Education News
Bad news for Harvard, first because students are increasingly choosing big Southern colleges for the parties and less complicated politics. From the Wall Street Journal:
Students say they are searching for the fun and school spirit emanating from the South on their social-media feeds. Their parents cite lower tuition and less debt, and warmer weather. College counselors also say many teens are eager to trade the political polarization ripping apart campuses in New England and New York for the sense of community epitomized by the South’s football Saturdays. Promising job prospects after graduation can sweeten the pot.
In 2017, my son was only the second student from his high school to ever apply to the University of Tennessee. It was his first acceptance, which he didn’t care about because it was his safety school. He wouldn’t have been accepted this year, because it’s now super competitive.
And students that do go to Harvard are just as illiterate as other college students.
Great article in the Atlantic about the poor reading skills of colleges students. “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”
I love Alexander Russo’s feature on Alec MacGillis and his great coverage of education policy. He was the first guy in the mainstream press, who covered the problems with school closures.
States are whitewashing the permanent education loss caused by Covid school closures. State education departments are just making the standardized tests easier. That sounds like a great idea.
Read more at Apt. 11D, the newsletter
Apt. 11d 
This is interesting–for years, studies show that 75% of college students attend a school 500 miles or less from home, and 75% attend a public institution. I wonder if this WSJ phenomenon is, like a lot of NYTimes education reporting, focused on what their readers or reporters are experiencing, and not a real trend?
That said, the shift to Southern colleges is not new–part of the positive reception of the book identifying the “public Ivies” 20 years ago pointed this out, and some credit it with the boom in southern college enrollment overall. It is also part of the general shift in population away from northern states to southern ones. I wonder, however, as so-called red states like Florida interfere with college curricula in ways that promote their own political biases will cause some students to reconsider moving in that direction. Some have also argued that the various restrictions on reproductive health in those states will also depress attendance. And then there’s hurricanes….
One other point–how many parents, in a time of high college costs, are willing to indulge their children’s desires to party at their expense? And how many will flunk out? About 25% of our community college enrollment comes from what we call “reverse transfers,” students who went to University of Missouri or another Missouri school and left because it didn’t work out.
I should mention I went to college in Virginia over 50 years ago–I was living in the Philippines at the time and was otherwise an in-state California resident–I could have gone to a Cal State college for free, or to one of the University of California campuses for $500 a year flat tuition. But there weren’t any military colleges there. I was lucky enough to get an ROTC scholarship to pay my way.
LikeLike
Here’s a good post by one of the interviewees for that Atlantic article, titled “The Atlantic Did Me Dirty,” suggesting that the author went in wanting to demonstrate something and was uninterested in hearing anything that challenged that:
https://cmsthomas.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-did-me-dirty?r=7krj4&fbclid=IwY2xjawF05HNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbqVPTTQrcWXUnvcmtAO32Fzaz1VXmUwp_uGaxkl8WM1Vlb8guxyLghoxw_aem_sVSOS7OrKJ37zXYXVxJMzw&triedRedirect=true
My experience is different but also challenges the Atlantic narrative: at a regional state school no one will ever feature in “hot new colleges for people who dislike Harvard or wasn’t one of the 1700 students worldwide who was admitted this year” I can get my students to read whole books. It takes a long time to find just the right ones, and to set them up to get the most out of them possible. For a scholarly book that’s a challenging read for first-year students, I have a variety of reading quizzes, discussion tactics, and primary source analyses to pull them through it. For books that are more geared to a general audience and a little lightweight academically, I make sure there’s enough information, but that they’re also a really good read. Curriculum development is hard. It is also very school and discipline-specific. These books take time to find, incorporate into your class, and frame with a variety of assignments. But the idea that you *can’t* get students to read books is just bs. (And I know high school teachers do it too.)
Yes, as usual the WSJ, like the NYT, cares only about prospective students who have Ivies on their radar. This is well under 10% of the college-attending population. Maybe 1 in 100 students who attend my college would have even thought of applying to an Ivy or top SLAC. Even the best students would only have considered the state flagship (which is quite good).
(I’m cranky this morning because all of the tedious administrative work I’ve been doing this week has just been undone by a top-down surprise change by the provost. Yay!)
af
LikeLike