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A university education
is important in today's world! An education, going from preschool to elementary
school, high school, college, university and continuing education through online
education for lifelong learning, contributes to your success and the success of
the community within which you live and work.
Informative
Articles On University
My university, my self
Like true love, there's only one perfect college
out there, and it's your mission to find it. Right?
Wrong. There are likely dozens of
colleges and universities where you would be happy and successful. The key
is to decide what you want out of a college experience, do your research,
and then apply to a reasonable number of schools. Whether you end up at
your first–or your fifth-choice campus, in the end it's you, and not the
school you choose, that will make all the difference.
The admit maze
The university admissions process continues to push
more and more students to the lunatic fringe. One new book likens
admissions to a game of Martian blackjack: college and university applicants find
themselves at a high-stakes table where they don't know the rules and no
one will tell them how to play.
U.S. News asked guidance
counselors and admissions officers for insight into the mysterious inner
sanctum of the admissions process, and what emerged was a world in
constant flux. "To paraphrase Dickens," says Martin Wilder, vice president
for admission counseling and enrollment practices at the National
Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, "it's the best of
times and the worst of times" to be applying to college. It's never been
easier to get in, he insists: The average acceptance rate at colleges and
universities nationwide is 70 percent. But a study done earlier this year
found that more freshmen than ever–nearly 1 in 10–are now attending
colleges that were their third choice or lower.
The SAT
The SAT's forthcoming makeover is the first since
1994. And despite the new essay, the news is not all bad for students in
the high school class of 2006, who will be the first to take the new test
during their junior year. The much-feared analogy section will be
scrapped. So will the test's infamous quantitative comparisons.
According to the College Board, the
new SAT will be a closer reflection of what should be learned in a typical
high school curriculum.
How will you learn?
At many schools, freshmen and sophomores are
packed into large lecture halls where they listen, go home, study, and
later take a test or two. Sure, it's cheap for the colleges to implement,
but is it the best way for students to learn? The latest higher education
research indicates that there are better models. Reform-minded colleges
across the country are turning to innovative programs like learning
communities and intensive semester-long freshman orientations to engage
students in academics and hopefully offer measurable success in the form
of higher retention rates and higher graduation rates.
"I've ... learned so much about my
strengths, weaknesses, and areas I need to improve on," says DeeAnn Resk,
a student in a learning, communities-based program at George Mason
University in Virginia. "You don't gain that from cramming for a test,
passing a test, and forgetting the next day."
Growing up already
Once upon a time, college students were still considered children.
Students of the opposite sex were forbidden from entering each other's
rooms, or they could go in but had to keep the door open. Quaint as it may
seem, some colleges and universities are turning back the clock and once
again acting in loco parentis, this time, to fight rising drug and
alcohol use, eating disorders, and other self-destructive behaviors.
Schools have found that students who
feel more connected to a campus community are less likely to engage in
certain harmful habits, and so they are expanding orientation programs and
adding layers to the support system meant to catch students before they
fall through the cracks. Experts say that no matter how grown-up a student
feels, he should take certain steps to ensure a successful college
experience.
How we got here
By Rachel Hartigan Shea
A moment of silence, please, in remembrance of 1983. Michael Jackson,
Quiet Riot, and the Police ruled the charts; moviegoers packed theaters to
see Flashdance, Risky Business, and Valley Girl; Cabbage
Patch Kids and compact disks debuted; and Sally Ride became the first
American woman in space. War was still cold, empire was still evil, and
Star Wars was no longer just a movie.
In the world of education, things
were no less dramatic. A federal education commission proclaimed the
country "a nation at risk." Columbia University finally admitted women.
And college costs at the most expensive schools had just topped $10,000
for the first time–and kept on going.
Two decades have passed since U.S. News & World
Report first ranked colleges, and those years certainly have been
tumultuous for higher education. Professors, administrators, and their
critics have fought pitched battles over perceived "political correctness"
inside and outside the classroom; new academic fields like genomics and
postcolonial studies have opened up; and more people than ever before have
signed on for a college education. Meanwhile, the ivory tower has been
scaled by powerful market forces as financial realities have forced
colleges to embrace such previously foreign concepts as "return on
investment," "customer service," and "branding."
