How colleges and universities can respond to legal pressures while remaining true to their educational missions.
Not so long ago, colleges and universities had little interaction with the law. In the 1970s, only a few well-heeled universities even employed in-house legal counsel. But now we live in the age of tenure-denial lawsuits, free speech battles, and campus sexual assault investigations. Even athletics rules violations have become a serious legal matter. The pressures of regulation, litigation, and legislation, Louis Guard and Joyce Jacobsen write, have fostered a new era in higher education, and institutions must know how to respond.
For many higher education observers and participants, including most administrators and faculty, the maze of legal mandates and potential risks can seem bewildering. Guard, a general counsel with years of higher education law experience, and Jacobsen, a former college president, map this unfamiliar terrain. All the Campus Lawyers provides a vital, up-to-date assessment of the impact of legal concerns on higher education and helps readers make sense of the most pressing trends and issues, including civil rights; free speech and expression; student life and wellness; admissions, advancement, and community relations; governance and oversight; the higher education business model; and on-campus crises, from cyberattacks to pandemics.
As well as informing about the latest legal and regulatory developments affecting higher education, Guard and Jacobsen offer practical guidance to those in positions of campus authority. There has never been a more crucial time for college and university boards, presidents, inside and outside counsel, and other higher education leaders to know the law and prepare for legal challenges.
SATs, ACTs, GPAs. Everyone knows that these scores can’t tell a college everything that’s important about an applicant. But what else should admissions officers look for, and how can they know it when they see it? In College Admissions for the 21st Century a leading researcher on intelligence and creativity offers a bold and practical approach to college admissions testing.
Standardized tests are measures of memory and analytical skills. But the ever-changing global society beyond a college campus needs more than just those qualities, argues Robert Sternberg. Tomorrow’s leaders and citizens also need creativity, practicality, and wisdom.
How can the potential for those complex qualities be measured? One answer is “Kaleidoscope,” a new initiative in undergraduate admissions, first used at Tufts University. Its open-ended questions for applicants, and the means used to score the answers, gives applicants and admissions officers the chance to go beyond standardized tests.
Does it work? As Sternberg describes in detail, Kaleidoscope measures predicted first-year academic success, over and above SATs and high school GPAs, and predicted first-year extracurricular activities, leadership, and active citizenship as well. And every year that Kaleidoscope measures were used, the entering class’s average SATs and high school GPAs went up too.
What worked at Tufts can work elsewhere. New kinds of assessments, like Kaleidoscope, can liberate many colleges and students from the narrowness of standardized tests and inspire new approaches to teaching for new kinds of talented, motivated citizens of the world.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors compete in a game they’ll play only once, whose rules they do not fully understand, yet whose consequences are enormous. The game is college admissions, and applying early to an elite school is one way to win. But the early admissions process is enigmatic and flawed. It can easily lead students toward hasty or misinformed decisions.
This book—based on the careful examination of more than 500,000 college applications to fourteen elite colleges and hundreds of interviews with students, counselors, and admissions officers—provides an extraordinarily thorough analysis of early admissions. In clear language it details the advantages and pitfalls of applying early as it provides a map for students and parents to navigate the process. Unlike college admissions guides, The Early Admissions Game reveals the realities of early applications, how they work and what effects they have. The authors frankly assess early applications. Applying early is not for everyone, but it will improve—sometimes double, even triple—the chances of being admitted to a prestigious college.
An early decision program can greatly enhance a college’s reputation by skewing statistics, such as selectivity, average SAT scores, or percentage of admitted applicants who matriculate. But these gains come at the expense of distorting applicants’ decisions and providing disparate treatment of students who apply early and regular admissions. The system, in short, is unfair, and the authors make recommendations for improvement.
The Early Admissions Game is sure to be the definitive work on the subject. It is must reading for admissions officers, guidance counselors, and high school seniors and their parents.
How does graduate admissions work? Who does the system work for, and who falls through its cracks? More people than ever seek graduate degrees, but little has been written about who gets in and why. Drawing on firsthand observations of admission committees and interviews with faculty in 10 top-ranked doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, education professor Julie Posselt pulls back the curtain on a process usually conducted in secret.
“Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion. That may change with the publication of Inside Graduate Admissions…While the departments reviewed in the book remain secret, the general process used by elite departments would now appear to be more open as a result of Posselt’s book.”
—Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed
“Revealing…Provide[s] clear, consistent insights into what admissions committees look for.”
—Beryl Lieff Benderly, Science
“An excellent book. Takagi takes a very complex and sensitive subject—racial politics—and shows, through a careful analysis . . . that changes in the discourse about Asian American admissions have facilitated a 'retreat from race' in the area of affirmative action. . . . This book will appeal to an audience significantly wider than a typical academic one.”— David Karen, Bryn Mawr College
Charges by Asian Americans that the top universities in the United States used quotas to limit the enrollment of Asian-American students developed into one of the most controversial public controversies in higher education since the Bakke case. In Retreat from Race, Dana Takagi follows the debates over Asian-American admissions at Berkeley, UCLA, Brown, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton. She explains important developments in the politics of race: changes in ethnic coalitions, reconstruction of the debate over affirmative action, and the conservative challenge to the civil rights agenda of the 1960s. Takagi examines the history and significance of the Asian American admissions controversy on American race relations both inside and outside higher education.
Takagi's central argument is that the Asian-American admissions controversy facilitated a subtle but important shift in affirmative action policy away from racial preferences toward class preferences. She calls this development a retreat from race. Takagi suggests that the retreat signals not only an actual policy shift but also the increasing reluctance on the part of intellectuals, politicans, and policy analysts to identify and address social problems as explicitly racial problems.
Moving beyond the university setting, Takagi explores the political significance of the retreat from race by linking Asian-American admissions to other controversies in higher education and in American politics, including the debates over political correctness and multiculturalism. In her assessment, the retreat from race is likely to fail at its promise of easing racial tension and promoting racial equality.
When it comes to the hotly disputed topic of college admissions, the one thing everyone agrees about is that it’s unfair. But there is little agreement on what a fair process would be.
Rebecca Zwick takes a hard look at the high-stakes competition of U.S. college admissions today. Illustrating her points using analyses of survey data from applicants to the nation’s top colleges and universities, she assesses the goals of different admissions systems and the fairness of criteria—from high school grades and standardized test scores to race, socioeconomic status, and students’ academic aspirations. The demographic makeup of the class and the educational outcomes of its students can vary substantially, depending upon how an institution approaches its task. Who Gets In? considers the merits and flaws of competing approaches and demonstrates that admissions policies can sometimes fail to produce the desired results. For example, some nontraditional selection methods can hurt more than help the students they are intended to benefit.
As Zwick shows, there is no objective way to evaluate admissions systems—no universal definition of student merit or blanket entitlement to attend college. Some schools may hope to attract well-rounded students, while others will focus on specific academic strengths. What matters most is that a school’s admissions policy reflects its particular educational philosophy. Colleges should be free to include socioeconomic and racial preferences among their admissions criteria, Zwick contends, but they should strive for transparency about the factors they use to evaluate applicants.
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