Studies suggest public schools do as well, sometimes better, than private

Public schools got some good news this past week in the release of a major statistical study, commissioned by the US Department of Education, that found that public school students performed as well, on average, as students in private schools.
The study is a politically-sensitive one, as drafters of the report have acknowledged, and it was clearly viewed as bad news by the Bush White House, which followed its usual strategy in such cases, by quietly releasing the news without comment or press conference late on a Friday afternoon, when most reporters have left the office for the weekend.

Even so, the newsworthy report did get some media attention, and it was deserved, because it suggests that public schools aren’t doing so badly after all, and are even doing better than some private schools, most notably conservative Christian schools. For the Bush White House and others who support the use of tax dollars to fund private religious schools, the study offers at least a minor setback.

For years, conservatives have railed against “failing” public schools and, especially, teachers’ unions, that they accuse of stifling educational innovation. Conservatives have long pointed to the superior performance of private school students, which is undeniable, as evidence that such schools offer a better approach to education. Those on the other side have long argued that private school students are a self-selected group, one whose parents generally have the means and the interest in education to pay for private schooling. It is no secret that the children of such parents perform better in school, whether in public institutions or private.

The study, which examined test scores for students in fourth and eighth grade, was designed to correct for such self-selection and all of the other demographic differences between students in public and private schools. And when those corrections were made, the differences between public and private school performance all but vanished. The only exceptions were in fourth-grade math, where public school students actually performed better than those in private schools, and in eighth grade reading, where private students performed better. The study also found that students in private Lutheran schools performed above the average, while those in conservative Christian schools performed at the bottom.

The results differed little from another recent study, which found little or no difference in math scores between public and private school students. The findings were also consistent with studies of charter schools, which have been found to provide no detectable difference in academic achievement.

If teachers’ unions were really the problem that conservatives claim, you would expect both private and charter schools to perform better, since most operate outside a union structure and don’t have to meet a number of mandates that regular public schools must. So far, studies have yet to demonstrate that claim.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration took pains to emphasize that studies comparing public and private schools are of little utility and they warned against drawing too many conclusions from the research. But such advice sounds a little ridiculous coming from the administration that ordered the study. It’s probably safe to assume that the White House position would be completely the opposite had the research found that, all things being equal, private schools do a better job.

An administration spokesperson said the study will likely have little impact on policy, which is not surprising coming from a White House that has ignored scientific findings for years. But if education is as important as policymakers across the board like to claim, recent comparisons of public and private schools should at least give everyone pause. Before abandoning a public school system as the dysfunctional institution that conservatives like to claim, perhaps we should know for sure whether anything better actually exists.

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IT back on the MBA agenda

By Della Bradshaw

Published: July 23 2006 17:27 | Last updated: July 23 2006 17:27

When the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 it was not just budding entrepreneurs and investors who had their fingers burnt. Business school professors who had pinned their hopes on teaching e-commerce and information technology courses also felt the pain. These days, though, it would seem that IT is increasingly creeping back on to the agenda in US business schools.

A recent survey by two professors at the Stern School of Business at New York University revealed that 43 out of 45 US business school deans interviewed believed that it was critical for executives of the future to have a clear understanding of how IT affected business and society.

Nearly half the deans interviewed believed IT was central to accelerating globalisation and was a significant contributor to wealth creation, according to Vasant Dhar, professor of information systems, and Arun Sundararajan, assistant professor, the authors of the report.

Some 27 per cent of those questioned believed that investment in IT was critical to the success of organisations and that successful managers needed to be able to make those decisions, while more than one-quarter also believed that being a successful executive depended on the creative use of electronic data

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Leading Medical Research Studies: Percentage Rises, But Still Lags Behind

The number of women with leadership roles in research studies published in major medical journals has increased significantly over the past three decades, but women remain under-represented among medical science investigators. In the July 20 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a group from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reports that, among U.S. physician-researchers leading original studies published in some of the country's most prestigious medical journals, the proportion who are women increased almost fivefold from 1970 to 2004.

"We found that women have come a long way, but that there is still a long path ahead," says Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, lead author of the study and formerly chief resident in the MGH Department of Radiation Oncology. "Although women are now entering the medical profession at the same rate as men, my colleagues and I had a sense that few of the studies and editorials in journals we read were authored by women, which might be discouraging to young women physicians and students. When we realized that no one had looked over time at the percentage of authors who were women, we decided to do it ourselves." Jagsi has now joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School.

