Philadelphia Daily News

The Story of Guantanamo | Philadelphia Daily News

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:03:00 -0400

Nor, as voiced by the author and al Qaeda expert Peter Bergen, and others, does torture produce valuable information. While the practices employed by the captors at Guantanamo Bay may not be as severe as the Inquisition's, they were as wrong and an ...

Taming the Tuition Beast

Ron Tang — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:47:00 -0400

It's not news that the cost of a college degree has risen significantly over the last couple of decades.

Since 1990, tuition and fees have risen by nearly 225 percent at four-year public colleges and by 154 percent at private four-year colleges. The real story is that tuition growth rates often fluctuate wildly from year to year -- which makes it hard for families to plan ahead and budget enough to cover the costs.

Last year, students at Villanova faced an unexpected tuition and fee increase that was double the previous year's.

Students entering Penn State in 2002 had no way of knowing that their costs would increase by 30 percent by 2006.

Such stories are echoed across the country. To take just one example, members of Arizona State's class of 2005 were stunned to learn as sophomores that their tuition was to rise by 39 percent in less than a year.

These shocks to the pocketbook no doubt contribute to the nation's 33 percent college dropout rate.

There is a solution to the problem. Recently, U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., of Bucks County, teamed up with a former Newt Gingrich lieutenant, Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., to sponsor a "Truth-in-Tuition" amendment to the pending College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008.

Despite the opposition of college lobbyists, the House of Representatives passed the amendment in early February. The bill is now in a joint House-Senate conference committee.

If the Murphy-Myrick truth-in-tuition plan becomes law, colleges will be required to change their traditional practice of announcing tuition and fees for the next academic year only a few months before the fall semester bill is due.

Instead, schools would either present each incoming freshman class with a multi-year tuition and fee schedule or give families a nonbinding estimate of what they can expect to pay after financial aid is taken into consideration, assuming constant family income. If a school goes the non-binding estimate route, they'd also have to disclose how much their past estimates have been off on average.

Every public college in Illinois is subject to a state truth-in-tuition law. George Washington, Baylor and many other institutions of higher education have successfully instituted such pricing practices. Other colleges have gone even further, guaranteeing a fixed annual cost for all four years.

Many college officials resist the idea of providing price estimates, arguing that forecasting revenues and costs four years into the future is too difficult. But these same administrators have little trouble entering into expensive multi-year contracts with professors and coaches, or long-term financing agreements to pay for extravagant building projects, including sports stadiums.

Some public universities rightly argue that they lack the authority to set tuition rates. But there is no reason that state tuition-setting agencies cannot be held to a truth-in-tuition standard. They worry that state funding cuts drive tuition hikes.

But that's just the point. It shouldn't be easy to boost tuition and fees dramatically to back fill every state budget cut.

College tuition undeniably is a drain on the wallets of American families. It does not, however, have to be an unpredictable surprise from year to year. Families won't like seeing that their costs may rise 10 percent one year and 20 percent the next. But at least having such information at the start of a college program will provide students and families with crucial information they need to plan their finances.

As families in Pennsylvania and across the country struggle to make college payments, the least our universities and states can do is to be up front about the true costs of getting a degree.

If, as seems likely, they won't do this on their own, Congress should require them to.

A Way Out Of the Nader Dilemma

Ron Tang — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

With Ralph Nader in the race, Democrats are fuming and no doubt preparing to use the same legal tricks they used in 2004 to keep Nader off the ballot in many states. Republicans are cackling with glee.

But Republicans shouldn't cackle too loudly. They've also been hurt by the spoiler dilemma.

In fact, the GOP lost control of the U.S. Senate due to Libertarian Party candidates in Montana, Washington, Missouri, Nevada and South Dakota spoiling things for Republicans. And many observers believe that Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992 only because Ross Perot drained away enough votes from Bush.

The problem is that the winners of our highest offices are not required to win a majority of the vote, either nationwide or in each state. Without a majority requirement, we can't be certain in a multi-candidate field that the winner will be the one preferred by the most voters.

How ridiculous: We can map the human genome, and send an astronaut to the moon, but we can't figure out a way to hold elections that guarantee the winner has a majority of the vote?

Naturally people are having flashbacks to the 2000 election, when George Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by only 538 votes, even though Bush lacked a majority of Florida's popular vote and Ralph Nader won 97,000 votes.

So much is at stake in a presidential election that we have to make sure that the winner this November can legitimately claim the presidency and try to heal a polarized nation.

Yet despite the spoiler problem playing out in the 2000 presidential election and in various Senate races, neither Democratic nor Republican Party leaders have done anything to fix this defect of our electoral system.

Fortunately, it's not too late to address this problem. Since the U.S. Constitution delegates to states the method of choosing its Electoral College electors, each state legislature could pass into law -- right now -- a majority requirement for their state to ensure that whichever candidate wins, he or she will command support from a majority of that state's voters.

