FROM THE PRESIDENT
There really is a difference B
ut they’re all good colleges, right?” Parents and relatives of young people trying to choose a college often toss that question my way. I’m never exactly sure whether it’s meant as a sincere question, a statement, or a retort. But I’ve become increasingly certain that, for the past 15 years, I’ve been a wimp with my answers. I should have answered bluntly, “No way.” It simply is not the case that every one of the nearly 4,200 degree-granting institutions in the United States is a “good college,” much less a “good college” for a child of God. How do you tell whether an institution is good? Here are some questions to ask. First, ask a prospective school about its four-year graduation rate. Insist on a rate for four years—not five or six. If the answer is less than 60 percent, there’s about a 50/50 chance that your son or daughter will leave after four years with a diploma, ready to enter the work force and contribute to society and to God’s kingdom. And if the rate is less than 50 percent, it’s a pretty good sign that you could be wasting your money in that school, even if the upfront cost is less than that at more successful institutions. A lower investment that is wasted will
prove significantly more expensive than a slightly higher investment that delivers what it promises. Second, ask the institution about its student loan default rates. One of the best ways to discover the impact of a school’s education on both character development and employability is to find out whether its graduates exhibit the moral character and financial ability to Carl E. Zylstra repay their loans. So don’t be put off. The government requires institutions to make that data public. Look for a default figure in the two to three percent range or lower. If it’s above five percent, I’d start to get nervous. And if you find that it’s above 10 percent, I would start looking elsewhere. Third, inquire about alumni giving rates and the percentage of current students that are children of alumni. An excellent way to tell whether a college or
university has made a lasting and positive impact on its graduates is to discover the percentage of graduates who continue to support the college financially— and who encourage their sons and daughters to enroll a generation later. Check the U.S. News &World Report online rankings to see where the school you’re considering stands in relation to its peers on alumni giving. If it’s not in the top ten, you might want to ask why graduates aren’t more loyal to the school that nurtured them. “Legacy enrollment” rates (children of alumni) are generally harder to find, but every institution worth your consideration knows its own rate. If it’s above 30 percent, it’s a good indicator that this is an institution whose positive educational impact lasts for decades. If it’s less than 20 percent, you might want to ask what has led the graduates of that college or university to steer their sons and daughters away from their own alma mater.
These questions are just a start. For serious Christians a whole series of other questions remain as well. In the last issue of the Voice, I posed four questions about educational philosophy that will help you evaluate how seriously Christian the education an institution offers will likely be. In the next issue, I’ll add a few questions that serious Christians can ask to help decide among Christian colleges. My goal in this series isn’t to get everyone to come to Dordt. Frankly, we don’t have room for the four million students who begin college every year in the United States. My passion is this: I’ve met too many Christian families who have stumbled blindly into bad educational choices for their sons and daughters and wound up being deeply disappointed. After a decade and a half in this position, I’m starting to feel guilty that I didn’t warn them more forcefully when I had the chance. I sincerely and humbly hope that this series will be beneficial to at least some within the upcoming generation of college students. And maybe it will help assuage some of my guilty conscience in the process.
Timmer demonstrates a residential solar-assisted hot water system Sally Jongsma
F
or the past two years, Engineering Professor Kevin Timmer and several of his students have been designing, building, and testing a residential solarassisted hot water system. Their work has been funded in part by a small grant from the Iowa Energy Center. In late April, Timmer gave a demonstration of the system along with a presentation on household energy stewardship to the public. The solar-assisted hot water heater has two solar collectors on the roof. Piping filled with antifreeze heated by the sun runs down and around the inside of a storage tank, heating the domestic water. “Studies show that these types of systems should be economically feasible as far north as Minneapolis,” says Timmer. Overall, the system would supply nearly all household hot water in the summer and about 20 percent of hot water in the winter in northern climates, or an average of 50 percent of annual energy use for heating water. When it is too cold and cloudy, the system shuts off. Like many research efforts, the project ran into a snag early on, causing Timmer to ask for an unfunded extension for the grant. Two students originally designed and built the unit but found that parts of it kept leaking. They had begun with a kit, manufactured in Europe, and modified it to suit their purposes. It wasn’t until Timmer spent time poring over the kit’s manual that he realized that the threading on three-quarter-inch piping supplied with the kit conformed to a European standard
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Professor Kevin Timmer with the solar panels on the roof of the Science Building. Pipes filled with antifreeze heated by the solar collectors heat the water in this water heater in the building's basement.
(BSPT) and had an angle five degrees different than the piping purchased here (NPT) to supplement the kit. The threads were also rounded on top rather than flat. These minor differences made a big difference during assembly. Sometimes the mismatched threads sealed and sometimes they didn’t. Once they diagnosed the problem, the team's work proceeded smoothly. “When you are learning plumbing and you have leaks, you naturally assume you did something wrong. It was nice to find out that we could blame the Europeans instead!” chuckles Timmer. Compared to relatively inexpensive traditional means of heating water, the system is marginally cost-effective because it would take almost the life of the system
to pay back installation costs. But as energy costs continue to rise, the payback time will be less. “And heating water with solar energy helps save nonrenewable fossil fuels for things that require highly concentrated energy like refining steel,” says Timmer. “It makes sense to develop ways to use solar energy for things like heating our water rather than using fossil fuels which are capable of producing very high temperatures,” Timmer says. There’s also another way to think about such efforts: “If we charged consumers the real cost of fossil energy, solar water heaters would not look expensive,” Timmer says. At
present we do not count in our energy costs the subsidies given to energy companies or the military costs of protecting our supply of oil in unstable countries. “We pay for part of our energy with taxes, not at the pump. And in the meantime we keep making infrastructure decisions that tie us into artificially cheap energy for the next 50 to 100 years.” Iowa Energy Center grants help fund small research efforts, like this one by Timmer and his students, on renewable energy, and as part of the grant they require the researchers to give a public presentation of their results to help people in local communities think about ways they can use renewable energy sources. Timmer shared both what he and his students had learned about solarassisted heating of hot water and shared some ways people can think about using different forms of energy in their homes. He described passive solar options, LED lighting, and photo voltaics (a method of generating electrical power by converting solar radiation into direct current electricity). “Our homes and businesses consume nearly 40 pecent of the energy we use in this country,” says Timmer. “Being wise stewards of that energy is a big deal.” Timmer is committed to exploring renewable energy uses and encouraging his students to do the same. Over the past two years, five students have benefitted from the employment opportunity they had because of the grant and, in the process, they learned a great deal about renewable energy—and plumbing.