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D. S. Koelling

Views: What's High School For? - Inside Higher Ed - 35 views

  • In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.
  • In reality, though, dual enrollment may do more harm than good.
  • The problem is that high school is not college and completion of a dual enrollment high school class is not always a guarantee that students have learned the material.
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  • As a result, classes that used to be termed “college-prep” are now seen as college proper.
  • In practice, however, courses covered in a high school setting on a high school calendar are often vastly different in practice.
  • This is not a criticism of high school teachers. Many are excellent educators and care deeply about students. But they often teach more classes than college faculty do, have myriad extracurricular responsibilities, and lack the requisite training that enables college faculty to introduce best practices in the field. In contrast, college faculty members expect a higher level of work from students, including having them study independently, write in the discipline and be exposed to the latest research. They are less likely to offer extra credit, or evaluate students based on an inflated high school norm.
  • High school students, especially sophomores and juniors, are not like college students. A collection of 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds are normally at a different stage of intellectual and moral development than are college students. Treating a high school student like a college student does not always do them a favor.
  • This student, as a sophomore in high school, earned a “C” in a “college” English course, which exempts her from our basic English 111 College Writing class. Even though her ACT score indicates her writing skills are deficient, we are limited in what we can do. Like many students who have already passed a “college” class, she thinks she already has the necessary writing skills to be successful in college. We know she very likely does not. Our willingness to increase student access by accepting transfer credit means that, without taking this student’s credits away, we cannot help her with her writing. Instead, by virtue of an average performance as a high school sophomore, this student will be placed into college classes for which she is unprepared.
  • Most colleges willingly accept credits from like institutions because we trust that our courses are equivalent and that our faculty are credentialed. I doubt that same trust applies to high schools. The best service a high school can provide is to prepare students for college, not substitute for it.
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    High school dual enrollment programs may not be helping students succeed in college.
Sasha Thackaberry

Colleges use FAFSA information to reject students and potentially lower financial aid p... - 34 views

  • When would-be college students apply for financial aid using the FAFSA, they are asked to list the colleges they are thinking about attending. The online version of the form asks applicants to submit up to 10 college names. The U.S. Department of Education then shares all the information on the FAFSA with all of the colleges on the list, as well as state agencies involved in awarding student aid. The form notes that the information could be used by state agencies, but there is no mention that individual colleges will use the information in admissions or financial aid -- and there is no indication that students could be punished by colleges for where they appear on the list.
  • Now, some colleges use this “FAFSA position” when considering students’ applications for admission, which may affect decisions about admission or placement on the wait list, said David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
  • So the institution is disinclined to use up a precious admissions slot for a student who is unlikely to enroll.  “The student has no idea that this information is being used in this context,” Hawkins said. The federal government "doesn’t indicate it. Institutions certainly aren’t telling students they are using it. Certainly, this is a concern from this association’s standpoint.”
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  • It's unclear if the Education Department was aware of this issue until contacted by Inside Higher Ed on Friday. The department now says it will review the longstanding practice of sharing the FAFSA positions with every college.
  • The use of the list on the FAFSA is just another example of how colleges are using increasingly sophisticated data mining techniques to recruit and shape their classes.
JD Pennington

Diigo in College/University - 253 views

Some questions: Is it possible to get an RSS feed of group annotated links that are no longer live pages, but are instead highlighted static pages? This way I can get a feed of a the links that ...

education diigo

Jeff Andersen

Colleges Using Athletics to Boost Profile - Athletic Business - 1 views

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    For many students, the college experience includes game days watching athletes wearing the school colors take the field or court. But in today's environment of rising costs, soaring student debt and declining enrollment, college and university leaders are sometimes finding they have to explain the need for what has become an "arms race" among athletic departments. The argument might be made that much of the money that is required to keep college athletic teams going comes from ticket sales and outside sources such as alumni contributions. The other side of that coin is that some of the cost is borne by students, even those with no interest in sports. In the case of private institutions, it is up to school officials to decide whether the expense is worthwhile. The public has an obvious and greater role in the determination of the role and funding of sports in state institutions.
Javier E