Life outside. Much of the tumult facing
higher education today springs from the central role it has taken in
American society–and in the individual lives of its citizens. Colleges and
universities provide the necessary ticket to career success and financial
well-being and the research that leads to new ideas and new inventions.
But perhaps more important, campuses are where the nation's social
anxieties and growing pains come into full relief. "Universities cannot be
cloistered institutions thinking about their own precious production of
knowledge and teaching," says Derek Bok, a former president at Harvard and
noted education scholar. "They have become too important to society."
By the early 1980s, higher education had largely
completed the tremendous growth spurt that began after World War II, when
the GI Bill opened the gates to veterans. With new federal financial aid
programs aimed at nonveterans kicking in during the 1950s and baby boomers
heading to campus by the hundreds of thousands in the 1960s and '70s,
enrollment had increased nearly sixfold by 1983. The number of two- and
four-year colleges had nearly doubled.
Among the hordes of new undergrads were students who
hadn't traditionally attended college in large numbers: women, minorities,
and older adults. In 1978, after centuries of marginal representation in
higher education, women outnumbered men for the first time by a 2 percent
margin. By 2000, the gap had widened to a full 12 percent, leaving many
universities today scrambling to come up with ways to recruit young men.
Minority enrollment also increased significantly, with African-American
college-going rates up from 45 percent in 1972 to 55 percent in 2001, and
Hispanic attendance rates rising from 45 to 52 percent.
Meanwhile, the growing variety of the college population
and the influx of professors who came of age in the 1960s led to pressure
to diversify the curriculum by including more works by underrepresented
writers and scholars. But critics worried that cornerstones of the
traditional curriculum, writers like Shakespeare and Milton, would be
squeezed out. Fierce battles broke out between conservatives like William
Bennett and Lynne Cheney–who consecutively headed the National Endowment
for the Humanities during the Reagan administration–on the one hand, and
liberal humanities scholars on the other. "The time is right for
constructive reform of American education," wrote Bennett in a
controversial report for the NEH in 1984. Philosopher Allan Bloom's book
The Closing of the American Mind attacked what he saw as academia's
cultural relativism and became a bestseller. A group of prominent
scholars, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Stanley Fish, issued a
statement declaring that the debates over feminism and multiculturalism
were a result of the increasing democratization of higher education and "a
sign of educational health, not decline." At the same time, City College
in San Francisco established the first gay and lesbian studies department,
and Temple University created the first doctoral program in
African-American studies. And in 1988, Stanford scaled back its western
civilization-based core curriculum, a move that outraged conservatives (as
did the memorable chant of student supporters: "Hey hey, ho ho, western
culture's got to go").
In the news. The battle spread outside the
classroom, too, with the most extreme incidents attracting the most
attention. College mascots came under attack: The University of Alabama-
Birmingham had to ditch "Blaze," its Nordic warrior mascot, because he
seemed too macho and too white. Speech codes at schools like Brown, Emory,
and the University of Michigan–aimed, their supporters said, simply at
restricting racial, sexist, and homophobic slurs–were criticized as
inhibiting free expression. The codes quickly inspired lawsuits and such
incidents as the charge of racial harassment against a Jewish student at
the University of Pennsylvania for calling several African-American women
making noise outside his dorm "water buffalo." (His supporters said that
the Hebrew-speaking student was using a literal translation of nonracially
tinged slang.)
All the squabbling drowned out a subtle shift in how the
nation thought about higher education. The prevailing wisdom had been that
the country as a whole benefited from a college-educated citizenry. In the
1980s, that notion was supplemented by increasing evidence that the
economic benefit to individuals was substantial. (Indeed, bachelor degree
holders earned 89 percent more than high school grads in 2001, the most
recent year for which data are available.) "The government used to give
financial aid to people because the country benefited," says Arthur
Levine, president of Columbia University's Teachers College. "During the
Reagan era, we made a fundamental change and decided it benefited the
individual."
