College Admissions Plus

2002-06-12T22:44:00.000-05:00

Apparently, books about grooming your child for elite Western colleges are all the rage in China:

This is a country where the hottest-selling book last year was "Harvard Girl," in which proud parents tell how they scientifically prepared their little darling, from age 0, to get into America's most prestigious university. That book's phenomenal success spawned close to a dozen quickie imitations, with titles like "Harvard Boy," "Cambridge Girl" (the British one), "Our Dumb Little Boy Goes to Cambridge," and "Tokyo University Boy."

One brave author, Zhou Hong, is bucking the trend with his daring offering "I'm Mediocre, I'm Happy," but "the book's title...was enough in itself to horrify many Chinese for whom advanced education is a consuming goal."

2002-06-11T08:35:00.000-05:00

More cracks appear in the early decision system as Harvard University considers whether or not to enroll students who have been admitted under a binding early program elsewhere. Harvard's own early program has always been non-binding. Previously to last fall, students could not apply to a binding and a non-binding early decision program simultaneously; however, the National Association for College Admission Counseling changed that rule in September 2001, and the change is now creating confusion.

It is confusing to explain, too, but is perhaps best illustrated by a hypothetical case. Johnny Valedictorian wants to apply early to both Yale (binding) and Harvard (non-binding). Previously he could not do this, but now, thanks to NACAC, he can. Here are the possible outcomes:

Admitted to Yale, rejected by Harvard: Johnny has to go to Yale.
Rejected by Yale, admitted by Harvard: Johnny can go to Harvard now, but he doesn't have to.
Rejected by Yale, rejected by Harvard: Johnny dials his ambitions down a notch.
Admitted to Yale, admitted to Harvard: Johnny has to go to Yale, right? It's binding.

It's in response to this fourth possibility that Harvard is saying "Not so fast":

Bill Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, said that rule is open to interpretation on a critical point: if an applicant is admitted early to both an institution like the University of Pennsylvania, which considers the admission binding, and to Harvard, can Harvard enroll the student?

In such a situation, Mr. Fitzsimmons said, the university had yet to decide whether it would consider a student's agreement with Penn to be binding on Harvard, should the applicant decide he or she preferred Harvard to Penn.

In other words, Dean Fitzsimmons said, Harvard might well permit a student who had made an early commitment to Penn to then break that commitment and enroll at Harvard.

If Harvard moves that way and chooses not to honor its "gentleman's agreement" with other universities to respect binding programs, that probably ends binding early decision as we have come to know it. If one reads between the lines of the New York Times article, you can tell that they are serious about this:

Under current early decision policies, students rarely break such pledges. But those who do — three, for example, did so at Penn this year, citing financial reasons — are not generally brought to account in the legal system. Indeed, Mr. Fitzsimmons said that one of the factors driving the discussion at Harvard were questions about whether such pledges were legally enforceable.

Mr. Fitzsimmons also questioned the legality of the lists of applicants admitted early that colleges with binding programs send to their competitors as a way to say, in effect, these students are now spoken for.

Coming on the heels of Yale's call to abandon binding early decision, and Beloit's and UNC's actually doing so, this gambit by Harvard suggests that endgame for early decision is coming very rapidly.

2002-05-17T18:14:00.000-05:00

A United States Court of Appeals has overturned an earlier court decision and ruled that the University of Michigan Law School may consider race as a factor in admissions in order to achieve a "critical mass" of minority students at the school. The vote was a close 5-4 and the case is expected to go all the way to the Supreme Court, which is apt to take the chance to clarify the famous 1978 ruling in the Bakke case (which appeared to encourage diversity, but prohibited quotas). The same Court of Appeals that ruled on the Michigan law school case is expected to rule shortly on a case involving the same university's undergraduate admissions policy, which automatically awards points on the basis of minority status (something the law school does not do, so the legal issues are slightly different).

2002-05-15T17:56:00.000-05:00

A recent New York Times article discussed the precarious state of many of the nation's "lesser" liberal arts colleges, which do not quite have the brand-name recognition of the elite schools, but are forced by economics to charge elite-school type tuitions. 34 such institutions have shut their doors since 1995, and others are teetering. The article contained some fascinating statistics:

Fifty years ago, half of college students went to private institutions. Today, less than one-fifth do...

