The SAT: more of the same prep, same anxiety?

Illustration: Zohar Lazar, from The New Yorker

First, if you haven’t already read it, see There’ll be some changes made, with the news report and a reaction or two on the announced changes coming to the SAT in 2016.

Since we have a couple of years until those changes come along, here’s some more test-prep reading…

1.  Elizabeth Kolbert, writing for the New Yorker, offers, “Big Score:  When Mom takes the SATs.” Kolbert relates her own experience, as well as that of Debbie Stier, author of The Perfect Score Project:  Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT, retaking the SAT as an adult, and covers a good bit of the test’s history as well.

Whatever is at the center of the SAT—call it aptitude or assessment or assiduousness or ambition—the exam at this point represents an accident. It was conceived for one purpose, adapted for another, and somewhere along the line it acquired a hold on American life that nobody ever intended. It’s not just high-school seniors who are in its thrall; colleges are, too. How do you know how good a school is? Well, by the SAT scores of the students it accepts. (A couple of years ago, the dean of admissions at Claremont McKenna College was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had inflated students’ scores to boost the school’s ranking.) As befits an exam named for itself, the SAT measures those skills—and really only those skills—necessary for the SATs.

I may be interested in reading about the SAT, but there is a less than zero probability of my registering to take the test, old or new. Just offering my real-world application of math.

2.  Walt Hickey, writing for FiveThirtyEight, offers advice in “How to Take the New SAT.” I’m likely to pay attention to his recommendations since FiveThirtyEight is the new data journalism organization headed by Nate Silver, statistician, baseball and politics forecaster, and author of The Signal and the Noise. Hickey examines the announced change that the SAT will no longer penalize test-takers for incorrect answers. Currently each wrong answer costs the test-take a quarter of a point.

Since the exam’s inception, students were advised to only guess on a question if they could eliminate at least one of the answers. This put expected value on their side, and they could hope to come out ahead in the long run.

Starting in 2016, with the death of the quarter-point penalty on wrong answers, there’s absolutely no reason anyone should ever leave a question blank on the SAT. According to College Board statistics, in 2012, every five points added to a test-taker’s raw score meant an additional 30 to 80 points on her curved final score.

So guessing isn’t just advisable, it’s about to become strategically crucial for people seeking to maximize their performance. Granted, everybody guessing is probably going to increase the average raw score, but that just means the College Board will adjust its grading curve commensurately.

If you choose not to guess, you risk falling behind the pack.

3.  Writing for The Atlantic, James S. Murphy says, “The SAT Prep Industry Isn’t Going Anywhere,” even though the  College Board president described their partnership with Khan Academy for free test prep, a “bad day” for test prep companies. Murphy has been an SAT teacher and tutor for the Princeton Review.

The truth is that there are no tricks to the SAT, or at least none that will make a significant change to a student’s score. Test prep raises scores by reviewing only the content students need to know for the exam, teaching them techniques they have not learned in school, and assigning students hundreds if not thousands of practice questions. It is this work, and not tricks, that overcome test anxiety. As Ed Carroll, a former colleague of mine, puts it,  “Competence breeds confidence.”

. . .

The main reason test prep isn’t going anywhere is that, as long as a superficial, high stakes test remains an important aspect of competitive college admissions, there will be no shortage of people looking for some advantage.  Admissions anxiety is not fomented by test prep companies. They do not need to make students and parent anxious.  The SAT has taken care of that for them.

4.  And finally, my favorite read on the SAT this past week:  Cora Frazier’s “New SAT Practice Questions” in the New Yorker. An example:

7. Student-produced-response math. You have one remaining pair of clean underwear, besides the pair you are currently wearing. You have an additional pair of underwear that doesn’t cover your entire butt and says “Thursday.” How many days can you go without doing laundry?

Now there’s a question with real-world applications.

