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Megan Flanagan

Hidden Side of the College Dream: Mediocre Graduation Rates - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “go to college” is such a proven prescription
  • college graduates have lower unemployment rates, earn higher wages and even have longer-lasting marriages
  • 7.2 million students who need federal loans to attend college
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  • Of the 1,027 private colleges studied, 761 have graduation rates of less than 67 percent.
  • the rate is even lower, 46 percent
  • high schools in which more than a third of students do not graduate on time are labeled to receive special attention by federal standards.
  • a college can have a graduation rate as low as 2 percent and still preserve its accreditation
  • “We act as if they’re all the same right now. In K-12 we differentiate.”
  • “Graduation rates are primarily two factors: what the student brings and what the college brings to the experience,”
  • Colleges with lower graduation rates tend to admit a higher percentage of students with Pell grants, which usually go to lower-income students.
  • money is a huge roadblock to graduation.
  • “That is the No. 1 reason our students give when they drop out,”
  • any setback or poor grade can make them question whether they should be in college in the first place
  • colleges are not fulfilling their promise of upward mobility to students, particularly those who are trying to become the first in their families to earn a degree
  • “It’s not that the low-income students are destined to fail,” Mr. Shireman said. “It’s just that they have more challenges, so it takes a lot more resources to ensure that they succeed.”
Emily Freilich

The Danger of Telling Poor Kids That College Is the Key to Social Mobility - Andrew Sim... - 1 views

  • She’d been promised that good grades and a ticket to a good college would lead to a good job, one that would guarantee her financial independence and enable her to give back to those hard-working people who had placed their faith in her.
  • When administrators, counselors, and teachers repeat again and again that a college degree will alleviate economic hardship, they don’t mean to suggest that there is no other point to higher education.
  • educators risk distracting them from the others, emphasizing the value of the fruits of their academic labor and skipping past the importance of the labor itself. The message is that intellectual curiosity plays second fiddle to financial security.
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  • My students are understandably preoccupied with money. They don’t have the privilege to not worry about it.
  • . The irony, though, is that many of these students aspire to go to a liberal-arts school but don’t necessarily understand its significance.
  • School can either perpetuate inequity through social reproduction or have a transformative effect and help students transcend it.
  • schools teaching the children of affluent families prepared those kids to take on leadership roles and nurtured their capacity for confident self-expression and argument.
  • Schools teaching children from low-income families focused on keeping students busy and managing behavior
  • While the vagueness stems from the lack of models in their communities, it also comes from the lack of imagination with which mentors have addressed their professed college plans. Students hear that being a doctor is great because doctors can make money, enjoy respect, and have a great life. They don’t hear that being a doctor is great because doctors possess the expertise to do great things.
  • College should be “sold” to all students as an opportunity to experience an intellectual awakening. All students should learn that privilege is connected to the pursuit of passions.
  • People are privileged to follow their hearts in life, to spend their time crafting an identity instead of simply surviving
dpittenger

Let's Sue Harvard and End Illegal Preferences in College Admission | Steve Ne... - 0 views

  • College admission should be based on merit and merit alone!" say the meritocracy police
  • Those who make these claims are convinced that students with better grades and/or higher SAT scores are inarguably more highly qualified, and that their rejection is thus a deep injustice.
  • measures of only two -- linguistic and logical-mathematical -- of the eight intelligences Gardner has identified.
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  • What would college admission look like if we flipped this whole understanding and placed a premium on empathy or the ability to recognize and create things of great beauty
qkirkpatrick

Jim Harrington: Beware Revising American History Education - The Patriot Post - 0 views

  • The College Board, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1926 to make higher education accessible to more Americans, introduced the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and, after World War II, the advanced placement (AP) test.
  • Students who score three of five points on the AP test are credited with completing a two-semester introductory college course in subjects like English, math and history. But revisions are coming, and they’re not going to result in better education.
  • Periodically, the College Board publishes new frameworks to alert schools to changes in AP tests. The latest American history framework has raised a raging controversy over what should be taught in AP U.S. history classes.
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  • “By obscuring this nation’s founding principles and promise, the College Board’s U.S. history guidelines will erode the next generation’s disposition to preserve what is best in the American political tradition.
  •  
    Using standardized teaching methods in schools and how it is shaping what is taught and how it is taught in schools
dpittenger