In 1969, about half of all college degrees awarded were in liberal arts. The figure dwindled to less than 40 percent in the 1970s and is about 25 percent today.

2002-05-15T17:45:00.000-05:00

The three-part New York Times series "Getting In," which appeared May 5-7 while I was on an extended business trip, represented a considerable improvement on the CNN documentary "Kids Under Pressure" (discussed immediately below). The Times series profiled three capable students from completely different backgrounds and with completely different admissions issues: a Manhattan private school over-achiever; an ambitious African-American at a Bronx Catholic high school; and a recent Albanian immigrant at a public high school in Queens. The contrasts between the three students' experiences proved to be more compelling than the similarities between the three students from the same high school in the CNN piece. And the fact that the over-achiever did not get into the school of his dreams in the early round or the regular round made following his decision-making process and his reactions much more interesting.

The first installment contained hard numbers on "the growing number of students vying for a static number of slots" at the nation's most prestigious universities:

Harvard had 19,605 applications this year for 1,650 spots, versus 13,029 a decade ago. At Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., the most recent applicant pool was 4,229 for 390 spaces, contrasted with 2,883 in 1992. And at Washington University in St. Louis, 19,512 applicants competed for 1,280 places in the freshman class, up from 8,329 a decade ago.

Also of considerable interest were the details about the upscale private school guidance counselor who by making "due diligence calls" can learn whether a student is headed for success or failure in a given college's admissions process, and who lets safety schools know when one of his students is "locked in elsewhere" (so that those schools can avoid offering a meaningless acceptance and decreasing their yield percentage). This information-trading has some advantages for students and for schools, but can appear a little cozy - and certainly most high school students do not have such advocates working on their behalf. (A professor emeritus at Yale took specific exception to this practice in a letter to the editor following the series; other letters in response to the series can be found here.)

2002-05-03T14:06:00.000-05:00

CNN recently ran a fascinating documentary called "Kids Under Pressure" about the relentless quest for admissions to elite colleges by students at tony high schools like Santa Monica High School in California. My only two quibbles about this generally excellent piece are (a) all three students profiled are so driven as to be almost self-parodying, but viewers are given the impression that they represent some kind of norm, which I don't think is the case; and (b) all three get into their first choice colleges (Harvard, Dartmouth, and Berkeley), which gives viewers the impression that "hard work always pays off" and "dreams always come true": definitely not the case in the realm of college admissions.

2002-05-03T13:09:00.000-05:00

Following up on his December proposal "to end freshman early-decision programs," Yale president Richard C. Levin is seeking advance immunity from applicable antitrust laws from the U.S. Department of Justice in case the Ivy League decides to enter into a joint agreement on the issue. The government sued a group of elite schools once before over "alleged tuition and financial-aid price fixing," and Levin clearly wants to avoid a repeat. But his crusade against early decision, on the grounds that it favors affluent and savvy students and "gives colleges an incentive to offer less financial aid...since the accepted student has no other choices," appears to be gathering steam: the University of North Carolina announced last week that it was cancelling its early decision program:

"Carolina has taken this step because we believe it will best serve our future students and their families," said Chancellor James Moeser. "We want to encourage students to approach their education seriously, not by using strategy, and we hope to contribute to a national climate that encourages thoughtful choice."

..."We've observed growing pressure on students to choose colleges earlier simply because they believe it is their best chance to get in, without the benefit of the considerable maturation that takes place in the senior year of high school," [Dr. Jerome Lucido, vice provost for enrollment management and director of admissions] said. "In that respect, we don't feel that our early decision plan serves the students' interests or the interest of good college decision-making, and we feel a responsibility to that."

UNC is retaining its non-binding early action program.

2002-05-03T12:25:00.000-05:00

Worrisome figures released by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education:

...on average, poor families spent 25 percent of their annual income for their children to attend public four-year colleges in 2000, compared with 13 percent in 1980. For middle-class families, the percentage of annual income required to attend public colleges nearly doubled as well, to about 7 percent from 4 percent. For the wealthiest families, there was no increase from the 2 percent spent in 1980.

Since access to educational opportunities is profoundly central to the mission of public universities, this trend deserves to be viewed with alarm.

2002-05-03T12:16:00.000-05:00

American universities that have collectively spent more than $100 million on developing online course offerings have little to show for their efforts, and many programs have been shut down altogether. The supply was created before the demand was proven to exist.

