Universities Weblog

Out from his coffin, Drac's voice did ring
Seems he was troubled by just one thing
He opened the lid and shook his fist
And said, "Whatever happened to my Transylvania twist?" Bobby "Boris" Pickett, Monster MashIt's the night of goblins, witches, ghosts and ghouls, black cats, pumpkins and bags of candy. It's Halloween, much to the chagrin of dentists everywhere.

And if you can't visit Romania, home of Dracula, to pay homage to this tradition, you could at least find your way to Lexington, Kentucky, where you'll discover Transylvania University. Transy, as it's known to insiders, is—despite its "university" tag—a liberal arts college, enrolling some 1,100 students. And while it's old (founded in 1780), it's not quite as old as the "Old World" from which Dracula and his buddies sprang.

But give Transy credit. At least it has a sense of humor about its name.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

(Source: Amherst College)Last week's New York Review of Books featured an essay chronicling the ills of higher education. Titled "The Truth About the Colleges," the piece elucidates what many already know: the social pressures to get into the "right" institutions; data showing little correlation between going to these "right" institutions and career success; commercialization and the facilities arms race; social stratification and the preponderance of the affluent at top schools; the unfairness of legacy admissions; professors ignoring undergraduates and undergraduates ignoring their studies; and the decline of liberal education. As you can surmise by this laundry list, the article focuses primarily on elite colleges, which enroll a small fraction of students nationally but attract the most attention and scrutiny.

Nonetheless, it's worth a read, especially if you're interested in any of the books mentioned in the piece:

– Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (by Ross Gregory Douthat)

– I'm the Teacher, You're the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom (by Patrick Allitt)

– What the Best College Teachers Do (by Ken Bain)

– University, Inc.: The Corporate corruption of American Higher Education (by Jennifer Washburn)

– The Best 357 Colleges: 2005 Edition (by the Princeton Review)

Quick: What's the second-largest private, nonprofit university in California?

(Waiting….)

It's National University, of course.

National is based in La Jolla and features 16 learning centers throughout San Diego County. Regional centers are also located in Costa Mesa, Sacramento, Redding, San Jose, Stockton, Fresno, Bakersfield, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Sherman Oaks, Orange, and Twentynine Palms. For those who don't live in California, National offers more than 35 online graduate and undergraduate degree programs as well as online credential and certificate programs.

The university is well-known for its unique one-course-per-month format and its curricular breadth. National offers over 60 undergraduate and graduate degrees, and 16 teacher credential and certificate programs. Disciplines include business, technology, criminal justice, computers, education, human services, nursing, counseling, and other programs within arts and sciences.

Check out what National can offer you.

(Source: University of Cambridge)Fans of rankings, rejoice. I recently stumbled upon a site that ranks the world's top 500 universities. That's right—you can now see how the best in the U.S. stack up against the premier institutions from around the globe. The site, sponsored by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, even breaks down the top 100 schools in North and Latin America, Europe and Asia.

For the record, here are the world's top 20:

1. Harvard University
2. University of Cambridge
3. Stanford University
4. University of California-Berkeley
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6. California Institute of Technology
7. Columbia University
8. Princeton University
9. University of Chicago
10. University of Oxford
11. Yale University
12. Cornell University
13. University of California-San Diego
14. University of California-Los Angeles
15. University of Pennsylvania
16. University of Wisconsin-Madison
17. University of Washington
18. University of California-San Francisco
19. Johns Hopkins University
20. Tokyo University

The Institute's methodology rests largely on research output and related rewards, including the following:

– Alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals
– Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals
– Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories
– Articles published in Nature and Science
– Articles in Science citation Index-expanded, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index
– Academic performance with respect to the size of an institution

Given the narrow focus of this methodology, the findings are debatable. Like other rankings, this one amounts to a fun exercise. But if nothing else, it does demonstrate America's dominance in research.

The cost of higher education continues to rise, outpacing what institutions offer for financial aid. As a result, says the college board, attendance and graduation rates will increasingly correlate with family income.

Consider this bit from Newsday:

As tuition across the nation continues to outpace gains in financial aid, students' chances of attending college and finishing with a degree increasingly are linked to their families' income, the College Board reported Tuesday.

