Understanding the Class of 2015

By Russell Olwell
For most college and university faculty, recruitment and admissions are a black box. We see the students who are admitted and enrolled in our classrooms, we read statistics about those students (GPA, SAT, ACT) but we do not have a lot of contact with the process itself. Outside of major lawsuits or referenda about admissions policies (such as the cases in Michigan, California and Texas) college faculty may not even know how admissions decisions are made, and may find themselves unable to explain the rationale behind them to members of the public.
Whole sections of the admissions and recruitment process might not even be part of the division of academic affairs, but part of an enrollment services division, staffed by people who are experts in marketing, admissions, financial aid and more conversant in “yield management” than in the language of academia. Faculty often talk about admissions, financial aid, and recruiting, but rarely run across or seek out the people responsible, and are not often involved enough in the process to understand it.
Up until a year or two ago, I would count myself in this category. However, last year I received a federal six-year grant to work on a project to help middle school students make a successful transition to college, and I was suddenly in the college admissions and recruitment business (though we sell college, not a college), and I began to better understand what the competitive world of college recruitment is like.
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Understanding and Engaging the International Student

In a session on “Understanding and Engaging the International Student,” representatives from Hobsons, a student recruitment and enrollment management firm, presented data from a 2006 survey of about 28,000 prospective international students worldwide. The survey looks at such questions as why students wish to study abroad, their perceptions of various English-speaking destinations and why some appeal more than others, their expectations, and their key concerns.

The landscape for recruiting and retaining international students is changing, said Line Verbik, research manager at Hobsons. Given changes in student mobility — Verbik pointed to declines in international student enrollment in the United States post September 11 and the slowing of growth in international enrollments in the United Kingdom and Australia in recent years — presenters stressed the need to have greater information about prospective students’ decision-making processes and the factors they consider.

Not surprisingly, the Hobsons survey found commonalities among international students from around the globe, as well as some country-specific distinctions. Among the highlights presented Tuesday, which focused exclusively on the approximately 11,000 survey responders from China, Germany, India, Japan and Nigeria:

When asked their reasons for wanting to study internationally, students across the board emphasized improving their opportunities for careers abroad and gaining experiences and better preparing for future careers in their home countries, as well as a sense that the standard of education is better abroad. But Verbik pointed out that students from countries with developed and less developed economies had different priorities: While students in Germany and Japan were most likely to list gaining new experiences as their top priority, Chinese, Indian and Nigerian students were more likely to stress getting a better education and preparing for their careers.
When it comes to perceptions, international students typically cited the strength of the education system and career preparation as top reasons to study in the United States and United Kingdom. While they mentioned Australia’s academic reputation, they were also more likely to point to other factors drawing them there — among them a more attractive lifestyle and the belief that it’s easier to get a student visa to study down under than in Europe or the United States, Verbik said.
Business and administration programs proved particularly popular with international students across the board. Information technology and engineering were especially popular with Indian and Nigerian students, whereas in Japan, for instance, social studies and art and design were the preferred fields after business.
Frequently cited expectations for education providers across countries included a safe location, responsive staff and good service, good sources of funding, good facilities and a strong institutional reputation for a course of study, although regional variations did persist. (Among them: German and Nigerian students were most likely to cite good facilities as the most important factor, while Chinese students pointed to reputation).
Chinese and Indian students said scholarships were their most important source of funding, while German, Japanese and Nigerian students pointed in greater proportions to relatives. Other popular sources of funding included bank loans (particularly popular in India, Verbik said), grants, sponsorships, savings and part-time work.
Confirming the conventional wisdom that word of mouth matters most, Hobsons found that in every country but Japan, friends were the most valued source of advice. In Japan, the teacher/lecturer was the preferred source (and in Germany, the teacher tied with friends for the top spot). Students returning home with stellar experiences are, Verbik said, “the best ambassadors.”
The cost of living and cost of tuition and fees were the most common barriers expressed in all countries, with concerns about visas cited by a much smaller proportion of students, Verbik said (although Nigerian students were most apt to mention visas as a barrier).
Steve Berridge, director of the international education office at the University of Westminster, in London (which has 6,000 international students), praised the Hobsons survey results for offering valuable information on prospective international students, while emphasizing the difficulty of reading the results in context. He added the caveat that a survey of interest among prospective students may not always signal market demand. For instance, Hobsons found that Nigerian students were far more interested in pursuing undergraduate study abroad. “I know for a fact,” Berridge said, “that Nigeria is a postgraduate market.”