Anxious Students Strain College Mental Health Centers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Causes? Schoolwork, they all replied. Money. Relationships. The more they thought about what they had to do, the students said, the more paralyzed they became.
  • Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among
  • college students, though depression, too, is on the rise.
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  • Anxiety has always played a role in the developmental drama of a student’s life, but now more students experience anxiety so intense and overwhelming that they are seeking professional counseling.
  • Because of escalating pressures during high school, he and other experts say, students arrive at college preloaded with stress.
  • Studies have repeatedly emphasized the nexus between mental health and academic success.
Javier E

Today's Exhausted Superkids - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Sleep deprivation is just a part of the craziness, but it’s a perfect shorthand for childhoods bereft of spontaneity, stripped of real play and haunted by the “pressure of perfection,” to quote the headline on a story by Julie Scelfo in The Times this week.
  • In a study in the medical journal Pediatrics this year, about 55 percent of American teenagers from the ages of 14 to 17 reported that they were getting less than seven hours a night, though the National Sleep Foundation counsels 8 to 10.
  • Smartphones and tablets aggravate the problem, keeping kids connected and distracted long after lights out. But in communities where academic expectations run highest, the real culprit is panic: about acing the exam, burnishing the transcript, keeping up with high-achieving peers.
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  • “No one is arguing for a generation of mediocre or underachieving kids — but plenty of people have begun arguing for a redefinition of what it means to achieve at all,” wrote Jeffrey Kluger in Time magazine last week. He noted, rightly, that “somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self-esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos, there has to be a place where kids can breathe.”
Javier E

Anxious Students Strain College Mental Health Centers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. More than half of students visiting campus clinics cite anxiety as a health concern,
  • Nearly one in six college students has been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety within the last 12 months
  • The causes range widely, experts say, from mounting academic pressure at earlier ages to overprotective parents to compulsive engagement with social media.
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  • the consensus among therapists is that treating anxiety has become an enormous challenge for campus mental health centers.
  • More students are seeking help partly because the stigma around mental health issues is lessening
  • Because of escalating pressures during high school, he and other experts say, students arrive at college preloaded with stress. Accustomed to extreme parental oversight, many seem unable to steer themselves. And with parents so accessible, students have had less incentive to develop life skills.
  • Social media is a gnawing, roiling constant. As students see posts about everyone else’s fabulous experiences, the inevitable comparisons erode their self-esteem. The popular term is “FOMO” — fear of missing out.
  • Anxiety is an umbrella term for several disorders, including social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. It can accompany many other diagnoses, such as depression, and it can be persistent and incapacitating.
  • Students who suffer from this acute manifestation can feel their very real struggles are shrugged off, because anxiety has become so ubiquitous, almost a cliché, on campus.
  • More often, anxiety is mild, intermittent or temporary, the manifestation of a student in the grip of a normal developmental issue — learning time management, for example, or how to handle rejection from a sorority.
  • Mild anxiety is often treatable with early, modest interventions. But to care for rising numbers of severely troubled students, many counseling centers have moved to triage protocols.
  • at Penn State, who have tracked campus counseling centers nationwide for six years, have documented a trend that other studies have noted: Students are arriving with ever more severe mental-health issues
  • Half of clients at mental health centers in their most recent report had already had some form of counseling before college. One-third have taken psychiatric medication. One quarter have self-injured.
summertyler

