Have Mathematics Exams Become Easier? 853
Coryoth writes "The BBC is reporting on a recent study in the UK that found that the difficulty of high school level math exams has declined. The study looked at mathematics from 1951 through to the present and found that, after remaining roughly constant through the 1970s and 1980s, the difficulty of high school math exams dropped precipitously starting in the early 1990s. A comparison of exams is provided in the appendix of the study. Are other countries, such as the US, noticing a similar decline in mathematics standards?" Readers with kids in school right now may have the best perspective on changes in both teaching and testing methods -- what have you noticed?
Pay teachers more (Score:5, Insightful)
We've noticed this 'dumbing down' (thanks Idiocracy) for a while now at Uni. The newer mathematics students enrolling in first year are lacking some of the basic skills. Example: a couple of years ago, trigonometric functions and identities were completely removed from the high school syllabus. It goes back all the way to year one at school.
I don't think teachers are being paid enough and they are certainly not valued enough by the community. Once upon a time, the best and brightest minds went into the teaching profession; it had respect and was highly valued. Now, it's whoever wants to become one, winner by default. The best and brightest need to be attracted back. Why would somebody who has the ability to earn more than four times the national average wage go into a job that earns less than the average wage?
we don't want to upset them (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet every year the exam results get better and the government congratulates itself on improving standards while denying the exams are getting easier.
education policymakers need to look good (Score:5, Insightful)
That time of the year, already? (Score:3, Insightful)
pass rates go up - exams are getting easier. education system in decline
pass rates go down - teachers not able to communicate with students. education system in decline
scalability (Score:1, Insightful)
Today, you need some mathematical background knowledge everywhere. This means that you have to lower the exam standard and let people move on. Today's automobile engineer doesn't sit down with complex geometry solving. Good computer skills with less mathematical knowledge is acceptable too. Such person would have been useless in auto engineering division in 1950.
No one is going to say (Score:4, Insightful)
This is because it would be false. You might get arguments about the extent of the change, but none on the direction.
And nothing in education will ever improve in the US as long as the system is union-controlled.
General request! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:tools (Score:3, Insightful)
Brand X: "Buy one, get one free!"
Brand Y: A few pence cheaper, and a larger pack too.
Brand Z: "25% off!"
How many people today can't work out which is best?
(UK supermarkets even do most of the work for you, below the price for every product is printed something like "1.50 per kg", so it's very easy to compare prices -- you only need to work stuff out if there's an item on multi-buy promotion, in which case the 'per' price will still be for a single item.)
Poor math skills of 1st year physicists (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only do teachers not get paid enough to attract and retain the good ones, but teachers unions and the fear of lawsuits make firing the awful ones nearly impossible.
Re:UkUniversityStudent (Score:3, Insightful)
Education is turning into almost a two tier system. There are those kids which are pushed by their parents and aim to succeed and then there is everyone else.
The kids who push hard all fight over a small handful of places in top schools fighting off with multiple public and private schools (who often are rubbing the Uni's asses).
It does amuse me that we have these moral panics about exam difficulty without really addressing the key question - Does it teach then what it intends to? And are the subject's goals in line with what is needed?
Looking at grades as an answer to either question seems about as intelligent as asking the cows about the weather.
Re:tools (Score:3, Insightful)
And yeah, I do carry my TI-89 with me, but I'm an Aerospace Engineer. Without that, my mechanical pencils and my ID card I'd be naked!
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, your English teacher wasn't paid enough.
But other than that, the problem I see in this country is that the consumers of education have no choice. And like in any other monopoly, the provider gets away with poor quality.
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you are quite right (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, since education used to be so much heavier in the memorization it is no surprise that the tests are "hard" for people today. I remember getting in to this argument with someone I knew. They'd found a test posted online that was a highschool graduation test circa 1900. They used it as an example of how much "harder" school was then and how I couldn't pass it. Well, turned out I could, but only because I'm a trivia junkie. I know lots of useless facts, and there was a whole lot of the test that was full of it. The geography and history sections were nothing but. Things like matching capital cities to states.
Ok, well that's neat and all, but it is quite thoroughly useless. There is no reason to know that. If you want to, great, but don't pretend like it is useful knowledge or that you are smart because you can do it.
