Behind the bribery: US university admissions favor the rich

NEW YORK, United States — The scandal of parents paying to cheat their children's way into elite US universities has put a harsh spotlight on the ultra-competitive college admissions process, in which the haves hold a massive advantage over the have-nots.

Thirty-three wealthy parents -- financiers, lawyers, and two famous actresses among them -- were arrested Tuesday as part of an operation that charged from $15,000 to millions of dollars to help them get their children into renowned schools like Yale, Georgetown, Stanford and the University of Southern California.

But as outraged as many Americans were at the illegality, even within the law, the rich have a huge, unfair advantage when it comes to gaming the intensely stressful annual college admissions battle.


The competition is clear in the numbers. Just 4.6 percent of over 40,000 students applying to Harvard University get in.

The figure is 4.3 percent at Stanford and 5.5 percent and Columbia, two other top universities.


Many who are qualified grade-wise are rejected, intensifying the competition to stand out.

The process favors the wealthy. They can apply to more schools and invest heavily in preparing for tests and essays.

The richest, too, can beat the competition by donating to universities. ProPublica editor Daniel Golden documented how President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner gained admission to Harvard University in 1998 after his father made a legal $2.5 million donation to the school.

"There's a limited number of spots for those with enormous means," said Hafeez Lakhani, whose Lakhani Coaching company helps prepare students.

"I understand that there is a disparity out there and that not everyone is able to afford the best help or any help at all."

Planning and spending 

Many parents spend their kids' lives planning their university career.

"In the United States, families are obsessed with the entrance into university," said Sylvie Bigar, a New Yorker whose daughter just entered the respected Smith College in Massachusetts.

"It seems like these things are decided almost in kindergarten, that admission to a prestigious university leads to a prestigious career and happiness."

"It's an extremely stressful process, especially for kids whose parents aren't the most affluent," said Angela Perez, a student at the highly competitive Georgetown University in Washington.

"While I considered myself academically strong, getting in was one thing, and paying for it was another."

Perez, from a working class, immigrant Filipino family, said that to maximize her chances at both acceptance and financial aid, she applied to 18 different universities.

Adding together the application fees, test fees, training for the tests, and other, she said, "it was honestly quite costly." 

$40,000 to prepare 

The process begins in earnest in tenth grade, three years before graduating from high school. Students prepare for and take multiple times the ACT and SAT entrance examinations -- the ones the parents arrested Tuesday paid to have fixed for their children.

There are essays to write, interviews, tutorials, preparation tests, and for the families with access and connections, direct lobbying.

And, notes Bigar, "at every stage of this process, there are firms that help families who can afford it."

According to the Independent Educational Consultants Association, parents pay on average $200 an hour to consult experts on the applications process. But that price, in some situations, can run into the thousands of dollars per hour.

The parents of children who are shepherded by Lakhani pay on average $40,000.

"The reason families are interested in working with my firm is that they see an opportunity to climb higher than they would have climbed potentially on their own," he said.

To critics of the system, the issue illustrates the deep economic and social inequality in the country.

"It's obviously a scandal when rich people are accused of breaking the law to get their kids into top schools," wrote journalist Rainesford Stauffer in an op-ed in the New York Times.

"But the bigger outrage should be that a legal version of purchasing an advantage happens every college application season and that there's an entire industry supporting it."

source: philstar.com

The Lows of Higher Ed

Welcome back, college students! Always nice to see you.

Although we are sort of worried by those bleak stories about student debt, which suggest a lot of you may graduate owing a ton of money and unqualified to do anything more remunerative than selling socks.

This year, Newsweek cheerfully welcomed the Class of 2016 by asking, “Is College a Lousy Investment?” And in The Times, Andrew Martin reported that the Department of Education is paying more than $1.4 billion per annum to folks whose job it is to collect on $76 billion in defaulted student loans. “If you wait long enough, you catch people when their guard’s down,” one debt collector told Martin after garnishing the savings of a disabled carpenter.

Look on the bright side, students. Perhaps when you graduate, some of you will be able to qualify for a good job in the booming accounts receivable management industry.

