Breaking: New Study Reveals that Students Who Spend More Time Preparing for the SAT’s Tend to Get Higher Scores
The Chronicle of Higher Education analyzed the demographics on the 2009 SAT scores this week. Overall, a record number of students completed the tests, and scores were slightly down. Wayne Camera, V.P. of Research and Development at the College Board thinks he knows why:
…Worrying gaps remain between male and female students, and between students of different ethnic groups and family incomes, and some of those gaps widened this year, said Robert A. Schaeffer, public-education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. For example, black students had the lowest average combined mathematics and critical-reading score, 855, while white students had an average combined score of 1,064.
Among students who reported that their family income was more than $200,000, there was a 26-point increase in the average combined score for all three sections over last year, from 1,676 to 1,702. About a third of test-takers did not report their family income. Still, College Board officials say the gaps
reflect differences in students’ academic preparation. “I think what you’re really seeing is the gaps are increasing for students who have better preparation,” said Wayne Camera, vice president of research and development at the College Board…Read the entire article on The Chronicle >>
Perishable Bequests. You can never expect a bequest to be eternal.
John Hechinger has an article on the Wall Street Journal today entitled, Brandeis Settles Donor Lawsuit Over Science Building, explaining why bequests may not be eternal:
Brandeis University settled a lawsuit filed by a descendant of a donor who had been seeking to block the demolition of a science building named after his great uncle.
 
The university agreed to name a research laboratory after the original donor, Julius Kalman, a Lithuanian immigrant who amassed a fortune in Boston real estate and left the bulk of it to Brandeis when he died in 1956, according to a court filing. Brandeis, in Waltham, Mass., also said it would place a prominent plaque honoring Kalman in the lobby of a new science center….Continue reading on the Wall Street Journal >>
What will they Learn? A New Website About What College Rankings Don’t Tell You
What Will They Learn?SM is a news website which claims to:
Provide…unique information on whether colleges make sure their students learn the things they need to know. You can find what they expect their graduates to study outside their majors, how much they are charging, how many of their students graduate, and what the colleges say about the education they offer.
[...]
What Will They Learn?SM rates each college on whether the institution (or, in many cases, the Arts & Sciences or Liberal Arts divisions) requires seven core subjects: Composition, Literature, Foreign Language, U.S. Government or History, Economics, Mathematics, or Natural or Physical Science. The grade is based on a detailed review of the latest online course catalogs.
The fact that a college has requirements called Literature or Mathematics does not necessarily mean that students will actually study those subjects. “Distribution requirements” on most campuses permit students to pick from a wide range of courses that often are narrow or even outside the stated field altogether.
For more information, or to check on your favorite school, visit whatwilltheylearn.com
How Much are Students Borrowing?
A Policy Brief by the College Board surveys student borrowing and finds that about 10 percent of those who earmed a bachelor’s degree borrowed more than $40,000. The median loan debt for college students was close to $20,000, not including credit card debt.
Bob Novak, RIP
Former Reader’s Digest Editor in Chief, Kenneth Tomlinson, reflects on the greatness of journalist Bob Novak. We will miss Bob Novak.
Few journalists have ever affected this nation like Bob Novak. Take the Evans-Novak column that ran under the title “the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine” in the early spring of 1976. When I finished reading it, I remember thinking, this is quintessential Bob Novak.
State Department Counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt had told a London gathering of American ambassadors that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was actually necessary for world peace. In fact, Poland was a good example of the benefits of Soviet control because that had enabled the Poles to overcome their “romantic” political instincts which had led to so many “disasters in their past.”
This column had almost everything. Those words were contained in an official State Department cable slipped to Novak by a highly placed source. Henry Kissinger’s right-hand man was confirming that détente was code for Communist victory over freedom. Within days, candidate Ronald Reagan who was challenging President Ford in Republican primaries, declared the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine meant “slaves should accept their fate.”
About the only one of Bob’s political obsessions missing from that column was the Republican bean counters defending high taxes as the only way to balance the budget.
Ford survived the conservative eruption over Sonnenfeldt’s words only to have the column indirectly revived in his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter. A New York Times reporter asked the President about Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and, still defensive over the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine, the hapless Ford stubbornly insisted that the Polish people were free. The election was over.
For those who believed the Cold War should be won, Novak’s Sonnenfeldt Doctrine column was a gift that kept on giving. Eight years later I was director of the Reagan Administration’s Voice of America when top State Department official Lawrence Eagleburger summoned me to his office. He was enraged by tough VOA editorials damning Polish strongman Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski as being “Soviet imposed” on the people of Poland.
At one point, an aide interrupted Eagleburger’s harangue. “Tomlinson is a close friend of Bob Novak,” he explained. “Before he leaves we better have an agreement that he will not tell Novak of this meeting.” Suddenly Eagleburger’s demeanor changed. There were no more complaints about our anti-Soviet Polish broadcasts…Continue reading on Human Events >>
The Influence of a College Education on Evangelical Christian Students
Scott Jaschik has a post on Inside Higher Ed today describing the social influence of a college education:
Higher education has always been celebrated by some (and criticized by others) for exposing students to ideas that may conflict with those with which they were raised.
