A Great University Undermines Its Mission [ NYTimes editorial board ]

The flava:

Seven years ago, the University of California system appointed an 18-member committee to study the use of standardized tests in its undergraduate admissions. The committee included professors from all 10 campuses and a range of disciplines. They spent a year studying the issue and published a 225-page report full of evidence and recommendations.

The committee concluded that scores on the SAT and ACT, the main standardized tests for college admissions, did a better job measuring student readiness for college than high school grades. High test scores were particularly good at finding talented students from low-income families and underrepresented minority groups. For these reasons, the committee recommended the system continue to require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores.

The university’s leaders disregarded the report.

A few months after its release, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the system’s Board of Regents voted to stop using the tests in undergraduate admissions. Initially, the university planned to make the submission of SAT and ACT scores optional, as many other colleges did during the pandemic. Almost immediately, though, the University of California began refusing to accept SAT or ACT scores, even from students who wanted to submit them. The policy was known as “test blind.” University leaders wrongly claimed that it would make admissions fairer and more equitable.

The results have been terrible. At the University of California, San Diego, a faculty group last year reported “a steep decline in the academic preparation” among entering students. Last fall, for example, nearly 12 percent of first-year U.C.S.D. undergraduates were not qualified to take pre-calculus, a low-level class, up from only 0.5 percent in 2020. “The key problem is that many of the students coming in do not know algebra,” said Mina Aganagic, a Berkeley physics professor. More than half of entering Berkeley students who took a math placement test incorrectly answered basic questions (such as solving for x in x²> 4). . . .       

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/opinion/university-california-sat-testing-admissions.html

As international enrollment falls, U.S. students face program cuts and higher prices [ The Hechinger Report ]

The flava:

Harrison Keller was starting only his second year as president of the University of North Texas last fall when he was abruptly confronted with a big problem. 

Enrollment was down. And the source of the crisis made it much worse: In the wake of Trump administration moves to deny and revoke visas, deport international students and impose travel bans, 2,800 students from abroad who the university expected to show up had stayed away. 

Full-tuition-paying international students — especially graduate students, who Keller said bring $20,000 to $25,000 each to his bottom line — are critical to balancing the budget, underwriting services and keeping costs lower for their domestic classmates. 

The loss of so many of them pushed the university $45 million into the red, Keller said, forcing it to eliminate 71 academic programs. And a continuing decline in the number of international students will mean a hit of another $47 million in lost revenue in the next academic year, according to university budget projections. . . .   

The article:

https://hechingerreport.org/as-international-enrollment-falls-u-s-students-face-program-cuts-and-higher-prices/

Can the Trump administration make college cheaper? [ NPR ]

Feynman on doubt

It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding, we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is unknown, not because you know the answer. And as you develop more information in the sciences, it is not that you are finding out the truth, but that you are finding out that this or that is more or less likely.

That is, if we investigate further, we find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty… Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity or absolute truth.

--from chapter 13 of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman 

How the federal student loan changes could impact borrowers [ PBS NewsHour ]

MORE THAN A DEGREE: Reimagining Higher Education to Meet Future Demands | Mlondi Khoza | TEDxUCT

How AI Enhances – and Diminishes — Learning [ Amanpour and Company ]

"Cautionary Tale": NYC's The New School Guts Faculty & Staff as Colleges Intensify Austerity [ Democracy Now! ]

More Than a Dozen Colleges Will Quietly Cross the $100,000 Mark This Year [ NYmag ]

 The flava:

[ money money money money . . . ]

The article:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/colleges-hundred-thousand-dollars-per-year.html

Jay Caspian Kang on A.I. in college

The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.

By Jay Caspian Kang

https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/the-despair-of-the-professor-in-the-age-of-ai