Education / LJWorld.com

Archive for Saturday, November 22, 2008

Students today face far grimmer challenges to get into college.

J-W Editorials

November 22, 2008

Where higher education is concerned, many of today’s students and prospective students may have a deep longing for those “good old days” they hear long-ago collegians discuss. Modernity, the youngsters may attest, may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Time was when all a Kansas youngster had to do to be accepted to a state university was to earn a diploma from an accredited state high school. The new student had to get enrolled and maintain a certain grade-point average to stay in school, but getting in the door in the first place was quite simple and often painless. And the costs involved were amazingly low as state colleges bragged about their being “the best educational bargains in America.”

Then came more selective admissions at virtually all schools and soaring costs that are staggering even at public universities such as KU.

Think how things have changed and how there is such an ordeal for youngsters and their families today as they try to figure out how to get the best education for the most reasonable price. It is not easy.

Then there is this development, as pointed out by Daniel de Vise in the Washington Post: “For many high school students, picking a college entrance test has become a multiple-choice question. The SAT has long dominated the bustling college-prep market. But the rival ACT is making inroads, buoyed by a shift in conventional wisdom, which now holds that a student would be wise to take both. Colleges are driving the trend because admission officers are spreading the world that it doesn’t matter which test students take. The ascendance of the ACT is a boon to students seeking to impress colleges. The SAT tests how students think. The ACT measures what they have learned. Each is a better fit for some students than the others.”

So which one should a youngster take? Sounds like it should be both.

That, of course, only compounds the list of challenges that college-oriented youths have to meet.

It’s a far cry from those easier times when you packed your bags for Lawrence and Manhattan and got into the educational swim so much more simply — and cheaply.