The NAFSA conference, with sessions and plenary addresses on a wide variety of topics involving international students and study abroad, continues through Friday. More than 7,000 participants from 90 countries are expected to attend.

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Top 10 percent college admissions law will stay as is

Web Posted: 05/28/2007 12:48 AM CDT

Polly Ross Hughes and Lisa Sandberg
Express-News

AUSTIN — In a surprise move, the Texas House shot down a bill Sunday night that would have limited automatic admissions at the University of Texas at Austin for students graduating in the top 10 percent of their class.

A cheer went up in the chamber with the final vote, 75-64, against adopting a compromise bill that would have let public universities cap admissions of high-ranking students at 50 percent.

"The top 10 percent (law) has worked well. We should keep it because it says all of our high schools are created equal," said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston.

The Texas Legislature passed the law 10 years ago to encourage racial and ethnic diversity after a court temporarily banned racial preferences in college admissions.

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Stanford U. discovers impostors on campus

2007/5/28
PALO ALTO, California, AP
Days after discovering a woman posing as a student, Stanford University officials have discovered a second impostor who managed to pass herself off as a member of the campus community for months.

Elizabeth Okazaki had made herself at home in Stanford's Variant Physics Laboratory, where she used computers, attended seminars and sometimes spent the night, students told the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Taking Action to Admit

UCLA tweaks its admissions process to stop the black student enrollment decline
By Samantha Levine
Posted 5/27/07
It was a self-described crisis. In the fall of 2006, only 103 black students said they planned to enroll as freshmen at the University of California-Los Angeles. That's the lowest black enrollment in 30 years—just 2 percent of the flagship public university's incoming class of about 4,800 first-year students. "We were devastated, and that was an understatement," says Janina Montero, vice chancellor for student affairs at UCLA.
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Internet-controlled Robots Anyone can Build

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new series of robots that are simple enough for almost anyone to build with off-the-shelf parts, but are sophisticated machines that wirelessly connect to the Internet. The press release says that the robots can take many forms, from a three-wheeled model with a mounted camera to a flower loaded with infrared sensors. They can be easily customized and their ability to wirelessly link to the Internet allows users to control and monitor their robots’ actions from any Internet-connected computer in the world.

The new tools that make this possible are a single piece of hardware and a set of “recipes” that people follow to build their ’bots. Both are part of the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK) developed by Associate Professor of Robotics Illah Nourbakhsh and members of his Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab. Their goal is to make highly capable robots accessible and affordable for college and pre-college students, as well as anyone interested in robots.

At the heart of each TeRK robot is a unique controller called Qwerk that combines a computer with the software and electronics necessary to control the robot’s motors, cameras and other devices. Qwerk, developed by the CREATE Lab and Charmed Labs of Austin, Texas, also connects the robot automatically and wirelessly to the Internet so it can be controlled by any Internet-connected computer. Read On......

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Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance

By LiveScience Staff

A quick look at the lengths of children's index and ring fingers can be used to predict how well students will perform on SATs, new research claims.

Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores.

Scientists have known that different levels of the hormones testosterone and estrogen in the womb account for the different finger lengths, which are a reflection of areas of the brain that are more highly developed than others, said psychologist Mark Brosnan of the University of Bath, who led the study.

Exposure to testosterone in the womb is said to promote development of areas of the brain often associated with spatial and mathematical skills, he said. That hormone makes the ring finger longer. Estrogen exposure does the same for areas of the brain associated with verbal ability and tends to lengthen the index finger relative to the ring finger.

To test the link to children's scores on the College Board's Scholastic Assessment Test (for which the name has changed a number of times in the past 100 years), Brosnan and his colleagues made photocopies of children's palms and measured the length of their index and ring fingers using calipers accurate to 0.01 millimeters. They used the finger-length ratios as a proxy for the levels of testosterone and estrogen exposure.

The researchers then looked at boys' and girls' test performances separately and compared them to finger-length ratio measurements. They found a clear link between high prenatal testosterone exposure, indicated by the longer index finger compared to the ring finger, and higher scores on the math SAT.

Similarly, they found higher literacy SAT scores for the girls among those who had lower prenatal testosterone exposure, as indicated by a shorter ring finger compared with the index finger.

