True Merit: Ensuring Our Brightest Students Have Access to Our Best Colleges and Universities

America's top colleges and universities should institute an admissions preference for low-income students because such students -- even when they are high-achievers academically -- now face unjustified barriers and make up a mere 3 percent of enrollment at the elite schools, according this report from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. The Cooke Foundation found that such a "poverty preference" for admissions to selective higher education institutions, akin to existing preferences for athletes and the children of alumni, would create a more level playing field for disadvantaged students.The Cooke Foundation report shows dramatic differences between enrollment rates at the most selective schools for students from families with the highest and lowest incomes. It highlights the major challenges low-income, high-achieving students face when seeking admission to these colleges and universities.Perhaps the most significant new finding of the report is that the vast majority of students in America's most competitive institutions of higher education -- 72 percent -- come from the wealthiest 25 percent of the U.S. population. In sharp contrast, only 3 percent of students in the most selective schools come from the 25 percent of families with the lowest incomes. The report is the first comprehensive analysis conducted on the postsecondary admissions process as it affects high-achieving, low-income applicants

Redesigning Nursing Education: Lessons Learned from the Oregon Experience

Offers evaluation findings, lessons learned, and guidance from a coalition of community colleges and university nursing programs that offer a standard competency-based curriculum to enable students to make a seamless transition and raise skill levels

Structural Chemistry of Anhydrous Sodium Silicates – A Review

Sodium silicates are of considerable importance for many fields of inorganic chemistry and applied mineralogy, being either raw materials for synthesis or already finished products. In addition to their industrial relevance they have also been studied intensively because of their interesting physico-chemical properties including high ion-exchange capacity and selectivity or two-dimensional sodium diffusion and conductivity. Furthermore, the structural chemistry of crystalline sodium silicates offers the crystallographer challenging tasks such as polytypism, polymorphism, temperature and/or pressure-dependent phase transitions, pseudo-symmetry, complex twinning phenomena as well as incommensurately modulated structures. Many of these structural problems have been solved only recently, although in some cases they have been known for several decades. This article will provide an overview on the structurally characterized sodium silicates and their fascinating crystallochemical characteristics

The Future of Affirmative Action: New Paths to Higher Education Diversity after Fisher v. University of Texas

This new research reveals African-American and Hispanic enrollments at America's 193 most elite colleges would more than double if the top ten percent of every class were guaranteed admission and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds were given an admissions boost