cost-to-deliver. Dual majors and minors don’t generate revenue like primary majors. Further, the cost and effort of supporting students (e.g., advising) is typically carried by the primary major.” 

WVU’s Aug. 11 news release announcing the proposed cuts said it was “exploring alternative methods of delivery” for languages, “such as a partnership with an online language app.” A sign on Monday called the university “Duolingo U,” complete with the green bird mascot of that phone app.

“We’re pissed,” Sadler said. “We’re losing languages; we’re losing departments; we’re losing faculty and friends.”

Gee told Inside Higher Ed Friday, “What we’re doing is that we’re really looking at the numbers and we realize that our students have spoken to us. And our students have said that offering languages the way that we are is just not something that they want.” 

Asked about the calls to reduce his salary, which were happening online before Monday’s protest, Gee said he contributes about 15 percent of his salary every year to student scholarships. 

John Fox, who just started his master’s degree in creative writing, one of the programs to be cut under the proposal, carried water bottles for the protesters. He’s from Morgantown.

“We’re losing out on the culture of West Virginia,” he said, “like a voice to the culture of West Virginia.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Higher Education, Students, Vouchers, West Virginia

Florida: State Drops Charges Against “New College” Student Who Spit at Chris Rufo

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2023 //
30

Governor Ron DeSantis seized control of New College by installing half-a-dozen hard-right trustees and instructing them to turn the small progressive liberal arts college into the Hillsdale of the South. One of his appointees was Chris Rufo, the extremist who invented the furor over critical race theory.

At a recent campus event, a New College student spit on Rufo. He filed charges against her for her “attack” on him.

The State Attorney’s office dropped misdemeanor battery charges against a New College of Florida student who was accused of spitting on Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the school’s trustees.

Libby Harrity, 20, was charged with misdemeanor battery on July 7 in connection with a Gov. Ron DeSantis bill signing at New College on May 15, when Harrity allegedly spat at Rufo. DeSantis’ visit to sign a bill banning state funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at state universities drew vocal protest from students, who have organized against his reshaping of the college since January.

The governor has said he wants to turn New College into a “classical liberal” college akin to the Christian, conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Higher Education

Florida: New College Paying to Recruit Students After Rightwing Takeover

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
3

If you need any additional evidence of why DeSantis should never be President, read this story by Paul Basken of the Times (London) Higher Education. DeSantis uses his power as Governor to force his beliefs on others. He uses his power to squash dissent. He thinks that anyone who stands in his way should be run over and left as roadkill.

Case in point: his takeover of the state’s university system. It started with New College, the smallest liberal arts college in the state system. He took control of the board and replaced the college president with an unqualified politician. The new board is trying to turn progressive New College into the Hillsdale of the South. They are replacing the college’s nonconformist students with athletes. At DeSantis’ request, the legislature abolished tenure and restricted what professors are allowed to teach about gender and race.

New College was a bastion for free thinkers. It had high academic standards, but was completely “woke,” with regard to race, gender, social justice, and politics. Gay students were welcomed. DeSantis could not let it be.

New College of Florida recruitment
tactics challenged

After losing faculty and students because of partisan DeSantis reforms, campus described as paying recruiters despite federal ban

New College of Florida, the public liberal arts institution undergoing a partisan overhaul by the state’s Republican governor, is reported to have resorted to aggressive and potentially illegal tactics to maintain and build enrolment.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, citing the institution’s own staff and faculty, described New College as lowering its academic criteria foradmission for this coming semester, relying more heavily on athletic recruits, mischaracterising the institution’s resources, offering inducements such as laptops, and paying bonuses to recruitment staff.

A spokesman for New College admitted the institution offered the bonuses to its recruiters, the newspaper said, even though the federal government has long prohibited the practice.
“High achievement deserves a reward, and increased pay will be implemented to recognise the diligent work of the admissions team in assembling this record-breaking class,” the spokesman told
the Herald-Tribune. He and other New College officials did not respond to requests for comment about the report.

New College has recently become the centrepiece of efforts by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a 2024 US presidential candidate, to impose his partisan views across higher education. His agenda has included restricting teaching about the US history of racial division, banning initiatives to improve student diversity, and weakening faculty tenure.

With his heavy focus on overhauling New College, Mr DeSantis chose the smallest institution in the state university system, long known for excellence in the liberal arts that made it one of the nation’s top producers of Fulbright scholars. He accused it of harbouring leftist views, and replaced the majority of its trustees with conservative activists who fired its president and replaced her with a political ally, Richard Corcoran, a former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.

