Archives for category: Higher Education
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Billionaire Pledges to Pay Student Debt of 2019 Morehouse College Graduates

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2019 //
6

Investor Robert F. Smith was invited to give the commencement address at Morehouse College, an all-male historically black college in Atlanta. Smith is the wealthiest black man in America, with a fortune estimated at $4-5 billion.

Smith began his speech by talking about his good fortune, having been bused to an integrated public school in Denver. 

Smith described being bused to a high-performing, predominantly white school across town in Denver, where he grew up. He said he’ll never forget climbing onto bus No. 13 to Carson Elementary.

“Those five years drastically changed the trajectory of my life,” he said. “The teachers at Carson were extraordinary. They embraced me and challenged me to think critically and start to move toward my full potential. I, in turn, came to realize at a young age that the white kids and the black kids, the Jewish kids and the one Asian kid were all pretty much the same.”

After talking about how he achieved success, he dropped his prepared remarks and announced that he was paying all the student debt of the class of 2019, some 400 young men. The students were stunned, then broke into cheers and tears, along with their families.

This was a beautiful act of genuine philanthropy. Mr. Smith is not controlling anyone’s life, he is giving without strings or conditions. I know many readers will react by saying that higher education should be tuition-free, and I agree. But it is not. So for now, I say, thank you for this generous and kind act, Mr. Robert F. Smith.

Since the Washington Post is behind a paywall, here are other sites on which to read this heart-warming story, including a video clip.

See here, here, here.

Something tells me Robert F. Smith will have many invitations to give commencement addresses in years to come.

 

Categories Education Reform, Higher Education, Philanthropy, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

Harvard Attacks Single-Sex Sororities and Fraternities and Threatens Those Who Join Them

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2019 //
37

 

As a graduate of an excellent, life-changing women’s college, this story strikes me as bizarre.

Harvard is trying to stamp out single-sex fraternities and sororities. Students who belong to them will be banned  from no,ding campus leadership roles. National sororities and fraternities are suing the university for violating their freedom of association, as well they should.

The university says that it wants to stamp out exclusion.

See here.  And here.

Harvard is taking legal action to preserve its punitive policies towardsthose who join sororities or fraternities.

Nuts.

 

Categories Education Reform, Higher Education

The Real Crime in Higher Education: Not Gaming Admissions but Underinvestment in Public Universities

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2019 //
85

 

Alan Aja, Joseph Entin, and Jeanne Theoharis identify the true crime in higher education: the abandonment of public higher education by the states and the federal government. The three authors are professors at Brooklyn College, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY).

They write:

The biggest scandal in American higher education today is the staggering disinvestment in public universities like CUNY, even as politicians and the public pay lip service to abhorring the inequalities in higher education. What would it mean to view as scandalous the well-documented decline in federal and state funding of public universities across the country over the last 25 years, at the same time students have been expected to shoulder the cost of those “missing expenditures” through tuition hikes (amid other persistent cuts to federal and state financial aid and vital support services)? What would it mean to view self-declared “education governor” Andrew Cuomo of New York as a part of the problem for the ways he has underfunded public universities in the state and to see members of the public who allow this as his accomplices? What would it mean to see the scandal that the broken ceiling exposes as part of a larger systemic problem directly tied to the current state budget’s continued underfunding of CUNY (which once again this time around, fell dramatically short)?

Nearly a quarter of a million undergraduates attend the City University of New York, and they are caught in a vicious bind. Tuition for CUNY — which was free until 1975 — has risen by 31% since 2011. It now stands at $6,730 for full-time students at CUNY’s senior colleges on top of the high costs of housing, food, transportation, books and other personal expenditures in New York City, where the majority of students attending CUNY come from families with incomes of $30,000 or less.

At the same time, CUNY’s per-pupil funding declined by 18% between 2008 and 2018.

Think of it. Students used to be able to enroll in a public university at minimal cost, or none at all. Now, they are saddled with debt for years after they finish college–if they finish. As Sara Goldrick-Rab wrote in her prize-winning book “Paying the Price,” the main reason that low-income students drop out of college is not because of their lack of motivation or ability, but because they can’t afford to pay the costs.

 

Categories Funding, Higher Education, Students

John Merrow: Eight Fixes for the College Admissions Mess

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2019 //
51

 

 

John Merrow noted the intense media attention on the recent college admission scandal, where rich parents found ways to buy higher test scores or pay for guarantees of admissions by pretending they were star athletes or paying off coaches to ask for them to be admitted or hiring a ringer to take the SAT for them.