So ya, people today had trouble passing the test, but that doesn't mean the test was hard, it meant the test was different.
Re:tools (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, not everyone is going to go on in mathematics; some will be poets, some will be historians, and so on. It is also true, however, that most people don't have their future that well written by the age of 16, and having a solid enough background in a variety of subjects, including mathematics, literature, and history, to be able to keep future options open to exploration is important.
Pay math and science teachers! Supply and Demand. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hope this isn't too far off topic, but what I really think needs to happen is that there should be incentives for people to become math and science teachers. Specifically, let prospective math and science students pay off government loans with years of teaching in public school. This brings more opportunities to poorer students by reducing the up front cost of getting such degrees. While likely many may leave, the public school system would benefit greatly. There must be some figure of tuition costs v. years of teaching in public school that would be mutually beneficial and bring more geeks into the classroom.
Re:First post! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:5, Insightful)
I would really like to know what others think. Btw, I am in the US (as one poster asked people to add)
Musings on school in general (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest is that the school system is not a great way to learn stuff. I remember (but bear in mind that I'm your average slashdotter, not your average person) at a fairly early age drawing 6x6 grids which taught be that 7 has probability 1/6. I remember my father drawing circles in the sand with dots in the center, explaining the basics of chemistry (and he's not a chemist), and me completely getting it.
I remember at age 14 (laughably late by slashdot standards) that a person I knew had written a program that played chess. Being a moderately skilled chess player at the time (1390), I thought that was awesomely cool and wanted to do that myself. That got me started writing C (I had dabbled in
Where am I? Studying CS & Math. Doing the things I chose to study in my own time, not the things I discovered in school.
Contrast this with school. You're forced into confinement (it wasn't until grade 6 or 7 we were allowed to leave school grounds unsupervised) with a bunch of people that mistreat you horribly and wish you the worst, and another bunch of people who really don't give a rats ass. You're bored out of your mind in the classes that interest you because the material is easy and progress through it is slower than your pace. You're bored in the rest as well, because they don't interest you; the disinterest may arise merely from the fact that they are being forced upon you.
And I went to a private school... with the things my mother has said about public schools (and she's worked at one), I think I should be glad to not have attended one. On top of that, I hear the danish school system is better than the one in USA.
More edibles for cognition: John Taylor Gatto (English teacher [johntaylorgatto.com]) says that we he finds companies that don't mind having the kid do some work, the kids do more and better work than the paid staff. My ex-girlfriend (okay, so not completely an average slashdotter
Not wanting to be completely off topic, the article says that work needs to be done on making math chic. The question is: who has the credibility and influence with kids to make math cool? For young kids, the parents have some influence, although not much in the "cool" department. For teens, it's mostly the peers (not the kinds who reset the connection). That's a network effects problem you have to solve. Who else? Rock stars? Quaterbacks? Miss teen south carolina (everywhere such as maps)? I mean, having math be the Hot Stuff wouldn't be bad, but it would imply (not just suggest, as the decline in maritime piracy has) the existence of the flying spaghetti monster.
(for those not picking up logician's humor, everything follows from a contradiction).
Re:Mensa and testing... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, they should be smart enough to know that the SAT was never meant to measure your IQ. In fact, they should be smart enough to know that IQ tests themselves only measure certain abilities, and are not really a good measure of intelligence.
I normally score around 135 in IQ tests (of course it depends on things like time of the day, quality of sleep on the previous night, BAL, etc), and in my opinion IQ tests and Mensa-like organizations are only good to inflate egos, as they have little relevance to real life.
By the way, did you know that "mensa" means "fool", "stupid", or "jerk" in Spanish? [wordreference.com] How fitting...
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maths has changed / evolved... (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'm afraid that you are, indeed, a victim. You see, the reason why you learn geometric proofs and calculus proofs is to assist with developing problem-solving skills that require an individual to reason a problem from start to finish, much like real life. It scares me that you claim, as an engineer, that all you need to know are the rote mechanics of math (and yes, that is what you describe: number crunching as opposed to critical problem analysis).