Getting Into the Ivies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • For American teenagers, it really is harder to get into Harvard — or Yale, Stanford, Brown, Boston College or many other elite colleges — than it was when today’s 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds were applying. The number of spots filled by American students at Harvard, after adjusting for the size of the teenage population nationwide, has dropped 27 percent since 1994.
  • The share for any individual college is minuscule, of course. In 2012, about 33 out of every 100,000 American 18- to 21-year-olds were attending Harvard, down from 45 per 100,000 in 1994. These changes in the share tell you how much harder, or easier, admission has become for American teenagers on average. Between 1984 and 1994, it became easier at many colleges. The college-age population in this country fell during that time to 14.1 million in 1994 from 16.5 million in 1984, and the number of foreign students was relatively stable.
  • For students from the Northeast applying to elite colleges in the region, college admissions have probably become even more difficult in recent decades than these statistics suggest. Not only have colleges globalized, they have also become less regional, admitting more students from states like North Carolina, Texas and Washington.
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  • Over the last 20 years, several large colleges, like N.Y.U. and the University of Southern California, have improved markedly, effectively increasing the number of seats on elite campuses
  • On average, about 15 percent of students at elite colleges receive Pell grants, which as a rule of thumb go to students in the bottom half of the income distribution.
  • Low-income applicants are left to compete for the remaining slots with applicants who have the highest test scores, most impressive extracurricular activities and most eloquent essays.
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    After reading this i felt I could assuage the parents group at my daughter's school who were heartbroken that their siblings were not accepted into the school as well.
Randolph Hollingsworth

Gateway to College National Network - 2 views

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    *Gateway to College helps high school dropouts (ages 16-21) and students on the verge of dropping out to earn a high school diploma while also earning college credits. *Project DEgree helps underprepared college students (ages 18-26) accelerate their progress through developmental education and on to transfer-level college courses.
Maureen Greenbaum

College is a waste of time - CNN.com - 49 views

    • Brian Mull
       
      Marketing oneself in society today is a skill that all students MUST have, but too many schools are ignoring.
  • Of course, some people want a formal education. I do not think everyone should leave college, but I challenge my peers to consider the opportunity cost of going to class. If you want to be a doctor, going to medical school is a wise choice. I do not recommend keeping cadavers in your garage. On the other hand, what else could you do during your next 50-minute class? How many e-mails could you answer? How many lines of code could you write?
    • Brian Mull
       
      The key is balance. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What we need is to construct learning environments and experiences that connect with the real world. NOt the world within the school's four walls.
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    • Brian Mull
       
      People who are successful in this area have a drive to be successful. We need to meet our students where they are, and we need to construct learning experiences in a way that engages their passions and promotes this drive. Schools and teachers can do this, but school and classroom structures need to change. 
    • Brian Mull
       
      I rather think of this as many schools are failing to give students the skills they need to empower themselves. We can't take the responsibility away of students empowering themselves. It's a small, but vital thinking shift.
  • I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.
  • 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college.
  • college as a stepping-stone to success rather than a means to gain knowledge. College fails to empower us with the skills necessary to become productive members of today's global entrepreneurial economy.
  • Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity.
  • Learning by doing
  • A major function of college is to signal to potential employers that one is qualified to work. The Internet is replacing this signaling function.
  • creating personal portfolios to showcase their talent.
  • document our accomplishments, and have them socially validated with tools such as LinkedIn
Christopher Jackson

Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say - NYTimes.com - 72 views

  • worth it.
    • Christopher Jackson
       
      "Worth it" suggests that the values in question are only those of money and calculation. Is that the best way to measure what college can offer?
  • Yes, college is worth it, and it’s not even close. For all the struggles that many young college graduates face, a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.
  • he singer Jill Scott, who was being given an honorary doctorate, at graduation ceremonies at Temple University in Philadelphia this month.
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  • hat the pay gap has nonetheless continued growing means that we’re still not producing enough of them
  • experts and journalists
  • According to a paper by Mr. Autor published Thursday in the journal Science, the true cost of a college degree is about negative $500,000. That’s right: Over the long run, college is cheaper than free. Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars.
  • education brings a huge return.
  • benefits of college don’t go just to graduates of elite colleges
Kimberly LaPrairie

