Weighing Expansion as More Top Students Clamor at Ivy Gates

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/education/26education.html

In the mid-1960s, when William R. Fitzsimmons was a student at Harvard, the college took in a freshman class of roughly 1,550, including students at Radcliffe, which it would eventually absorb. In the four decades since, the population of the United States has ballooned by two-thirds, applications to Harvard have tripled and Mr. Fitzsimmons has ascended to the job of dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, but this year’s freshman class is only about 125 students larger than when he was a student.

That reluctance to grow has been true of many selective colleges that want to sustain their genteel scale. But with ever more students pressing at their gates, admissions officers find themselves having to reject what Anthony W. Marx, Amherst’s president, calls “astonishing applicants.”

The most elite institutions are accepting historic lows of 10 percent of applicants, and next year the sieve should become excruciatingly finer with applications from baby boomers’ offspring expected to crest.

At least four of the nation’s most exclusive institutions — Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Amherst — are either modestly expanding enrollments for the first time since the late 1960s (when some began admitting women) or have task forces studying the matter.

Georgia: We already know effective educators make the most difference

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/12/25/schoolsed_1226.html

The most effective teachers are those with high SAT or ACT scores and grade point averages, yet few of those high-achievers at the state’s premier universities now go into teaching.

Those students should not have to come out of colleges of education, which have held the franchise too long without producing results. It’s time to retire the education colleges and teach math teachers in the mathematics departments and science teachers in science departments.

New teachers… should have a deep background in their content area, especially if they are teaching math and science, which can’t be faked.

To keep these smart, young people in the classroom, Georgia must abandon its one-size-fits-all raises that assure the lackluster teachers are overpaid and inspiring ones underpaid. The state must introduce a pay-for-performance system that rewards excellence.

Georgia also has to end the costly and counterproductive practice of handing out huge raises every time a teacher gets a master’s degree, even if the sheepskin comes from a fly-by-night diploma mill and has no relevance to the teacher’s content area. Georgia continues to reward teachers based on degrees on their walls rather than real accomplishments with their students.

As a result of this absurd policy, Georgia teachers have become the best customers of fast-food master’s programs, where teachers essentially pull up to the drive-thru, order a quickie educational leadership degree and return home with credentials and higher pay in as little time as a month or two.