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Former US Senator Claiborne Pell died on New Year’s Day, at the age of 90.
Pell wrote the laws that created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but as his New York Times obituary noted, he is best known as the father of Pell Grants.
Pell Grants, federal need-based grants to college students, today provide assistance to almost one-third of all those who attend American colleges. Claiborne Pell was the Senate’s greatest champion of the program, and an editorial appreciation of Pell Grants appeared in yesterday’s Times as a tribute to him.
But the Pell Grant program, passed by Congress in the summer of 1972, was not simply the product of Pell’s vision. It was also the first great victory in the American student movement of the 1970s.
On June 30, 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing the vote to Americans between the ages of 18 and 20. With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.
A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed, professionally-staffed student lobbying organization.
Created by students in the service of the students’ interest, NSL was a milestone in American student history … and the passage of the Pell Grant program was its biggest priority.
In an effort to cut costs without reducing programs, colleges around the nation are cutting back to four-day class schedules.
Plans for four-day weeks have been announced at colleges in New York, Missouri, Georgia, and other states. The idea is even being considered at a few high schools.
The shift is expected to reduce heating and maintenance costs, and reduce commuting expenses for students, faculty, and staff.
On colleges with large on-campus student populations, a four-day week could make it easier to schedule student events and meetings. On commuter campuses, it could have the reverse effect.
The organization that administers the SATs has announced that going forward students who take the test multiple times will be allowed to send whichever result they choose to colleges, rather than sending all results along as they do now.
The College Board says this new system “allows students to put their best foot forward,” but others are opposed.
To begin with, they say, the “Score Choice program” advantages those students who can afford to take the tests multiple times, allowing them to cherry-pick scores without informing colleges that they are doing so. It also increases the importance of test-prep services to the college admissions process, and enriches the College Board itself by encouraging students to take the test more often.
Further complicating the situation, colleges are not bound to accept the Score Choice program, and some institutions — including Cornell, Penn, Stanford, and USC — have announced that they will continue to require students to submit all their SAT scores as part of their admissions package.
The College Board implemented Score Choice once before, in 1993, but abandoned it in 2002, concluding that it was unfair to low-income students and students of color. But today, as the New York Times puts it, the organization “sees things differently.”
For those interested in more data on this subject, one blog critical of Score Choice has linked to a 2002 study that found a significant skew in the family income of repeat SAT-takers.
Take a look at College Freedom, a blog from John K. Wilson, the author of Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and its Enemies and The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education.
A new survey of nearly four hundred private colleges and universities showed that more than two thirds were “greatly concerned” about enrollment figures for next fall, the New York Times reports.
Across the country, most private institutions are seeing declines in applications relative to last year, though final figures are not yet available. Experts attribute the drop-off to the current financial crisis, among other factors.
Elite privates seem to be immune to the application decline, though they are seeing more requests for financial aid. Administrators at large, mid-ranked schools say they can weather a dip by admitting a slightly higher percentage of applicants.
Even a small decline in enrollment can have a major effect on a college dependent on tuition for its funding, however. At Beloit College in Wisconsin, which has a student body of 1,300 and brings in three-quarters of its revenue from tuition, a decline in the entering class of just 36 students led administrators to announce that they would be reducing about forty staff positions.
studentactivism.net 
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