That meant that paying for college became the student's
responsibility, not the government's, and loans overtook grants as the
chief form of federal financial aid. Twenty years ago, the Pell grant took
care of 84 percent of the total price tag (tuition and room and board) at
public universities; with college costs rising, the Pell covered just 42
percent in 2002. New programs introduced in the 1990s, like tuition tax
credits and state-sponsored merit scholarships, tended to favor the middle
class. "There's been a real tilt in the last 20 years away from making
[higher education] available to all citizens toward helping people who
might need help less," says Bok. Sixty-eight percent more low-income high
school graduates head off to college today than did in 1972, but the
amount of debt they carry by the time they graduate has also increased.
Public university students at the lowest income level have seen their debt
load go up nearly 70 percent–after inflation–since 1989.
Students now face increasing tuition sticker prices, as
well. Average college costs are around $25,000 at private schools, while
some publics have instituted double-digit-percentage tuition increases in
the face of severe budget constraints. The rising cost of personnel
accounts for much of these changes, as does students' appetite for fancy
gyms and plush dorms. The main culprit for public universities, however,
is the decreasing state support of higher education. Over the past two
decades, running a public university became increasingly expensive, and
state legislatures--beset with ballooning healthcare and primary and
secondary education costs–were paying a shrinking share. "The funding
structure of higher education changed from being high state support and
low tuition to moderate support and moderate tuition," says David Ward,
president of the American Council on Education and formerly chancellor of
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Universities learned quickly that if
they wanted to be better than average, they needed to turn elsewhere for
support. Fundraising activity increased, and private donations to public
schools have shot up 159 percent since 1980. And this past spring, the
University of Virginia became one of the first public universities to
receive more of its operating budget from private sources than from the
state. (The state provided a mere 9.6 percent of the university's total
budget last year.)
Public and private universities, alike, have become much
more savvy about finding money. Luckily for them, as the chief providers
of what Bok calls the three ingredients essential to
prosperity–"well-trained people, expert knowledge, and new
discoveries"–opportunities for colleges to cash in have multiplied over
the past two decades. Industry is funding more scientific research, and
legislation passed in 1980 allows universities to patent and license
findings from federally funded research. Since then, 3,870 companies have
been formed to turn these patents and licenses into products (the Google
search engine is one of the more famous ones); in 2001, they had an income
of $1.1 billion. Universities have also been quick to introduce new
programs tied to the employment needs of potential students, including
vocational master's degrees in such fields as healthcare leadership,
computational finance, and human-computer interaction–and charged hefty
fees for them.
Money for something. Today's students,
says Alexander Astin, director of the Higher Education Research Institute
at the University of California-Los Angeles, put "less focus on the
intrinsic value of higher education [and more] on the instrumental value
of college and financial aid." In other words, they want to know what's in
it for them. Fully aware of the economic benefits of a degree, these
budding careerists want higher education to give them the credential that
gets them a well-paying job. It's all part of their "galloping psychology
of entitlement," says Robert Sevier, senior vice president at Stamats, an
educational consulting company. "The educational consumer is so much more
sophisticated and so much more interested in return on investment" than in
the past.
This utilitarian view of higher education could be
blamed on a materialistic generation. But college students span all
generations these days, with 39 percent of the postsecondary population
consisting of adults over 25 years old. Indeed, 73 percent of all students
count as "nontraditional," i.e., they are older, attend part time, have
children, or support themselves financially. These students have to focus
on the practical outcomes of a college degree; otherwise, it's not worth
the effort. "College is what they're doing in addition to everything
else," says Sevier.
Critics worry that all this talk of money and job
preparation has diluted the soul of higher education. Will departments be
judged by how much cash they generate? Does a program need to have
vocational relevance to survive? What happened to knowledge for the sake
of knowledge? "Since we depend on public funds, we have a responsibility
to serve the needs of society," says Bok. "It isn't going to help society
if we break the essential academic values that allow us to perform
effectively in the long run." But you can't turn back the clock. "You
could say [commercialism] is bad because of some loss of the public
spirit," says Ward, "but on the other hand, we could have gone the way of
the dodo."
Of course, that's unlikely to happen. If the past two
decades demonstrate anything at all, it's that the United States needs its
institutions of higher education–for job training, for scientific
discovery, and even as a proving ground for social change. Now, more than
ever.
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Articles
courtesy of US News.com
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