The MGH team analyzed the number of women with the key roles of lead or senior author in papers published in six leading U.S. medical journals: NEJM, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Annals of Internal Medicine, Annals of Surgery, Journal of Pediatrics, and Obstetrics and Gynecology. They reviewed all original research reports published in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2004 to determine the gender as well as the academic degrees and institutional affiliations of the lead and senior authors, restricting their analysis to authors holding MD degrees from U.S. institutions. They also reviewed editorials written by invited experts in NEJM and JAMA.
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Googling for a Gig

A recruiter at the Internet company whose name is synonymous with search says that working there isn't the same as surfing there—even if you can do both in flip-flops
With fun perks like free lunches, on-site massage, and weekly roller hockey games, it's no wonder that Google (GOOG ) is high on the list of where college grads want to work. After all, the company was launched from a Stanford University dorm room, and Staffing Programs Director Judy Gilbert says working at Google is still a lot like being at a college campus.
While most of the Internet company's undergraduate hires are in technical fields like software engineering, she says Google is also hiring top-notch candidates for positions in sales and marketing. She spoke with BusinessWeek.com reporter Kerry Miller about what it's really like inside the Googleplex and revealed the one answer students shouldn't give when interviewers ask, "Why are you interested in Google?"
Google ranked No. 2 in this year's Universum Survey of where college grads most want to work and fourth among undergrad business majors (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/4/06, "They Love it Here and Here and Here")
Certainly, we have a very visible brand, as a company as well as an employer, and I think it's very difficult to separate those. But, at the end of the day, we don't know quite what drives it. We're just flattered to be near the top of the list. We like being popular.

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Does Microsoft Campus give good value for money?

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) said on 3 July, 2006 that it has teamed up with management consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) to find out whether colleges and schools are getting the best "value" out of using the dominant educational licensing product, Microsoft Campus.
A spokesperson for Becta said: "Becta has always recognised the importance of ensuring schools and colleges have access to a range of products and services that represent good value for money.
"In areas where a single supplier is dominant, particular vigilance is necessary to guarantee that this happens and that institutions do not find themselves inadvertently locked in to a particular supplier via, for example, a licensing mechanism."
Participating colleges will be asked to complete an online survey, along with a four-hour interview on campus.
The deadline for interested parties is the middle of July and the results of the review will be released in September 2006


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Public schools in India woo British Asian pupils

By Amit Roy

India's top public schools are urging British Asian parents to send them their children if they cannot afford the £20,000 boarding fees in Britain or are not satisfied with local state schools.
One such leading establishment is the Scindia School in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, founded by the local royal family in 1897, whose current headmaster, Nirmal Kumar Tewari, assured prospective parents in Britain: "If you send them here, we can guarantee a good education."
Mr Tewari, 48, who came to the school 26 years ago and now has 600 boys, aged 11 to 18, emphasised: "It's much cheaper here."
While boys from India pay 200,000 rupees a year, the fees for Indians from Britain doubled two years ago to 400,000 rupees a year. "That's still only about £5,000 a year."
He has a clutch of boys from abroad, including two from Britain, but he would like the latter number to grow. He says that with the rigorous academic education they receive, they would sail through their GCSEs and A-Levels, which they can sit at Scindia.
"I send more than 20 to 25 students every year on exchanges to countries outside India," said Mr Tewari, whose school has exchange schemes with, among others, Westminster, Ellesmere College, Woodbridge, Oswestry, Wellington and Eton.


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Universities battling to capture the worldwide market

By Jennifer Sharples

As demand for cross border education continues to grow, successes and failure abound.

Following the 2003 demise of Fathom, an online venture between prestigious British and American universities offering over 2,000 online courses, recently the acclaimed AllLearn e-learning venture between Yale, Stanford and Oxford Universities collapsed.

Founded in 2001, despite offering 110 online courses from three of the world's most prestigious universities to over 10,000 worldwide participants AllLearn failed to attract enough students to make the project viable.

AllLearn's president S. Kristin Kim stated the cost of offering top-quality enrichment courses at affordable prices was unsustainable but added that each university would use the experience gained to improve their own online courses. Indeed, barely pausing for breath, the University of Oxford plans on launching a number of new courses over the next 12 months ranging from statistics for health researchers to northern Renaissance art.

When it comes to success, Britain's flagship of distance learning, the indomitable Open University (OU) continues to blaze a trail.


