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In the next few weeks, I’m going to be cleaning out my bookmark folders from 2008 and passing along some of the news and links that I didn’t get around to posting last year. Starting with this…
Back in December, I mentioned an organization called Choose Responsibility in passing, calling it “a drinking-age reform group that arose out of college administrators’ frustration with the status quo.”
In August, Choose Responsibility unveiled a statement on the drinking age that declared that “Twenty-one is not working.” The statement was signed by more than a hundred college and university presidents, a list that at this writing has grown to 134.
See the full text of the statement after the jump, or click through to The Amethyst Initiative to learn more.
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.
Earlier this fall, Tennessee State University became the first public university to block students’ access to the gossip website Juicy Campus.
Now comes word that Juicy Campus has reached out to the Tennessee chapter of the ACLU for assistance in bringing a lawsuit against TSU. The headline of this article notwithstanding, it does not appear that JC has yet filed suit. But we’re following this story, and we’ll pass on more news as we get it.
In other Juicy Campus news, the student government of Western Illinois University has passed a resolution calling on WIU’s administration to enact its own JC ban, with student government president Robert Dulski organizing for statewide action at a meeting of Illinois state student governments in February.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Miami University’s panhellenic organization asked the state attorney general to take action against JC, while the Miami student newspaper editorialized against such a move.
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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