‘Salary After Attending’
After all that back and forth about the Obama administration’s plan to create a federal system for rating colleges — the dire warnings by college presidents, the repeated delays by the Education Department — the website that the administration has finally unveiled is almost anticlimactic.
Sure, among the first things you’re going to see about an institution on the College Scorecard site is a figure labeled “Salary After Attending” (which turns out to be “the median earnings of former students who received federal aid, at least 10 years after entering the school”) — a figure that is a little hard to take seriously. It’s no secret that any college’s graduates who become hedge-fund managers end up making much more than classmates who become poets, right?
What’s more, even among those who become poets — or hedge-fund managers — talent, commitment, and luck play big roles in determining how big your paychecks are. And since when does how much you make say anything about whether you’re really a success, whether you’re happy with your life a reasonable amount of the time? If only happiness were a matter of just choosing the right college.
Nonetheless, the College Scorecard site is there, one more in a profusion of online resources high-school students can turn to if they want to learn more about colleges. In the end, the site may be less important for the actual information it makes available — there was no shortage of information beforehand — than for putting the government’s weight behind the idea that students should think about outcomes when they’re considering what college to attend, rather than being wowed by rec centers or residence halls or merit-aid offers. (Read more here.)
One footnote: Nearly one community college in five is missing from the College Scorecard, which the Education Department limited to two- and four-year institutions that primarily award degrees. Institutions that mostly award certificates — including some 17 percent of community colleges, by one estimate — were left out. The thinking was that certificate programs vary so greatly in length, from a few months to two years, that comparisons among them would be unfair. But the Education Department now says it’s working to include the missing institutions.
Fafsa Made Easy
Speaking of aid, the Obama administration announced an important change to rules for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which students use to apply a variety of federal benefits. Rather than having to wait to file the application after completing tax returns for the previous year, students and families will be able to use tax information from two years prior.
What this means is that, starting next year, students will be able to apply for federal loans and grants nearly a year before starting classes, instead of waiting through months of worry about what attending college will actually cost. As is already the case, those who complete the 108-question forms online — as nearly everyone does — will be able to take advantage of technology that automatically imports tax and other information from IRS servers, making the chore much simpler and quicker than it used to be. (Read more here.)
More Thoughts on Speech
Andrew Harrer, Bloomberg, Getty Images
It’s turning out to be an interesting semester on the campus free-speech front.
Even as debate continues on whether students ought to be offered trigger warnings before anything that might offend someone is mentioned, the University of California’s Board of Regents has waded into a debate between supporters of Israel and backers of Palestinian causes over what constitutes anti-Semitic language. The regents rejected a request from Israel supporters to adopt the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, but then chose to consider their own draft set of “principles against intolerance.”
Those were criticized as “self-contradictory” because they attempted to embrace “the free exchange of ideas” while promising that the university would “respond promptly and effectively to reports of intolerant behavior,” as though various forms of intolerance weren’t themselves ideas cherished by their practitioners. Last week the regents backed away from the draft and asked a campus panel to come up with a proposal. (Read more here.)
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (above), the Vermont socialist, freely exchanged a lot of ideas after being invited to speak at, of all unlikely places, Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution in Lynchburg, Va.
As he began, he reminded his audience that it is important “for us to try and communicate with those who do not agree with us on every issue” and “to see where if possible, and I do believe it is possible, we can find common ground.” Students listened politely through his speech, in which he focused on income inequality, but did not appear to agree with him on very much. (Read more here.)
President Obama, at a town-hall meeting in Iowa the same day, was asked about conservative criticism of “politically biased colleges.”
“It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem,” Mr. Obama said. “Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side. And that’s a problem, too. I was just talking to a friend of mine about this. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative. Or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal toward women. I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.
“Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying you can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say. That’s not the way we learn, either.”
Dept. of Skepticism
Rich Schultz, Getty Images
Rutgers University said it would discipline its football coach, Kyle J. Flood (above), for asking a professor to give a player another chance in a course so he would not lose his eligibility to play. Mr. Flood, who is said to be on course to earn $1.25 million this year, will be suspended for three games and will pay a $50,000 fine. … Wheelock College’s interim vice president for academic affairs, Shirley Malone-Fenner, resigned after The Boston Globe reported that a welcome email she sent out in August included unattributed passages from others, including six from the president of Harvard. … Three years after merging Augusta State University and the Georgia Health Sciences University and naming the new institution Georgia Regents University, the Georgia Board of Regents gave in to critics of the name and agreed to change it to Augusta University.
Sorrow in Mississippi
Police officials Cleveland, Miss., spent last week asking why Shannon S. Lamb, an assistant professor of geography and social-science education at Delta State University, allegedly shot and killed both the woman he lived with, Amy Prentiss, and one of his colleagues, Ethan A. Schmidt, an assistant professor of history. Ms. Prentiss was killed at the home she and Mr. Lamb shared several hundred miles from the university, but Mr. Schmidt was shot on the campus, prompting a lockdown. Hours later, police officers stopped Mr. Lamb’s car and, according to police accounts, he ran into a wooded area and killed himself with a single shot.
News outlets subsequently showed photographs of a note Mr. Lamb reportedly left by Ms. Prentiss’s body. “I am so very sorry,” it said. “I wish I could take it back.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