What Makes a Positive College Experience? - 0 views

  • sociologist at Hamilton College
  • believes he knows what most determines how students feel about their time at college
  • dorm design, friends and extracurricular involvement more than what happens in the classroom
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  • What’s the most important element in shaping the college experience?
  • who meets whom, and when
  • So what should students do to get more out of college?
  • As a freshman, live in one of the old-fashioned dorms with the long hallways, multiple roommates and communal bathroom, where you’ll have to bump into a lot of different people every day.
  • In choosing classes, pick the teacher over the topic.
  • Try to get to know a lot of people your first year, when everyone is looking for friends.
  • It helps to join a large high-contact activity, like a sports team or choir
  • it only takes two or three close friends and one or two great professors to have a fulfilling college experience
  • should students take as many small classes as they can get into?
  • Small classes are great. But most colleges also have some wonderful very large classes
  • What should colleges do to make students’ experiences better?
  • things that give the biggest payoff for the least effort
  • What do colleges do that doesn’t improve the experience?
  • Strategic plans.
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    A sociologist believes he knows what determines how students feel about their time at college. Sociology is the study of social problems.
Javier E

Best, Brightest - and Saddest? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Between May 2009 and January 2010, five Palo Alto teenagers ended their lives by stepping in front of trains. And since October of last year, another three Palo Alto teenagers have killed themselves that way, prompting longer hours by more sentries along the tracks. The Palo Alto Weekly refers to the deaths as a “suicide contagion.”
  • the contagion has prompted an emotional debate about the kinds of pressures felt by high school students in epicenters of overachievement.
  • the situation isn’t so different in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where a separate cluster of teen suicides in recent years forced educators and parents to re-examine the messages they give teenagers, intentionally and unintentionally, about what’s expected of them and what’s needed to get ahead in this world.
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  • the number of advanced-placement classes that local students feel compelled to take and the number of hospitalizations for depression rise in tandem.
  • They reflect a status consciousness that bedevils Americans at all income levels, and they underscore an economic trepidation that is sadly widespread and is seemingly intensified by the gaping divide between the haves and have-nots.
  • According to a 2013 survey by the C.D.C., 17 percent of American high school students had considered suicide in the previous year. Eight percent said they’d attempted it.
  • “There’s something about childhood itself in Palo Alto and in communities like Palo Alto that undermines the mental health and wellness of our children,
  • It reflects on the shortfalls of some modern parenting, which, in her view, can be not only overprotective but overbearing, micromanaging the lives of children, pointing them toward specific mile markers of achievement and denying them any time to flail or room to fail. They wind up simultaneously frazzled and fragile
  • “The suicides are tragic, but they are at the pointy head of the pyramid, the tippy top,” she said. “Beneath them is a larger number of kids who are really struggling and beneath them is an even larger number of kids who feel an amount of stress and pressure that they shouldn’t be made to and that’s untenable.”
  • while many Palo Alto parents are “wealthy and secure beyond imagining,” they’re consumed by fear of losing that perch or failing to bequeath it to their kids. “Maintaining and advancing insidiously high educational standards in our children is a way to soothe this anxiety,” he said
  • He recommended lightening children’s schedules, limiting the number of times that they take the SAT, lessening the message that it’s Stanford or bust.
  • “I will never be neutral on this issue,” he wrote. “The ‘Koala Dad’ is the far better parent than the ‘Tiger Mom.’ ”
  • “Want the best for your child, not for your child to be the best.”
Javier E

The Sheltering Campus: Why College Is Not Home - The New York Times - 2 views

  • The college years — a time for important growth in autonomy and the consolidation of adult identity and life goals — have evolved into an extended period of adolescence during which many of today’s students are not saddled with adult responsibilities.
  • For previous generations, college was a decisive break from parental supervision; guidance and support needed to come from peers and from within.
  • In the past two decades, however, continued family contact and dependence, thanks to cellphones, email and social media, has increased significantly — some parents go so far as to help with coursework.
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  • At the same time, the rise in protective committees and procedures (like trigger warnings) ensure that students will not be confronted with course materials that might upset them (even classics like Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”).
  • universities like Yale have given in to the implicit notion that they should provide the equivalent of the home environment.
  • But college is a different kind of community than a family, and its primary job is education of the student and adaptation to independent community living.
  • To prepare for increased autonomy and responsibility, college needs to be a time of exploration and experimentation. This process entails “trying on” new ways of thinking about oneself both intellectually and personally, which is possible only if a certain degree of freedom is allowed.
  • While we should provide “safe spaces” within colleges for marginalized groups, we must also make it safe for all community members to express opinions and challenge majority views. Intellectual growth and flexibility are fostered by rigorous debate and questioning.
  • It is not surprising that young people are prone to lash out, particularly when there are sociologic reasons to do so. Our generation rallied around clear issues: the war in Vietnam and governmentally sanctioned discrimination based on race and gender. ISIS, Newtown, a changing economy with fewer good jobs and stable career paths create anxiety without generating a unifying moral vision
  • The encroachment of behavioral guidelines into the social and even intellectual spheres comes at a cost. Every college discussion about community values, social climate and behavior should also include recognition of the developmental importance of student autonomy and self-regulation, of the necessary tension between safety and self-discovery.
carolinewren

