Universities across America are marketing traditions to appeal to prospective students and to reflect their current student body, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Oberlin College emphasizes that its art museum rents works by artists such as Chagall, Dali and Picasso out to students for five dollars, none of which have been lost or damaged. At the College of William and Mary, professors participate in the Raft Debates every October, where they pretend to be stranded on an island and must convince the audience why their discipline would be the most useful to save humanity.
A report released Thursday said 10 lenders for private student loans are responsible for 90 percent of all consumer complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Sallie Mae, with 46 percent of all complaints, was the most complained about lender. The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Authority and Wells Fargo also topped the list. Of the over 4,300 complaints filed between March 2012 and August 2013, only 8 percent were settled monetarily and 12 percent were resolved through other forms of relief. The study also suggests several solutions to end the complaints, including sharing more details about specific cases, developing an app to inform consumers on the complaint system and analyzing the trends of private student loans.
Colleges are using private recruiters to target students for certain desired traits, including family income, zip code, ability to pay or ethnicity, Inside Higher Ed reported. The College Board, the ACT and the National Research Center for College and University Admissions gather information on high school students and sell the data to colleges and consulting firms in a practice known as "predictive modeling." The number of students going to university and students who can pay has dropped, causing college officials to rethink how to expose their institutions to prospective students. Admission officers estimate that colleges spend about $2,500 per enrollee on recruitment. Many students are not only unaware of these aspects of the recruitment process, but do not realize colleges use them to lower acceptance rates.
