Links for 5/26/10

Eric Hoover

A majority of students and their parents have ruled out colleges based solely on published sticker prices without considering how much financial aid they might receive, according to a recent survey of college applicants. Most students and parents said they had not used online financial-aid calculators to determine how much they would need to pay at different colleges…

students from high-income families made greater use of aid calculators than those in the lowest-income group…

Nearly two-thirds of students with SAT scores of 1250 or higher expected to receive merit aid. Almost as many respondents with scores between 1000 and 1240 expected to receive merit aid, and so did about 45 percent of students with scores 1000 or below.

The widespread availability of merit aid seems to have created "a climate of expectations" among applicants…

Rob Manwaring

The back and forth in the last couple of weeks over seniority layoff policies goes something like this. When districts are forced to lay off teachers based on seniority policies, those layoffs happen disproportionately at schools serving low income students. Research has shown that high rates of teacher turnover impacts the achievement levels at schools. This results in a civil rights issue because of the disproportionate impact that these policies have on the most disadvantaged students. (See National Journal discussion and new CRPE report for more details on the debate and research).

On the other side, the best argument seems to be that districts do not have good teacher evaluation systems, and until such evaluation systems are in place, any policy for teacher layoffs other than based on seniority would end up being arbitrary and could actually discriminate against veteran teachers because they are more expensive…

Paula Krebs

If we value the humanities enough to teach them at the undergraduate level, if we believe that humanities education produces thoughtful, critical, self-aware global citizens, then we need to recognize that advanced training in the humanities cannot be simply the province of aspiring tenure-track faculty members. If there’s no prospect of a tenure-track job in the humanities, and humanities graduate programs train students for nothing but tenure-track jobs, how long can these programs be sustainable?...

KC Johnson

Principles of academic freedom, appropriately, guard against retaliatory action toward professors who take ill-conceived positions. But with the rights of academic freedom are supposed to come responsibilities as well---including open-mindedness in pursuit of the truth. The Group's utter lack of accountability---and what it says about the state of the fields that they dominate---reflects the malaise that continues to beset contemporary higher education.