Related articles

• RIP ‘SAT words’? Not exactly
• Students in praise of SAT changes

On the SAT: there’ll be some changes made

The College Board announced the details of its long-awaited revisions to the SAT this week. You’ve probably seen reports on these big changes:

Data, College Board
Illustration, NYTimes

1. The essay section will be optional and scored separately, changing the scale back to 1600 from 2400 (implemented in 2005).
2. The test will no longer penalize students for wrong answers (now, each wrong answer takes 0.25 points off the score).
3. Vocabulary words will be those students are more likely to see in college than the current, more obscure list.
4. The test will be offered on computers.
5. The College Board also tried to address the income-bias of the SAT by making fee waivers more easily available and by partnering with the Khan Academy for test prep.

Want to know more?

Eric Hoover, reporting for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, in Plans for New SAT Spark Mixed Reviews, outlines the changes and provides reactions from a number of college and college-prep professionals:

Ms. Leopold [executive director of CollegeTracks, a Maryland group that works with low-income and first-generation students] was skeptical of other changes in the SAT. “They do not address the underlying access problem,” she wrote, “that the College Board’s member colleges rely on a test that has been demonstrated to systematically understate the abilities of low-income and underserved minority students.”

. . .

Jeff Rickey, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid at St. Lawrence University, in New York, praised several of the coming changes in the SAT. “I applaud the College Board for tying the test better to what’s needed in college, the way they will provide readings across the curriculum other than just math and English, and also ask for analysis,” he said.

. . .

Mr. Roberts [dean of admissions at the University of Virginia] and his colleagues don’t even look at the SAT essays applicants write—just their scores on the writing portion of the exam. When the essay is no longer part of the SAT, he wondered how many colleges would require or recommend that students write one.

“Colleges will require it if they think it’s a useful tool,” he said. “But the College Board’s going to have to convince folks that this is something that will help us evaluate students and predict success.”

The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul, by Todd Balf, published in the New York Times magazine, provides extensive details about how and why the changes were made, as well as how David Coleman, president of College Board, worked with critics of the SAT to develop the revised version. Coleman was integral to the development of the Common Core, now implemented in more than forty states.

By the time he took over in October 2012, Coleman was well versed not just in Perelman’s critiques but also in a much wider array of complaints coming from all of the College Board’s constituencies: Teachers, students, parents, university presidents, college-admissions officers, high-school counselors. They all were unhappy with the test, and they all had valid reasons.

. . .

In redesigning the test, the College Board shifted its emphasis. It prioritized content, measuring each question against a set of specifications that reflect the kind of reading and math that students would encounter in college and their work lives.

Finally, Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president of enrollment management for policy and planning at DePaul University, writing on the SAT revisions in The College Board and the Catholic Church, first provides his feelings on college admission tests:

–Any test created by someone who never taught the material to the students tested is inherently lacking
–SAT and ACT do explain freshman performance, but since the tests and High School GPA covary so strongly, it simply duplicates the effect of GPA, but does not do it better.  As an incremental measure over and above High School GPA, the benefit is negligible at best.
–GPA–even compressed GPAs from 35,000 different high schools–explains more about freshman performance than the SAT or ACT (no one from either organization disputes this, by the way).
–Both tests do, in fact, measure a certain type of intelligence: Picking the “right” answer from four given. And the fact that the tests might get it right 40% of the time seems good enough for many. However, this is not necessarily the way students “do” college.  In life as well as in many classes, sometimes you don’t even get the question; when you do, oftentimes the answer fails to be described in a few words.
–The tests have a very high “false negative” and a very low “false positive” for whatever it is (and we can’t always even define what it is) they purport to measure.
–Insecure people who have high standardized test scores are often the ones touting the value of standardized tests
–Super-selective institutions like the tests, even though they know it doesn’t predict much of anything academic, because: a) high numbers equate with “smart” and equate with “high quality” and b) they don’t need to, nor do they want to, take any risk on students, and c) they one thing they do measure really well–wealth–is important to many of them colleges.  It also gives them a convenient excuse to enroll fewer poor students.

Head over to the post to see what he thinks about the changes. Spoiler alert:  It includes the Who playing “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

We have two children who won’t have to take the SAT again, old or new. Our third child, Mod Squad Linc, will be taking the PSAT in the fall of 2014 and 2015, then taking the SAT for the first time in the spring of 2016… just in time to try out the new test.

