Bingo! It’s a budget trade-off. A public can spend money to provide a lot of social and academic support programs, or spend that money on faculty to offer more classes to teach more students, i.e., admit fewer but provide them more support, or admit more students with less support.
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Absolutely. I did think your #3 fell under of my category #2 (as in a college that is not set up to serve its current students for various reasons, some of which could be lack of resources), but I should have separated that idea out. Instead, I kind of lumped that idea with lots of other colleges like those that have the resources but have not found effective strategies to serve struggling students and colleges that have the resources + know some good strategies but lack the appropriate leadership to make it happen.
I keep finding parallels between higher education and healthcare in this country. Since we’ve supposedly paid, either directly or indirectly, for the services (in college education or healthcare), we don’t really care about the costs to provide such services, with obvious consequences.
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Since 1980, K-12 student populations in the US have grown 25% (44M to 56M). How many new schools are there in your area? You can’t have lower taxes and less infrastructure per person, but that’s what we have.
Fareed Zakaria (of WaPo and CNN) recently wrote that we’d become a country that thinks the solution to every problem is to throw money at it. Unfortunately, money, even if we had unlimited amount of it, doesn’t solve every problem. Here in NJ, we spend more than $24.5k per pupil a year (and rising each year), which is independent of the increase in student population in the state.
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/07/24543-nj-total-spending-per-pupil-18208-average-budgetary-cost-2020-2021-school-year/
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Without parental (guardian) involvement in a child’s education, the current dismal results in our education system will persist, no matter how much more money we’d sink into our schools. Parental involvement is not costly, yet I recognize that, tragically, it can be an unattainable luxury to some students.
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Went to a Colleges That Change Lives college fair this evening. There was a big group of students there from an area high school which is in a socioeconomically-disadvantaged part of town, where the goal for most of the students is usually just to graduate from HS, let alone attend college.
They were all there w/1 of the HS teachers and 1 of the school counselors. Huge smiles all around. They took a big group photo before walking in together. All of the students were dressed up in ‘business casual’ wear. They had resumes printed up, too. You could tell that they’d all been coached & mentored before arriving.
Made me really happy to see. 1 of the CTCL schools that we are going to have D24 consider got mentioned recently in some article I read about how colleges can better support 1st gen/under-resourced/under-served students. I hope some of the kids from that HS apply to some of the CTCL schools because those communities might be able to intervene & redirect them, help them, etc. so they don’t end up just blending in with the crowd and quietly dropping out.
I do think that the solution to the question posed in this thread is a complex one. Having good mentors, in my opinion, is 1 piece of the larger puzzle.
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Purdue started a free polytechnic high school in Indians. Home | Purdue Polytechnic High School
The goal was to provide first gen, minority, low income students with the foundation to succeed in STEM careers.
92% of the HS grads were accepted at Purdue after graduation.
Purdue also does robust summer programs for HS students, summer start for accepted students who need some shoring up, and then heavily promotes help trims, tutoring, and the center for academic success in orientation and classrooms.
There was a specific activity in freshman orientation to highlighted that the only way to get through was to ask for help and not go it alone.
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If parental involvement is not costly, then you have the luxury of time many others don’t.
I don’t recall much parental involvement in my education beyond “where’s your report card”? I don’t recall my friends having much either. Most went on to attend highly regarded colleges. There was an expectation that we’d do what was necessary, without relying on a parent or two.
The problem isn’t a lack of help, it’s that the parents can do the homework without going to class. Parent involvement is one of the great differentiators. Those with means can afford to help, while those who struggle to pay the bills A) have less time, and B) are likely to be less able to help as the child matures through school.
The issues are the quality of k-12 education in the US, coupled with massive disruption in the availability of information. “Smart” phones have eliminated the efforts of research, and the apps have been engineered to destroy attention span. Students in college now have had access to smart devices their entire lives.
This site collects a lot of experiential data about colleges, with one of the largest being “how did you feel after the tour”? I’d suggest that you ignore the info session and the tour babble, and look at the number of people looking at their phones…in the dining hall…in the library…on the lawn with friends…walking the pathways. The lower the number, the more engaged the community.
The reason there are too many unprepared students is that the curriculum in colleges hasn’t been revised downward as student knowledge in k-12 has fallen. The programs mentioned above are a reflection of that. UCLA understands that they end up with students who may have some holes in their education, but their testing abilities and the grades from their high school don’t make that obvious.
