The University of Texas admits almost all students under the top 10% of the class for each high school criteria. UT is struggling with equity and quality issues in applying the top 10%, UT is considering eliminating grades in music, career education, and many electives from the class rank calculation, but faces resistance from these subject matter lobbies. Wealthy suburban schools claim their top 10% is much harder than the average school to attain, so UT should admit the top 15% from some schools.
UT does not know how to consider what content is in courses at different high schools and relies on similar course labels, But UT is carefully tracking the college success of students from various types of high schools.
Class rank admissions is a continual trade off among conflicting objectives, and no policy will satisfy everyone.

Labels: College Admissions, college sucess

The New York Times on page a-13 carried a good article on the new report advocating less reliance on SAT for admissions at the annual convention of college admissions officers. The report drafted by the Harvard admissions director said SAT is "incredibly imprecise" and favored students who can afford intensive SAT prep. Most of these charges are not new, but what caught my eye was the support for more college tests based on the high school curriculum. This suggests more k-16 talks and negotiations concerning course content alignment that is badly needed. For example,ACT and SAT1 are not as well aligned as the New York Regents tests are to NY courses like biology and history. But how to handle huge interstate k-12 differences in testing and state content standards will be very dificult.
Are we headed towards top down college advocacy for more uniform national standards?

Labels: College Admissions

Last blog I wrote about the new study of high school grads in 2015 featuring the declining states. But there are some states with huge growth where college space will get tight or nonexistent. For examle Arizona growth is projceted to be 50% between 2005 and 2015! Some other states are Fla 22%, Ga 23%, Nevada 49%, NC 20%, Texas and Tenn 21%.
Many of these states barely have capacity for exisitng students-eg AZ, NV, and FLa. In Arizona the only four year public school in the Tuscon metro area is the University of Arizona which is bulging. Fla has communuty colleges converting to 4 years degrees, and has many geographical dense areas with no four year capacity.
Increasingly public college opportunity will depend on where you live.-see- http:/www.wiche.org for the projections. And even better high school preparation will be required to get admitted.

Labels: academic preparation, College Admissions

Largely due to data limitations, higher education research has focused chiefly on income and less on other socioeconomic proxies, with the specific role of wealth largely left unexplored. Wealth and income are markedly different. Wealth measures the total supply of financial resources available to a family, whereas income only measures the current stream of cash payments. As such, wealth better measures the financial well-being of families – it “signifies the command over financial resources that a family has accumulated over its lifetime along with those resources that have been inherited across generations”.

Wealth’s inclusion in the analysis of postsecondary access would greatly improve the understanding of the college choice process, just as it has enhanced the understanding of academic achievement, and racial inequalities. Research in these areas indicates that when looking at measures of social equality, disparities in wealth are much greater than disparities in income.

If wealth and income were strongly correlated, income would be an adequate measure of financial well-being, but they are not. When income stemming from assets is not included when measuring income, the correlation is 0.26. Wealth can provide income (and income may eventually build to wealth), but wealth also has other beneficial characteristics that income does not have. Wealth brings stability. It generally does not change drastically over time in the way that income may. It can be passed on from generation to generation. Unlike income, it is not used for daily expenditures; it is used to “create opportunities, secure desired stature and standard of living, or pass class along to one’s children”.

Research indicates that focusing solely on income to measure financial resources ignores the huge gaps in wealth by race. While the income gap between blacks and whites is still very large, the wealth gap is even larger. In 1998, black households earned sixty-two cents for each dollar earned by white households. In comparison, black households held between zero cents to twenty-five cents for each dollar of wealth held by white households.

Not only is the wealth gap between blacks and whites distressing, the proportion of black families that are nearly or totally without financial resources is alarming. Approximately 83% of black households did not have enough net financial assets (measured as assets minus debts and equity accumulated in a home or vehicle) to survive at the poverty line for six months without any income, as compared to only 43% of white households.

More importantly for studying issues of college access, the disparity in wealth between blacks and whites is present for households with children. Nearly twice as many black children as white children (almost 75% of all black children) grow up in households without any net financial assets. Even more striking, nearly 90% of black children are raised in households without the financial resources to support themselves at the poverty line through three months without income – slightly more than half of white children live in households with similarly dire financial situations.

Labels: College Admissions, College Success, income, Student Success, wealth

A significant amount of attention is focused on the role of race in the college choice process, although recent reports have begun to focus on the access problem that exists for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, especially with regards to selective colleges. One report found that only about 10% of students at highly selective colleges came from the lowest 40% of the family income distribution. While race receives most of the public’s attention, we need to focus more on the role of income in who attends college.

Compounding the fact that low-income students have largely been ignored in the college admissions process is that they are the ones that benefit most from attending elite universities. These students benefit personally from higher rates of graduation and higher incomes after graduation, and society benefits from decreased dependence on public services and increased diversity in corporate, political, and military leadership.

Furthermore, most elite universities, while claiming to desire low SES students, have not been giving any them preferences during the admissions process. Findings like these on the effect of family income on college attendance have been remarkable, further highlighting the vast inequalities in higher education, especially at highly selective universities.

Labels: College Admissions, College Success, College Success Studies, ready for college, Student Success, Successful College Student