Related articles

• SAT Makeover Aims to Better Reflect Classroom Learning
• SAT changes set to take effect in 2016
• SAT Overhaul or Not, Standardized Testing Will Always Fail Students by Liz Prisley

The Price of College, or how one college sets its tuition

In a recent post, The Price of College, or how a $60,000 tuition can be dubbed a discount, I described college pricing as complicated, individualized, and opaque. Upon occasion college administrators shed light on the process. A couple of years ago, W. Kent Barnds, Vice President for Enrollment, Communication & Planning at Augustana College, wrote about the steps Augustana follows to determine a price.

Old Main, Augustana College, Rock Island, IL

Augustana is a very well-regarded small, private liberal arts college in Illinois. Barnds’ post opens the door to the enrollment management perspective of admissions, a perspective internal to a college. While prospective students and their families may look at admissions as the team selecting the few who will be invited to attend, the college administration may look at admissions as the team charged with filling classroom seats and dormitory beds. If you’re interested in understanding the college’s perspective, I recommend you read Barnds’ post, Establishing the price (and cost of a college); here’s the introduction:

This is in no way a complete description of the many considerations that go into the decision-making process, but it’s a start. My goal is to keep it simple and provide the perspective of an enrollment leader. Another goal is to reinforce the idea that establishing price (and by virtue of establishing price, determining net cost) is neither as haphazard as tossing darts at a dartboard or a scientific certainty. It’s complex and somewhat idiosyncratic.

Not surprisingly, the process begins in May, after deposits are received and the admissions yield is determined, with an evaluation of how well the college recruited its fall class. (See What happens when, the college admissions calendar.) Barnds also mentions that the past several years have caused an increased focus on:

…a family’s willingness and ability  to pay …the changes in demographics in the Midwest that brings more first-generation and multicultural applicants to our pool …our position within the broader marketplace (publics, community colleges and high-quality, more selective privates that we know many of our accepts will pay more to attend) …far more conscientious about what the market will tolerate, rather than what we “need” to run our operation

Those demographic changes also include a smaller pool of high school graduates, especially in the Midwest. See Dwindling Midwest High School Grads Spur College Hunt, via Bloomberg:

A waning number of high school graduates from the Midwest is sparking a college hunt for freshman applicants, with the decline being felt as far away as Harvard and Emory universities.

Back to the considerations Augustana (and most other colleges) faces; these questions [pulled from Barnds’ post] will directly affect offers of admission and financial aid to potential students:

• How much did we spend in financial assistance in an effort to attract the class?
• And, how much total revenue did the class generate?
• What size class do we desire?
• How many students from out of state?
• What is the academic profile we seek?
• How much aid can we afford to offer?
• How little financial aid can we afford to offer and make the class?

And here’s another piece of Augustana’s process:

We typically discover that we can’t afford to do what we want to do. In this discussion we involve members of the admissions and financial aid staff and the chief financial officer (CFO), who provides guidance about “how much more revenue we need” to accomplish our financial goals for the coming year (think pay raises, new hires, programming, physical plant improvements, etc.). Hopefully, we get close enough to the targets during this process that we make the CFO and President happy and we think we can accomplish our goals. It is also during this stage that we begin to model a couple of different % tuition increases based on CFO recommendations.

Though Augustana is a nonprofit college, it still has to function as a well-managed business, balancing the needs of the college operations with the desire to attract a strong cohort of new students, leveraging financial aid and merit funds as efficiently as possible.

I appreciate the opportunity Barnds offers with this glimpse behind Augustana’s meeting room door.

 

Still more on the price of college to come.

 

 

Related articles

• College admission offers may get easier to obtain
• Demographic Winter Already Reaching The College Bubble
• May 1st = National College Decision Day

The Price of College, or how a $60,000 tuition can be dubbed a discount.

What’s your favorite analogy for college costs? The airline business, where every seat is sold at a different price? The automobile industry, where you’re a fool to pay the sticker price on the side window? Perhaps Alice-in-Wonderland, when a $60,000 tuition can be called a discount?

