In this
article, Fareed Zakaria discusses the changing trends in U.S. college
admissions. He contends that universities are moving them away from granting
admissions on merit and achievement and moving in the direction of providing a
privileged experience to a bunch of students that already are privileged in
some way or the other.
In the
article, he quotes from a book ‘Paying for the Party: How College Maintains
Inequality’ saying that some state universities admit rich students that are
from out of state and can pay heavy tuition but are not great academic
performers. He adds that top-notch universities do admit high achievers who
deserve merit scholarships but their number is so less that it is almost negligible.
About the private colleges, he says that, they have less merit based
scholarships and most of the spots are for minorities, legacy students or the
athletes.
He says that
the economic mobility is on a decline in the U.S. If a student from not a very privileged
background works really hard to enter a top university on merit scholarship, it
is becoming harder and harder for him given the current trends.
4 comments:
I think this goes back to what we talked about in class about how living the "American dream" is much harder in reality than what we would like to believe it is. I am also curious on what the author considers to be a privileged background; is it someone from a good public school or is it someone whose parents make millions of dollars?
I agree with Brenda that the term privileged should be defined. However, the facts are that with economy moving slowly out of recession, colleges are tightening their budgets and admitting "rich" students definitely helps pay the bills. It would be interesting to compare the amount of merit-based scholarships that are awarded in times of economic prosperity as opposed to when the economy is suffering from a recession.
This article is very discouraging. It just reinforces the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult for individuals to achieve the "American dream". It also says a lot about the values of our country that universities are lowering their admissions standards in order to build sports teams. It would be interesting to see what the retention rate of these highly skilled athletes is, since most of them most likely do not perform well in the classroom.
It is not very surprising to me that colleges and universities are admitting more and more rich students, mainly because of the damage of the recession. I think OWU is doing a good job in giving merit-based scholarship and financial aid to students (even though the amount might decline). However, if the economy is not recovering well enough, this situation continues and will definitely have the same effect on schools like OWU as on schools already favoring wealthy family-based students.
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