He offers eight ways to repair the college admissions process.

Here are a few of his recommendations.

1) Elite colleges should stop participating in the annual US News & World Report college rankings process.  Just stop!  Because US News uses a college’s rate of rejection as an important measure of its quality, many colleges have stepped up their efforts to recruit applicants–just so they can turn them down.  After all, the more it turns down, the better US News says it must be.  If Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, MIT, Stanford et alia just said NO to US News, that would be a step in the right direction.

2) Get rid of the common application.  It’s now too easy for high school students to apply to dozens of colleges with one keystroke, and many kids do just that, particularly if their parents don’t mind paying the fees.  If we want to level the playing field, then colleges should do more reaching out to high schools in low- and moderate-income schools and help students apply.

By the way, the US News frenzy and the common application changed the admission process dramatically between our coverage of Williams in 1986 and Amherst in 2004.  In 1986 prior to the common application, every application was read by at least two members of the committee, and the entire committee met as a whole for days (often arguing passionately about particular candidates). However, by 2004 the flood of applications had forced Amherst to establish a SAT/ACT cutoff point; applicants below a certain number were rejected without a reading.  In 2004 Amherst had what amounted to two committees, which met and admitted and rejected candidates separately.

3) Administer–free of charge–the PSAT to all high school sophomores and juniors, because that test is a good indicator of talent and potential.  It might be an eye-opener for many kids in low income areas, because now many of them don’t even try to apply to “elite” colleges because they feel they don’t or won’t qualify; their PSAT scores might help change their minds.   Always remember that talent is randomly distributed, while test scores are closely related to parental income.  

There are eight in all. Read them and see what you think. Equitable funding of all high schools is another.

Categories Competition, Education Reform, Higher Education

Valerie Strauss: Is It Time to Dump the SAT and ACT?

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2019 //
31

 

Reflecting on the recentmassive scandal of rigging college acceptances, Valerie Strauss discusses the debate about whether the SAT and ACT are necessary. 

Research indicates that a student’s four year record reveals more about his or her college readiness than either of the two big standardized tests.

Wealthy parents have always had advantages, including the ability to pay tutors to help their children.

Now we see that some parents paid to have someone take the test for their childor change the answers from wrong to right.

Fairtest has long kept count of the number of colleges and universities that have gone “test-optional.” The number now exceeds 1,000. The elite University of Chicago joined the list.

One thing is clear: from NCLB To the SAT, American schools place far too much emphasis on standardized tests.

 

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Higher Education, Standardized Testing

Mercedes Schneider: The College Admissions Scam Used a Nonprofit

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2019 //
6

 

Mercedes Schneider tracked down the tax filings of the “charity” at the heart of the college admissions scam.

You will be interested to learn that the cover for the heist was a nonprofit dedicated to helping the “underpriviled.”

Well, you can’t open a charity for the “privileged,” now, can you?

Categories Cheating, Higher Education, Testing

The College Admissions Scandal: Why Am I Not Surprised?

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
102

 

When I first heard about a federal investigation of cheating and rigging of the college admissions process on behalf of wealthy people willing to pay, I completely misjudged the ramifications. I was not surprised.

Why was I not surprised? I was not surprised because admission to elite colleges and universities has long been rigged, though not as blatantly as the latest scheme. In the present story, ringers were paid to take the tests, and test answers were changed by proctors on behalf of students whose parents paid the price. That’s awfully blatant.

The old-time rigging was more subtle. Start with legacy admissions. If the college had eight applicants for every place, a student whose parent or sibling went to the same institution was likely to be admitted despite his or her grades or scores. That’s unfair.

Then there is the rigging that occurs when the college puts too much weight on the SAT or ACT, which favors students from wealthy homes, who have gone to the best schools and had advantageous life experiences. Numerous studies, including some released by the testing companies, acknowledge that the GPA (grade point average) is a better predictor of college success than the college admission test taken on a single day. That is why more than 1,000 colleges and universities have become “test-optional.” Go to the Fairtest website to see the list of test-optional institutions of higher education.

The scores on the SAT/ACT are also affected by tutoring, which is a function of parental income. So, not only do wealthy families begin with a big advantage, they can multiply their advantage by paying for tutors who are skilled in training students to raise their scores. Tutors can be very expensive. They may costs hundreds of dollars an hour. This skews the admissions process yet again towards those with money.