Illustration by John Tenniel for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

Learning about college prices and college costs is just one of the many learning curves for parents new to the system. A few reasons why:

1. Pricing and costs are complicated, individualized, and opaque.
2. The pricing and financial aid system changes often, even within one school.
3. Many families try to decipher costs at a number of schools, and each college determines and presents costs in a different manner.

First, though, back to that discounted tuition. NPR’s Planet Money ran the story on university accounting a week or so ago, in “Duke: $60,000 A Year For College Is Actually A Discount.”

In 1984, it cost $10,000 a year to go to Duke University. Today, it’s $60,000 a year. “It’s staggering,” says Duke freshman Max Duncan, “especially considering that’s for four years.”

But according to Jim Roberts, executive vice provost at Duke, that’s actually a discount. “We’re investing on average about $90,000 in the education of each student,” he says.

That accounting depends upon the charges the university chooses to apply toward each student, according to a retired U-Cal Berkeley professor, who questions whether the costs related to professors chiefly involved in lab research (and the cost of building their labs), should trickle down to undergrads.

Will the undergrad take full advantage of the resources afforded by a research university, seeking out research opportunities and working with the professors? If not, $90,000, even marked down to $60,000, could mean the student and his or her family are buying a lot more college then they need.

Yet colleges, other than community colleges to some extent, don’t offer an á la carte system. You make your choice and you buy into the college’s value system.

Each college administration, and its Board of Governors or Regents or Visitors, makes its own determination of how much of the college’s total operating costs to pass along to the students as tuition and fees, or its price. At the same time each college makes additional determinations that lead to an individual student’s net cost. Those include, but are not limited to:

• Will the financial aid policy be loan-free?
• Will the college commit to meeting all of the family’s financial aid?
• Will the college offer merit aid?
• Will the college encourage completion in four years?

The statement from Duke University’s Executive Vice Provost that $60,000 represents a discount exemplifies a choice Duke made about how to allocate costs. Duke also decided to allocate a third of the $60,000 tuition paid by full-freight students to financial aid for other students.

Just when you may have thought the list of considerations for college choices was long enough, families may want to add a look at what each college values–what choices the college administration and Board make–starting with those that affect your student’s net cost. Even a cursory glance at higher ed journals, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, could add more considerations to that list, including how healthy the college”s finances and endowments are, whether the college pays a living wage, how much the size of administration has grown in the past two decades compared to the size of faculty, and how many professors are hired versus lower-cost adjunct professors.

More to come on the price of college…

Related articles

• Higher education is not available à la carte.
• Duke Undergraduate Tuition To Increase 4 Percent
• AUB officials to meet students over tuition hikes

This just in: summer vacation!

Yesterday was the final day of school for the local school district, but the summer break launched in stages for our household.

Mod Squad Pete’s first year of college ended May 10th. He came home for a night, then headed off to South Carolina for Beach Week with friends from school.

South Carolina

M.S. Linc graduated from middle school at the end of May. Four days later he traveled solo to visit family in the Midwest.

The farm

M.S. Julie completed her junior year on June 6th and left for the North Carolina beaches the following day.

North Carolina

All that to say:  happy summer! Turn up the volume! (We’ll deal with reading requirements, internships, camps, and application essays soon enough. Next week, right, Julie?)

What were they thinking? A few crazy college stories.

Nassau Hall; Princeton University; Princeton, NJ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This seemed to be the spring for craziness on the college newsfeed. If you happen to follow loads of college stories, you’ve likely seen one or two of these, but just in case…

Find a husband.

One of Princeton’s first female attendees, Susan Patton, class of ’77, participated in a Women and Leadership conference on campus and, in the breakout discussion afterwards, saw current Princetonian “girls glazed over at preliminary comments about our professional accomplishments and the importance of networking,” yet who “asked about the value of our friendship, about our husbands and children.”

Ms. Patton took this opportunity to write a letter to the editor of the Daily Princetonian, Advice for the young women of Princeton: the daughters I never had. In short, “Find a husband on campus before you graduate.”

My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone. My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless. Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It’s amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman’s lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

Really.

