Well, the headline says it all, doesn’t it: looks like the most selective school in the history of the Ivy League just got even pickier. A sign of our intellectual and institutional superiority over the hated HPY triad? Not exactly:

“As the application pool increases, we get to sculpt the class more,” Director of Undergraduate Admissions Jessica Marinaccio said. She added that it has been “an unpredictable year because of the elimination of early decision programs by Harvard and Princeton.”

Does this mean that Columbia’s low admit rate was subsidized by the other colleges’ sense of social responsibility? For instance, When Harvard got rid of ED a couple admisions cycles ago, then-president Derek Bok explained it this way:

“Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged. Students from more sophisticated backgrounds and affluent high schools often apply early to increase their chances of admission, while minority students and students from rural areas, other countries, and high schools with fewer resources miss out. Students needing financial aid are disadvantaged by binding early decision programs that prevent them from comparing aid packages. Others who apply early and gain admission to the college of their choice have less reason to work hard at their studies during their final year of high school.”

At least on the surface, Columbia has directly benefited from Harvard and Princeton’s attempts at injecting parity into top-flight college admissions. Going by Bok’s logic, this means that our rivals have driven “students from more sophisticated backgrounds” to the Ivies that still accept early applicants, a fact that Marinaccio seems to welcome:

Marinaccio remarked that with other Ivy League schools getting rid of their early decision programs, the challenge is now to entice people to come to Columbia.

Columbia should feel under no obligation to get rid of early decision, since I’m not sure that I completely buy Bok’s logic for abolishing it. At the same time, there’s a strong possibility that our falling admit rate is a reflection of Columbia’s comparative social deafness. Couple this with a generous financial aid program that’s nevertheless aimed at the kind of middle class students who would theoretically be more aware of how early decision works, and you get a pretty good sense of the University’s maddeningly complicated network of institutional and social priorities.

One way to untangle them would be to get rid of early decision and forfeit what little ground Harvard and Princeton might have given us. Just don’t count on it actually happening.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student body president was found dead in Chapel Hill early Wednesday and identified on Thursday. Eve Carson, a 22-year old from Athens, Georgia, was a recipient of the prestigious Morehead scholarship and part of the North Carolina Fellows leadership program. By all accounts, she was an amazing human being.

Ms. Carson’s body was found with gunshot wounds in a residential Chapel Hill neighborhood, reports the Associated Press. So far there are no suspects.

Hearing about an incident like this is heartbreaking and bewildering, especially when the setting is a quiet, idyllic college town like Chapel Hill and the victim someone as gifted and well-loved as Ms. Carson evidently was. It’s a senseless crime. I send my love out to a mourning campus.

[Yeah, you wish you were in Paris right now. But should you be wishing you were going to college there? Reid Hall correspondent Greg Keilin takes a look.] 

My first class in a French school was an L1 (first-year) philosophy class at the Sorbonne. When the professor arrived, ten minutes late in typical Parisian fashion, he began a lecture not on Aristotelian ethics, the subject of the course, but instead on why his students should drop philosophy.

Each year, he told us, about six hundred Sorbonne students take the L1 philosophy curriculum; about four hundred are allowed to advance to L2; two hundred move on to L3 (the final year of undergraduate study, in the French system). Though most of that group does graduate, he said, only half receive positions in Masters programs. Roughly fifty percent of Masters graduates are rejected for doctoral candidacy, and only a handful of new PhDs are offered jobs. In short, the odds are that only one out of sixty students in that class will wind up a professor.

As this story demonstrates, the mission of French universities is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Their job is to winnow down the list of potential butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers until only the best and the brightest remain.

The advantage of this approach is that anyone can attend, and cheaply. Public universities are open to every student with a Baccalauréat (high school diploma). Full annual tuition is about 400€ ($607.48, according to this website. -ed.), and scholarships and stipends are available to low-income individuals. As far as equality of opportunity goes, French schools get high marks.

But the selection strategy they employ does have negative side effects. Despite many pedagogues’ assertions that a broad general education and a self-determined curriculum have intrinsic educational benefits, the threshing process in France begins early: students have a concentration in secondary school, which limits their college choices and their major options. Interdisciplinary studies are virtually non-existent, and courses in one subject can rarely be applied to a degree in another.

This super-specialization throughout the process leaves some students out in the cold.  Though humanities students at least have limited leeway (political science undergrads sometimes go to business school), the system’s flexibility only goes so far–for instance, literature majors can’t be pre-med. As a result, post-graduation career changes are almost impossible, and those who don’t make the cut after one or two years of school often find themselves back where they started, with no degree and useless coursework.

So, do the costs of college, French-style, outweigh the benefits? In my view, the mission of an academic institution should be to serve its students, not the state. The chances afforded by universal admissions is illusory—the door it opens often leads nowhere—and my peers here would derive greater benefit from a system that helps them succeed than from a lecture on why they will fail. Education reform is badly needed in France, and I hope President Sarkozy, who has made it a priority, will take things in the right direction.

-GREG KEILIN

Remember University Writing, waaaaay back in the day? Remember trying to decipher the instructions for the lens essay and the conversation essay? Remember how your teacher always told you that these were some of the most important writing techniques you’d ever learn, and you should be paying careful attention, because you’d probably use them for every paper you wrote in college?

Remember how cynical you were? Remember how you went, “I don’t know…I took twenty-five APs and four college classes in high school, and none of them ever required a lens essay…”? And the ever-present response: “Well, that wasn’t at Columbia. The work here is much more demanding.” And because it was your first semester *ever* at an Ivy and you were a scared little first-year, you didn’t argue, but continued to quietly bust your butt over the stupid thing.

Well, as a seasoned student, I’m here to tell you: I still haven’t used that lens essay. I get the feeling I never will. And watching other people write in class (and having to edit what they write) makes me realize—the people that could write before can still write. And the people that couldn’t write before are still as bad as ever.

Screw lens essays—we need to be drilling grammar and punctuation here. And we’re supposed to be smart?

According to this RCP wonk, if you support Obama or Clinton’s domestic policies, the answer is yes. Hanson says that the Dems’ are nothing but class-baiting hypocrites willing to trade our last shreds of personal responsibility for cheap electoral success. It’s a standard argument, but this article is noteworthy for offering the first right-wing critique of Obama and Clinton’s single-lender student loans program that I’ve read in any mainstream media outlet:

Likewise, students are failing to graduate from college because there are too few government-guaranteed student loans. We don’t hear that thousands enter public universities without basic reading and mathematical skills - or that their college problems might in part be the fault of their own misplaced priorities in high school, and in part the fault of an educational system that is mostly therapeutic, offering fluffy courses and self-esteem training rather than rigorous math, science, literature and history classes. Nor is there ever mention of teachers’ unions, the system of tenure, or a vapid, politically correct curriculum, as explanations why our students are not competitive in the global marketplace.

Not sure there’s much of a connection between high-school curricula and the availability of need-based financial aid, but I’ll ignore the demagoguery for this reason only: higher education issues are finally seeing daylight. Hopefully the right will begin questioning the possibly-misplaced priorities of a single-lender system, and start pressuring the Democratic candidates on a fundamental ideological difference: whether higher education should be seen as some inalienable public trust (as in most other countries on earth), or whether acadme should be allowed to operate like any other private sector industry.

Also holy shit, Radiohead is coming.