The researchers also compared the finger-lengths ratios to all the children's SAT scores and found that a relatively longer ring finger-indicating greater prenatal exposure to testosterone-meant a wider gap in scores for math versus literacy (writing and critical reading).

"Finger ratio provides us with an interesting insight into our innate abilities in key cognitive areas," Brosnan said, in a prepared statement. The results will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the British Journal of Psychology.

In the future, his team will see if finger-length ratios are related to other cognitive and behavioral issues, such as technophobia, career paths and possibly dyslexia.

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Beyond Research Rankings

Research competitiveness and productivity are complex subjects that should inform the development and oversight of R&D programs at the national, state and institutional levels. From a national policy perspective, studies of our national innovation ecosystem – of the factors that promote discovery and innovation – are important to America’s economic vitality.

Ironically, rather than advance our knowledge and discussion of these important topics, many university presidents seem more inclined to debate the shortcomings of available measures such as the rankings of U.S. News & World Report, sometimes even threatening to boycott the surveys. What is more, these same presidents defend the absence of adequate measurements of institutional performance by saying that the strength of American higher education lies in the diversity of its institutions. So why not develop a framework that characterizes institutional variety and demonstrates productivity understandably, effectively and broadly throughout the spectrum of our institutions?

Of course, it is not easy to characterize the wide range of America’s more than 3,500 colleges and universities. Even among the more limited number of research universities, institutional diversity is so broad that every approach to rank or even classify institutions has been rightly criticized. Most research rankings use only input measures, such as amount of federal funding or total expenditures for research, when funding agencies would be served better by information about outcomes — the research performance of universities.

The Center for Measuring University Performance, founded by John Lombardi, has compiled some of the most comprehensive data on research universities. Its annual studies examine the multi-dimensional aspects of research universities and rank them in groups defined by relative performance on various measurable characteristics — research funding, private giving, faculty awards, doctorate degrees, postdoctoral fellows and measures of undergraduate student quality.

The 2005 report of the Center and a recent column on this site by Lombardi note the upward or downward skewing of expenditure rankings by the mere presence or absence of either a medical or an engineering school, thereby acknowledging the problems of comparability among institutions. Lombardi hints at a much-needed analysis of research competitiveness/strengths and productivity, stating, “Real accountability comes when we develop specific measures to assess the performance of comparable institutions on the same measures.” Read On.....

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Documentation for the Undocumented?

s Marie Nazareth Gonzales puts it, “Life in limbo is no way to live.” A junior at Westminster College in Missouri and a Costa Rican who came to the United States at the age of 5, Gonzales is living here on borrowed time. Her parents were deported in 2005, and her own deportation has now been deferred three times, each deferral good for one year. “Last month, when they gave me until June of 2008, they told me it would be the last renewal. If the DREAM [Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors] Act doesn’t pass by then, I will have to leave,” Gonzales told the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law during a hearing on undocumented student issues Friday morning.
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“My life since April of 2002 can be easily compared to a roller coaster,” Gonzales said. “There have been times when I have felt like I was on top of the world, living out mine and my parents’ dream of being a successful young woman in her college career, only to be brought down by the realization that at any moment it can be taken away.”

The plight of undocumented college students attracted virtually unprecedented attention in Congress last week, when Democratic and Republican Senate leaders, with President Bush’s backing, announced a comprehensive immigration reform package that would include a DREAM Act provision providing a path to permanent residency for college students and military personnel under 30 who came to the country illegally as children. Passage of the Senate plan — already derided as an amnesty bill — is in no way a sure thing. Still, advocates for undocumented students say they have good reason to be hopeful.

“This seems to be the most optimism that we’ve been allowed to have in quite some time, certainly in the seven years that I’ve been working on this issue,” said David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He cited not only the bipartisan Senate plan but also the willingness of the House subcommittee to hold a hearing on undocumented students Friday. That same hearing, Hawkins said, never would have happened even one year ago (when Republicans were in control).

“I don’t want to jinx ourselves, but if you have [the support of] the administration, a bipartisan agreement in the Senate and a committee in the House that seems willing to take this on, in addition to some very compelling testimony from students this morning, I have to feel that the outlook is good, certainly better than it has been in some time,” Hawkins said Friday afternoon. He added that he thinks the Senate plan will spur the House to come up with a package of its own to send to the floor by summer.Read On....

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