Unfortunately, at least in the US, proofs of any type are becoming rare to non-existent in many curricula. I see the direct result of this every day I'm in school and a student stares at me with a blank look on his/her face when I ask him/her to analyze and determine the best course of action for solving for some quantity X given Y and Z.
You didn't mention what type of engineer you are. Computer/software/hardware, perhaps? Then yes, I'd agree that programming logic, vector operations, and the like are probably a valuable intellectual commodity. But I know many engineers who work day in and day out designing things, and this takes more than a simplistic knowledge of how to perform statistical computations.
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:1, Insightful)
Today it's not just the top 20%-30% of students taking geometry. It's not just the top 10% going on to college. This fact brings with it certain undeniable circumstances. The major one is a "dumber" average high school student and a "dumber" average university student. It also means to keep society happy schools have to bend over backwards to help everyone "achieve".
The first sad fact is many kids don't have the genetic predisposition and/or the proper environment to "achieve". All of us fall into a bell curve when it comes to "smarts". You can't just wish that away or force kids to learn.
The second sad fact is that pushing kids to "achieve" is not working. I for one support bring vocational programs back into high schools and vectoring the lower "achieving" kids into vocational tracks by their sophomore year. And stop the insanity of pressuring kids to go to 4 year universities. The majority should be going to 2 year vocational associates programs (assuming they don't get the vocational training they need in high school).
There are plenty of good paying vocational-level jobs out there. Ones like electrician, plumber, welder, and HVAC repair are skilled vocations that pay quite well and will NOT get offshored ever! Even many/most programming jobs really just need a vocational level of training. I don't know of any programmer at an insurance company or bank that needs to worry about automaton theory, compilers, etc.
We need less "achievers" and more people that can earn a survival living.
Re:Easier or more straight forward? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:tools (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that 1234+2345 is ball park 3500. If I grab my calculator and get something that is about 3500 I'm happy. The point of doing stuff without a calculator is so that you don't depend on it. It is way to easy to make a mistake using a calculator, and if you cant at least estimate the right answer then you have no way of knowing if you operated the calculator correctly.
This skill becomes even more important in physics later on, when you want to neglect terms but cant work out their exact contribution without solving the very problem you want to neglect them from.
A student should be able to ball park the square root of 10 in their head, or work out the sine of 0.1 radians, or estimate what the sum of some set of numbers is in their head because they can simplify the problem to the point that they know they have the right answer.
Then you use a calculator to get it precisely.
Re:General request! (Score:1, Insightful)
ok
the learning ramp (Score:2, Insightful)
I was educated in the UK, and I left school at 16 to start an apprenticeship - I'm not sure that there are many of those left.
If I had stayed at school I would have done "A" levels - the (at the time) horribly hard exams designed to stop people from going to university.
I'm not kidding, the public wanted value for the money they spent on university education and A levels were a way to screen out those that might struggle to make it. In some ways they help make a "4 year degree" only take 3 years to obtain in the UK.
If I had done the A levels and not gone to university I would have been considered an academic oddball, who really did not fit into the scheme well.
So there were two streams of people doing exams; the university-bound and the apprenticeship-bound and the exams were tailored to those needs.
Needs must have changed...
1) UK and other nations want to encourage further education, not put a barrier in the way
2) Many of the traditional forms of employment for 16 yr olds have gone, 16 years is a waypoint in a normal schooling to 18 now.
3) Universities have welcomed "nontraditional" academic backgrounds for years, and indication to me that the old way of doing exams was not considered optimal.
I think it's inappropriate to expect the exams to stay the same when their context has changed.
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:4, Insightful)
So "they" had a choice, and blaming minorities is just a way of deflecting from lack of investment in combating the real problems: Poverty - because the common theme when it comes to who underperfom is social situations, not race -, and too little investment in education.
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:4, Insightful)
But why don't they work? I don't know where you're from but around here one of the major reasons private schools get better results than the neighbouring public school is that most of the private schools have the ability to select the students they take. They take the bright kids and these kids do well. The little shits who don't want to learn / ate lead paint for the first six years of their lives end up concentrated in the public schools which can't refuse them.