Research finds college placement tests in need of makeover | Education Dive - 1 views

  • majority of colleges in the United States use a single test to determine what courses incoming students are eligible to take
  • placement tests decide whether students are ready for college-level coursework or if they first need to re-take the fundamentals to prepare.
  • these placement tests aren't necessarily good predictors of success in college courses.
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  • researchers are coalescing around the need to rethink the placement process itself.
  • Some are calling for statewide policy changes, others are pushing individual schools or systems to look at their own practices and improve upon them
  • Nearly 70% of community college students are placed into remedial courses each year. Many of these students are from low-income and minority backgrounds, both of which are still highly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, fields
  • recommend colleges incorporate student goals and motivation into their placement decision and acknowledge the realistic math needs of various degree programs.
  • Yet, placement tests are almost universally skewed to measure how well students know algebra.
  • “The way that math placement is done right now hurts a lot of students.”
  • a key recommendation for colleges is to step up professional development with advisors and help them guide students through appropriate course sequences for their end goals
  • In many places the advisor-to-student ratio is too high to allow for proper guidance
  • Placement tests must evaluate the range of skills, however
  • Single standardized tests are easy to administer and cheap to interpret, but they don’t seem to work for placement
cvanderloo

Colleges are eliminating sports teams - and runners and golfers are paying more of a pr... - 0 views

  • Since COVID-19 emerged, dozens of colleges and universities have announced the elimination of different intercollegiate athletics teams.
  • But the majority of closures came at regional and local campuses that participate in the NCAA’s Division II and Division III, or the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Also, around 30 teams were eliminated by community colleges.
  • The 78 schools we examined spend around $87 million a year to keep all those teams going.
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  • Most university administrators don’t expect their athletics programs to make a lot of money. Only about 25 of the 1,100 NCAA member schools’ athletics departments generate a profit.
  • public universities with NCAA Division I football teams received about 6% more in state funding annually than other institutions.
  • Many colleges and universities depend on varsity sports – like rowing, track and swimming – to attract more students to attend.
  • Most students who play college sports – including all of those at Division III and Ivy League programs – are not on an athletic scholarship.
  • Playing sports can also help with the transition into college. An intercollegiate team provides a ready-made social group that can help the new team member adjust to their new school.
  • Research also shows that hiring managers value college sports experience
  • The financial savings for athletics departments are immediate and obvious. But a longer-term impact will be seen on enrollment, campus life and the communities where colleges are located.
cvanderloo

Black students have far less trust in their colleges than other students do - 0 views

  • Black undergraduates consistently said they trusted the people who run the colleges they attend – and society overall – substantially less than their white peers did. We have termed this difference the racial trust gap, and it was not a trivial difference.
  • We came to these conclusions based on our analyses of data collected from 8,351 college students enrolled at 29 U.S. colleges and universities across the country this spring.
    • cvanderloo
       
      shows importance of sample size
  • we can surmise that the lasting effects of historical racism and current issues around race may play a contributing role in the trust dispositions of Black college students.
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  • We’ve yet to fully understand how trust might affect whether or not students finish school.
  • First, how does trust influence important college outcomes like degree completion and learning? Second, what strategies can colleges and universities use to improve trust among their constituents, particularly college students? Third, is there a productive role that higher education institutions can play in encouraging long-term societal trust among students?
cvanderloo

