Strengthening affirmative action programs and fighting discrimination present challenges to America's best private and public universities. US college enrollments swelled from 2.6 million students in 1955 to 17.5 million by 2005. Ivy League universities, specifically Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, face significant challenges in maintaining their professed goal to educate a reasonable number of students from all ethnic, racial, religious, and socio-economic groups while maintaining the loyalty of their alumni. College admissions officers in these elite universities have the daunting task of selecting a balanced student body. Added to their challenges, the economic recession of 2008-2009 negatively impacted potential applicants from lower-income families. Evidence suggests that high Standard Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are correlated with a family's socioeconomic status. Thus, the problem of selecting the "best" students from an ever-increasing pool of applicants may render standardized admissions tests a less desirable selection mechanism. The next admissions battle may be whether well-endowed universities should commit themselves to a form of class-based affirmative action in order to balance the socioeconomic advantages of well-to-do families. Such a policy would improve prospects for students who may have ambitions for an education that is beyond their reach without preferential treatment. As in past decades, admissions policies may remain a question of balances and preferences. Nevertheless, the elite universities are handling admission decisions with determination and far less prejudice than in earlier eras.

This book shows teachers how to meet the challenge of inclusive classrooms and help all students succeed. It includes tips for writers' workshops and classroom reading requirements and practical ideas for involving students in their own studies.

From ice-breaking activities to ways to meet specific expectations in all areas of the curriculum, teachers will discover practical strategies and organizational frameworks that will help them to reach all students. Whether you're searching for new ways to inspire students with different learning styles, celebrate the abilities of the physically challenged, or boost the skills of those learning English for the first time, Student Diversity has what you need to meet and defeat the wide variety of challenges in today's classroom. Packed with examples of student work and reproducible worksheets, this book will help to smooth the daily path of beginning and experienced teachers alike.

In The Qualified Student Harold S. Wechsler focuses on methods of student selection used by institutions of higher education in the United States. More specifically, he discusses the way that college and university reformers employed those methods to introduce higher education into a broader cross-section of America, by extending access to an increased number of students from nontraditional backgrounds. Implicit in much of this book is an underlying social and ethical question: How legitimate was and is higher education's regulation of social mobility? Public concern over colleges' and universities' practices became inevitable once they became regulators between social classes. The challenging of colleges' admissions policies in the courts augments similar concerns that have been present in legislatures for decades. The volume is divided into three main sections: Prerequisites, Columbia and the Selective Function, and Implications. It focuses mainly on four universities, The University of Michigan, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the City University of New York. Wechsler maintains that unlike other universities, these institutions were pacesetters; they did not adopt a new policy simply because some other college had already adopted it. A new introduction brings the book, originally published in 1977, up to date and demonstrates its continuing importance in today's academic world of selective admissions.

Supporting Student Diversity in Higher Education is a working manual that is designed to help managers, academics and members of the professional service teams within universities, recruit and support a diverse student body across the student lifecycle at the same time as delivering a quality student experience in a challenging and pressured environment. Using the Student Experience Practitioner Model as a framework, this book helps colleagues responsible for improving the student experience navigate their way through the maze of student diversity across all levels of study, determining what to deliver, how to deliver it and to whom. It interlinks academic, welfare and support activities at faculty department, school, course and university level to support the student in their university journey. Containing 40 practical and innovative undergraduate UK and international case studies from across 12 countries spanning four continents, this book provides practical examples of recruiting and supporting a diverse student body. It includes initiatives to support: mature students (e.g. academic re-engagement); students with special needs (e.g. dyslexia and other disabilities); international students (e.g. language support requirements); students at risk (e.g. lower socio-economic groups, care leavers, male learners); Transfer and direct entry students (e.g. supporting students through this transition); individual learners and their learning needs (impact of personality on learning); students who support students (e.g. peer support). This book will be of great use to senior and middle administrative managers and academics involved in the recruitment, retention and progression of students; and also to anyone involved in education policy and students aiming to work in higher education.

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school’s substantial past in this volume. Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, town and gown relations, governance, and funding during its two centuries of existence. Through Amherst’s engagement with educational improvement in light of these historical undulations, it continually affirms both the vitality and the utility of a liberal arts education. Contributions by Martha Saxton, Gary J. Kornblith, David W. Wills, Frederick E. Hoxie, Trent Maxey, Nicholas L. Syrett, Wendy H. Bergoffen, Rick López, Matthew Alexander Randolph, Daniel Levinson Wilk, K. Ian Shin, David S. Reynolds, Jane F. Thrailkill, Julie Dobrow, Richard F. Teichgraeber III, Debby Applegate, Michael E. Jirik, Bruce Laurie, Molly Michelmore, and Christian G. Appy.

In the era marked by globalization and its profound impacts on individuals, societies, states and markets, world-class universities need to position themselves in the forefront of seeking conceptual and practical solutions to daunting challenges by paying greater attention to their roles in serving local society and contributing to global common goods. Based on the findings of the Seventh International Conference on World-Class Universities, World-Class Universities: Towards a Global Common Good and Seeking National and Institutional Contributions provides updated insights and debates on how world-class universities will contribute to the global common good and balance their global, national and local roles in doing so.

Drawing on decades of research, Karabel shines a light on the ever-changing definition of "merit" in college admissions, showing how it shaped--and was shaped by--the country at large.

The front-page news and the trials that followed Operation Varsity Blues were just the tip of the iceberg. Poison Ivy tells the bigger, seedier story of how elite colleges create paths to admission available only to the wealthy, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Evan Mandery reveals how tacit agreements between exclusive “Ivy-plus” schools and white affluent suburbs create widespread de facto segregation. And as a college degree continues to be the surest route to upward mobility, the inequality bred in our broken higher education system is now a principal driver of skyrocketing income inequality everywhere. Mandery—a professor at a public college that serves low- and middle-income students—contrasts the lip service paid to “opportunity” by so many elite colleges and universities with schools that actually walk the walk. Weaving in shocking data and captivating interviews with students and administrators alike, Poison Ivy also synthesizes fascinating insider information on everything from how students are evaluated, unfair tax breaks, and questionable fundraising practices to suburban rituals, testing, tutoring, tuition schemes, and more. This bold, provocative indictment of America’s elite colleges shows us what’s at stake in a faulty system—and what will be possible if we muster the collective will to transform it.

A groundbreaking history of how elite colleges and universities in America and Britain finally went coed As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, a number of very traditional, very conservative, highly prestigious colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom decided to go coed, seemingly all at once, in a remarkably brief span of time. Coeducation met with fierce resistance. As one alumnus put it in a letter to his alma mater, "Keep the damned women out." Focusing on the complexities of institutional decision making, this book tells the story of this momentous era in higher education—revealing how coeducation was achieved not by organized efforts of women activists, but through strategic decisions made by powerful men. In America, Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth began to admit women; in Britain, several of the men's colleges at Cambridge and Oxford did the same. What prompted such fundamental change? How was coeducation accomplished in the face of such strong opposition? How well was it implemented? Nancy Weiss Malkiel explains that elite institutions embarked on coeducation not as a moral imperative but as a self-interested means of maintaining a first-rate applicant pool. She explores the challenges of planning for the academic and non-academic lives of newly admitted women, and shows how, with the exception of Mary Ingraham Bunting at Radcliffe, every decision maker leading the charge for coeducation was male. Drawing on unprecedented archival research, “Keep the Damned Women Out” is a breathtaking work of scholarship that is certain to be the definitive book on the subject.