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In recognition of the death of Senator Claiborne Pell, the Obama transition website change.gov is hosting a discussion of the cost of attending college.
At this writing, the thread stands at 254 posts.
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.
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.
The Rutgers Daily Targum may take a financial hit soon, if the university enacts a student senate proposal to allow students to opt out of paying the fee that funds it.
The Targum is independent of the university and the student government, but receives about a third of its funding from a $9.75 per student per semester designated fee. Currently, students can request a refund of the newspaper fee at the end of the semester, but the student senate proposal would allow them to opt out in advance by checking a box when they pay their tuition bill.
The newspaper’s editor says that about one half of one percent of students currently opt out, and that if the check-box system caused that figure to rise as high as ten percent, the paper would likely be forced to eliminate one edition per week, ending its run as a daily newspaper.
The Targum is one of two organizations on the Rutgers campus funded through such a designated fee. The other, the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group (NJPIRG), already has an opt-out check-box provision.
Rutgers’ president is expected to make a decision after the end of the semester.
Two sociologists at the City University of New York have received a prestigious and lucrative award for their research into the effects of open admissions on students and colleges.
The professors, Paul Attewell and David Lavin, have been awarded the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education, which comes with a $200,000 prize.
Their research, a study of two thousand women students admitted to CUNY under open admissions in the 1970s, found that more than two-thirds had graduated, and that their time in college had improved their annual earnings by $5000 to $10000 a year. It also found that the women’s children were better educated than the children of similar women who had not attended college.
They presented their research in a 2007 book, Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?
studentactivism.net 
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