Princeton Review Assesses LGBT Issues By Polling Straight Students

August 14, 2009 in Access, Gender, Media, Sexual Orientation, Students | by | Leave a comment

LGBT/Ally group Campus Pride is warning LGBT students to take Princeton Review’s ratings of gay-friendly campuses with a big grain of salt.

Princeton Review’s guide to The Best 371 Colleges ranks schools on how inclusive and welcoming they are to members of the LGBT community, but it does it on the basis of a single survey question, asking responders whether they agree or disagree with this statement: “Students, faculty, and administrators treat all persons equally regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.”

That’s it. That’s the whole basis for the ranking.

As Campus Pride points out, “the majority of students responding to such a question — irrespective of response — will be straight. Their perceptions of equality are likely quite different from those of LGBT students.” Without knowing what conditions on the campus actually are, or what LGBT students actually think, it’s hard to put much weight on the results of a single survey question.

Campus Pride isn’t quite a disinterested bystander on this issue, since they publish a guide to gay-friendly campuses and maintain a LGBT “campus climate” website. But their point is a good one, anyway. Asking straight students whether a campus is a good environment for LGBT students doesn’t give you much information at all. In fact, it may give you the opposite of the information you need.

If a campus has an active LGBT student community, and a climate of openness to LGBT issues, straight students are likely to know about any difficulties that LGBT students are confronting and reflect that awareness in their answers to the Princeton Review survey. If such a climate doesn’t exist, straight students may assume that there aren’t any problems, since they haven’t heard of any. So a gay-friendly campus could easily rank lower on the Princeton Review ratings than one with a less supportive environment.

PR should really rethink this survey for next year’s edition of their guide.

Why Student Newspapers Need to Publish Online

August 13, 2009 in Administration, Campus Press, Student Power | by | 4 comments

There’s a great article up at the MediaShift blog about student newspapers and online publishing.

According to one recent study, more than a third of college papers are still print-only. The MediaShift post looks at why that is, what the barriers to publishing online are, and why it’s so important to make the effort.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few excerpts:

Make no mistake, college news is a messy business. Students are learning, and their mistakes all too often show up in print. An online presence will broadcast those mistakes to the world, so the theory goes. Also, a college that supports student press freedoms when distributed to 2,000 people on campus might not be so keen to distribute “bad news” about the campus when the whole world is watching.

[But] staying offline is a disservice to student journalists who cannot use the online tools now widespread in the industry. A student who can’t put material online can’t really understand the impact of social networks like Twitter or Facebook to spread news. They can’t really understand what it is to create a personal brand. And they can’t really understand the challenges of multimedia production.

A college that will not allow their student journalists to practice online journalism in a “real world” setting is abandoning its commitment to education in order to save face. And that is a tragedy not only for the college, but for the students who look to higher education to prepare them for the future.

Good stuff. And I’d add that a paper-only student newspaper is going to lose on-campus readership, particularly at a commuter campus, sequester itself from broader regional and national debates, and cut itself and its readership off from its own history.

Keeping a student paper offline isn’t just a disservice to the students who work on the paper, it’s a disservice to students who are doing organizing and activism on the campus as well.

Update: Butch Oxendine makes some excellent points in comments. An excerpt:

[Student newspapers] will maintain their relevance by specifically writing about campus-based issues, problems, and news that no one else is covering and reporting on. They will maintain their relevance by pulling the plug on the use of “wire” service reports from the Associated Press, etc.

Student newspapers must evolve. They’re not doing it well now. In tight economic times, more of them every year are being shut down. If they don’t have a web presence, they won’t be ready for this transition.

Cheerleader Humiliated When Coach Rummages Through Her Facebook Account

August 12, 2009 in Administration, Civil Liberties, Gender, High School | by | Leave a comment

A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.

According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.

The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.

Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”

As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”

Loan Burden for Community College Students Jumps

August 12, 2009 in Access, Finances, Financial Aid, Students, The Corporate University | by | Leave a comment

A new report on student loan debt finds the proportion of community college students saddled with debt at graduation has skyrocketed in the last five years.

The report, a College Board analysis of the U.S. Education Department’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, found that nearly half of 2007-08 community college graduates took out education loans to pay for school, up from thirty-seven percent in 2003-04. Of those students who did take out loans, half accumulated debts of more than $10,000.

Borrowing rose from 30% to 38% of graduates of public community colleges, and from 90% to 98% of graduates of for-profit two-year schools. The debt burden among those taking out loans was higher at the private two-years, too — 43% had debts of more than $20,000, compared to just 13% of public community college grads.

All told, 59% of college graduates left school with at least some educational debt in 2007-08, up  from 55% just four years earlier. Students’ median debt rose from $13,663 to $15,123 in the same period, an 11% rise.

These figures exclude credit card debt and loans from friends and family, by the way, so the true numbers are even higher.

Update: As the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, debt burdens for four-year college grads vary dramatically by college type too. They point out that “10 percent of students at four-year public institutions had $40,000 or more in loans, while 22 percent of graduates of private four-year institutions and 25 percent of students graduating from for-profit four-year institutions had that level of debt.”

“Facebook Ain’t Cool With The Kids?” Not So Fast.

August 6, 2009 in Students, Youth | by | Leave a comment

Facebook Ain’t Cool With The Kids No More.

That’s the headline on a post at CrunchGear this morning, claiming that “social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd.” That post was based on an article in this morning’s Guardian, a British newspaper, titled “It’s SO Over: Cool Cyberkids Abandon Social Networking Sites.”

So is it true? Are young people abandoning social networking sites in droves? Have the youth of today written off Facebook as uncool?

Well, no.

The CrunchGear and Guardian pieces were both based on a report from the UK media regulatory agency Ofcom. Specifically, they were based on a single piece of survey data from page 289 of that report.

According to Ofcom, social networking use by British youth aged 15 to 24 held steady at 50% from the third quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, after dropping from a high of 55% in the first quarter of 2008.

That’s it. That’s the whole story. A five point drop in social networking use a year ago among British youth.

Note that there’s nothing here about which young people are dropping out of social networking, or why, or how sure the pollsters are that they actually are. Nothing about the poll’s margin of error, which I wasn’t able to find in the report. And nothing, of course, about “coolness.”

And here’s one other thing. The Guardian article says “part of the reason” that “the kids don’t like social networking anymore … appears” to be “that older users do.” The US trade magazine Billboard dropped the hedge, saying that “adults’ love of social networking sites is driving away teens.” But there’s nothing — literally nothing — in the original report to suggest this. The report said social networking use in Britain dropped a little among 15-to-24s, and that went up a little among older people, but that’s it. There’s no support in the data for any sort of cause-and-effect relationship.

Next up: Mashable’s post on “Why Teens Don’t Tweet.”

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

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