It would have been far simpler for the families involved in the present scam to pay a tutor $5,000-10,000, and they would have not been investigated by the FBI.

But there is one more way to get preferential treatment. Give a large gift to the college or university shortly before your child applies for admission. Daniel Golden, a journalist then at the Wall Street Journal, now at ProPublica, wrote a book in 2006 called The Price of Admission, about how wealthy people gave money to get their children into elite colleges. He referred to a little-known family named Kushner in New Jersey. A real-estate developer named Charles Kushner, who had graduated from New York University, made a gift of $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998. Not long after, his son Jared was admitted to Harvard.

Golden wrote:

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Higher Education, Inequity

Another For-Profit ”College” Chain Collapses, Students Left with Debt

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2019 //
6

 

Another for-profit chain of colleges has gone into bankruptcy and its students ar3 left holding the bag, loaded with debt and worthless degrees. Policing these institutions is the job of the Education Department. For years, the for-profit colllege Industry has hiredlobbyists from both parties to protect them.

 

The New York Times reports:

“When the Education Department approved a proposal by Dream Center, a Christian nonprofit with no experience in higher education, to buy a troubled chain of for-profit colleges, skeptics warned that the charity was unlikely to pull off the turnaround it promised.

“What they didn’t foresee was just how quickly and catastrophically it would fail.

“Barely a year after the takeover, dozens of Dream Center campuses are nearly out of money and may close as soon as Friday. More than a dozen others have been sold in the hope they can survive.

“The affected schools — Argosy University, South University and the Art Institutes — have about 26,000 students in programs spanning associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and psychology. Fourteen campuses, mostly Art Institute locations, have a new owner after a hastily arranged transfer involving private equity executives. More than 40 others are under the control of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students.

“The problems, arising amid the Trump administration’s broad efforts to deregulate the for-profit college industry, began almost immediately after Dream Center acquired the schools in 2017. The charity, started 25 years ago and affiliated with a Pentecostal megachurch in Los Angeles, has a nationwide network of outreach programs for problems like homelessness and domestic violence and said it planned to use the schools to fund its expansion.

“Now its students — many with credits that cannot be easily transferred — are stuck in a meltdown. On Wednesday, members of the faculty at Argosy’s Chicago and Northern Virginia campuses told students that they had been fired and instructed to remove their belongings. In Phoenix, an unpaid landlord locked students out of their classrooms. In California, a dean advised students two months away from graduation not to invite family to attend from out of town.

“In less than a month, everything I have worked for the past three years has been taken from me,” said Jayne Kenney, who is pursuing her doctorate in clinical psychology at Argosy’s Chicago campus. “I am also conscious of the fact that what seems like the swift fall of an ax in less than one month has in reality been festering for years.”

“The fall accelerated last week when the Education Department cut off federal student loan funds to Argosy after the court-appointed receiver said school officials had taken about $13 million owed to students at 22 campuses and used it for expenses like payroll. The students, who had borrowed extra money to cover things like rent and groceries, were forced to use food banks or skip classes for lack of bus fare.

“Lauren Jackson, a single mother seeking a doctorate at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology, an Argosy school in Chicago, did not receive the roughly $10,000 she was due in January. She has been paying expenses for her and her 6-year-old daughter with borrowed money and GoFundMe donations.

“On Tuesday, after three months of not paying her rent, she received an eviction notice.

“I didn’t want to go home and tell my baby that Mommy may not be a doctor,” said Ms. Jackson, whose school could close Friday. “Now I don’t want to go home and tell her that we don’t have a home.”

‘Bad for Everyone’

“Led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Education Department has reversed an Obama-era crackdown on troubled vocational and career schools and allowed new and less experienced entrants into the field.

“The industry was on its heels, but they’ve been given new life by the department under DeVos,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

“Ms. DeVos, who invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges before taking office, has made it an agency priority to unfetter for-profit schools by eliminating restrictions on them. She also allowed several for-profit schools to evade even those loosened rules by converting to nonprofits.

“That’s what Dream Center wanted to do when it asked to buy the remains of Education Management Corporation.

“Education Management, once the nation’s second-largest for-profit college operator, was struggling for survival after an investigation into its recruiting tactics resulted in a $200 million settlement in 2015. Despite those troubles, it had 65,000 students, and some of its schools maintained strong reputations.

“Dream Center is connected to Angelus Temple, which was founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist once portrayed by Faye Dunaway in a TV movie, “The Disappearance of Aimee.” It is affiliated with the Foursquare Church, an evangelical denomination with outposts in 146 countries.