My favorite response, by Maureen O’Connor in NY Magazine, Princeton Mom to All Female Students: ‘Find a Husband’, includes this,

What an excruciatingly retro understanding of relationships she has. If men are happy with bimbos, but women aren’t happy with “men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal,” then the conclusion is that a successful heterosexual relationship requires the man to be smarter than the woman. This is the same logic used by teen girls who feign stupidity to attract dates for the homecoming dance.

Suzy Lee Weiss.

SLW on the Today Show.

There are any number of steps a high school student can take in response to college application rejections, and if one’s older sister used to develop features for the Wall Street Journal, the student can even get an essay to leap into the college admission zeitgeist of the moment.

First, the essay: To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me

Second, the media tour: Rejected high school senior: colleges lied to me

Note:  it’s easy to spot a well-coached media guest when her very first response is not to the question asked, but to thank the interviewer for inviting her on.

Third, cue the backlash: simply Google her name and dip in.

One of my favorite admissions bloggers (Jon Boeckenstedt, DePaul) followed up his initial post about Weiss with this one: Let’s agree to knock it off, already, reminding us,

In short, it reads like it was written by a 17-year old kid whose cerebral cortex is not yet fully developed. Which, I’ll remind you, is perfectly normal.

Yet, I really liked this response from Seth Taylor, who blogs as Dad Overboard, An Open Letter to my 11-Year-Old Daugher in the Hope that She Never Becomes Suzy Lee Weiss.

1)  No one in this world owes you anything.  Sure, I think you’re smart, creative, talented, and unique. I think you’re a sparkling unicorn in a world of plain ol’ ponies, and I think any Smarty-Pants college would be lucky to have you. But if you ever, ever feel entitled to something just because you really want it, think again.

And this, a bit of a poem posted by Christoper Lee-Rodriguez on his NothingIsNeverGood Tumblr:

Your rejection from opportunity
Has blinded you from the millions of opportunity
Already in front of you

Mocking applicant essays.

Penn had to let go one of their admission officers, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, in Former admissions officer mocked applicant essays:

In the posts, which were made available through a collection of Facebook screenshots sent anonymously to Dean of Admissions Eric Furda and The Daily Pennsylvanian on Dec. 3, Foley mocked a number of student essays she had come across in her work.

. . .

In another excerpt, she quoted an essay in which an applicant had described the experience of overcoming his fear of using the bathroom outdoors while camping in the wilderness.

“Another gem,” Foley wrote of the student’s topic choice.

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, here,

Surely it’s not uncommon for admissions officers, who may read thousands of such essays, to poke some gentle fun in the privacy of a cubicle or a bar booth. However, copies of Ms. Foley’s excerpts, along with her snide comments, made it as far as the College Confidential Web site, where students find and share information about institutions they may apply to.

Which brings me to finally share a blog that could help provide a reality check for students and parents across the land. Admissions Problems offers admissions officers an online outlet to poke some gentle fun — without calling attention to specific students or mocking specific their essays. See, especially, the tagline:

NO, YOUR KID ISN’T SPECIAL AT ALL, ACTUALLY…

Related articles

• Princeton Mom Calls Feminists “Bullies,” Women in Their Thirties “Man Repellents”

How to send poor kids to top colleges? 2 Suggestions

Last week, in the New York Times, David Leonhardt wrote about an analysis of SAT takers, which indicated that more low-income, high-achieving students,

• do not apply to selective colleges for which they have the aptitude, and
• often do not graduate from the less selective colleges they do attend.

I wrote about his report and two others here. I really hadn’t planned to write about this again, but I must admit to a weakness for studies followed-on promptly by possible solutions. This week, these articles presented ideas on how to help change this.

1.  Tell them:  Make better efforts to inform. 

Leonhardt returned to the topic with How to Send Poor Kids to Top Colleges. He presents the results from an effort to identify whether high-scoring, low-income students didn’t want to apply to selective colleges or they didn’t know about the opportunities available to them.

THE packages arrived by mail in October of the students’ senior year of high school. They consisted of brightly colored accordion folders containing about 75 sheets of paper. The sheets were filed with information about colleges: their admissions standards, graduation rates and financial aid policies.