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Going online for a better life-work balance

By Adrian Barrett

While the full-time, campus-based MBA is still popular, there is a growing recognition that not every student is willing to leave both home and workplace for anything between 12 months and two years.

As a result the distance learning MBA, whereby candidates can either study completely remotely or combine face-to-face tuition with home-based work, has become a tempting option.

According to a recent survey, some 2.35 million Americans are opting for online learning, while on the Pacific Rim the amount spent on online learning is expected to triple by the year 2008.

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MBA Graduates in High Demand

Preparing for the GMAT More Important Than Ever

Job prospects have never looked better for business school graduates. According to new research from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), corporate recruiters plan to hire 18 percent more MBAs this year than in 2005. Moreover, the survey found that the average new MBA’s starting base salary is over $92,000 up 4.2 percent from the $88,626 average in 2005. The average total compensation package for newly minted MBAs has risen to $99,737.

Numbers for the top b-schools look even more promising. Last year, Harvard Business School graduates reported an average total compensation package worth over $174,000, up 11 per cent from 2004. MBAs from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School reported a substantial increase of more than 15 percent, receiving an average of $150,000 and Stanford Business Graduates averaging almost $149,913, up 9.5 percent.

“Everyway you look at it, the market for MBA talent has come back strong,” said David A. Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC. Recruiters have a positive outlook of the economy, and feel it is stronger now than at any other point since the GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey was launched in 2002. Furthermore, two thirds of students surveyed rated their MBA degree as an outstanding or excellent value, proving that most MBA students feel that their investment in business school was worthwhile.

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Anil Agarwal donates $1 billion to set up university

Anil Agarwal, chairman, Vedanta Resources Plc, is keen to establish a world class, multi-disciplinary university in India, with a vision to developing India's education and research infrastructure.

To be established with an endowment of up to $1 billion, Vedanta University will be of the calibre of institutes like Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, a Vedanta media statement said on Thursday.

Based on a 'not-for-profit' philosophy, the university will strive to impart world-class education and drive a cutting-edge research agenda, with an envisaged student population of more than 100,000 in the long term.

The university will also aim to nurture all-round excellence, beyond the academic dimension, to produce tomorrow's Nobel Laureates, Olympic champions and community leaders.


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Differing Standards on Plagiarism

Welcome messages written by presidents, chancellors and deans on university Web pages aren’t generally considered great intellectual works. They aren’t typically controversial, either.
At Southern Illinois University, some passages are being scrutinized by a contingent of young alumni, and current and former faculty members from both the Edwardsville and Carbondale campuses. The informal group, Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at Southern Illinois, is calling on trustees to respond to their allegations that a number of administrators have plagiarized material that appeared on these campus Web sites — and in university addresses......


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10 Ways to Fix College Admissions

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 11, 2006; 9:48 AM

It is mid-July. College campuses thunder with the sound of high school students and their parents touring dorms, questioning admissions officers and sampling cafeteria food before they decide which schools to apply to.

Many people don't think this is fun. Several of them consider the entire admissions process in need of a make-over. I have been collecting the thoughts of such critics. I have added some of my own complaints and have come up with a list of changes. As a reality check, I asked a group of college admissions officers and high school counselors at a Columbus, Ohio, conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling to rate each suggestion for quality (3 is good, 2 is mediocre, 1 is bad) and likelihood (3 is very, 2 is maybe and 1 is no way.) I offer their average ratings at the end of each suggestion Read on

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US schools face stiff competition attracting students

The US may draw the lion's share of the world's 1.9 million international students, but for the past several years the numbers have dropped off slightly as competition in Europe and Asia grows.
Students from India, China, South Korea and Japan make up about 40 percent of foreign students in the US.
Beginning in 1954, international students had started flocking to the US in large numbers, increasing every year from 34,000 to a whopping 586,000 by the 2002-03 school year.
But the trend went down for the first time ever, over the last two years, with a 3.5 percent drop to 565,000 students.
China accounts for about 10 percent of the world's 1.9 million international students, Unesco says, and India for four percent. However, even China has suddenly become a major host country with over 100,000 foreign students.
On the surface, a glitch with visas after the 2001 terror attacks was blamed for the falling number of students.
But the real reason had started by the mid-90s, with the growth of globalisation and the rise of rival English-language schools around the world.
Oddly, American educators do not seem alarmed - in fact, they greet the increased competition as a tribute to their own private-public system of 4,000 colleges and universities, the largest and most diverse system in the world.
"Other countries have been fast figuring out the key to the success of the American system, which is driven by hard budget figures and funded by student fees, corporations, alumni and generous donors - and not the heavy hand of the government," said Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president at the International Institute of Education (IIE), an 87-year-old organisation that administers 200 international study programmes....