“Buying a chain of schools “aligns perfectly with our mission, which views education as a primary means of life transformation,” Randall Barton, the foundation’s managing director, said when Dream Center announced its plan.

“But Dream Center had never run colleges. It hired a team including Brent Richardson, who worked on the conversion of Grand Canyon University to a nonprofit as its chairman, to lead the schools’ corporate parent, Dream Center Education Holdings. He stepped down in January.

“Alarms were ringing from the moment the takeover was proposed. Dream Center’s effort to buy the failing ITT Technical Institutes schools had fallen apart after resistance from the Obama administration. When it asked to buy Education Management’s schools, consumer groups, members of Congress and some regional accreditors raised concerns.

“But in late 2017, Ms. DeVos’s agency gave preliminary approval to Dream Center’s plan.

“Almost immediately, the organization discovered the schools were in worse shape than expected, with aging facilities and outdated technology. The universities “were, on the whole, failing without hope for redemption,” the receiver wrote in a court filing last month.

“Dream Center had anticipated a $30 million profit in its first year, Mr. Barton wrote in a recent legal filing. Instead, it was facing a $38 million loss.

“And Dream Center showed little inclination to curb the tactics that got Education Management in trouble, like misleading students about their employment prospects. The executives it installed cultivated a high-pressure culture in which profit surpassed all other concerns, according to a report filed last year by Thomas J. Perrelli, the court-appointed monitor overseeing the schools’ compliance with their state settlements.

“By the end of 2018, Dream Center was facing eviction on at least nine campuses and owed creditors more than $40 million, and Education Department officials scrambled to plan for what looked like an imminent implosion.

“We know all too well that precipitous school closures are bad for everyone involved and leave too many students high and dry,” said Liz Hill, an agency spokeswoman. “Teams of people at the department have been working tirelessly on behalf of students — caught up in this situation through no fault of their own — with the singular goal in mind to ensure as many students as possible had options to complete their education.”“The way they presented the receivership was that it would be beneficial to the students, but it’s actually been detrimental,” said Marina Awed, a student at an Argosy school in California, Western State College of Law, who was scheduled to graduate in two months. “It shouldn’t be this easy to defraud the Department of Education.”

Disgraceful.

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

Wisconsin: Will The Liberal Arts Survive in a Tech-Hungry Society?

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2018 //
18

Scott Walker tried to turn the University of Wisconsin into a career-preparation institution. No more of this “search forvtruth” stuff.

Happily, Walker was defeated by Tony Evers, thevstate’s Superintendent of Instruction.

But this article suggests that Walker’s ideas will prevail anyway.

The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point just went through a process of planning for the future. In the early form of the plan, the following majors would be cut: geography, geology, French, German, two- and three-dimensional art, and history.

At a time of budget cuts, administrators decided to cut the majors where demand was lowest. Students increasingly want education that prepares them to get a job.

In the spring of 2018, administrators offered a plan “to add majors in chemical engineering, computer-information systems, conservation-law enforcement, finance, fire science, graphic design, management, and marketing….

“Fierce backlash to the proposal from students, faculty, and alumni pushed the administration to reconsider its original plan. By the time the final proposal was released in mid-November 2018, it was less expansive, though still forceful. Six programs would be cut, including the history major. The university seemed to be eyeing degree programs with low numbers of graduates, and nationally, the number of graduates from bachelor’s programs in history has had the steepest decline of any major in recent years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.”

Dis Scott Walker win the ideological war? Will the University of Wisconsin produce graduates who can get a job but know nothing about fascism?

Categories Education Reform, Higher Education

This For-Profit College Chain Is Closing, Stranding Students with Plenty Debt But No Degrees

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2018 //
1

The for-profit college chain Education Corporation of America is closing down. This is the kind of college that Betsy DeVos adores, wants to deregulate, and hopes will grow. But this one is a goner, leaving students with lots of debt and no education.

“The Education Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit college chains, announced last week it was immediately closing more than 70 campuses in 21 states. Between fifteen and twenty thousand students are now in the unenviable position of being thousands of dollars in debt with no completed degrees or certifications and, reportedly, little prospect of being able to transfer their academic credits to different schools.

“NBC reports that in some instances, students were told in the middle of class — some of them while in the middle of their certification exams — that their school no longer exists. Their student debt, however, sure does.”

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Higher Education
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »