Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Free tuition at US public Universities?

Here is a new article about the athletic programs at Berkeley.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/...c-damage-expanding-independent-athletics
A Doomed Marriage?
January 8, 2014
By Allie Grasgreen
Inside Higher Education

When describing the approach that administrators at the University of California at Berkeley took to the university's sports program, John Cummins consistently uses a somewhat unexpected term: ambivalent.

Unexpected, says Cummins, a former associate chancellor at the university, because Berkeley, like all other big-time football programs in the major athletic conferences, is in a “spending race” on facilities, coaching salaries and conference-related travel in order to lure – or, as the paper puts it, “in the hopes of luring” – the best recruits.

Because the university continues to admit underprepared students because of their athletic prowess, he says, despite football boasting the lowest graduation rate (44 percent) of athletes of any Division I program this year, and despite athletes consistently graduating at lower rates (especially black athletes) than non-athletes do.

And because administrators have allowed the athletics department to move further and further outside the institution and operate simply as a business, he argues, no matter what deficits, internal conflicts, scandals and National Collegiate Athletic Association violations ensue.

That article is titled "CNN analysis: Some college athletes play like adults, read like 5th-graders". There are college athletes who are literally at the first grade level:

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Education-of-Dasmine/132065/
The Education of Dasmine Cathey
by Brad Wolverton
Chronicle of Higher Education
June 2, 2012

He hid them in a shoebox under his bed. "My own little secret," he said.

Inside the box, he kept 10 thin paperbacks he was given as a child. For years he didn't touch them. But as he reached 19, they became a lifeline.

Each night after dinner, he closed his dorm-room door, reached under his bed, and opened the box. Resting his head against the blanket his grandmother had made him, he pulled out the books: "First Grade, Level 1, Ages 6-7."

Quietly, so none of his teammates would hear, he read aloud, moving his finger across the page.

...

Growing up, Dasmine Cathey hated everything about school—reading, writing, even the smell of books. To him, school was nothing but a needless burden. Once you learned about your ancestors and your heritage, he figured, what else did you need to know?

He still remembers the day a middle-school teacher asked him to read aloud in class. As he mumbled through, clearing his throat on words he didn't understand, he heard snickers around him. "How can you be so good at sports but so dumb in school?" a classmate asked.

His sixth-grade teacher suggested he enroll in a tutoring program to overcome his reading problems. Mr. Cathey's parents didn't have enough money, so an aunt helped cover the cost. He took classes for two or three months before dropping out. "You need the money more than me," he told his mother.

By high school he still hadn't read a single book. It took him hours to wade through a handful of pages, and by then he'd forgotten most of what he'd read. But outside of class, things were looking up. He was a finalist for Tennessee Lineman of the Year in football and played on a state-champion basketball team at Ridgeway High, in suburban Memphis. And so he got a pass. Few people seemed to care if he was learning.

From the article:
No, intensive tutoring, except in unusual circumstances (such as a student who studied in another country and barely knew English), will not turn a student with 380 SAT verbal into one with a 650 or 700. And if a program to greatly increase scholastic aptitude did exist, it ought not to be limited to athletes.

On the SAT improvement, I heard from parents last year, that improved their kids math SAT scores significantly with tutoring. The kid got into Columbia.

I know internists that are finding it hard to get well paying jobs to pay off the medical school debt. And when you say, how many plumbers does a society need? You still build locally. That is still done here. Dental Hygiene still done here, radiology -- they are reading xrays in India and Israel. But the xray tech still has to take the xrays here. Talking about kids that are going to school for some degree but are not going to go to a professional level degree program that gets them a job.

A side comment on Bostonian's whole thing on Milton and Chaucer. Reading Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath. He writes about the whole impressionist movement wouldn't have existed if they did not shun the whole establishment and have their own gallery showing. They were not tradionalists. Modern art needed a break with the past in order to be the innovation that it became.

Though I am not sure what English language is becoming with texting and "what up?" It will be interesting what communication skills are in the next 20 years.

This is why every college football fan on this board should be cheering for the Stanford Cardinal: http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/...-hindered-by-intelligence?nclick_check=1

Just so long as everyone is aware, there is no such thing as "free" tuition, someone ends up paying for it, granted, that person might not be you or your family, however, it's likely that eventually you will if you graduate from college and secure a job that pays middle class level.

I'd just prefer if people use the phrase, "Free to me" or "Free to me for the time being."

Wow.

I just have to look at programs like these and wonder... and what would those resources have meant if they'd been applied elsewhere-- say, to economically disadvantaged but academically high-potential students?

You know, those who come in from low-income high schools-- lacking AP coursework, but possessed of otherwise good grades and test scores (albeit not stellar ones due to lack of experience/superscoring)?



Serious question-- how much WOULD it actually cost to reduce tuition by 30-50% at public colleges and universities? COULD it be done? If you raised standards-- say, that a floor for test scores would be something like a 27 ACT or an 1800 SAT, no exceptions-- could that reduce the number of attendees sufficiently to make government support of the institution adequate to the task? I don't really know the answer-- I'm curious.

I don't think that the general public would stand for a floor for test scores as described, that's not politically correct in today's society and it's not viewed by the masses as "fair" There are always going to be special interest groups fighting anything where their special interest isn't proportionately represented even if their test scores are substantially lower than the established floor.

I agree with this and Old Dad's other post. Making tuition free (provided other "fees" are not raised to compensate) makes college a windfall for those attending, and groups will fight over how that windfall is divided.

Since high school achievement is correlated with IQ, and since
high-IQ children come from more affluent and educated families on average, it could be asked why those who have won the genetic lottery should be further favored by free high education.

(Two answers could be that
(1) free college tuition but selective admissions encourage working hard in high school
(2) free college tuition encourages the parents likely to have smart children to have more of them)

That's why I earlier proposed giving young adults a grant that could be used for higher education or to offset income and payroll taxes.

The father of a friend of mine was QB on the Stanford football team. He went on to win the Nobel prize.