We don't even need to do it in every state, since the race will boil down to a half-dozen battleground states, including the perennials Ohio and Florida.

Rather than asking Nader or any candidate to forego his democratic right to run for political office, the Democratic and Republican leaders could legislate this right now. What are they waiting for? Time is growing short, but it's in the public interest to protect majority rule.

One approach would be to adopt a two-round runoff system similar to that used in most presidential elections around the world and many southern primaries and local elections in the United States.

A first round with all candidates could take place in mid-October. The top two finishers would face off in November, with the winner certain to have a majority.

But two elections would be expensive and time-consuming, both for taxpayers and candidates. So a better way would be for each state to adopt instant runoff voting (IRV), which accomplishes the goal of electing a winner with majority support, but getting it over in a single election.

IRV allows voters to pick not only their first choice but also to rank a second and third choice at the same time, 1, 2, 3.

If your first choice can't win, your vote goes to your second choice. The runoff rankings are used to determine a majority winner with only one election.

Nader or Perot-type voters are liberated to vote for their favorite candidate without helping to elect their least favorite.

IRV is used in Ireland and Australia for national elections, in San Francisco, Cary, N.C., and elsewhere for local elections, and in South Carolina, Arkansas and Louisiana for overseas voters.

Interestingly, IRV is supported by John McCain, Barack Obama and Ralph Nader.

Many people are criticizing Nader for risking a repeat of 2000, but only Democrats and Republicans have the power to change the rules of the game.

We've seen this movie before and don't like how it might turn out. It's time for the Democrats and Republicans to produce a new ending by fashioning a fair, majoritarian system for electing our nation's highest offices.

A Matter of Degrees

adminn — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:53:00 -0500

As the college football season nears its final showdown between Ohio State and LSU, the media-stoked frenzy over which teams were selected for the Bowl Championship Series has reached a fever pitch.

Penn State is in the Alamo Bowl, with less money and media attention. But if team academic performance were considered by the BCS, Penn State would have fared much better.

Over all, the academic performance of big-time college football is dismal. Only 56 percent of Division I-A football players graduate within six years of enrollment. Many who do receive a diploma are tracked into jock majors or pass through a substandard academic program.

Successful college football programs generate millions for their schools, so does it really matter if a relative handful of athletes leave college without an education?

We at Higher Ed Watch think it does, and that Penn State's team deserves credit for its work in the classroom. We created an "Academic BCS" formula that we hope will persuade some fans to rethink the one-track definition of success as a BCS berth.

Unlike the reams of information available on athletic performance, public data on the academic performance of student-athletes is scarce. There are only two: graduation rates and the NCAA's less-rigorous "academic progress rate" (APR) for each team. Half of each college's score comes from just having players in school. The other half comes from players completing 20 percent of their courses toward a degree each year. No minimum GPA required.

Under our Academic BCS formula, the NCAA's APR gets less weight than graduation rates. We give teams points based on (1) the gap in graduation rates between the football team and school overall, (2) the gap in graduation rates between black and white players in comparison to the school gap and (3) the team's APR in comparison to the median APR for all football teams. Our formula rewards schools that educate players as successfully as they do other students.

When our formula is applied to the teams ranked in the top 25 of the actual BCS poll, the results change dramatically. Boston College, Cincinnati and Connecticut look like champs compared to Ohio State and LSU, which rank at the bottom academically.

If Penn State is added to the mix, the Nittany Lions would rank second after Boston College and be competing for the Academic BCS National Championship.

Some teams from schools that might be expected to be top-ranked given their academic reputations (University of Virginia, for example, and Michigan, which recently dropped from the BCS poll) failed to earn top honors.

That is largely because these schools have significant gaps between the graduation rates of black and white players. Michigan graduated only 46 percent of black players who entered from 1997 to 2000, compared to 91 percent of its white players.

In contrast, Penn State graduated more black than white players during that period (74 percent for black players and 72 for white players), an accomplishment that doesn't attract the attention it deserves given the national disparities in black-white graduation rates overall.

Other teams from schools not generally considered academic powerhouses are doing a relatively good job educating their football players. At the University of Cincinnati, for example, 71 percent of players who entered the school from 1997 to 2000 left with a degree, compared to only 49 percent of all students at the school. Cincinnati's team had only a three-point black-white graduation gap, compared to the school's near 20-point gap.

Unless we adopt a purely mercenary approach to college sports, and perhaps pay players rather than perpetuate the charade of the student-athlete, we should recognize that the future of most college football players depends on getting a degree, not securing an NFL contract.

It's easy to ignore the academic question when cheering on a third-and-goal. But when the Nittany Lions take the field against Texas A&M later this month, take a step back and think about the broader picture. There are measures of success more important than a bowl victory.

A version of this article also appeared in the Dec. 9 edition of the Patriot-News.