2002-05-02T16:04:00.000-05:00

The Chicago Tribune notes the growing popularity of dual graduate degree programs, often combining an MBA with a JD. Many such programs exist on paper, but only at some universities such as Northwestern are the programs truly integrated and collaborative, involving real cooperation among the different schools. Students who enter the programs are gambling that in a credential-crazy society, more letters after your name (as well as more real skills) are always a good thing; but a legitimate question arises as to whether one can truly become fully educated in two professions in (increasingly) the same amount of time that most students take to learn one.

...no one doubts that joint degrees involve compromises, including a restrictive course schedule. A budding trial lawyer or marketing executive would suffer from being unable to concentrate on relevant classes.

2002-05-02T15:52:00.000-05:00

A fascinating Wall Street Journal report details the efforts of Vanderbilt and other universities to court Jewish students:

...Vanderbilt is unusually forthright. It wants [Jewish students in order] to raise its academic standing..."Jewish students, by culture and by ability and by the very nature of their liveliness, make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life," [Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee ] said in an interview.

Some complain that a positive stereotype is "just as pernicious as a negative one"; however, Jewish students on the average score higher on the SAT than those of any other religious affiliation except for the notably intellectual Unitarians, so Vanderbilt (where Jewish students have been woefully under-represented) can hardly be faulted for trying to make itself more welcoming to capable students who might otherwise avoid it because of its Bible Belt location and its predominantly "Southern white Christian" character. Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University, officially Christian institutions, are following the same line and creating professorships in Judaic Studies.

2002-05-02T15:32:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that "schoools are getting tired of dilly-dallying students who take five and even six years to graduate":

Instead of wishing the problem away, they're going on the offensive, granting tuition discounts, running television commercials and even sending out e-mail alerts to get kids into their caps and gowns. The latest tactic at the University of Iowa: Asking new freshmen to sign a "contract" promising to get out in four years.

Unfortunately, none of these maneuvers is proving very effective. Plenty of students want to live off mom and dad as long as possible, and in a sagging economy in which there's little demand for new graduates, there's insufficient financial incentive to finish degree programs. It may be that we've made the college years too comfortable.

2002-04-25T15:47:00.000-05:00

Some second-tier New England boarding schools such as Winchendon, Bridgton, and New Hampton are irking their first-tier league-mates such as Andover, Exeter, and Choate by recruiting basketball stars from the inner city and from abroad without much concern for academic merit. After some embarrassing routs, the academic prep schools are simply refusing to schedule the "renegade programs." The Wall Street Journal article does not make it clear that these trends are not entirely new: prep schools that offer post-graduate years have always recruited male athletes who wanted an additional year of athletic and academic seasoning before appying to college. They've just gotten better at it. Bridgton is the only all-PG prep school in the nation, and with its yearly rotating crop of 18 and 19-year old high school all-stars, inevitably dominates the competition.

2002-04-25T15:32:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that many states are hacking away at higher education expenses, one of their "few large discretionary budget items." Community colleges, which cannot rely on research grants or private donations to make up the lost funds, have been especially hard hit. Tuition increases jeopardize the educational chances of precisely the striving lower-income students that community colleges are intended to serve.

2002-04-23T15:08:00.000-05:00

According to the Wall Street Journal, "one of the fastest-growing sectors of kids sports is...ultracompetitive travel leagues." Parents are chauffeuring their children hundreds of miles and across state lines "so their kids won't feel left out or miss a shot at sports stardom":

With parents worried about the economy, and colleges cutting back on financial aid, competition for sports scholarships has never been so intense...[But "o]nly the smallest minority" of kids will get a scholarship to a Division I university.

Mathematicians who over the years have drawn attention to American "innumeracy" would point out that we seem to have a very difficult time internalizing odds (or else think that we are the ones destined to beat them). There are zillions of moderately athletically talented youngsters, but only a very minute number who will ever be able to capitalize on it in any meaningful way. When I taught high school economics, I would pose the hypothetical question: would you rather be the 1,000th best quarterback in the country, or the 1,000th best accountant? Clearly the latter: the 1,000th best quarterback doesn't have a job, whereas the 1,000th best accountant is making a fortune. People have such a hard time seeing this.