. . .
Among a control group of low-income students with SAT scores good enough to attend top colleges — but who did not receive the information packets — only 30 percent gained admission to a college matching their academic qualifications. Among a similar group of students who did receive a packet, 54 percent gained admission, according to the researchers, Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Sarah E. Turner of the University of Virginia.

. . .

Perhaps most important, the packets presented a series of tables making clear that college is often not as expensive as many students and parents fear. Selective colleges frequently cost less for low-income students than local colleges, because the selective ones have the resources to offer bigger scholarships.

At the less-selective campuses in the University of Wisconsin system, for example, the average net annual cost for a year of tuition, room, board and fees in 2010-11 was almost $10,000 for families making less than $30,000, Ms. Turner said. At the flagship campus in Madison, by contrast, the equivalent net cost was $6,000. And at Harvard, such students paid only $1,300 a year.

That last bit — about understanding the different net costs for colleges — shouldn’t be surprising. Even those parents and students who study the process closely can have a difficult time predicting what the net costs at a variety of schools might be, since much depends upon the interest/value a particular student in a particular cohort holds for that college. College pricing is closer to the multiple prices-per-seat-on-a-plane model than one might imagine.

Illustration by Ted McGrath, for the New York Times.

2.  Sell them:  Follow recruiting methods used by the military.

Responding to this same topic in an op-ed piece, Elite Colleges are as Foreign as Mars, published in the New York Times, Claire Vaye Watkins, a writer and English professor at Bucknell, wrote

For deans of admissions brainstorming what they can do to remedy this, might I suggest: anything.

By the time they’re ready to apply to colleges, most kids from families like mine — poor, rural, no college grads in sight — know of and apply to only those few universities to which they’ve incidentally been exposed. Your J.V. basketball team goes to a clinic at University of Nevada, Las Vegas; you apply to U.N.L.V. Your Amtrak train rolls through San Luis Obispo, Calif.; you go to Cal Poly. I took a Greyhound bus to visit high school friends at the University of Nevada, Reno, and ended up at U.N.R. a year later, in 2003.

Ms. Watkins provides a role model:  the military recruited very well by sending uniformed alumni back to the high school and by providing guidance on how to enlist, while the school provided classroom time to take the Armed Services aptitude test.

Granted, there’s a good reason top colleges aren’t sending recruiters around the country to woo kids like me and Ryan… The Army needs every qualified candidate it can get, while competitive colleges have far more applicants than they can handle. But if these colleges are truly committed to diversity, they have to start paying attention to the rural poor.

Until then, is it any wonder that students in Pahrump and throughout rural America are more likely to end up in Afghanistan than at N.Y.U.?

No wonder, indeed.

Related articles

• On Recruiting Underprivileged Students
• College rejection letters, how colleges boost their rankings, and funny math.
• Q&A: Son is a HS freshman – Where to begin?

Coming to a University near you: 5 stories of higher ed disruption.

It doesn’t take much time or effort to find examples of economically-driven disruption in higher ed, whether those examples are related to changes in financial aid plans, remodeling tuition policies, chasing after the Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] train, or trying to attract a particular demographic of students.

1.  The President of Metro State University in Denver, CO, explains the different strategies undertaken by Colorado’s institutions, in a recent Denver Post article, Colorado’s colleges make tough decisions to ensure survival:

“They’re all part of long-term strategies that we’re all making — really tough decisions that will ultimately determine, in many respects, whether those schools survive or not,” Jordan said. “I see that playing out in all our institutions around Colorado. We all have different missions and different sets of problems, but ultimately we’re all in the same place: What are we going to do to ensure the long-term survival of our universities?”

Colorado’s strategies include:

• changing colleges to universities (to attract more out-of-state students),
• possibly building a $250 million football stadium (to raise Colorado State University’s profile),
• creating a new tuition rate for undocumented students (more than in-state, but less than out-of-state), and
• attempting to increase visibility with Latino students (becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution has the potential to double federal funds available to the University).

2.  Last year Sewanee received national attention by cutting tuition; last week it was Concordia University, which cut its tuition for 2013-14 by $10,000 or about thirty-four percent. The Minneapolis Star Tribune subhead tells it all: The St. Paul university hopes that a lower sticker price will impress a public weary of the high cost of college.

