They Say I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings (Fourth Edition) by Cathy Birkenstein & Russel Durst & Gerald Graff

Author:Cathy Birkenstein & Russel Durst & Gerald Graff [Birkenstein, Cathy]
Language: rus
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-05-31T21:00:00+00:00

Shut Up about Harvard

b e n c a s s e l m a n

H

A focus on elite schools ignores the issues most college students face.

It’s college admissions season, which means it’s time

once again for the annual flood of stories that badly misrep-

resent what higher education looks like for most American

students—and skew the public debate over everything from

student debt to the purpose of college in the process.

“How college admissions has turned into something akin

to ‘The Hunger Games,’ ” screamed a Washington Post head-

line Monday. “What you need to remember about fate dur-

ing college admission season,” wrote Elite Daily earlier this

month. “Use rejection to prepare teens for college,” advised

The Huffington Post.

Ben Casselman is an economics writer and senior editor for FiveThirty-

Eight, a website that “uses statistical analysis—hard numbers—to tell

compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics,

and culture.” Previously, Casselman worked for Salem News and the

Wall Street Journal, where he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a

story about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This essay first appeared on

FiveThirtyEight on March 30, 2016.

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Shut Up about Harvard

Here’s how the national media usually depicts the admis-

sions process: High school seniors spend months visiting col-

leges; writing essays; wrangling letters of recommendation; and

practicing, taking and retaking an alphabet soup of ACTs,

SATs and AP exams. Then the really hard part: months of

nervously waiting to find out if they are among the lucky few

(fewer every year, we’re told!) with the right blend of academic

achievement, extracurricular involvement and an odds-defying

personal story to gain admission to their favored university.

Here’s the reality: Most students never have to write a

college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a poten-

tial letter-writer. Nor are most, as the Atlantic put it Monday,

“obsessively checking their mailboxes” awaiting acceptance

decisions. (Never mind that for most schools, those decisions

now arrive online.) According to data from the Department of

Education,1 more than three-quarters of U.S. undergraduates2

attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants; just 4

percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and hardly

any—well under 1 percent—attend schools like Harvard and

Yale that accept less than 10 percent.

Media misconceptions don’t end with admission. “College,” 5

in the mainstream media, seems to mean people in their late

teens and early 20s living in dorms, going to parties, study-

ing English (or maybe pre-med) and emerging four years later

with a degree and an unpaid internship. But that image, never

truly representative, is increasingly disconnected from reality.

Nearly half of all college students attend community colleges3;

among those at four-year schools, nearly a quarter attend part

time and about the same share are 25 or older. In total, less

than a third of U.S. undergraduates are “traditional” students

in the sense that they are full-time, degree-seeking students at

primarily residential four-year colleges.4

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