It is perfectly true that decent high school athletes, particularly in "minor" sports, can use their talent as a calling card at liberal arts colleges that recruit athletes (without, however, offering free ride athletic scholarships, so the benefit is on the admissions side rather than the financial side). Whether that is worth "all the wear and tear on family life" that participating in a travel league involves is debatable. Bettter to send the kid to a math camp and get a start on being the 1,000th best accountant.

2002-04-18T15:22:00.000-05:00

As noted here before, Duke University has added a question to its applications that no other college or university in the country (so far) asks: Did you get help on your application essay?

Predictably, students are admitting that yes, they got feedback, but no, no one else wrote the essay. What did Duke think they were going to answer? That they were hiring ghostwriters? Obviously some students do, and obviously that's unethical, but asking such a question is no way to ferret the truth out:

Katherine Kendall, a consultant from Beverly Hills, Calif....said the worst offenders among essay writers probably won't answer Duke's question truthfully. "I don't see it serving any purpose," she said. "It only adds to the anxiety for students."

Since Duke has been one of the most aggressively marketed universities in America during the past decade, and has created a mystique around itself that various commentators have suggested is just ever so slightly out of kilter with reality, one may legitimately wonder whether adding to anxiety isn't in fact a big part of their agenda. Former guidance counselor Caitlin Flanagan says as much in a recent Atlantic Monthly article:

...schools that I had never considered particularly dazzling turned out to be white-hot centers of the universe. In vast, high-achieving droves, for example, these kids wanted to go to Duke...[M]any places seem to be prestigious simply because student fads and crazes have made them hard to get into. Brazenly capitalizing on the whims and passions of teenagers seems a questionable practice for institutions dedicated, in part, to the well-being of young people. Here's how Rachel Toor describes her former job as an admissions officer at Duke in her new book, Admissions Confidential:
I travel around the country whipping kids (and their parents) into a frenzy so that they will apply. I tell them how great a school Duke is academically and how much fun they will have socially. Then, come April, we reject most of them.
The university devotes a considerable amount of money and effort to recruiting BWRKs ("bright, well-rounded kids") only because denying them boosts the school's selectivity rating.

Those accusing students and parents of "playing games" with the admissions process (Hello, Denise Clark Pope!) might ponder the fact that the colleges are playing some games of their own, and driving families to it.

2002-04-18T13:19:00.000-05:00

The New York Times revisits the issue of Advanced Placement courses and tests and notes that concerns about the tests are growing even as they continue their penetration of American high schools. As the 40 percent of American high schools that do not currently offer AP begin to do so, some affluent suburban and private high schools are starting to de-emphasize them a little, as are certain universities. (Harvard now only offers AP credit to students who achieve the highest score, a 5, on AP exams - a challenging proposition even for Harvard matriculants.)

This was to be expected, of course. Democratization always has an equal and opposite reaction. Undoubtedly many of the concerns over AP are valid, but I can't honestly see that fact slowing the progress of the AP curriculum:

Many educators now worry that there are not enough qualified teachers to keep up with the expansion, and that as more Advanced Placement courses are offered in schools without rigorous preparation for either teachers or students, the class work is being watered down.

It will be watered down; there is no question of it. Because, among other reasons, there are never enough qualified teachers. There never will be, either. High school teaching salaries are simply not high enough to attract enough intellectually capable candidates to teach all those advanced classes, and even if they were, there are plenty of other aspects of school and classroom life that serve to alienate potentially gifted teachers. Schools muddle through as best they can, and for rural and inner-city students who have tended to be kept out of the selective college running by the limited offerings of their high schools, even watered-down AP may be better than no AP at all.

2002-04-18T12:57:00.000-05:00

After I wrote the last post (immediately below this one), I read Denise Clark Pope's New York Times op-ed about the upcoming revisions to the SAT. It tends to bear out James Tracy's criticism of the Stanford School of Education professor:

Her vision is...blurred by a Dewey-eyed, child-centered sentimentality...Children, she insists, are the best architects of their own learning. Predictably, the only learning that passes her criterion for "passion" occurs "most of the time . . . during participation in an extracurricular activity." Education should consist of nothing but students doing what they find fun...Analytically, Pope inhabits a Rousseauian La-La Land.

