Links for 5/17/10

William Deresiewicz

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics…

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject…

Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools… others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class… These are the kinds of kids who are likely… to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés…

Edward B. Fiske

Perhaps the most distressing thing about the reputational surveys is that they tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Nicholas A. Bowman and Michael N. Bastedo, two academics who have studied the effects of reputational surveys, talk of the "anchoring effect" under which people asked to make judgments in ambiguous circumstances start with whatever information they already have at their disposal and then go on from there. In the case of reputational surveys, what college presidents know at the outset is last year's U.S. News rankings. So in a paper prepared for the recent meeting of the American Education Research Association they come to the conclusion that "rankings drive reputation, and not the other way around."

Doug Lederman

How bad are things in Colorado?...

Under the plan, which is designed to last for five years, each institution would by November submit a plan for how it would deal with a 50 percent reduction in its current allocation of state funds. (The Colorado Commission on Higher Education would take those plans into consideration in framing its budget request for the 2011-12 fiscal year.) In exchange, individual universities would, beginning in 2011-12, be allowed to increase their tuition by up to 9 percent a year with no restrictions, but would need approval from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education to exceed that level.

While it's a "very seductive policy" for colleges to say "give us tuition authority, we'll assure you that we protect the students," the approach has both philosophical and practical problems…