Que ce soit à l’écrit aux concours ou à l’oral en colle, le thème Education a tendance à tomber assez régulièrement. Pourtant, ce n’est pas le plus trivial du programme. Il demande des connaissances pointues afin de décrire les différences entre les systèmes d’éducation anglais et américain, que ce soit au niveau du collège, du lycée ou de l’université.
Bien entendu, un des sujets les plus débattus dans la presse outre-Atlantique est l’accumulation des dettes étudiantes (1,64 trillion tout de même), la santé financière parfois chancelante des meilleures universités privées, surtout en période de Covid, et enfin le caractère fondamentalement inégalitaire de ce système. C’est ce dernier point qui intéresse l’autrice de cet article, et plus particulièrement le sujet polémique des « legacy admissions », que je te laisse le soin de découvrir ou de redécouvrir dans cet article.
Pourquoi lire cet article sur le thème « Education » ?
D’abord, parce que le sujet abordé est aussi intéressant qu’actuel, et que tu peux éventuellement citer son autrice. Ensuite, parce que c’est un article de type concours, de difficulté et de longueur semblables à ce qui peut paraître à l’écrit. Finalement, parce qu’il a servi de support pour la rédaction de deux essais qui ont été notés 20/20 par un professeur de classe préparatoire. Tu peux donc t’inspirer de leurs idées, de leur structure, des tournures de phrases employées, etc.
Bonne lecture !
L’article de Natasha Warikoo sur le thème « Education », paru dans The Atlantic, January 29, 2020
The Easiest Reform For College Admissions
In the world of college admissions, few choices about how to weigh applicants are simple. How much weight should schools give to applicants’ athletic performance, to standardized-test scores, to the need for a diverse student body, to the donations of wealthy benefactors? These are all complicated questions. But Johns Hopkins University just presented the higher-education world with at least one easy decision: Legacy admissions need to go.
Johns Hopkins recently made public a decision, reached in 2014 but kept secret until recently, to stop giving an admissions boost to applicants who have a parent who attended Johns Hopkins. Giving weight to legacy status takes attention away from consideration of an applicant’s accomplishments, raw talent, leadership ability, academic achievement, and athletic skills. And it does that without offering much in return: It doesn’t measure the obstacles that a student has overcome, or her potential to contribute to peers’ learning, or any other characteristics that colleges sometimes consider. Nor does a broad legacy-admissions preference guarantee that alumni will donate to an institution in any meaningful way—despite the widespread and often-unquestioned assumption that it will. (The students who might have been admitted if not for legacy preferences are potential donors, too.)
The strongest legacy applicants will be admitted anyway; they make up about 3.5 percent of the current freshman class at Johns Hopkins, down from about 12.5 percent several years ago. But reducing the number of legacies makes room in a college class for top students from all backgrounds; the percentage of students who are eligible for Pell Grants at the school has more than doubled during the same period. Johns Hopkins’s experience since eliminating legacy admissions undercuts other colleges’ claims that they are engines of social mobility, that they select the very best candidates from their deep pool of applicants, and that the admissions process is fundamentally meritocratic.
Legacy admissions do not rise to the level of the Varsity Blues celebrity scandal, in which dozens of wealthy parents paid big dollars to a private consultant to enable their children to cheat on the SAT and to bribe coaches to claim that their children were needed on sports teams. However, they represent different versions of the same problem: a special admissions door for applicants who have already enjoyed major advantages in life.
The irony is that the legacy-admissions preference, a policy supported only by a vague notion that catering to long-ago graduates is in an institution’s long-term interest, has survived at elite institutions, while affirmative action now faces existential threats. A policy in which black, Latino, and Native American applicants can get a small boost in admissions has multiple important justifications supporting it. Universities and their students welcome its impact on campus life and interracial dialogue. Others view affirmative action as a policy to extend opportunity to groups historically underrepresented on elite-college campuses, or even as a form of reparations for past exclusion. Finally, affirmative action diversifies the pool of potential leaders in society, so that our politicians, judges, executives, and teachers might better reflect the society they serve.