The result has been an exodus of faculty ahead of the coming academic year. New College’s interim provost, Bradley Thiessen, has counted at least 36 departures, or more than a third of the faculty, heading into the autumn semester. Dozens of students also described plans to leave.

Mr DeSantis has mocked the fleeing academics, telling conservative activists that he welcomed the transformation. “If you’re a professor in like, you know, Marxist studies, that’s not a loss for Florida if you’re going on,” the governor told the annual meeting of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council in Orlando. “Trust me, I’m totally good with that,” he said.

Earlier in the month, Mr Corcoran announced that New College would have a record enrolment for this autumn, exceeding 300 first-year students. He attributed the gains to an emphasis on sports, saying that a third of the new students would be athletes. The college’s data also showed that its first-year enrolment of black students would rise 6 percentage points to nearly 10 per cent, and that male enrolment would jump 23 percentage points to nearly 54 per cent.

The Herald-Tribune report, quoting admissions staff speaking anonymously, said the increase was coming at costs that include using photos of a nearby university and presenting them as New College in marketing materials; accepting students with lower standardised test scores; and offering the admissions staff $5,000 (£4,000) bonuses for reaching the 300-student goal.

The US Congress in 1992 forbade colleges paying bonuses or other incentives to anyone based on their success in enrolling students, mainly because of abuses in the for-profit sector. The Department of Education later allowed exceptions for outside companies that provide student recruitment as part of a bigger package of services, although the Biden administration said earlier this year that the use of that exception has grown to the point where
it might need to be reconsidered.


paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Higher Education

FAIRTEST: Record Number of Colleges Are Test-Optional

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2023 //
62

FairTest has been fighting the overuse and misuse of standardized testing for decades. One of their goals has been to encourage colleges and universities not to require the SAT or ACT. The pandemic accelerated their goal.

for further information, contact:      

Harry Feder    (917) 273-8939           

Bob Schaeffer (239) 699-0468

for immediate release Wednesday, July 26, 2023

ACT/SAT-OPTIONAL, TEST-FREE ADMISSIONS MOVEMENT EXPANDS AGAIN:

RECORD 1,900+ SCHOOLS DO NOT REQUIRE SCORES FOR FALL 2024 ENTRANCE

AS NEW CYCLE OF COMMON APPLICATION OPENS NEXT WEEK;

FAIRTEST LIST NOW INCLUDES ALL-TIME HIGH 85% OF COLLEGES, UNIVERSITIES

As a new college admissions cycle gets underway with the launch of the 2024 Common Application on Tuesday, August 1, a new tally shows that a record 85% of U.S. bachelor’s degree-granting colleges and universities will not require ACT or SAT scores from recent high school graduates seeking to enroll in fall 2024.

According to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), an all-time high of more than 1,900 U.S. colleges and universities have announced that they will practice ACT/SAT-optional or test-free admissions for this fall’s high school seniors. Several dozen additional schools have not yet made public their testing requirements for Fall 2024 admissions, but most are expected to remain test optional.

FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder explained, “More and more schools are ACT/SAT-optional or test-free every year because the policies have proven to be so effective. Admissions offices that stop requiring standardized exam scores usually receive more applicants, better academically qualified applicants, and more diverse pools of applicants. Most admissions leaders have seen no persuasive reason to restore testing requirements. The realization that standardized test scores provide virtually no useful additional information on a college application has sunk in. That means nearly every senior in the high school class of 2024 can choose to apply without submitting scores.”

Bob Schaeffer, FairTest’s Public Education Director, added, “After recent Supreme Court decisions on admissions, eliminating testing requirements is a fair, legally permissible way to encourage applications from first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented student groups, for whom standardized exams are often a poor predictor of college success.” FairTest filed an Amicus brief in the Supreme Court cases calling for an end to the use of “race conscious” test scores in admissions and financial aid decisions.

FairTest has led the U.S. test-optional admissions movement since the late 1980s. At that time, fewer than three dozen colleges and universities did not mandate ACT or SAT score submission from applicants. Immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic,1,070 schools were test-optional or test-blind.

Categories Education Industry, Higher Education, Standardized Testing

Raj Chetty: Rich Kids Are Likelier to Be Admitted to Elite Colleges than Middle-Income Ones: Here’s Why

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2023 //
98

Raj Chetty and associates have combed through a massive dataset and determined that rich kids are likelier to be accepted by elite colleges than students from middle-income families.

