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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

THOU ART TOO DEAR...


An education writer for the Washington Post wishes that parents and their children “did not worry so much about being admitted to a college whose name will impress their neighbors and instead thought about how they were going to learn something useful and get a degree. Only about half of Americans starting college acquire a degree within six years, and for students who start in four-year schools like the ones in the Education Trust data base, the graduation rate goes up to only about 60 percent. … To dramatize the problem, the Education Trust, a non-profit organization in Washington that works to improve education for minority and low-income students, has produced an interactive Web tool called College Results Online and two reports on college graduation rates that I think should be part of every family's college research. They are on the group's Web site.”



UD checked out that data and those sites a couple of weeks ago, and was surprised by her university’s relatively low graduation rate, as was the Post writer:


“The Web site explains in more detail than I have space for exactly how the researchers chose the groups of peer colleges, which is good because some schools are going to complain about being misfiled. The University of Maryland, with a graduation rate of 70.7 percent, is only 14th in its peer group of 16, far below number one University of California at Berkeley, 85.4 percent and number two University of Michigan, 85.1 percent. And George Washington University, 75.1 percent, is only 12th out of 16 in a list topped by Notre Dame, 94.6 percent, and University of Virginia, 92 percent. … George Cathcart, spokesman for Maryland, said the university is working hard to improve its graduation rate, which has reached 72.9 percent since the 2003 data on the Web site. He said since 1998, the rate for African Americans has gone from 49.4 to 56.8 percent and for Hispanics from 50 to 67.5 percent. Tracy Schario, spokeswoman for George Washington, said the university's rate has reached 78.7 percent, and that its peer list is different than the one used by the Education Trust.”


UD presumes this means that for the purpose of this ranking GW abandons its customary sense of its relative value in the college marketplace and abases itself a bit so as to make that 75 percent look not too bad…

UD has evolved her own theory, after thinking about it for awhile (for twenty minutes, to be precise), as to why GW students take a long time to graduate. The answer came to her this morning at 9:13 as she stepped for the first time into the latest campus Starbucks, this one 42 steps from her office. It was a beautiful winter morning -- brilliantly sunny, not very cold, the world lit up with snow -- and the new Starbucks was not only supremely convenient, but roomy, aromatic, and musical. Attractive young people sat at natural wood tables upon which they had placed ebony laptops. Upon these laptops their fingers delicately tap, tap, tapped… It all made UD ponder the overpowering delights of being at a school like GW (or NYU, or Brown, or any other chic urban college)... and she suddenly felt a sonnet coming on…

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gavest, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gavest it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.


It was clear to UD, even as she inwardly recited these lines, that she’d never really understood them, and that it was unlikely they had anything to do with the situation at hand....But she was reaching for a sonnet that conveyed the lover’s sense that the loved thing was too great ever to contemplate leaving … and thus…um…many GW students can’t tear themselves away from the place. Something like that.