Colleges confront their links to slavery and wrestle with how to atone for past sins - 0 views

  • . Back in 2006, Brown University published a report showing that the university – from its construction to its endowment – participated in and benefited from the slave trade and slavery.
  • The revelation sparked an effort to track down descendants of the people and to atone by offering preferential admission – but not scholarships – for them to study at Georgetown.
  • Many universities benefited from slavery, and there has been a growing discussion about what, if anything, universities owe to the descendants of the people they enslaved and what they can do to atone.
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  • Even after slavery, these schools continued to oppress Black people by not allowing them to enroll as students.
  • Even though the nation’s 100 or so HBCUs represent less than 3% of the nation’s 4,360 colleges and universities, they graduated 13% of Black undergraduate college students nationally in the 2017-2018 school year.
  • The disparities transcend higher education. White families, on average, tend to have 10 times the wealth of Black families.
  • Yet scholars and economists studying racial economic inequality, such as William A. Darity Jr., point to the need for federal action. This action could range from economic reparations and endowment-building at HBCUs to debt forgiveness for Black students.
knudsenlu

Check This Box if You're a Good Person - The New York Times - 0 views

  • When I give college information sessions at high schools, I’m used to being swarmed by students. Usually, as soon as my lecture ends, they run up to hand me their résumés, fighting for my attention so that they can tell me about their internships or summer science programs.
  • The problem is that in a deluge of promising candidates, many remarkable students become indistinguishable from one another, at least on paper. It is incredibly difficult to choose whom to admit. Yet in the chaos of SAT scores, extracurriculars and recommendations, one quality is always irresistible in a candidate: kindness. It’s a trait that would be hard to pinpoint on applications even if colleges asked the right questions. Every so often, though, it can’t help shining through.
  • Over 15 years and 30,000 applications in my admissions career, I had never seen a recommendation from a school custodian. It gave us a window onto a student’s life in the moments when nothing “counted.” That student was admitted by unanimous vote of the admissions committee.
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  • Colleges should foster the growth of individuals who show promise not just in leadership and academics, but also in generosity of spirit
Javier E

A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Use this hiatus to do something you would never have done if this emergency hadn’t hit. When the lockdown lifts, move to another state or country. Take some job that never would have made sense if you were worrying about building a career—bartender, handyman, AmeriCorps volunteer.
  • If you use the next two years as a random hiatus, you may not wind up richer, but you’ll wind up more interesting.
  • The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life.
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  • If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith.
  • The list goes on. If you didn’t read de Tocqueville, you probably don’t understand your own country. If you didn’t study Gibbon, you probably lack the vocabulary to describe the rise and fall of cultures and nations.
  • The wisdom of the ages is your inheritance; it can make your life easier. These resources often fail to get shared because universities are too careerist, or because faculty members are more interested in their academic specialties or politics than in teaching undergraduates, or because of a host of other reasons
  • What are you putting into your mind? Our culture spends a lot less time worrying about this, and when it does, it goes about it all wrong.
  • my worry is that, especially now that you’re out of college, you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain.
  • the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you spend your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff.
  • The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.
  • After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks.
  • I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent.
  • I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.
  • the whole culture is eroding the skill the UCLA scholar Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy,” the ability to deeply engage in a dialectical way with a text or piece of philosophy, literature, or art.
  • “To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape.”
  • I can’t say that to you, because it sounds fussy and elitist and OK Boomer. And if you were in front of me, you’d roll your eyes.
  •  
    Or as the neurologist Richard Cytowic put it to Adam Garfinkle, "To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape."*
karenmcgregor

Mastering Network Security: Your Trusted Network Security Assignment Helper - 2 views

In the rapidly advancing world of technology, mastering network security is pivotal for academic success. Students navigating the complexities of this dynamic field often seek the expertise of a re...

#networksecurityassignmenthelper #assignmenthelpservicesonline #students #college #universityassessment

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