In an article by Greg Rosalsky, NPR reported:

Affirmative action for minority kids may now be dead. But a blockbuster new study, released today, finds that, effectively, affirmative action for rich kids is alive and well. They may or may not always do it on purpose, but a group of the most prestigious private colleges in America are handing a massive admissions advantage to rich kids over less affluent kids — even when they have the same SAT scores and academic qualifications.

The study is by Raj Chetty and David J. Deming, of Harvard University, and John N. Friedman, of Brown University. We at Planet Money have already dubbed Raj Chetty the Beyoncé of Economics because of his long list of popular hits in empirical economics. And, let me tell you, this is another ***Flawless classic in his catalog. I mean, not only is the study eye-opening, but Chetty is also kind of sticking his neck out here, by shining a spotlight on the admission practices of his employer, Harvard. But they can’t fire Beyoncé! (He has tenure).

Among a number of other discoveries, the economists find that kids from the richest 1% of American families are more than twice as likely to attend the nation’s most elite private colleges as kids from middle-class families with similar SAT scores. The silver spoon these wealthy kids are born with can, apparently, be used to catapult them past other equally bright, but less privileged kids into some of America’s best colleges….

A student from the richest 1% of American families (from families earning over $611,000 per year) is twice as likely to attend an elite private college as a middle-class student (from a family earning between $83,000-$116,000 per year) with the same academic credentials. The economists find this disparity can only be found at elite private colleges: they find no such advantage for rich kids at America’s flagship public universities, like UC Berkeley or the University of Michigan…

The economists find three factors that give rich kids this huge admissions boost. The first is legacy admission programs. They calculate that 46% of their admissions advantage comes from programs that give them preferential admission due to their parents being alumni.

One defense for these legacy kids might be that they’re smart, hard-working, and ambitious, so they’d be able to get into another Ivy-Plus college if they wanted to. But the economists find these same legacy kids see no advantage when they apply to schools their parents did not go to. “So, in other words, that legacy impact is totally non-transferrable across colleges, which strongly suggests that it’s not that these kids are just kind of stronger applicants in general,” Chetty says. “It’s actually about literally being a legacy at this college.”

The second reason that rich kids get an admissions advantage is athletic recruitment. The economists calculate that 24% of the admission boost for students from the richest 1% of families comes from the fact that they excel at some sort of sport. That may be somewhat surprising, because if you watch pro sports, the stars usually don’t come from privileged backgrounds. The economists are unable to do a sport-by-sport analysis, but, Chetty says, it’s likely that kids are finding a recruitment advantage in expensive, elite sports, such as fencing, tennis, rowing or lacrosse. Elite private colleges, after all, are generally not known for their stellar football or basketball teams.

The last reason rich kids are more likely to be admitted is because they tend to have higher non-academic ratings that make their applications pop. Think extracurricular activities, compelling letters of recommendation, and guidance counselors who help them engineer perfect resumes and personal statements. This explains about 30% of their advantage.

Chetty says the rich-kid advantage in non-academic ratings is almost entirely driven by the fact that they are much more likely to attend elite private high schools. “If you’re coming from an elite private school, you tend to have much higher non-academic ratings,” Chetty says. “Now, of course, kids from high-income families are much more likely to attend these schools.”

The cost of attending Harvard is $80,000. Students who come from families with an income under $85,000 attend cost-free.

A student from a family in the range that Chetty and company studied ($83,000-116,000) would need substantial tuition assistance, as 70% of Harvard students do.

Why would Harvard want students from the top income bracket? The NPR article about Chetty’s study has a throwaway line: rich kids are more likely to pay tuition — and their parents are more likely to give donations and pad their endowments.

This strikes me as a common sense solution to the question of why elite colleges are likelier to admit rich kids than middle-income kids with the same SAT scores. The rich kids pay their full tuition. Somebody has to.

Categories Economics, Higher Education

Politico: Campus Towns Vote Overwhelmingly Democratic

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2023 //
13

Politico wrote recently about the powerful impact of campus towns. They typically vote Democratic, and they have a large impact on state elections. It’s long been known that education is a factor in voting. The most educated counties vote Democratic, and the least educated vote Republican.

Politico wrote:

Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in record-breaking numbers.

No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something else. Turnout in Dane was higher than anywhere else in the state. And the Democratic margin of victory that delivered control of the nonpartisan court to liberals was even more lopsided than usual — and bigger than in any of the state’s other 71 counties.

