On the Wagner piece, he's effectively promoting a balanced scorecard approach to weighting students holistically. Admirable goal, but it's fraught with ideology.
"The new reporting will indicate the skills and knowledge that students have mastered. But it will also include qualities of character that make their humanity visible and help admissions officers make better decisions when it comes to an applicant’s “fit.” The design will help colleges better understand students’ skill sets and potential to succeed on campus, and allows students to present themselves more authentically to admissions officers."
Universities already gauge the "intangible"/EQ/character piece through essays, community involvement, extracurriculars, references, and interviews. And, because each institution--even program--has its own value system with different preference-ranked criteria, I'd suggest that a global student score wouldn't be used by most universities anyway.
Let's also address the elephant in the room: this is likely to promote greater social inequity in access to university education. The time and financial cost associated with applying for university successfully is already high. Now, magnify that process with greater red tape, and you're adding a new set of transactions costs to the application process to enable screening, measurement,and monitoring of these new criteria, further lifting already astonishingly high tuition costs. And, for low SES students who may be working to self-support or self-fund, or not have an advantaged home environment, this process may be yet another barrier which prevents their accessing appropriate education.
My personal opinion is that admissions standards to university should be relatively accessible to ensure minimal denial of access to underprivileged students on an aggregate basis. As we've established that a large component of ability is not genetically pre-determined, talent is relatively blind to economic starting conditions. (For follow-on responses to my post: let's agree to set some of the tired social Darwinist tropes to rest, please.) However, once students matriculate, standards should be quite high to filter out unsuitable students on the basis of academic merit. The proof is in the pudding. Let the floodgates open, but then separate the wheat from the chaff on the basis of observed collegiate merit, blind to starting family conditions, and without instituting additional hurdles to access that overlap with existing sorting criteria.
Last edited by aquinas; 11/03/17 04:53 PM.