YOUniversityTV: Tutorial - 0 views

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    Video tours of college campuses aren't a new phenomenon; many universities have provided video tours and information about their campuses to prospective students for years. But Boynton Beach, Fla., startup YOUniversity LLC is hoping to draw users to its sites by offering prospective college students an unbiased, third-party source of information about hundreds of schools in an interactive, social environment. "Most of our employees are recent grads, who are best able to share their campus experiences with others getting ready to go to college," said co-founder Ron Reis, who launched the company in January 2008. The 17-person staff has three full-time camera crews that travel around the country, shooting high-definition footage of college campuses and the surrounding area. They've already taped more than 400 top schools throughout the country and have interviewed administrators, faculty, and students about their campus experience. "They've done a really good job, and they seem to have found a niche market that people really need," said Gordon Chavis, associate vice president for undergraduate admissions at the University of Central Florida
Randolph Hollingsworth

Time Is the Enemy, Complete College America, September 2011 - 0 views

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    Unless we move with urgency, today's young people will be the first generation in American history to be less educated than their predecessors. Consider this a sobering wake-up call - and an urgent appeal for action now. ...4 of every 10 public college students are able to attend only part-time. Which means leaders have been making policy decisions about higher education absent critical information about 40 percent of the students, as if their success or failure was less important than that of "traditional" full-time students... Seventy-five percent of today's students are juggling some combination of families, jobs, and school while commuting to class; according to the U.S. Department of Education, only a quarter go full-time, attend residential colleges, and have most of their bills paid by their parents.... Part-time students rarely graduate.... Poor students and students of color struggle the most to graduate.... Students are taking too many credits and too much time to complete.... Remediation is broken, producing few students who ultimately graduate. ...The Big Idea: Time is the enemy of college completion.
smilex3md

College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one. - The Washington Post - 32 views

  • What truly makes an education valuable: the effort the student puts into it.
  • Unlike a car, college requires the “buyer” to do most of the work to obtain its value. The value of a degree depends more on the student’s input than on the college’s curriculum.
  • Yet most public discussion of higher ed today pretends that students simply receive their education from colleges the way a person walks out of Best Buy with a television.
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  • If colleges are responsible for outcomes, then students can feel entitled to classes that do not push them too hard, to high grades and to material that does not challenge their assumptions or make them uncomfortable.
  • This point is made succinctly by an apocryphal story about a university president who said this to new freshmen each year: “For those of you who have come here in order to get a degree, congratulations, I have good news for you. I am giving you your degree today and you can go home now. For those who came to get an education, welcome to four great years of learning at this university.”
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    "College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one."
Randolph Hollingsworth

Georgia - Board of Regents System Initiative - Early College - 5 views

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    "The Office of Educator Preparation, Innovation and Research (EPIR) of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia serves as the Intermediary for the Georgia Early College Initiative -- a partnership between the Georgia Department of Education and the University System of Georgia. It is the Intermediary's role to offer leadership and support for Early Colleges in Georgia; provide technical assistance for each site to help ensure a successful experience for the Early College students; and study the model with an eye towards replicating the program across the state."
Maureen Greenbaum

The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views

  • proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
  • inductive reasoning
  • Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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  • subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
  • felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
  • One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
  • because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
  • adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
  • past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
  • fellow edu-nauts
  • Lectures are banned
  • attending class on Apple laptops
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
  • Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
  • “Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
  • One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
  • when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
  • Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
  • “The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
  • What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
  • methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
  • Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
  • We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
  • memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
  • he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
  • ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
  • e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
  • pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
  • Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
  • a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
  • he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
  • I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
  • Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
  • MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
  • It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
  • part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
  • “hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
  • I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
  • it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
  • for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
  • Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
  • professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
  • The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
Randolph Hollingsworth