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He, Once a She,Offers Own View On Science Spat

Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 10 years ago, describing to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other top institutions his discoveries about nerve cells called glia. As the applause died down, a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, "Ben Barres's work is much better than his sister's."
There was only one problem. Prof. Barres, then as now a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doesn't have a sister in science. The Barbara Barres the man remembered was Ben.....

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The Best Class Money Can Buy

The rise of the "enrollment manager" and the cutthroat quest for competitive advantage. The secret weapon: financial-aid leveraging
I asked Bob Bontrager what he thought about eating other people's lunches.
"I personally prefer kicking their ass," he replied. "It's a zero-sum game. There's a finite number of prospective students out there. Are you going to get them, or is your competitor going to get them? You face the pressure and say, 'That feels burdensome to me; I don't want to deal with that.' Or you say, 'That's a pretty interesting challenge; I'm going to go out there and try to eat their lunch. I'm going to try to kick their ass.' That defines people who are more or less successful and those who stay in the position."
Bontrager, who works at Oregon State University, is the school's head of enrollment management—a relatively new but increasingly essential post in higher education. Three quarters of four-year colleges and universities employ an enrollment manager to oversee admissions and financial aid. The position is standard at private schools, and is spreading quickly across public institutions.
Eating the other guy's lunch is one of several turns of phrase (most involving some sort of predatory snacking) used to evoke the competition for prestige and revenue that has led to the rise of the enrollment manager. If you've snatched up another school's top prospects or leapfrogged it in the U.S. News rankings, you've eaten its lunch.
Over the past twenty years, often under cover of the euphemisms with which the industry abounds, enrollment management has transformed admissions and financial aid, and in some cases the entire mission of a college or a university. At its most advanced it has a hand in every interaction between a student and a school, from the crafting of a school's image all the way through to the student's successful graduation. Any aspect of university life that bears on a school's place in the collegiate pecking order is fair game: academic advising, student services, even the curriculum itself. Borrowing the most sophisticated techniques of business strategy, enrollment managers have installed market-driven competition at the heart of the university.

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Report on the International Competitiveness of UK universities

The future of the UK will be largely determined by the international competitiveness of our multinational businesses. Those that are domiciled in or operating from the UK need outstanding leadership and management and continuous innovation. In a global economy they have to react to the twin forces of advanced global communications and the opening of markets worldwide. Innovation (the successful exploitation of new ideas) has to underpin ever higher value-adding products, services and processes. These businesses look to the best universities for future talent, research and business education to help provide them with a competitive edge. The same is true for the UK. Along with other western countries we cannot compete against the growing power of China and India on the basis of price or on the volume of technical graduates:

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The Washington Monthly College Guide

Other guides ask what colleges can do for you.
We ask what are colleges doing for the country.

This month, U.S. News & World Report releases its annual rankings of colleges. First published in 1983, the guide has become its own mini-event: College presidents, education reporters, alumni, parents, and high school juniors alike all scramble to get their hands on the rankings. Its release is followed by weeks of gloating from the top-ranked schools and grumbling from those schools that dropped a slot (or 14) from the previous year. Inspired by the popularity, other guides—from Princeton Review to Peterson's to Kaplan—have rushed to compete. College rankings are now so influential that universities and higher-education journals hold regular chin-stroking sessions about whether the numbers-game has too much influence over the way schools behave. New York University's Vice President John Beckman sniffed to the Harvard Crimson this spring that the rankings “are a device to sell magazines that feed on an American fixation with lists,” which is precisely what institutions say when they're trying to duck accountability.
There's a good reason for the American fixation with rankings—if done correctly, they can help tell us what's working and what's not. Of course universities ought to be judged. The key is judging the right things.

College rankings or junk science?

By Robert Kuttner

IT'S APPROACHING that season when students and their parents anxiously await college admissions decisions. But increasingly, an equally feverish process is infecting the other side of the transaction and distorting the process of who gets financial aid.

Colleges these days engage in an ever more frantic competition for ''rankings," driven almost entirely by the annual U.S. News & World Report issue on ''America's Best Colleges." U.S. News is so dominant that when a dean boasts that his school is ranked in the top 10, or a president's bonus is based on whether his college makes it into the top 50, they invariably refer to U.S. News.

