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This chapter examines the developments in Advanced Placement (AP) from the years following its first two decades up to the mid-1990s. By the late 1970s, a profound directional shift began with the gradual emergence of a second major AP mission: assisting able disadvantaged students to engage with and master college-level academic challenges during high school; boosting their confidence that they might in fact be “college material” even if family members and neighbors had never matriculated; and—as with their more privileged age-mates—holding out the possibility of exam scores that would elevate their admissions prospects and kick-start their progress toward degrees. As the participation of minority youngsters expanded faster than the program as a whole, particularly toward the end of the 1980s, the national AP population began to diversify. State legislators began to pass laws that encouraged AP participation and expanded access to it. These years also saw the College Board adding more subjects to the AP catalog. Some of the new classes were accessible to younger high school students without a lot of prerequisites, and some appeared less daunting than physics and calculus. Ultimately, during this period, “AP became a national program to a degree which even its most fervent supporters in the early years could not have imagined.”

This chapter looks at more recent developments and the present state of Advanced Placement (AP). Advanced Placement's recent decades are notable for the program's stunning growth on multiple dimensions. Many more schools, students, and subjects joined in, and they did so at accelerating rates. At least five factors have fueled the AP program's expansion in recent years. First, the use of AP participation to rate and rank high schools has impelled more of them to increase their student numbers so as to boost their standings. Second, schools and districts were induced to add more AP courses because they wanted to challenge their students intellectually, tone up their curricula, hold on to their best teachers, attract and retain more middle-class families, draw more sophisticated employers to the area, and respond to demands from parents of gifted kids. Third, the country's mounting concern about equalizing opportunity for poor and minority youngsters and getting more of them into and through college inevitably drew greater attention to AP's potential contribution. Fourth, stiffening competition to enter top colleges and more scrambling by kids to advantage themselves in the admissions process also continued to pump air into the AP balloon. The fifth factor is the forceful marketing and lobbying activities of the College Board itself. As AP has expanded, it has done so unevenly, however, giving rise to multiple issues of fairness. The chapter then considers these inequalities.

This chapter explores the Advanced Placement (AP) program in suburban school districts. Even as urban centers like Fort Worth and New York typify today's livelier venues for AP expansion, the program has deep roots in the prosperous suburbs that abut them. Along with elite private schools, upscale suburban high schools were among the program's earliest adopters, and they remain natural habitats for a nationally benchmarked, high-status venture that gives strong students a head start on the college education that they are almost certainly going to get and perhaps an extra advantage in gaining admission to the universities they aspire to. Yet they are also ripe for attention as they struggle with equity and growth issues of their own. The chapter then reviews two well-known yet very different suburban districts: Dublin City Schools in Ohio and Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. Both are celebrated as education successes in their states and both boast long and impressive AP track records. Both, however, face distinctive challenges as they seek to serve today's constituents. Their stories illustrate how AP is functioning in places that know it well yet continue to evolve with it.

The interface of law with medical education brings to the fore a range of topics starting from establishing educational institutions to securing admission, from setting standards of medical education not merely of students passing out of colleges established in India but also to appraising persons who have graduated from foreign universities before being granted the license to practice in India. The IMC regulations provide the course content and admission norms but the preoccupation has been essentially in garnering the limited number of seats in colleges by application of rules of reservation without compromising on issues of merit. Private enterprise in establishing colleges has raised the costs of medical education and unconscionable levy of capitation fees. State control that began as attempts to abolish the practice have been tempered with over a time through judicial pronouncements that have not been consistent. Minority-run institutions have pressed home to enjoy immunities from state control in matters of admission and levy of hefty tuition fees. Flights of students to hitherto unknown foreign universities for acquisition of degrees have become common place.

This chapter offers a final case study of landmark higher education policy development, analyzing the creation of Title IX. By departing from the redistributive policy design of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) and the Higher Education Act (HEA) and employing a regulatory approach to expand access to higher educational institutions, lawmakers ventured beyond the precedent of promoting equal opportunity through financial aid. This analysis reveals an interesting shift in the intentionality of lawmakers when it came to expanding women’s access to college degrees. While the substantial benefits that women received from the NDEA and the HEA were byproducts of broader political forces that supported their inclusion as incidental and even accidental beneficiaries, Title IX was crafted with the explicit purpose of expanding women’s access to higher educational institutions.

This chapter presents a speech by former Stanford University president Gerhard Casper on October 4, 1995, on the issue of affirmative action. He focuses on the specific subject of college admissions at Stanford. He says that all applicants receive careful consideration, and the admissions review takes the individual circumstances of the applicant into consideration. These efforts aim at a class characterized by diversity in terms of academic interests, artistic and athletic accomplishments, leadership qualities, and ethnic and social backgrounds.

This chapter examines how children with learning disabilities can be eligible to receive special education and related services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). It begins by reviewing the legal and psychological literature on what constitutes a learning disability and how such a disability should be diagnosed. It then considers the disagreement that continues to exist on whether there must be evidence of a psychological or neurological impairment, and whether the discrepancy model should be part of the diagnostic model. It also discusses the wide range of definitions of learning disability used by the various states despite the fact that the IDEA is a national statute, along with the implications of the learning disability classification for college admissions testing. The chapter concludes by suggesting how the learning disability mess may be solved.

This chapter begins by discussing the history of translation studies programmes British universities. It then examines how the study of French and translation is organised in the UK today. The discussion is based on three surveys of universities accepting applications for entry in 2011, and online summaries of programme and module content. Sources were the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, the institutions' websites, and specialist websites designed to help applicants select courses of study. It shows that the prevailing view in the UK is that translation and interpreting skills are best learned at postgraduate level, despite the availability of undergraduate degrees devoted to translation.