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That’s why universities have resorted to placement tests. Northwestern has them for nearly every single subject. They know they can’t rely on grades and APs alone.
Confirming that the answer to the OP’s query is yes.
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All, or nearly all, elite privates have placement tests, but the tests do consume additional resources. Some (public?) colleges (e.g. UCLA) actually charge fees for taking their placement tests (Take the Diagnostic Test - UCLA Mathematics). I didn’t know this until I took a look at UCLA recently because of the discussion of it in this thread (I’m not trying to single out UCLA by any means). In the case of UCLA, it’s also interesting to note that UCLA offers Math 1 (Precalculus) for those who score below 60% but above 30% (not sure what happens to students who score below 30%).
Not every subject – just some of the most common ones (math and foreign languages) plus biology and chemistry: https://www.northwestern.edu/purple-prep/prepare/placement-exams.html
Placement tests are actually common across colleges (and have been common for a long time), with the most common subjects tested being math, foreign languages, and English.
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Yeah, don’t pretty much ALL colleges have math and foreign language placement tests? I know my kid’s non-elite private does and her friend’s non-elite private does too. The friend also did a science placement test of some sort. I think this is pretty standard.
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Yes, but were they being used to differentiate (excuse the terms) average vs. advanced, instead of remedial, average, and advanced?
Foreign language placement testing distinguishes between beginner in that language and various levels of advanced, and is common because external tests like AP do not capture all levels and ways of knowing a foreign language.
Math and English placement testing is commonly used for levels below AP level, since AP is commonly used as a convenient placement test for that level. Math placement testing higher than AP level sometimes exists.
Science placement testing sometimes exists because college science courses may have high school (not necessarily AP level) science as a prerequisite.
From EyeVeee’s reply to my post: “The problem isn’t a lack of help, it’s that the parents can do the homework without going to class. Parent involvement is one of the great differentiators. Those with means can afford to help, while those who struggle to pay the bills A) have less time, and B) are likely to be less able to help as the child matures through school.”
To me, effective parental involvement does not involve doing homework (for or with) the child, nor does it mean paying for test preps or tutoring; instead, it is about teaching a child to listen and to focus on finishing a task, so that they are ready and can learn at school. Some parents might think that, “I just don’t have time, nor the ability to help my seventh grader with geometry”, yet if that same seventh grader had already learned to be resilient, then he or she will learn it at school. It is not just about finding the right book or using right website to learn geometry, it is at least equally important that the student should have the desire and drive to learn it.
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So you would force unwanted assistance on adults instead? That doesn’t usually end well.
The issue for many of the FGLI students that are at risk is knowing the full range of available support resources, and then stripping away any stigma from actually taking advantage of them. Further, the UT program in the article above was effective by letting these kids know that the insecurity or failure they were feeling was both normal and usually transient. Once you learn that rough spots in the road are normal and that others felt insecure until they had some success, then it allows a student to attack the issue rather than just surrendering to it.
Confidence is the big gap, so when kids who got great grades from unchallenging schools find they got cheap ribbons, they don’t know what to believe. Kids who do not have college educated people in their circle don’t know what to expect, how it differs from high school, how to study, how to change definitions of success, and so on. Fundamentally, they just don’t have the same basic assumption that “of course I am going to graduate” that kids have from better educated families. That’s huge. Knowing the culture of college allows you to go in without a certain goal or hard skills and be comfortable faking it until you decide what you want and how you’ll get it.
What’s the real difference between two kids saying “My family always goes to college and gets the grades they earn, because we all have what it takes” and “My family doesn’t go to college.” Those families are probably not intellectually different from each other, but one is familiar with education and how to crank out a paper, find a study partner or talk to a prof and the other is not. (Oh, and there’s also usually a money gap. ) But if you tackle the money gap (and knowing how many unfunded expenses can pop up is another thing FGLI often don’t know about and haven’t arranged resources for) you still have the experiences and confidence gap, and that’s what UT was trying to address in its program. That doesn’t cost a lot to tackle if you involve other kids who have made the jump, for example. If you talk to everyone early before they get in trouble it’s almost free and can have a big effect.
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A seventh grade student in geometry is three grade levels ahead, and probably does not need parental help to get an easy A in that course. If the student has too-busy parents, the student’s math talent was probably extremely obvious to teachers to lead to such placement, rather than the placement being the result of lobbying by parents who have plenty of time on their hands to do so.
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