Scholars here at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association presented data suggesting that this shift in attitudes (a liberalizing one) applies to evangelical Protestants who either earn college degrees or live in areas with many college graduates.
Seth Ovadia of Bowdoin College and Laura M. Moore of Hood College write in their paper that evangelical Protestants make up more than a quarter of of the U.S. population, and that they have become an important political force, making it important to understand both the way they influence society (a topic much studied) and how they are influenced (a less studied topic). They note that evangelicals are not a uniform group and not an isolated group — nor are they (as some stereotypes have it) uneducated…Continue reading on Inside Higher Ed >>
Economic Rigor Mortis
Patrick Bedard, Indy 500 Jaguar racer and journalist for Car and Driver magazine is retiring from journalism. In his column today, “Thoughts on My Last Day: What I’ve seen in my four decades at Car and Driver,” he explains:
…Show of hands, please: Who thinks Americans will line up for Fiats wearing Chrysler labels? Sure, if gas goes back to four bucks a gallon. But there’s a term for what happens to the economy at that point—rigor mortis.
Imagine a future in which American brands can’t compete against the foreigners on American soil. Actually, that’s where we are right now. I can imagine GM and Chrysler operating as public utilities—green jobs building Obama-mandated green cars. The government has already poured into Chrysler, or promised, a sum that amounts to $314,000 per U.S. Chrysler employee, according to the Journal. Who thinks the pouring will stop here? Why not just cut a quarter-million-dollar check for each of them and pull the sheet up over the corpse?
Am I being too gloomy as my clock runs down? Actually, I remain the cockeyed optimist…Patience is the key. Costs come down pennies at a time. There’s no market for miracles people can’t afford….Read the entire column on Car and Driver >>
‘I have no idea right now what is going to happen to me.’ – The downside of student loans.
Alex Jurek has a very interesting article on InDenver today, When debt ruins lives: The dark side to student loans:
Student loans offer an opportunity for financing one’s education, but these loans also have a dark side.
“I have no idea right now what is going to happen to me,” said Steve, a Denver-area college student. “With a student loan in default, I get to look forward to no credit — how will I rent an apartment? With liens on anything I own, I can never make any plans for owning anything. With Social Security taken away, I have no idea how I will live when I am old as I have nothing saved for my future.”
Steve’s story is not unique. At least 200,000 Americans are silently enduring the corrosive effects of student debt, if the Facebook friends of student loan forgiveness advocate Rob Applebaum’s “Cancel Student Debt and Stimulate the Economy” page are any indication. Like most Americans who take on significant debt, all these borrowers wanted was to improve their lives. But the student loan system, with its punitive rules and no provisions for life’s changing circumstances, makes that hard, if not impossible, for many. And when student loans go bad, lives can be destroyed.
The potential for trouble has grown with the prevalence of student loans as major sources of financing a college education, the traditional path to a better life in America.
Current economic problems have led to a dramatic increase in the percentage of defaults – over 9 percent, the most since 1998 – as thousands find themselves unable to make monthly payments. Often running into hundreds of dollars a month, monthly payments become an impossible burden when the jobs that borrowers planned on getting after graduation, the jobs that were going to cover the tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, simply aren’t there.
But even before the current economic crisis, student loans posed enormous financial burdens…Continue reading on InDenver.com >>
A Notable and Quotable Blog on a Landmark Federal Study
Jonathan Kaplan, the President of Walden University, has a post on Inside Higher Ed today entited, The Medium is Not the Message:
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that looked at 12 years’ worth of education studies, and found that online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face instruction.
The study, “An Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies,” stated that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.”
Except for one article, [on Inside Higher Ed], you probably didn’t hear about it — and neither did anyone else.
But imagine for a moment that the report came to the opposite conclusion. I’m sure that if the U.S. Department of Education had published a report showing that students in online learning environments performed worse, there would have been a major outcry in higher education with calls to shut down distance-learning programs and close virtual campuses. [emphasis in bold face added]
I believe the reason that the recent study elicited so little commentary is due to the fact that it flies in the face of the biases held by some across the higher education landscape. Yet this study confirms what those of us working in distance education have witnessed for years: Good teaching helps students achieve, and good teaching comes in many forms.
We know that online learning requires devout attention on the part of both the professor and the student — and a collaboration between the two — in a different way from that of a face-to-face classroom…Continue reading which aspects of online education Kaplan feels are noteworthy on Inside Higher Ed >>
FreedomFest in Las Vegas
Following is video of the awards ceremony hosted by Dr. Richard Bishirjian at Freedom Fest, in Las Vegas, NV. This year’s event was hosted by Yorktown University. To download copies of the Supply-Side Economics seminars, visit YU. The honorees at this year’s FreedomFest are Richard Rahn, Stephen Moore, and Larry Kudlow.