Just a handful of Concordia undergrads now pay the full $29,700 in tuition and fees. But Concordia hopes to attract families who are being scared off by the published price.

“It’s been a bigger and bigger challenge for us to get those individuals to even consider us,” said Prof. Eric LaMott, Concordia’s senior vice president and chief operating officer. “The high discount isn’t fixing the problem, because they don’t even look.”

Concordia believes it’s making a bold move toward greater affordability and transparency in a marketplace that’s demanding both.

Publicity stunt or reality check? Enrollment management professional and consultant, Dan Lundquist, wrote about Concordia and the college sticker price on a college marketing firm’s blog: Dan Lundquist on Concordia’s Tuition Reset. It’s an interesting read, both for more information on Concordia’s “right pricing” experiment and some historical context:

Back before the federal government busted the so-called Overlap Group (the Ivies and MIT) for collusion and price-fixing, we in the admissions office would compare prices and financial aid offers with our core overlap group (AKA “competitors”) in hopes that we could minimize the role the cost would play in college choice. But there was another result; one that I honestly believe at the time was unintended. Penn’s president Martin Meyerson said it best: “We were building up a kind of notion about colleges and universities that the higher the price, the better they were.” (Stanford’s finance vice president Bill Massy was blunter: “The theory was, basically, we will increase tuition as much as the market will bear.”)

3. Meanwhile, a new state law in Ohio —  which currently awards a degree to only 56 percent of their students in six years — requires the public universities to show students how they could earn a bachelor’s degree in three years. See Public colleges told to outline 3-year grad plan, by Meagan Pant in the Dayton Daily News.

“College is not getting any cheaper,” said Jim Petro, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents.

“One sure way that families can bring that cost down is by doing it in a shorter time span,” Petro said. “I don’t know when it became almost practical in Ohio that many students take five, six years to get a degree, but that really drives up the cost.”

The law didn’t set goals for the number of three year degrees — those range from one to three percent of students now. One hope expressed by state officials is that, by showing students the path toward completing a degree in three years, the universities will increase the number of students earning a bachelor’s degree in four.

4.  A few months back I wrote about Wesleyan University’s move away from need-blind admissions. Here’s an Inside Higher Ed story about that change. This summer Cornell reversed its previous no-loan guarantee to families earning under $75k, beginning with the 2013 school year. From the Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell Kills Portion of Financial Aid Guarantee.

The revised aid policy will add thousands of dollars more in loans for families. Where they previously would have had to take out no loans, students whose families make between $60,000 and $75,000 annually will now take out up to $2,500 in loans.

Other income brackets will be affected by the policy, too. Those making between $75,000 and $120,000 will take out up to $5,000 — not the current $3,000 — in loans. The only group not affected by the changes are families making more than $120,000 annually, who, as in previous years, will receive up to $7,500 in loans.

5.  Finally, let’s circle back to Colorado, specficially Colorado State University-Global Campus, which announced last week it will be the first US university to accept transfer credits for Udacity, the Stanford University MOOC spinoff. Katherine Mangan writes, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, A First for Udacity: a U.S. University Will Accept Transfer Credit for One of Its Courses.

The university decided to accept the transfer credits after a committee of four faculty members in information technology reviewed the Udacity course and its methods of assessing student learning.”We believe that as a public university, affordability and accessibility are key,” said Becky Takeda-Tinker, president of the Global Campus.

A few minutes searching online could bring up five more examples. Or, here in Charlottesville, one could simply pick up the daily paper. Coming soon:  more on the still-evolving story of disruption at the University of Virginia.

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On Doonesbury and for-profit colleges: the numbers.

Last week Garry Trudeau focused his daily Doonesbury strips on the high debt, high CEO pay, and low grad rates associated with for-profit colleges. I wrote about it here with links to the first three strips, and you can click to see the Thursday and Friday strips.

Since some of those numbers seem outrageous at first reading, especially since they’re presented in a comic strip, I included links to the news article sources, including the Harkin report and a NYT article.

