Skip to main content

Welcome to the Hen House, Mr. Fox

Jerry Falwell, Jr., President of Liberty University, has just indicated that he will head a new task force to examine the Department of Education's policies on colleges and universities: Things like, "overreaching regulation” and micromanagement by the department in areas like accreditation and policies that affect colleges’ student-recruiting behavior, like the new “borrower defense to repayment” regulations," according to this report in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, but if you're in higher ed and you're not subscribing, you should. I've not been paid to endorse the Chronicle. Or anything, for that matter.)

Thousands of people on Twitter and in other social media have already pointed out why this is a bad idea, especially coming on what appears to be the approval of Besty De Vos as Secretary of Education.  But if you want to see how far Liberty has taken recruitment, even under the current regulations that attempt to make admissions and recruiting more ethical, I challenge you to fill out the inquiry form on their website.  Then count to ten, and I'm guessing you'll soon be connected to one of their friendly, helpful, sales agents who will tell you how you, too, can become a champion for Christ, and how you can use federal dollars to do so.

Here is how much federal aid Liberty students (and those from every other university receiving your tax dollars) received in 2015-16 (a few of the programs are 2014-2015, but they don't change much.) Interact to your heart's content.

And feel free to share this with your elected officials.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity.  And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level.  I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone.  The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn...

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be.  His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges."  As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office.  The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look:  The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl...

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report.  It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so.  One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it.  In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...