Pathfinders Game - Strategizing for College - IES Grant - 80 views

  • A combination of tools such as graphic novels, board games, and online games will be developed for middle school students.
  • The online version of the high school Pathfinder card game will have players guide a character through class and activity selection, time management challenges, putting together application materials, and acquiring the financial resources to afford college and its related costs. Games are to take about a week to complete and will require 5–10 minutes at a time to advance the game. The goal of the game is not only to be accepted but also to be able to afford and be prepared to succeed at the player's college of choice. Students can repeat play the game using characters with different backgrounds.
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    Bill Tierney at USC got over a million bucks to modify his card game called Pathfinders to an online version so it can be played on Facebook. "The intended audience is students with low-income backgrounds who are not aware of their postsecondary options and who attend schools lacking strong college guidance counseling." Hope the players can cash in their winnings at a local casino and get real money to pay for college! That would be even better!
D. S. Koelling

The Liberal Arts Are Work-Force Development - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Hig... - 35 views

  • Now consider that, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, about half of all freshmen and sophomores are enrolled at the nation's 1,300 two-year colleges, and many of those students transfer to four-year institutions. For a large percentage of people who earn bachelor's degrees, then, the liberal-arts portion of their education was acquired at a two-year college. Next, factor in all of the community-college students who enter the work force after earning two-year degrees or certificates, and whose only exposure to the liberal arts occurred in whatever core courses their programs required. The conclusion becomes obvious: Two-year colleges are among the country's leading providers of liberal-arts education, although they seldom get credit for that role.
  • Employers rank communication and analytical skills among the most important attributes they seek in new hires, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Perhaps those of us who teach those very skills at community colleges should embrace the integral role we play in preparing the nation's workers rather than rejecting the idea of work-force development as somehow beneath us.
  • More important, this new perspective could have a positive effect on student success. If we come to see ourselves as preparing students not just for transfer but ultimately for the work force, students may be more likely to understand the relevance of the skills that we teach them and better able to use those skills for some purpose other than just getting a passing grade.
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  • Require lots of writing. As the management guru Peter Drucker argued, communication is the one skill required of all professionals, regardless of field. "As soon as you take one step up the career ladder," he said, "your effectiveness depends on your ability to communicate your thoughts in writing and in speaking."
  • Clearly, one of the best things we can do for students is to require them to write—a lot.
  • Focus on critical thinking. A common complaint of employers, as reflected in the NACE survey, is that many workers have difficulty thinking for themselves. They may be thoroughly trained, having mastered all of the concepts in the textbooks, but, inevitably, situations arise that weren't covered in the books. When that happens, the ability to think critically, independently, and creatively becomes indispensable.
  • Bring the real world into the classroom. Another strategy we can adopt, if we want our courses to be more relevant, is to make our class discussions, case studies, experiments, and assignments as real-world-based as possible. For example, in my composition courses, I not only allow students to choose their own essay topics, but I also encourage them to write about issues related to their prospective majors. I also assign reading (in addition to the old textbook standbys) from newspapers, popular magazines, even the Internet.
  • Make the connection. Take advantage of every opportunity to connect what students are doing in class with what they will be doing some day as employees. My students hear the term "the real world" so much that, by the middle of the term, they're starting to roll their eyes. But it's important for them to understand that the work we're doing now in class isn't just a series of meaningless exercises, another set of hoops for them to jump through on their way to a degree. They're going to have to do these things for real one day—describe processes, do research to find solutions, draw comparisons—and my course may be the last time anyone ever actually teaches them how.
Jeff Andersen

Attention, college shoppers. These schools are slashing their prices. - The Washington ... - 15 views

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    As soaring tuition scares off many families, a growing number of private colleges have embraced a marketing tactic associated more with selling airline tickets or flat-screen televisions than higher education: a price cut. St. John's College slashed tuition from $52,734 in this school year to $35,000 in the next.
Randolph Hollingsworth