All your solution does is increase the education gap between the high-achieving kids and low-achieving kids. I think that goes against the whole point of compulsory education, which is that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than algegra, geometry, etc., as discrete courses, they get jumbled together and reintroduced each year through 3 years. The problem is that there's never enough of it at any given time to actually stick, so you get a lot of students who are going through the motions.
On top of that you get a lot of group work, which basically ends with the one or two students that actually get the course material providing answers to the entire group.
In an atmosphere like that, where the basics aren't really ever taught, I'm not really sure that most students could cope with anything particularly challenging. And that's not even bothering with the switch from more more theory and analysis to more focus on useless proofs.
Proofs can be valuable, but only when the students are being taught to understand the reason why certain corollaries, postulates and theorems have been put forth. Mindlessly regurgitating them without an understanding of the implications isn't particularly worthwhile.
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't exactly in the public sector, but it was one of the cheaper and thus more popular private vocational colleges. My already modest expectations were far beyond what this enterprise was offering, which is probably why all the grads wound up either in brainless government jobs (lucky them), or call centers.
The day we rid schools of the financial burden, is the day they will start churning out smarter grads.
Oh no, post-secondary is now compulsory (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? Since when did university become a right rather than a privilege one earned? Oh, that happened a few years after we decided that everyone had to finish high school and made high school a college prep program.
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:3, Insightful)
Some people take Idiocracy way, way, too seriously.
When civilization has to concern itself with what might happen in the next few hundred thousand years, when it has been shown that stupidity is actually favored (despite modern hazards like cars and common day-to-day requirements for math, etc), and that it will be favored for hundreds of thousands of years into the future, only then can we think of this as a potential future problem.
Until that time it's just a nice way to feel smug and superior, and I think that may be all this article is.
Everyone likes to hear that standards have dropped and that much more was expected of themselves, but the report compares different syllabuses and exams that are taken at different ages.
This report is comparing individual exam questions even when the syllabus has been changed. As it says in the article "The content became broader and shallower"; a wider range of maths is probably a good thing.
Also aside from all the politically motivated bashing and calls for a "cultural revolution" they sneak this past people:
What a disgrace! Down with Brown!
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:3, Insightful)
Bludge? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:4, Insightful)
My favorite idea for "fixing" schools comes from Milton Friedman's book "Capitalism and Freedom". The basic idea is that the government would subsidize education and set some minimum requirements, while the actual schooling would be done by competeing private companies. Parents (or students) could choose which school the kids went to and, if they wanted, could add money on top of the subsidy.
It would solve the quality problem because schools would be competing with other schools. Nobody wants to send their kids to a bad school, so the schools would get better or they'd go out of business. It would also fix the teacher salary problem because better teachers would go to the better schools where they could make more money (hint: that would make them all try harder to be better teachers).
Before anybody yells about poor people getting screwed, look at the current system. Right now poor neighborhoods tend to have worse schools, and the parents in those neighborhoods have no choice but to send their kids to those schools. Under this plan there would always be the option of sending the kids to a better school across town if the nearby school got too bad.
Privatizing *really* not the answer (long post) (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me start off by owning up to my bias -- actually, twofold. First, my wife is a middle school teacher, and I have volunteered in many different ways at her school as both elective teacher and simple extra pair of hands. Second, I have found very little in Milton Friedman's writings that I can wholeheartedly agree with. The man seemed to think that private enterprise was a panacea for all of mankind's various ills. He somehow seemed to miss the problem that the underlying profit motive is often at cross-purposes with many of the not-really-business areas he advocated for privatization.
To extend this and dig into the meat of your post, let's look at your postulation. Schools are, ostensibly, there to provide a public service. There is some real debate at certain levels in education circles about how much that public service really has to do with teaching, and how much has to do with daycare. No, I'm not just being cynical -- a large part of why schooling in the US plays out the way it does is because, historically, mandatory schooling for certain age groups was instrumental in allowing for the 9-5 working day for both men and women, which became very important during WWII.
So let's say we assume that schools are there to provide the public service of actually teaching kids, with daycare as a nice side-effect. Fine.
