= Premium Content

  • Monday, May 28, 2012

Previous

Next

The End of Admissions as We Know It?

August 29, 2011, 1:13 pm

By Eric Hoover

The college admissions process is laden with long-held rituals that go a long way in determining who gets in and who doesn’t, not to mention which students even apply to particular colleges in the first place. Today, Washington Monthly published an intriguing article by Kevin Carey, who suggests that the times they are a-changin’—fast—in the realm of student recruitment.

The reason? Technology, of course.

Mr. Carey, policy director of Education Sector, writes that “the market for matching colleges and students is about to undergo a wholesale transformation to electronic form.” He describes the growth of a Boston-based company called ConnectEDU, which is building a vast online database of information that, its creator believes, will change the way many students and colleges find one another, democratizing an inefficient process that favors the affluent and the savvy.

Will the predictions described in this article come to pass? Will colleges, elite or otherwise, start enrolling different types of students just because they have access to an ever-growing number of tools (ConnectEDU is but one) with which to find applicants? Will the college application as we know it really cease to exist?

I’m not sure, but Mr. Carey (who writes for The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog) has woven together some fascinating details in a piece that has a great deal of the two things that mainstream articles about admissions often lack: depth and context.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

  • Print
  • Comment
  • marktropolis

    I, too, applaud Lumina on it’s moves towards transparency – including their very public goal of 60% by 2025, and holding themselves accountable for reaching that goal. But I’d add that the final proof (for me at least) is how these findings will be used to inform future funding strategies. My read is that Lumina is moving more into the realm of policy and advocacy, and moving away from supporting program. Which is problematic for me – especially since Lumina is the largest funder focusing exclusively on college access and success. Also, it would help if their support moved down from higher ed into K-12 reform – which is a key component of the “access” part of the equation.

  • chgoodrich

    A sidelight: when I read arguments / commentary / explanations from academics that vibrate with condescension and name-calling — often the case, and effects notably absent in both Haidt’s and Wood’s articles — I find it hard to take the writer / argument seriously, even if they’re logically spot-on (or close to). A good argument, and yes, even “the truth,” can benefit from artistry and emotion, sure…but those based on demonizing the other side — oh, right, we call that “delegitimizing” now, yes? — undercut themselves. A race is honestly run by being quick and skilled, not by tripping up the competition, throwing elbows, yanking jerseys….

  • chuckkle

    nathanielcampbell

    Yes, I have met, and worked alongside, conservatives in academe and have throughout my career. Thanks for elaborating your own understanding of how you accept (and live) the label. Part of my point was that Wood uses the term conservative here in such a vague way to gain rhetorical high ground while ignoring a finer degree of analysis and differentiation about how we define “conservative.” (Also, he has in recent blogs dismissed gay civil rights issues and stood in support of Glenn Beck’s attacks on Frances Fox Piven while ignoring that those attacks have lead to death threats to Piven.)
    Chuck Kleinhans

  • http://www.amazon.com/Debating-Holocaust-Look-Both-Sides/dp/1591480051/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_2 Michael Santomauro

    More on Jonathan Haidt’s Tribal Moral Communities with VIDEO:

    Excerpt:

    This doubtless relates to ethnic networking among Jews. How does Jewish ethnic networking operate at the psychological level…MORE:

    http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/02/more-on-jonathan-haidts-tribal-moral-communities/#more-6674

  • Dr_Zachary_Smith

    I have no doubt that both “right” and “left” in and out of academe have aspects of the “tribal-moral community.”

    Which one has a greater tendency not to question sacred tenets? (Heck, which one freely admits to hewing to sacred, unquestionable tenets?) Which one is more rigid, more ideological, less likely to skepticism?

    These are not difficult questions to answer, although the answers may be uncomfortable for the NAS.

  • 11121641

    A dear friend of mine, one of the first people I knew to die of AIDS back in the early 1980s, had a PhD from Harvard in Classics. He was a Latin scholar. His day job was as a self-employed bookkeeper, skills he picked up in a community college setting when his Harvard PhD proved worthless on the job market.

  • kathleenchgriffin

    It is not at all clear what your discipline is, but in freshman and sophomore composition I can’t let students just write happily about themselves. There are standards to meet in objective, analytical writing if they are to succeed in all their other classes. I can leave the floor open for questions and remarks; break up the class into lively seqments; use Internet and films for everything from costume of a period to dramatizations, essay outlines, and group reading on-screen. But I have to focus all this on teach them the tools of composition. They’re not in high school anymore, and I can’t treat them as such.

    I completed my own BA as an adult with a full-time job, FT night and weekend classes, and unexpectedly over half a dozen student activities from literary magazine to honor societies. I profoundly sympathize with my students, and I’m flexible about deadlines. I have a portfolio with revisions, and a reading journal to pre-write essays, rather than pop quizzes, midterms or finals. Students tell me they feel more confident; I see a greatly increased comfort level in writing.