Financial aid did not keep pace with tuition increases this year, continuing a trend, the reports said. The average net tuition and fees — the price paid after financial aid is awarded — was $11,600 for private college students, up from an inflation-adjusted $9,500 a decade ago. Public college net tuition and fees averaged $2,200, increasing from a real price of $1,900 a decade ago.The piece notes that the middle class is being squeezed the most. Families earning $50,000 to $100,000 often don't qualify for substantial aid packages, yet cannot manage the additional burden of college costs.

You can read the entire article here.

Want to visit West Coast and Ivy League schools but can't fathom a cross-country trip? No problem. A new company called "The U" has a solution: DVD tours of colleges, complete with student and faculty interviews and insider looks at campus life.

Here's a mention in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

High-school students no longer need to visit a college to get a feel for its campus. A new series of fast-paced DVD documentaries — packed with footage from parties, and interviews with students and professors — gives viewers an inside look at life at 50 top colleges.

"There's an incredible disconnect between higher-education marketing and the way kids think and speak," says Mr. Imbruce. "Why not give them information in a way that's hip and relevant?"Visit the company's site here and take a sample tour. Then decide if it's worth $14.95 for each school.

A new book on the history of admissions practices at Harvard, Yale and Princeton—commonly known as the "Big Three"—is getting a good bit of attention. You can find yet another review of The Chosen at Inside Higher Ed.

Here's an excerpt:

In broad outline, the story goes something like this. Once upon a time, there were three old and distinguished universities on the east coast of the United States. The Big Three were each somewhat distinctive in character, but also prone to keeping an eye on one another's doings.

But by World War One, something was menacing these idyllic institutions: Namely, immigration in general and "the Hebrew invasion" in particular. A meeting of New England deans in the spring of 1918 took this on directly. A large and growing percentage of incoming students were the bright and driven children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. This was particularly true at Harvard, where almost a fifth of the Freshman class that year was Jewish. A few years later, the figure would reach 13 percent at Yale — and even at Princeton, the number of Jewish students had doubled its prewar level.You can read the full review here.

(Source: College of William and Mary)"Hey, Justice O'Connor, you just wrapped up a 24-year stint on the Supreme court. What are you going to do next?"

"I'm going to William and Mary!"

Well, not exactly. The position of chancellor at the nation's second-oldest college is largely an honorary designation, a high-end advisor who's supposed to counsel the president and board. Past chancellors include Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Warren Burger (another member of the Supreme Court), and some guy named George Washington.

A time-honored tradition, to be sure, and one that garners William and Mary a bit of prestige and national ink.

(Source: Princeton University)Don't miss an excellent piece in The New Yorker, an historical and contemporary look at how elite colleges—particularly Harvard, Yale and Princeton—have selected their classes. The article is part first-person, part literature review and part critique of a recent book titled The Chosen.

Here's an excerpt:

Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn't have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It's confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don't become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you're beautiful.

The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modelling agency than like the Marine Corps, and, sure enough, the studies based on those two apparently equivalent students turn out to be flawed. How do we know that two students who have the same S.A.T. scores and grades really are equivalent? It's quite possible that the student who goes to Harvard is more ambitious and energetic and personable than the student who wasn't let in, and that those same intangibles are what account for his better career success. To assess the effect of the Ivies, it makes more sense to compare the student who got into a top school with the student who got into that same school but chose to go to a less selective one. Three years ago, the economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale published just such a study. And they found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears.You can find the article here.

(Source: Fitchburg State College)Higher education can be a huge investment—of time, if not money. Does it pay off? Yes, of course it does. But how much?

A new study suggests the following, as detailed in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The hourly-wage gap between people with college degrees and those with only a high-school education has been growing for decades, but the rate of increase slowed in the 1990s. At the same time, tuition prices rose, leading people to ask whether college was still worth it. But after studying the financial risks and rewards of higher education, two economists have concluded that continuing one's education definitely still pays off.

That increase is important to focus on, in contrast to the rising cost of tuition, which the authors say has almost no effect on the value of a college education. In fact, despite the growth in the number of graduates, the wages of degree-holders continue to rise, indicating "an increasing—not a decreasing—demand for their skills," they write.

You can read the full article, titled "Does College Still Pay?," here.