Career and Technical Education: Five Ways That Pay Along the Way to the B.A. - 1 views

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    New report from Center on Education and the Workforce, Georgetown University, September 2012, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera, Andrew R. Hanson - Daniela Fairchild of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute writes in The Education Gadfly Weekly: "At 31 percent, the United States currently ranks second among OECD nations-behind Norway-for the percentage of its workforce with a four-year college education. That's the good news. The bad news is that we rank sixteenth for the percentage of our workforce with a sub-baccalaureate education (think: postsecondary and industry-based certificates, associate's degrees). Yet a swath of jobs in America calls for just that sort of preparation, which often begins in high school. Dubbed "middle jobs" in this report by the Center on Education and the Workforce, these employment opportunities pay at least $35,000 a year and are divided among white- and blue-collar work. Yet they are largely ignored in our era of "college for all." In two parts, this report delineates five major categories of career and technical education (CTE), then lists specific occupations that require this type of education. It's full of facts and figures and an excellent resource for those looking to expand rigorous CTE in the U.S. Most importantly, it presents this imperative: Collect data on students who emerge from these programs. By tracking their job placements and wage earnings, we can begin to rate CTE programs, shutter those that are ineffective, and scale up those that are successful. If CTE is ever to gain traction in the U.S.-and shed the stigma of being low-level voc-tech education for kids who can't quite make it academically-this will be a necessary first step."
Jon Dorbolo

The World's Richest College Dropout Urges Colleges to Stop Dropouts - Jordan Weissmann ... - 22 views

  • Gates sees this problem largely as a matter of incentives. Publications such as U.S. News and World Report reward colleges for the resources they spend on students and their exclusivity, but not necessarily for their results. High SAT scores will move a colleges up in the rankings (and so, it should be noted, will having a high graduation rate). Making sure your alums have a well-paid job, or a job at all, will not. To begin fixing this problem, we need need flip U.S. News' logic, Gates said, and reward schools that "take people with the low SAT and actually educate them well."  
    • Jon Dorbolo
       
      Taking in less qualified students in order to bring them up to speed is part of the the Land Grant University mission. Sal Khan (Khan Academy) recently observed that for students who take longer to master fundamental math skills, once they do so they accelerate faster such that they catch up to those who are ahead. Ubiquitous learning is species survival.
Tracy Tuten

The Irascible Professor on "The SAT that isn't (the death of aptitude.)" - 2 views

  • It used to be that the SAT was distinguished from its competitor the ACT by the fact that the former was seen as measuring aptitude and being effectively un-coachable, while the latter was a gauge of achievement in learning.
  • At the risk of sounding pejorative, I'd say that I was expecting the test to be a measure of who I was, while some of my fellow students and their parents treated it more as a test of how they could present themselves to admissions officers.  And while I wouldn't suggest that people tend to think of it in these terms, I believe that the latter perception relies on the academically damaging belief that an individual student's capabilities need not matter to what goals he sets for himself.  That perception leads people to believe that there is something inherently unfair about a test that you can't study for.
  • And if after four years of high school they haven't developed much skill for reasoning, that's okay – they can take preparatory courses to learn how to fake it for an exam, and let that be their stepping stone toward academic accomplishment.  As a society that values the promise of formal education more than the satisfaction of actual learning, we have precipitated the death of aptitude.  We are afraid to acknowledge that it exists, because aptitude, whether the product of inborn talent or effective rearing, makes some people better suited than others for certain goals.
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  • Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.  As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."  To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.  Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.
  • But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.  College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.  The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.  By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.
  • We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.  Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.  But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.
  • We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.  It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.
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    An essay on what the SAT says about society's view of education, accomplishments, aptitude, and self-esteem. 
Bill Graziadei, Ph.D. (aka Dr. G)

Imagining College Without Grades :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for N... - 1 views

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    Inside Higher Ed offers free online news and job information for college and university faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and administrators, higher education jobs, faculty jobs, college jobs and university jobs
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