  • elfnes2

    I wonder what you really think . . .?

  • evaegronpolak

    Thanks first to Francisco Marmolejo for getting the news out about the new IAU Ad hoc Expert Group which is already engaged in a dynamic debate.  I would go one step further than the question posed by Francisco ‘are we prepared for the changes in internationalization? I would add several others, such as; given the fact that internationalization is becoming so pervasive, how do we prepare the future of this process? If it is an means to an end, how do we ensure that it serves to reach the ends we want it to reach? Can we reach an agreement, at the international level, on what these ends should be since the goals pursued are multiple?
    I will be reading the comments to this blog entry with interest and thanks to all who contribute.

  • http://twitter.com/ftherin Francois Therin

    Could you tell us more ? What are you suggesting to enhance/change the current practices ?

  • http://twitter.com/MeritocracyMan Meritocracy Man

    I am a huge proponent of internationalizing curricula with dual degrees from branch campuses across the globe. The Haas School of Business in Berkeley, California and Columbia University in New York City already offer one of the most prestigious joint-MBA programs in the U.S. I foresee similar cooperation in the future between institutions of higher-education on a global scale. It will add significantly more value to study abroad programs worldwide. To many American students, a semester abroad is an extended vacation. But if we change the expectations of such a shared experience, demanding more from our students than a few months of pass-fail grades, then everyone involved will gain more from the experience. Rather than being a student of the University of Texas who spent a semester abroad at the University College London, why not be a dual student of both universities, spending nearly equal time on both campuses, immersed in both cultures?

    In the first paragraph above, you mention “brain drain” versus “brain circulation.” Will you please elaborate on this comparison?

  • ketoril

    Comment from Finland,

    It is interesting to follow discussion of the international activities. It is important that students meet new cultures during their studies. It means that they must also studu othet languages than English to be able understand other cultures. Is small countries like in Finland it is a must to study many  foreign languages.  And for US students and professors it is very important to go abroad not teach their own culture but to leran other cultures top be able to understand the world. When double degrees are planned there is a possibilty to take new components to the curriculum. That is real international cooperation. One element of learning other cultures is to live among normal people not live in separate campus area where you meet only academic groups.         

  • 11302531

    When I first saw this article, I was puzzled.  Then it made me recall a discussion about another field some 20 years ago.  Among organization development practitioners, there was the same question asked.  Do you study org development for its own sake, or in the context of creating more effective change processes for other purposes, like improving R&D, or doing better implementation of IT systems.  I think the answer is ‘both’.  And, it asks those of us committed to internationalization of higher education to consider the educational purposes:  cross-cultural competence?  developing global thinkers?  “simply” developing critical thinkers?  empathy?  equipping everyone and anyone to live a rich life in a world that is inextricably and wonderfully tightly connected?  Or, assuring that our engineers and physicians can appreciate and function in culturally different settings, effectively?  So if a college or university pursues an internationalization strategy, then that institution should have some sense of the purposes the strategy is designed to serve. Otherwise, how else to select sensibly from among the many program options those which is makes most sense support, grow and fund, at one particular institution?

  • hodgefam

    This blog post on higher-education internationalization motivated me to do some further reading on the Web. Interestingly, I came across the 2003 IAU Survey Report on the internationalization of higher education (http://www.unesco.org/iau/internationalization/pdf/Internationalisation-en.pdf). I noted that among the IAU members who responded (176 IAU member HEIs out of 621), the top six reasons for internalization focused on academics: student mobility, teaching and research collaboration, improvement of academic quality, curriculum development, etc. Reasons for internationalization that focused on political, economic, and social/cultural issues were in the bottom six. As mentioned in the report, I suspect that if national leaders were surveyed they would consider the political, economic, and social benefits of internationalization to be more important.
    “Brain drain” was the most frequently mentioned downside of internationalization in the IAU survey. To combat brain drain, are there countries that fund the international education of their citizens in exchange for a commitment to return home for a certain number of years?

  • jcmarsh106

    A good way for the United States higher education system to prepare for “internationalization” is to have a better world view of the importance of education especially at the college and university levels. Every country is not as fortunate to have in place an educational system that is available in the United States. Higher education should never be taken for granted.   

  • pgteach

    The internationalization of higher education should not be focused only on the academic factors of educating international students, but on the financial stability and income components. The influx of international students is nothing new and has been part of the United States educational system for as long as our founding fathers were building our nation. International students are rich sources for money, ideas, bridging cultural differences, and exposure to other cultures. Before we begin to develop an international curriculum, should we not first develop a national curriculum for students? 

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.