Tag Archives: cost of college tuition

Good News About Admissions To Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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On Friday, The City Journal posted an article about some changes being made in the admissions policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The article reports:

This week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it would once again require applicants to take standardized tests. “Our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT⁠ is significantly improved by considering standardized testing,” wrote the university’s dean of admissions, Stu Schmill. Parents and alumni largely hailed the decision.

Sanity, it seems, might be coming back. MIT needs the tests to remain MIT. Progressive critics of standardized testing say that a merit-based focus comes at the expense of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and they question the predictive value and objectivity of the tests. But the weight of the evidence shows that the tests indeed measure what they set out to measure.

The goal of any college should be to provide and education for its students and to work to help those students achieve academic success. If you are taking in students that are not able to learn at the level you are teaching, helping those students to achieve academic success is going to be an uphill battle.

Just for the record, this is the cost of tuition at MIT according to their website:

A term at MIT currently costs more than what my husband and I paid for our first house.

The article at The City Journal concludes:

Standardized tests are among the fairest assessment methods available. They not only predict academic talent across economic levels but also counter the mischief that holistic admissions allow. Schools can use holistic admissions to justify double standards on an individual level, or a wider range of biases against certain groups. As UC–Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel shows in his research on Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, holistic admissions were designed early in the twentieth century to limit the number of Jews at colleges. Later on, the targeted group became Asian students.

Standardized testing, with their emphasis on an objective measure, can be a tool of upward mobility. With holistic admissions, by contrast, wealthier families can shift their resources from test preparation—which even the poorest of families can pursue through public libraries—to purchasing edifying experiences, such as arts, athletics, summer programs, and unpaid internships. They can also purchase services, such as interview coaching and essay editing. These experiences and polished writing samples look good on applications, but they further punish those applicants who are qualified but lack such advantages. Grade inflation, too, benefits the wealthy: the Fordham Institute recently found that the phenomenon “worsened in schools attended by affluent students more than in those attended by lower-income pupils.”

Without standardized tests, American universities will confront obvious and difficult selection problems. MIT has decided on a better way.

A Slightly Different Take On Occupy Wall Street

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Yesterday The Corner at National Review OnLine posted an interesting commentary on the Wall Street protests. The article points out that although part of the crowd protesting is ‘old lefties and sundry off-their-meds street people,’ many of them are college graduates. The protesters have stated that they are mad because they cannot get jobs. The problem is not that they can’t get jobs–they can’t get the jobs they want where they want them.

The article points out:

Wages for entry-level and semi-skilled workers have barely budged in ten years. I credit this to employer’s wariness about hiring anyone at all. Hiring people (and all the litigation risks they present) is simply too risky unless that hire is obviously going to enhance the bottom line. Risks on the young and the untested are simply unacceptable in a tight economy tied down with regulation.

In short, if an Occupy Wall Street kid is ever inclined to look for work, the job he finds is not likely to be the groovy one he and his beleaguered parents envisioned when that $200,000 was shelled out for a four-year degree in poli-sci or women’s studies.

The point of this article is that the revolution we may be seeing may eventually target the educational system in America.

The article concludes:

We haven’t had a bad enough economy to test this proposition in a while — an economy that forces employers to hire only the most essential workers — but what we are seeing these days is that a four-year liberal-arts degree is completely non-essential. The only twentysomethings I know who are gainfully employed and living like men, with their own apartments, cars, and girlfriends, are in the building trades. My upstairs neighbor has more work than he can handle designing and installing sound systems in large places like auditoriums and shopping malls.

If there’s going to be a revolution in this country, I would like one part of it to look like this: Vocational schools would be opened again (and celebrated, not marginalized) and parents would tell junior that a four-year degree is off the table unless he knows exactly how he can use it.

I am not opposed to sending children to college, although I will admit that when I sent my children to college it was much less expensive. All three of my daughters are gainfully employed in the fields that they studied to the degree that they choose to be employed. One daughter is a practicing lawyer, one is an electrical engineer, and one has an art degree. The lawyer and engineer work full time. The artist teaches part-time (which is her choice. She lives in California which has eliminated public school art teachers). I can, however, understand that a degree in women’s studies might not put you on the top of the resume pile.

It is interesting to note that as government aid to students has increased, the cost of an education has also risen rapidly. There is a chart at a website called trends.collegeboards.org which shows the rise of the cost of college since 1976. The question that some of the protesters need to ask is, “Is the government college loan program providing cover for colleges to raise their tuition fees beyond what those fees would normally be?”