Now let's look at the theoretical private company under Friedman's model that would step in to fill this sudden demand for private education. It would ostensibly be a for-profit corporation, given Friedman's leanings, which means a number of things. For starters, the corporation's management is under a legal obligation to ensure that the company makes as much profit as possible -- by deliberately taking in more money than it costs to do business. This is diametrically opposed to how not-for-profit corporations (i.e. most private schools that I'm aware of) operate -- by deliberately spending all funds alloted in the budget for that year in order to ensure that the services provided are the best possible.
With those *very* different directives, a few moments' thought should be enough to show that any for-profit entity operating in the field of public services is going to provide the least possible service at the highest possible rates. We've seen that time and again, in country after country, in sector after sector. Medical services in the US? Check. Water utilities in the UK? Check. Power companies in the US? Check. Major ISPs in Australia, Canada, the US? Mobile communications services just about anywhere? Check.
Fobbing such services off onto the private sector produces other problems as well, as corporations are by their very definition protected by legal limits on their liability. Given the intimate roles that teachers play as in loco parentis, it is important on many different levels that parents have a serious say in what happens at schools -- which is where PTAs come in. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that no for-profit company would really allow a PTA to have much authority over what goes on.
Part of the problem in the Friedman model is the simple issue of motivation. Why would companies suddenly spring up to take over the role of schools? Private schools that exist at present are there in large part because of an organic need in the community, combined with the presence of people with the motivation to be teachers. The Friedman pipe dream instead seems to be based on the profit motive, which is, as noted above, largely incompatible with public services. His model is also flawed in ignoring the very real geographical constraints of schools -- even assuming real market-style competition
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, So? Why should a teacher master differential equations to teach algebra? I'd rather have a good teacher that knows enough math, than a great mathmetician that can't teach. When you require degrees, you restrict more than you enable. My high school physics teacher had a biology degree (and wasn't the biology teacher, but did teach chemistry) the French teacher had an economics degree. The economics teacher had a masters in political science, but no high school diploma or bachelors from college. Oh, and the political science teacher had a degree in education, not political science. Amd they were all good at what they taught.
Throw in the fact that mathematics is one of those subjects where a student can be permanently set back by just one bad teacher and you have a decent part of the problem.
Which is why you need a person at the front of the class that connects, and their knowledge of the material is secondary. I know from personal experience tutoring, that I've actually tutored someone successfully in a subject I had no knowledge of. I talked them through, asked them questions, and they were able to learn what they needed with direction, but not someone just giving them answers. Math teachers eed to be teachers first, and mathmaticians low on the list, at least until up until the last coule years of high school and beyond, where the math gets more complicated.
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Transport. You just know that "poor" schools will be in poor neighborhoods. Now, poor people don't tend to have the money to drive their kids to school (they most likely have to leave their house before their kids even to get to work somehow), so poor kids would have to either go to those schools or be transported somehow to the "better" ones. How do you plan to solve this problem?
2. "Money on top" from the parents. What should this money pay for, if there is already a standard set? Additional credit? Better teaching material and/or teachers? No matter what that money pays for, it gives the children whose parents can pay some sort of advantage. How does this not disadvantage the children of poor parents?
3. Is an extension of 2: If there is a standard set, why should anyone have to add something on top of it? There are only two possible systems, either the standard is so low that this is necessary (which basically means again that you have "rich" and "poor" schools, because no poor person could afford topping off the governmental funding, thus having to resort to cheap (and bad) schools), or the standards are adequate which in turn raises the question what the money should pay for.
Basically not a bad idea, but you just know how it will turn out: Good schools will require you to fork over extra money, so they can hire better teachers and get better equipment, which no poor person can afford, and the dregs will be left over for the poor kids. That won't change a thing.
Re:Yes, yes, yes and partly no. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's racist when you massage the numbers to make it look like 90% of the worst students are Pakistani.
However, if that genuinely is the case then IMO it's not racist at all. There may be underlying reasons for it that are racist in origin, but if you refuse to acknowledge the problem you're never going to find those underlying reasons.
Re:Privatizing *really* not the answer (long post) (Score:4, Insightful)
I've tired to answer some key points, but it's nowhere as elaborate as your post..
As I understand his theories, they were actually misunderstood by the politicians implementing them as a panacea to all thier ills.
