Universities Weblog

Rejected by your first (second…third…) college of choice? You're not alone. Competition for spots at the Ivies and other top schools has become ridiculous. Even if you're a valedictorian with a 1,500+ SAT score and loads of extracurricular activities on your resume, you're not a shoo-in for admission.

Shunned by first-tier colleges, more and more students are turning to what formerly were considered "safety" schools. And many are learning, to their surprise, that they're no longer safe. This trickle down effect has reached even lower tiers of private colleges and has certainly made gaining admission to flagship public universities increasingly tough. At some point down the private college prestige scale, a public college begins to look like a better deal.

All that said, don't fret—you can get a good education just about anywhere.

On the heels of the recent U.S. News and World Report annual ranking of graduate programs, two top business schools say they've had enough. Both Harvard and Penn's Wharton School no longer will enable publications to survey students and alumni for data relevant to devising the rankings.

Ostensibly, the two B-schools say they're trying to protect the privacy of their alums and students, but they're also quite vocal about their opposition to rankings, which have been described as academic beauty pageants. Of course, both Harvard and Penn have fared well: this year's U.S. News evaluation ranks Harvard number one and Wharton third; in 2002, BusinessWeek put Harvard third and Wharton fifth, though Wharton had ranked first in 2000.

This move will not affect U.S. News, which doesn't rely on student survey data, but it will hamper BusinessWeek. And they're not happy about it. The magazine issued a statement on its Web site condemning these actions and assuring readers that the rankings will go on. Here's a snippet:

"Rest assured, the BusinessWeek B-schools team will conduct our survey—including the student survey—and produce our biennial ranking, using reporting where necessary. Already, virtually all the other schools—more than 100—are cooperating."

And now for the bashing:

"Just as investors today are clamoring for more transparency on the part of companies, so should students expect a similar degree of openness and cooperation from the very schools that nurture new business leaders. It's particularly troubling that the information filter comes from institutions whose key precepts include the free flow of information and ideas."

But BusinessWeek might be fighting a losing battle. Every year, it seems, more higher education leaders decry the rankings and threaten to withhold necessary information. It might be only a matter of time before enough of them join forces and end widespread participation once and for all. Ranking could continue, but without objective data they would become even less credible.

Still, if you're even more curious than ever about MBA programs and rankings, check out this handy site.

A new study by a former Princeton president suggests elite colleges should "put a thumb on the admissions scale" for students from poor families. "After race," said William Bowen in an interview with the New York Times, "there is no question that the most serious forms of disadvantage in america today are low income and low education."

According to Bowen's research, low-income students account for only 11 percent of the population at the 19 institutions he and a colleague studied. What's more, the study reveals that substituting income-based affirmative action for current race-based measures would reduce racial diversity. Therefore, he concludes, colleges need to do both.

And why is this a good idea? Well, Bowen thinks it's a matter of equity, and that exposing all students to this form of diversity is somehow educational. How can rich students understand poor students, and vice versa, unless they're sitting together in the same classroom? I buy the "equity" argument, but stumping for diversity as an educational tool has become tiresome.

Yet here's the kicker. When asked how such a policy would affect financial aid decisions, Michael McPherson, a higher education finance expert, said, "If you want Harvard to look more like America, changing admissions policies is going to have much more dramatic effect than changing financial aid." Sorry to say, but Harvard and its fellow Ivies have never looked like America, nor will they ever. They're supposed to be meritocracies, not microcosms.

Every year dozens of campus newspapers publish prank issues on or near April 1. Sometimes, though, these fools go too far, at least in some people's estimation.

Three campus papers recently faced censure for such activities. At Carnegie Mellon, students found trouble by running a "racially charged" cartoon. The editor blamed his lack of proper judgment on fatigue. The University of Scranton's paper was closed after it published a parody of Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ." Scranton, you see, is a Jesuit institution, and certain things are sacred. And at Nebraska, students ran a special issue called "The Ghettoway," a spoof of the regular paper, "The Gateway," complete with a contrived contributor called Mindjo Bidness. How clever.

Did these students go too far? Their universities certainly think so. Everyone knows these were just jokes, but that's not always a sufficient excuse. Here's an excerpt from the linked story:

"When you engage in humor or satire, the challenge that a newspaper … faces is one of interpretation. The general idea is that people who are doing an April Fool's joke expect that people on whom it's played will understand the prankster's position," Colon said. "That's where a disconnect can take place."Advice to editors: Go ahead with your satirical issues, but be sure not to target sensitive topics, especially race.

(Source: U.S. News and World Report)U.S. News and World Report has published its annual rankings of graduate and professional schools. The 2005 edition ranks Yale first in law; Harvard first in medicine, business and education (tied with Stanford); and MIT first in engineering. It also includes evaluations of many other programs such as fine Arts, public affairs, social sciences and humanities. You can view some data on the U.S. News Web page, but most content is restricted to paying customers.

As always, these rankings will spur debate, particularly among those who didn't fare well.

When will sportscasters learn to avoid commenting on race matters? In this latest example of broadcast foolishness, legendary Notre Dame quarterback turned announcer Paul Hornung suggested that his alma mater should lower its academic standards so it could "get the black athlete." He's implying, of course, that black athletes and academic standards are somehow mutually exclusive. He's also saying that blacks are better athletes than whites, at least on the football field.

Such issues are subject to debate, but our society has long made it clear that it's taboo to venture into those debates on air. Years ago, Jimmy the Greek lost his job for related comments, as did former Dodger GM Al Campanis more recently. Maybe Hornung is next.

For its part, Notre Dame has denounced Hornung's comments, stating that they are "generally insensitive and specifically insulting to our past and current african-American student-athletes."

And for the record, of next year's incoming Notre Dame freshmen football players, 12 are black and five are white.