Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Rankings Stress College-Bound Seniors: 12/22/03
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec03/collegeranking_12-22.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Are you, or someone you know, worried about applying to college?

2. What is the most stressful part of senior year?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What did the National Association for College Admissions Counseling survey find?

Stress level among high school seniors applying to college was higher for students in the class of 2002 then it had been in previous years-- part of a general trend.

Thirty percent of the 772 guidance counselors surveyed by NACAC reported that the increase in stress among students was largely related to "getting into the right college."

2. How does the news media contribute the stress of applying to college?

"There is a much wider media buzz about college admissions now," Hingle said. "When the cover of Time magazine is about the SATs then students see what a big picture they are part of, and they do not feel competitive enough."

Magazines such as U.S. News and World Report, which has famously ranked colleges and universities since 1983, could fill in another piece of this puzzle.

"Ranking started in the early '80s and I think shortly after that started there was a greater focus by the American public on the top 25," Blackburn said.

The increased attention on rankings has added to the stress, according to Blackburn. But, he adds, the rankings are "certainly here to stay."

3. What do supporters say about the ranking system?

At a recent seminar on the campus of the University of Wisconsin Madison the director of data research at U.S. News and World Report's ranking issue, Robert Morse, responded to comments made about its methods and consequences.

Morse defended the attacks of educators who say the rankings are an insufficient measure of a university's real character, saying that the rankings perform a valuable service to students.

"Our measures are measures of academic quality," he said, according to the Madison State Journal.

4. What do some critics say about the rankings?

The University of Wisconsin's admission director Robert Seltzer agreed that the rankings could be a good tool. He said, however, that there was too much emphasis on their importance.

"There are students who really do think there's a difference between No. 12 and No. 15," Seltzer said.

Paul Boyer, author of "College Rankings Exposed," said that the annual U.S. News survey and other ranking guides have transformed choosing a college into a ratings game.

He said colleges are forced to spend money on "superficial changes" that will raise their rating, at the expense of real innovation in the undergraduate classroom.

"It's damaging at many levels and keeps getting worse every year," Boyer said.

Discussion Questions and Extension Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Do you think stressing out over college applications is good or bad? Why?
2. Do you think the U.S. News and World Report rankings are useful?
3. How will you, or did you, choose which colleges to apply to?

Send your answers, in essay form, to extra@newshour.org for possible publication!