Massive efforts by admission departments, deans, and college presidents are devoted to gaming the U.S. News ranking system, published every August. This includes everything from manipulating who is considered a part-time student (which raises the reported performance of full-time students) to giving students temporary research jobs in order to raise the placement score reported to U.S. News. But the easiest single way to raise rankings is by enrolling students with ever higher SAT scores.

If the average score of your entering freshman class increases, the U.S. News ranking will probably improve, too. And if your ranking goes up, the presumed prestige of the college will follow. More kids will apply, more applicants will choose your college rather than brand X, and, best of all, more families will pay sticker price....

Will gaining admission to one of the nation's elite colleges guarantee a prosperous future -- or just a mountain of debt?

Every striver mother and father knows the rules when it comes time to shop for a college. These are so deeply embedded in the subconscious of affluent, highly educated parents that their wisdom is rarely questioned.
If your kid is bright enough, you shoot for the Ivies, Stanford or MIT. If those are out of reach, you aim your child at other prestigious private institutions -- Duke, the University of Chicago, Georgetown or some other brand-name, liberal arts college that doesn't let just anybody in the door. If all else fails, you might consider a top-ranked state university, but only as a last resort.
Money should be no object, not when it comes to something as important as your child's education. Paying those tuition bills may sabotage your ability to save for retirement or necessitate a second mortgage on your house. But, in the end, your goal should be to send your kid to the most exclusive, impressive option available. The payoff is obvious: In a society that likes to think of itself as a meritocracy, the Ivies and other selective private schools offer a shortcut to the top. They promise an instant pedigree, future wealth and an opportunity to mix with the country's next generation of movers and shakers.
But what if all those calculations and assumptions are wrong? What if all those Ivy graduates whose parents shelled out $150,000 or even $200,000 for their undergraduate degrees could have done just as well if they'd gone somewhere else? Somewhere much cheaper?
Research implies that is actually the case. According to these recent studies, when you do a cold, hard analysis -- removing family dreams and visions of class rings -- the Ivies and other elite private schools simply aren't worth the money. The answer isn't conclusive, and there are skeptics -- at the Ivies and elsewhere. But at the least, the research should give parents pause and prompt them to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before steering their child to an elite private college.

The Reading Matrix

The Reading Matrix

An International Online Journal is a peer-reviewed professional journal with an editorial board of scholars in the fields of second language acquisition and applied linguistics. The journal seeks to disseminate research to educators around the world. It is interested in exploring issues related to L2 reading, L2 literacy in a broader sense, and other issues related to second language learning and teaching.
The Reading Matrix was created as an interactive journal, not an electronic version of a traditional print publication. The journal is published twice a year exclusively on the World Wide Web. Doing so allows us to reach a broad audience. It also provides a multimedia format more suited to some of our goals as we explore language as it taught and learned in both traditional and hypertextual environments, and it facilitates and encourages dialogue and communication from researchers and educators, offering an international perspective on the issues presented. As an online journal, we are committed to providing a forum for alternative modes of inquiry and viewpoints about the nature of literacy practices of diverse groups of persons around the globe,

Are You Ready to Go Hybrid?

Hybrid education is also a blending process that combines classroom-based education with technologically distributed teaching methods.
Using technology to distribute education includes a number of methods, such as CD-ROM, videotape, satellite and the Internet. These methods are collectively referred to as "distributed" or "distributive" methods. Regardless of the technology involved, the common denominator of distributed methods is that teaching and learning can occur without an instructor and student being together at the same time and place, which is what makes these methods so attractive to EMS administrators, educators and field providers...

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College Student Tracking Assailed

Private colleges yesterday fired a rather noisy shot across the bow of an education proposal aimed at keeping closer tabs on institutions of higher learning through a new national database of student records.
"Is there some reason to reverse three decades of [privacy] policy and go down this Orwellian road?" asked Christopher B. Nelson, the president of St. John's College, during a conference call with reporters to call attention to a new survey on the subject.
The controversial concept of a national student "unit" tracking system has been floating around for about two years. It was given a boost last month when Education Secretary Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a draft report endorsing such a

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At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust

Nearing graduation, Rick Kohn is not putting much energy into his final courses.
"I take the path of least resistance," said Mr. Kohn, who works 25 hours a week to put himself through the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "This summer, I looked for the four easiest courses I could take that would let me graduate in August."
It is not that Mr. Kohn, 24, is indifferent to education. He is excited about economics and hopes to get his master's in the field. But the other classes, he said, just do not seem worth the effort.