The trick is to align the profit motive with the actual task at hand. When private companies are paid to run buses in Copenhagen, they are (as I understand it) required to run certain routes at certain frequencies. They are not required to run a service that customers will want to use. Thus, bus service is plentyful, but sucks, and most people will rather bike 15 km in the rain than set foot in a bus.
Similarly, if you subsidise a school according to grades (e.g. you're only paid for >B average students), there's a motivation to neglect the ones that take too much effort to pull above B, or to pressure teachers to over-grade. If you subsidise per student-attendance-day, well, then you create a motive to be a great day-care center.
These are all very high barrier-to-entry industries. A private school can be six kids around a kitchen-table and their parents taking turns as teachers, so while your reservations hold (mostly - most private telecommunications businesses are orders of magnitude more customer-aligned than in their government-past) true for the mentioned businesses, they don't for schools.
Because they can operate the same service at a lower cost, which means money in the pocket.
The more money a business pockets (or sinks in inefficient operations), the more likely it is that a more efficient competitor will appear.
The idea it to create true competition, and true competition means that a loser will lose something real, and the winner will win something real. In a public pseudo-competition, the fight is only for prestige, in private it's for actual money, and people tend to be a bit more rigorous with their money that with their prestige.
("MY school has a superior athletics program" - "Oh yeah, MY school has a better library" - "Oh look, our salaries are exactly the same" - "How about that, let's play golf")
Way to sustains a negative spiral. In a private system, parents, not conjunctures, decides funding.
If you're living in a neighbourhood where the land value declines - if the school is good, you'll keep your kids there, and the school will keep it's funding. If it's struggling, you might even make a donation with the money you saved from property taxes. Now there's a cheap neighbourhood with a good school => more kids => more money.
Competition. Real competition. To win, you must continuously improve yourself. Significant innovation and progress is risky, and is generally awarded.
Responsibility and accountability comes when irresponsibility means losing your job tomorrow, not in four years, and then only if someone will run against you.
Re:Pay teachers more (Score:4, Insightful)
And she would have gotten a lot less stress too. I can't count how often she had to stay late to help a student (sometimes only to have that student not show up) or how many times she had to deal with an irate parent. ("What do you mean my kid didn't get an A? I want my kid to get an A! It's your fault my kid didn't get an A.") She was in a private school and many of the parents seemed to think that, because they paid for school admission, they owned her and were entitled to have their kids on the honor roll. Yes, being on the honor roll was thought of as automatic by parents, not something students earned through hard work and good grades.
She got out just in time too. Apparently, a couple of teachers (good ones, mind you) have been let go because that same group of parents decided to organize to "get rid of" teachers they had a beef with. My wife, on a visit back to the school, overheard some parents discussing which teacher to go after next. When teachers face working conditions like you described, lousy pay, students who don't want to learn, and parents who could care less so long as the teacher gives their kids A's, of course the good teachers will wind up leaving. I'm really fearful about the kind of education that my kids will get. I can only hope that they either wind up with new teachers (who have not yet been beaten down by the system) or are lucky enough to get those rare "diamond" teachers who seem to stay great no matter what pressure the system heaps on them.
Re:Privatizing *really* not the answer (long post) (Score:3, Insightful)
1) grade inflation - the customer is always right, and students are education customers, so to keep them pleased we give them all A's and B's. There is documented evidence that the average grades given out in university classes is on the rise. If you have time and you care to read it, there's a book called "Ivory Tower Blues" that gives far more detail than a slashdot post ever could. (Be forewarned - for a book written by two academics I was expecting something a little better written and researched, and a little less biased towards their own university, but it's a start I guess. )
2)Students working and spending less time on school work. This would probably be less problematic in high school, but might affect poorer students who want to attend a higher-cost school.
3)The reputation of a school being tied to price. No jokes, one of the arguments the president of our university gave for raising tuition fees was that students, particularly out-of-province or international students without direct knowledge of our university funding system, would assume we were a wal-mart university if we kept costs low. We had to raise them to look like we were the same caliber as other universities in the area. On the flip side of that, another university in our area had a extremely well-regarded engineering program, so they just raised the fees for engineering students because they could. Every year the fees went up, but with very little to show for it. It becomes this insane cycle of raising fees to look good, then raising fees because you look good.