Higher education is still the key to most good jobs, but the nation is starting to ask some questions about the way we finance it. Shouldn’t there be more of a match between the cost of school and the potential earning power of the graduates? Who speaks for the art history majors? And why is tuition so high, anyway? (Parents, if your kid is planning to take out student loans, you might want to avoid any college where the dorm rooms are nicer than your house.)

“People don’t believe much any more about the altruistic motives of colleges and universities,” sadly noted Pat Callan of the Higher Education Policy Institute.

Not without some reason. In his reporting, Martin uncovered a newsletter aimed at college admissions officers that advised them to avoid using “bad words” such as “cost” or “pay” in their admissions materials. Instead, it suggested: “And you get all this for ...”

In Washington, Congress is holding hearings! The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is considering a bill — co-sponsored by Democrat Al Franken and Republican Charles Grassley — that would require all schools to fill out the same form telling the student loan applicants useful facts like exactly how much per month they’ll be forking over when they start paying.

That would be the superminimum, right? How amazed are you that this isn’t happening already?

“Some of the packages don’t delineate what’s a grant, what’s a scholarship, what’s a loan,” said Franken. “And the information all comes in an award letter, so you’re thinking: Award!”

The Obama administration, which can’t do much about this without Congress, has been working to get the schools to voluntarily adopt a “shopping sheet” that would provide clear basic information so students could compare different schools’ financing before making a choice. “We’ve been encouraged by the feedback from the higher-ed sector,” one of the experts working on the program said. “I think we have 100 individual colleges and universities.”

The good news is that controlling college costs really does seem to be an administration priority. The bad news is that there are more than 4,000 colleges and universities.

People, don’t you think young adults should get the clearest, most easy-to-compare information conceivable before they sign a huge, life-changing loan deal? Don’t you think there should be somebody in charge of calling them up once a week and yelling: “Eight hundred dollars a month until you’re 51 years old!”

Maybe I’m underestimating the ability of teenagers to make serious, well-thought-out decisions about their higher education. All I can tell you is that when I was 21 years old, I signed up to go to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts because I had always wanted to live in Boston. I had no idea the main campus was on the other side of the state until I got there.

Franken is hoping the Senate might take up his proposal next year. I presume you weren’t expecting anything sooner. Congress can’t even get it together to keep the Postal Service from defaulting. And the Senate leaders admitted the other day that they’re not going to be able to pass a bipartisan bill to legalize Internet gambling on poker, which seems to be a really high priority for some important people. If they can’t do poker, they are not going to get to student loan transparency.

The House is planning hearings on student loans, too. The chairwoman of the subcommittee assigned to this task is Representative Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican who once said that she worked her own way through college and had “little tolerance” for people who complain about their huge student loan debts.

“New ideas to advocate for financial aid transparency are always welcome in this discussion,” Foxx said in an e-mail on Friday. “But we have to question whether the federal government’s dictating the terms of every college and university’s financial aid communications will actually achieve the desired results.”

So maybe a little less sense of urgency there.

source: nytimes.com

Top US colleges to offer free classes online

Five prestigious US universities will create free online courses for students worldwide through a new, interactive education platform dubbed Coursera, the founders announced Wednesday.

The two founders, both professors of computer science at Stanford University, also announced that they had received $16 million in financing from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Coursera will offer more than three dozen college courses in the coming year through its website at coursera.org, on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to neurology, from calculus to contemporary American poetry. The classes are designed and taught by professors at Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.

Coursera joins a raft of ambitious online projects aimed at making higher education more accessible and affordable. Many of these ventures, however, simply post entire lectures on the web, with no interactive component. Others strive to create brand-new universities from scratch.

Founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng say Coursera will be different because professors from top schools will teach under their university's name and will adapt their most popular courses for the web, embedding assignments and exams into video lectures, answering questions from students on online forums -- even, perhaps, hosting office hours via videoconference.

Multiple-choice and short-answer tests will be computer scored. Coursera will soon unveil a system of peer grading to assess more complex work, such as essays or algorithms.