"What's the difference between an A and a B?" he asks. "Either way, you go on to the next class."

He does not see his female classmates sharing that attitude. Women work harder in school, Mr. Kohn believes. "The girls care more about their G.P.A. and the way they look on paper," he said.

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How profits, research mix at Stanford

The proliferation of ties between medical companies and Stanford University School of Medicine has enriched the school and fattened the personal bank accounts of many of its prestigious faculty members.

Dozens of professors moonlight for medical firms or have founded companies based on their government-funded research.....

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People of Indian Origin university awaiting cabinet nod
A proposal for a university exclusively for non-resident Indians (NRIs) and people of Indian origin (PIOs) is ready and awaiting the crucial nod of the Indian Cabinet.
Disclosing this at the first ever International Gujarati Convention hosted by the Gujarati Association of North America (GANA) in New Jersey, Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs Vayalar Ravi said the endeavour would be a joint venture between the Indian government and the Indian diaspora spread across the world.
Ravi, who was the guest of honour at the event held over the last weekend, said modalities relating to admission and other details were being worked out in close coordination with the University Grants Commission (UGC).The Indian diaspora, spread across 110 countries in the world, is 25 million strong.

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The Confusion Over a Little Thing Called Blog

Blogs are one of the current hot topics in educational technology. That will probably change by this time next year, but for now many of us are grappling to understand how reverse chronological reflection journals with feedback can fit into our educational theologies. Even worse – many of us are confused as to just how web logs are so different from online journals or even discussion boards. We understand those two – but what about this new kid on the block? ----

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Race and Class Color the advice given
A new study suggests that race and class have an impact on the advice high school students receive on where to go to college. A Drexel University professor analyzed the responses of more than 1,700 guidance counselors to student profiles with information about academic performance, race, class and other factors. The professor, Frank Linnehan, found that — irrespective of academic performance — counselors were more likely to recommend community colleges to middle-class students than to upper-class students. Another finding: For middle-class students with lower academic performance, the guidance counselors were more likely to recommend that black students attend community college than they recommended that approach to comparable white students. The reverse was true for wealthier students, where white students were more likely to be urged to attend community colleges. The study will be presented in August at the National Academy of Management meeting.

Let the Litigation Begin

A legal team that has won millions of dollars in the past over errors in standardized testing on Friday served notice that it would file a class action suit against the College Board and Pearson Educational Measurement over errors in scoring October’s SAT.
Long-time critics of the SAT said that the lawsuit — and more that are expected to follow — could provide new information about how the SAT is scored, how vulnerable the test may be to errors, and how the College Board manages the process. Officials of the College Board and of Pearson, which handles the scoring, declined to comment, citing policies against talking about litigation. The College Board’s Web site, however, includes a general statement about the scoring errors and efforts to correct them.

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Rich Student, Poor Student

Harvard University has a $25 billion endowment and in
2003-4, only 6 percent of its undergraduates were of
sufficiently modest means to qualify for Pell Grants.
While Pell eligibility varies based on a number of
factors, only 5 percent of Harvard undergraduates that
year came from families with incomes less than $30,000.
At Trinity University, in Washington, there’s a lot
less money in the bank — but a much larger share of
students are getting Pell Grants. The endowment is
about $9 million. In 2003-4, fully half
of Trinity’s students were poor enough for Pell
Grants, and 26 percent came from families with incomes
less than $30,000.
If the comparison makes anyone in Cambridge squeamish (or just has someone objecting to the comparison’s fairness), that’s precisely the point of a new Web site, Economic Diversity of Colleges, which is being unveiled today. The Web site features data from about 3,000 colleges — taken from reports that the institutions file with federal agencies. Tools on the Web site allow users to browse institutions or to set up groups — by geography or institution type, for example — for comparison purposes.

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Access to the Most Selective Private Colleges by High-Ability, Low-Income Students:Are they out there?