Yet affirmative action has been under sustained political and legal attack for decades. Opinion polls since the 1960s have continually asked ordinary Americans for their views on the subject, and politicians have exploited it for political advantage. Some will recall President Bill Clinton’s charge to “mend it, [not] end it.” Multiple states have had public referenda leading to bans on affirmative action in college admissions. A case now working its way through the courts could extinguish the practice entirely. Why aren’t legacy admissions in similar peril?
American colleges and universities are coy about acknowledging the moral trade-offs that they obviously make. While prosecutors say that the money the former sitcom star Lori Loughlin spent to ensure her daughter’s acceptance at the University of Southern California broke the law, the $2.5 million that Jared Kushner’s parents spent to ensure his admission to Harvard despite Kushner’s mediocre performance in high school was fully legal. This policy of essentially selling seats further compromises universities’ claims of fairness in admissions.
At the same time, universities seem to rely on these large donations, and even people outside a school’s fundraising office are capable of viewing these transactions in relentlessly utilitarian terms. When my research team interviewed students on Ivy League campuses for my book The Diversity Bargain, many students suggested this compromise: If one legacy admission meant the university could pay for five packages of financial aid for disadvantaged students, it was worth it. One executive at the Harvard Management Company has even suggested that colleges simply auction a small number of seats to the highest bidders, which would eliminate the need for the more subtle admissions boosts given to a much larger group of legacy applicants and the children of donors.
Essai numéro 1 : résumé ciblé
According to the columnist, why is the legacy-admissions preference an “indefensible-policy”?
The admission process to higher education institutions in the US has to weigh in a wide variety of factors, ranging from an applicant’s SAT scores to their athletic prowess. However, this process has been widely criticized : most colleges have a “legacy-admissions preference”, which to the author is an “indefensible policy” due to financial and ethical reasons, especially when affirmative action is threatened.
The alleged legitimacy of legacy-admissions lies in the financial benefits they offer to an institution. By giving the children of alumni a boost in the admission process, the said alumni would in return make a generous donation, thus contributing to the institution’s funding. However, the author underlines that those donations, let alone generous ones, are not guaranteed. Moreover, some say legacy-admissions could fund scholarships or financial aid to poorer students, especially if there were auctioned. But then again, an ethical dilemma would rise.
Indeed, legacy-admissions directly sap the meritocratic principles of the core of education. Applicants admitted through this policy usually have lower gratifications than others. In fact, the number of students that are granted a scholarship at Johns Hopkins University has doubled since legacy-admissions were removed. Therefore, legacy admissions necessarily undermines social mobility and maintain student inequalities, which are visible in the SATs themselves. Affirmative action could be a way to reduce those inequalities, allowing students from different cultural backgrounds to attend prestigious (or not) institutions. Despite its benefits, it has been criticized, because it gives an “unfair” boost to people from poorer backgrounds. But how can one criticize affirmative action while championing legacy-admissions, which give a boost to students from upper social classes?
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Essai numéro 2 : expression
In your opinion, should access to higher education be a right for all?
The access to higher education is a crucial issue in our inequality-ridden society, especially given the importance of a (prestigious) degree on the labor market, and thus in shaping one’s future. Therefore, access to higher education should be a right for all, but that does not mean that every single one of us should have a PhD.
Indeed, one’s degree determines one’s attractiveness on the labor market, because it certifies a certain set of skills, taught in higher education institutions. The higher the degree, the rarer the skills, and thus the greater the pay. Therefore, not having access to higher education because of economic reasons (rather than a lack of talent) means missing out on a better life, and creates a vicious cycle of poverty. Regardless of the economic and social consequences, the access to higher education should be a right for all : a democracy should be able to provide its citizens the education they need, and all the knowledge they want, no matter their background, thanks to affirmative action and financial aid.
However, if everyone should have the right to access higher education, not everyone should have a PhD. As the number of people attending college increased, a “degree inflation” on the job market appeared, which essentially means that the sheer number of bachelors and masters in different job sectors has decreased the rarity, and hence the value of said degrees. The first generation of workers which have experienced this phenomenon are the millennials, a large number of which have lower living standards from their parents, despite having a better degree.
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Et si tu veux connaître une bonne méthode pour rédiger ton essai, va voir cet article !