Students will not get college credit. But Coursera may offer "certificates of completion" or transcripts for a fee. The company may also seek to turn a profit by connecting employers with students who have shown aptitude in a particular field, a spokeswoman said.

For their part, participating universities expect to benefit by boosting their reputation overseas, connecting with far-flung alumni and - they hope - bringing in donations from grateful online students.

"It will increase our impact on the world," said Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania.

In trial classes Coursera hosted this year, the production values were a bit rough.

Scott Page, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, filmed his lectures for a class called Model Thinking in front of an unpainted door in an addition being built on his house. Interruptions forced him to reshoot several segments - and as a result, he looks undeniably grumpy in some takes. A few of his online quizzes contain errors. His slides are sometimes hard to read. From time to time, his dog wanders into the frame.

Yet 30,000 people from around the globe stuck with the class week after week, doing the homework, watching the lectures and chatting with one another in lively discussion forums. "It's awesome," Page said. He has calculated that it would take 150 years of teaching in person for him to reach as many people as he did online.

A course Ng taught in artificial intelligence was just as popular: Nearly 25,000 students completed most of the work - and 13,000 scored high enough to earn a "statement of accomplishment" from Stanford. Some even translated the lectures into their native languages and posted subtitles. "People really get engaged," Ng said.

The concept does have pitfalls.

There's no way for professors to tell who is completing the work, so "doors are wide open for cheating," said Michael Winckler, a mathematician at Heidelberg University who took Page's course on models. It's difficult, he added, to replicate the collaborative learning that takes place in a traditional classroom when students puzzle through problems together.

Still, Winckler was impressed enough with the quality and rigor of the online class to let his doctoral students count it toward their required coursework.

As online education matures, students may be able to build their own first-rate college education for free through sites like Coursera, said Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology.

That may make it tough for some universities to survive. "They can't assume a never-ending supply of students" willing to pay for a pricey campus education, DeMillo said.

But Phil Hanlon, a provost at the University of Michigan, said he wasn't worried the free offerings would cut into his school's appeal. On the contrary, he said the technology would enhance the campus experience. Professors could direct students to watch online lectures to learn the nuts and bolts of a given subject, freeing class time for hands-on activities that can't be replicated in cyberspace, he said.

The two venture capital firms backing Coursera are Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates, both in Menlo Park, Calif. Each invested $8 million.

source: interaksyon.com

Metro Manila hosts most number of colleges allowed to hike tuition

Metro Manila will have the most number of private universities and colleges to increase their tuition in June, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) said, adding that it already approved fee hikes for 256 schools nationwide.

Higher tuition will be charged in 67 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Metro Manila, followed by 41 in Region XI (Davao Region), and 36 in Region IV-A (Calabarzon), the Commission said.

The Commission added that 30 schools have been allowed to impose increased tuition in Region VI (Western Visayas), 28 in Region III (Central Luzon), and 16 in Region V (Bicol), 15 in Region X (Northern Mindanao), and 14 in Region IX (Zamboanga Peninsula).
Tuition fee increases have also been approved for 12 schools in both Region VII (Central Visayas) and Region XII (SOCCSKSARGEN), 7 in Region I (Ilocos), and six each in the Cordillera Administrative Region and CARAGA.

Five schools in Region IV-B (MIMAROPA) and two in Region VIII (Eastern Visayas) were also allowed to impose higher tuition, the body said.

Increase in tuition ranges from seven percent up to 15 percent.

Schools in Region II are reported to have the highest percent of increase at 15 percent, followed by CARAGA (13 percent); Region 1 (12 percent); Regions XI and V with 11 percent; Region 3 (10 percent); NCR, Regions VI, VII, VIII, and IX (9 percent); Regions IVA and CAR (8 percent) and Region XI (7 percent).

The number of schools that have sought--and eventually secured approval to hike fees--is lower, compared to last year’s 324 HEIs, CHED said.

These schools comprise "roughly only 10 percent" of the 2,247 HEIs nationwide, including in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

source: interaksyon.com