The margin was so big that it changed the state’s electoral formula. Under the state’s traditional political math, Milwaukee and Dane — Wisconsin’s two Democratic strongholds — are counterbalanced by the populous Republican suburbs surrounding Milwaukee. The rest of the state typically delivers the decisive margin in statewide races. The Supreme Court results blew up that model. Dane County alone is now so dominant that it overwhelms the Milwaukee suburbs (which have begun trending leftward anyway). In effect, Dane has become a Republican-killing Death Star.

“This is a really big deal,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in Wisconsin. “What Democrats are doing in Dane County is truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.”

In isolation, it’s a worrisome development for Republicans. Unfortunately for the larger GOP, it’s not happening in isolation.

In state after state, fast-growing, traditionally liberal college counties like Dane are flexing their muscles, generating higher turnout and ever greater Democratic margins. They’ve already played a pivotal role in turning several red states blue — and they could play an equally decisive role in key swing states next year.

One of those states is Michigan. Twenty years ago, the University of Michigan’s Washtenaw County gave Democrat Al Gore what seemed to be a massive victory — a 60-36 percent win over Republican George W. Bush, marked by a margin of victory of roughly 34,000 votes. Yet that was peanuts compared to what happened in 2020. Biden won Washtenaw by close to 50 percentage points, with a winning margin of about 101,000 votes. If Washtenaw had produced the same vote margin four years earlier, Hillary Clinton would have won Michigan, a state that played a prominent role in putting Donald Trump in the White House.

Name the flagship university — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others — and the story tends to be the same. If the surrounding county was a reliable source of Democratic votes in the past, it’s a landslide county now. There are exceptions to the rule, particularly in the states with the most conservative voting habits. But even in reliably red places like South Carolina, Montana and Texas, you’ll find at least one college-oriented county producing ever larger Democratic margins.

The American Communities Project, which has developed a typology of counties, designates 171 independent cities and counties as “college towns.” In a combined social science/journalism effort based at the Michigan State University School of Journalism, the ACP uses three dozen different demographic and economic variables in its analysis such as population density, employment, bachelor’s degrees, household income, percent enrolled in college, rate of religious adherence and racial and ethnic composition.

Of those 171 places, 38 have flipped from red to blue since the 2000 presidential election. Just seven flipped the other way, from blue to red, and typically by smaller margins. Democrats grew their percentage point margins in 117 counties, while 54 counties grew redder. By raw votes, the difference was just as stark: The counties that grew bluer increased their margins by an average of 16,253, while Republicans increased their margins by an average of 4,063.

Back in 2000, the places identified as college towns by ACP voted 48 percent to 47 percent in favor of Al Gore. In the last presidential election, the 25 million who live in those places voted for Joe Biden, 54 percent to 44 percent.

Many populous urban counties that are home to large universities don’t even make the ACP’s “college towns” list because their economic and demographic profiles differentiate them from more traditional college counties. Among the missing are places like the University of Texas’ Travis County, where the Democratic margin of victory grew by 290,000 votes since 2000, and the University of New Mexico’s Bernalillo County, where the margin grew by 73,000 votes. The University of Minnesota’s Hennepin County has become bluer by 245,000 votes.

North Carolina offers a revealing snapshot of a state whose college towns have altered its electoral landscape. Five of the state’s nine counties that contain so-called college towns have gone blue since voting for George W. Bush in 2000. Back then, the nine counties together netted roughly 12,000 votes for Bush, who carried the state by nearly 13 percent. Twenty years later, those numbers had broken dramatically in the opposite direction — Biden netted 222,000 votes from those counties. He still lost the state, but the margin was barely more than 1 percent.

There’s no single factor driving the college town trend. In some places, it’s an influx of left-leaning, highly educated newcomers, drawn to growing, cutting-edge industries advanced by university research or the vibrant quality of life. In others, it’s rising levels of student engagement on growing campuses. Often, it’s a combination of both.

What’s clear is that these places are altering the political calculus across the national map. Combine university counties with heavily Democratic big cities and increasingly blue suburbs, and pretty soon you have a state that’s out of the Republican Party’s reach.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the GOP, which is responding in ways that reach beyond traditional tensions between conservative lawmakers and liberal universities — such as targeting students’ voting rights, creating additional barriers to voter access or redrawing maps to dilute or limit the power of college communities. But there are limits to what those efforts can accomplish. They aren’t geared toward growing the GOP vote, merely toward suppressing Democratic totals. And they aren’t addressing the structural problems created by the rising tide of college-town votes — students are only part of the overall phenomenon.

There is more, and it’s all encouraging to those who hope for a Democratic surge. Keep reading.

Categories Democrats, Elections, Higher Education, Republicans
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