Colleges increasingly see the dispensing of financial aid as a way to achieve their goals rather than to help needy students. Some use sophisticated financial aid models to optimize the use of their financial aid dollars, but find that modeling can create uncomfortable trade-offs between improving academic quality and net tuition revenue by giving less grant money to weaker students with more need. A consultant and officials from three colleges will lead a discussion of a growing and worrisome trend toward fewer men in college. This trend could have enormous effects on the nation's social and economic well being. There is a bit of science to the admission process, and colleges should know that they need to validate their criteria in order to make decisions that are not arbitrary.
Recent data show that our education institutions are still separate and unequal.
Leveling the playing field in Florida. Arthur Levine on the coming changes in higher education. Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, will speak about the changing future of higher education and teacher preparation, and the implications and limitations of demographic forecasts at lunch at 1 pm Sunday, Oct. 29. Two sessions with Laurence Smith on the challenges of the changing student population. Smith, a noted demographer at Eastern Michigan University and president of Education Development Systems, Inc., will describe how changes in student populations will affect schools and colleges at 8 am Tuesday, Oct. 31.