Last week Pro Publica also published an article on the same topic:  The For Profit Higher Eduction Industry, By the Numbers. Written by Suevon Lee, here’s part of the intro:

The report has provoked some pushback. The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a membership organization composed of accredited for-profit schools, issued a statement criticizing what it saw as “continued political attacks” on the for-profit sector. Saying the report “twists the facts to fit a narrative,” it went on to challenge several figures.

It didn’t contest the following numbers.

Go read the piece. Trudeau got it right — the numbers are outrageous.

One reason why this is a big story:  Industry growth.

766,000 = number of students enrolled in for-profit higher education schools in 2001

2.4 million = number of students enrolled in for-profit higher education schools in 2010

225 = percent by which enrollment at for-profit colleges grew between 1998 and 2008

Two reasons why, if you know someone interested in taking a for-profit college course, you might suggest the local community college.

1.  Cost of education.

$35,000 = average cost of a two-year associate’s degree at a for-profit college

$8,300 = average cost of an associate’s degree at comparable community college

2.  Loan — and debt.

96 = percent of those enrolled in for-profit schools who take out student loans

13 = percent of students at community colleges who take out student loans

35,202 reasons for-profit colleges will work hard to recruit students plus 78 million reasons to ignore them:  Recruitment and lobbying.

35,202 = number of recruiters hired by 30 for-profit higher education companies in 2010 — roughly, one recruiter per 49 students enrolled at a for-profit college

3,512 = number of career services staff employed by for-profit schools in 2010

$78 million = amount Apollo Group Inc. agreed to pay in December 2009 to settle a whistleblower lawsuit for tying University of Phoenix recruiters’ pay to student enrollment

7.3 million reasons why, if you’re offered an executive position, you’ll do better at a for-profit than a non-profit:  Executive compensation.

$7.3 million = average compensation of CEOs at for-profit higher education companies in 2009

$3 million = average compensation of five highest-paid presidents of non-profit colleges and universities in 2009

$1 million = average compensation of five highest-paid leaders of large public universities in 2009

Meanwhile, this week Trudeau explores the world of Walden University wondering what will happen if it goes public. Start here and watch out for the fighting flashdrives.

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College: non-profit or for-profit? Doonesbury weighs in.

In case you haven’t seen it in this week’s daily papers, Garry Trudeau reports on the astounding amount of revenue for-profit colleges take in, and how attractive that might look like to non-profit administrators.

See the first strip here. Tuesday. Wednesday.

Per usual, this Doonesbury topic coincides with real news about for-profit colleges. See Why the Harkin Report on For-Profit Colleges Really Matters. Some excerpts below:

…it’s important to acknowledge the report’s true significance: it puts thousands of pages of internal company documents into the permanent record, providing crucial evidence that fraud and abuse have run rampant throughout the sector, and especially at some of the country’s largest for-profit college companies.

…

Over the last decade, both publicly-traded and private-equity owned for-profit higher education companies have come under scrutiny from federal and state regulators, and have faced numerous lawsuits by former employees, students, and shareholders over allegations that they engaged in misleading recruitment and admissions tactics to inflate their enrollment numbers. Many of these companies have been accused of routinely recruiting and enrolling unqualified student and sticking them with huge amounts of debt for training from which these individuals were unlikely to benefit.

Yet, time and again, these actions have ended in settlements, in which the companies agree to pay a fine but do not admit to any wrongdoing. What’s more, as part of the terms of these agreements, evidence of abuses that has been unearthed is put under seal, hidden permanently from public view. (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.)

Trudeau cites $32 billion in taxpayer money going to these ‘failure-factories.’ Here’s the NYT article, which provides that number as well as the average $7 million paycheck for the CEOs:  Harkin Report Condemns For-Profit Colleges.

The Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit college, got $1.2 billion in Pell grants in 2010-11, up from $24 million a decade earlier. Apollo got $210 million more in benefits under the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill. And yet two-thirds of Apollo’s associate-degree students leave before earning their degree.

Meanwhile, an associate degree or professional certificate program costs about four times as much as those through community colleges or public universities.

The most expensive college education:  where you leave with debt and no degree.

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