Gordon C. Winston Catharine B. Hill2Williams College

The growing concern about access to highly selective colleges
and universities was heightened by a soon-to-be-published study
of 28 of the most selective private schools in the US – “the COFHE schools”-
that showed that only 10% of their students come from the bottom 40%
of the US family income distribution (Hill-Winston-Boyd, 2005).
While few might have expected that the students at these demanding
schools would have been drawn equally from across national family
incomes, the 10%/40% ratio surely demands a better understanding.
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Learning From the Pros

Learning From the Pros

Every other Tuesday afternoon, from 2:30 to 3:30, Camilla Sanders-Avery's students at Carver High School, in Birmingham, Alabama, have a videoconference with some of the most successful animators in Hollywood.
The students display their animation projects and get immediate feedback from the experts. No sugarcoating here: "They tell you exactly what your work needs," says senior Eric Gates. "They don't hold anything back." The frank critiques can initially rattle kids accustomed to handing in assignments, getting a grade, and moving on. But many students rise to the challenge. Soon, they're revising their illustrations, storyboards, and film clips, laboring mightily to show the pros, and perhaps themselves, what they're capable of achieving.

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Encourage Distance Education says Commission for Higher Education:

We recommend that America's colleges and universities embrace a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement by developing new pedagogies, curricula, and technologiesto improve learning...Do more to support and harness the power of distance learning to meet educational needs of rural students, adult learners and workforce development.

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The Future of Higher Education

It is time to be frank. Among the vast and varied institutions that make up U.S. higher education, we have found equal parts meritocracy and mediocrity. As Americans, we can take pride in our Nobel Prizes, our scientific breakthroughs, our Rhodes Scholars. But we must not be blind to the less inspiring realities of college life in our nation: • For all the strides we have made toward widespread access to post-secondary education, the complex interplay of poor academic preparation, inadequate information, and lingering financial barriers means that that too few of those who could benefit from college actually attend. • Among high school graduates who do make it on to post-secondary education, a troubling number of undergraduates waste time – and taxpayer dollars – mastering English and math skills that they should have learned in high school. • Rising costs, combined with a confusing, inadequate financial aid system, leave some students struggling to pay for education that, paradoxically, is of uneven and at times dubious quality.
Excerpt from The Commision of Higher Education Report

Higher education: Priced out of reach?
By Holly Hubbard Preston International Herald Tribune

Talk about the real world. U.S. university graduates enter the job market with new degrees, all the confidence of youth and student loan debts averaging $19,200 - a 58 percent inflation- adjusted increase from ten years ago, according to figures compiled by the State Public Interest Research Group, a Washington-based independent research organization.

Most university graduates outside the United States have nothing of the financial burden of their American counterparts - yet. But countries around the globe, from Britain to Kenya to New Zealand to Mexico, are embracing what academics call "cost sharing" or "revenue diversification" to shift education finance away from government. That means more students and their parents are assuming more of the cost of higher education - and that is leading economists and educators to wonder about the long-term effects on personal wealth and advancement.

Canada-Tuition fees: The higher cost of higher education
For many post-secondary students, the rising cost of tuition tops their list of grievances. And it's not hard to see why. In the early 1990s, average tuition fees were rising by more than 15 per cent a year at Canada's universities. While the rate of fee hikes slowed later in the decade and into the new millennium, the increases still tended to far outstrip the rate of inflation. Broadly speaking, tuition fees have tripled since 1990-91

Education at a Glance
The 2004 edition of the publication Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries' performance. It provides a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on the performance of education systems that represent the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.

Illiteracy:Canada's shame
Conclusion of a recent study published in The National | May 24, 2006

Nearly 15 per cent of Canadians can't understand the writing on simple medicine labels such as on an Aspirin bottle, a failing that could seriously limit the ability of a parent, for example, to determine the dangers for a child.
An additional 27 per cent can't figure out simple information like the warnings on a hazardous materials sheet, the kinds of warning that set out workplace dangers such as risks to the eyes and skin.
In total, 42 per cent of Canadians are semi-illiterate. The proportion is even worse for those in middle age. And even when new immigrants are excluded, the numbers remains pretty much the same.
But what's worse is that for the past 15 years there's been scarcely any improvement.

Calculating College Costs
from Forbes.com

A little-noted draft report from the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education concludes, “The nation’s system of higher-education finance is increasingly dysfunctional, inefficient and inadequate.”

Few Rules Protect Young Foreign Students in U.S.

Every year, tens of thousands of teenagers from around the globe come to the United States to live and learn. Most go home with positive memories of America...

A Third of U.S. Dropouts Never Reach 10th Grade
A recent article in NY Times gives a disappointed outlook about American education.
More than a third of high school dropouts across the nation leave school without ever going beyond the ninth grade.