Pope calls for schools where students can pursue their passions freely, letting "their imaginations run wild," being credited for doing what they love, without any adult constraints (or any adult assessments that warrant the term). There is nothing new here: she is describing [Rousseau's book] Émile, and she laments that "almost ninety years later, most American classrooms do not fulfill John Dewey's vision of educational experiences that lead toward growth." Learning, according to Pope, should consist of nothing but indulgence of the child's whims...

The inescapable fact is that children need to be inculcated with a studious discipline in order to learn things that they might not love but that will stand them in good stead for understanding the world they are to inherit. (Pope seems blithely unaware that even Dewey, if not his adherents, recognized that.)

In keeping with this philosophy (rather out of touch with any describable real world, but all too common in schools of education), Pope in her op-ed laments that

Just as high-achieving students learn to "do school," they learn to "do tests" like the SAT.

Well, I mean, sure. The students are savvy on that score. They know full well that later they will be required to "do work" (and many other things) as well. In case anyone hadn't noticed, schooling in America is not so much preparation for intellectual inquiry as it is for the business of life. This has always been the case. Rather than wring our hands over the fact, we probably ought to be grateful that the system permits for and even rewards that intellectual inquiry where it occurs, a fact anyone can witness by actually talking to some of the supposedly cut-throat, grade-grubby high school juniors and seniors that Pope excoriates.

In fact, I recommend this. Talk to them! It might restore your faith in the country.

2002-04-16T18:54:00.000-05:00

In a negative review of Denise Clark Pope's book Doing School in Bostonia, the Boston University alumni magazine, James Tracy discusses the phenomenon of the "organization student" (a concept first popularized by David Brooks in the Atlantic Monthly):

It has been clear to classroom educators for some time that a new phenomenon, or at least a new iteration of previous phenomena, has emerged in America's schools: children who sculpt their entire lives to getting into a prestigious college. Even their private lives are built around activities geared to fit what they believe will best distinguish them in the extracurricular column of their college applications...

[T]his "organization student," while in certain respects a teacher's dream (hard-working, well-behaved, conscientious), is surprisingly devoid of innovative ideas or capacity for critical thought...educators will be certain to encounter growing numbers of students who strive mightily to cast themselves, sometimes at great personal cost, in the Procrustean bed of what they believe characterizes the dream student, but who are deficient in the passion for learning we have tended to associate with such academic motivation.

Tracy's perspective, based on his experiences as headmaster of Boston University Academy, is a valuable one. Yet my hunch is that the phenomenon has been overstated and overblown. Certainly there is intense competition in the college admissions game these days, and a form of "market positioning" by both students and universities that didn't exist in the same way a generation ago. But in my own teaching career I have seen no evidence of a deficiency in the "passion for learning," and I would reject the notion that earlier generations possessed it to a more intense degree. The driven students that Tracy, Brooks, and Pope describe do engage in some of the excessive behaviors imputed to them (multitasking by "doing English homework during biology class," and taking sick days just to catch up on schoolwork), but most of the ones I have known have had active and admirable intellectual lives - as well they might, given the high level of subject matter they are exposed to. They impress me greatly.

2002-04-16T16:21:00.000-05:00

A group of elite colleges has decided to operate by common financial aid rules and formulae in an attempt to cut down on haggling by families looking for better deals. In recent years it has become very common for upper middle class families (especially) to try to play off one college against another in an often successful attempt to lower their own contribution. A school's willingness to increase the amount of money on the table depends greatly upon the desirability of the student in question, as well as upon their own policies. Some schools such as Carnegie Mellon are known to sweeten their offers quite regularly.

2002-04-16T07:17:00.000-05:00

Remember the rural Virginia law school, the Appalachian School of Law, where three people including the school's dean were gunned down and killed by a disturbed student a few months ago?

Applications are up 50 percent. Apparently there truly is no such thing as bad publicity.

2002-04-09T12:51:00.000-05:00

Gloomy days on prestigious business school campuses: this late in the year, as many as 40 percent or more of graduating MBAs do not have jobs lined up. Oh, most of them will find something, but in this hiring climate the positions may be well below the expectations associated with their investment in b-school. It's nothing like the past couple of years, when, as one b-school acceptee put it, "I saw my whole life strech brilliantly before me."

However, none of this means that new b-school supplicants are at all discouraged: this year, NYU's Stern School of Business received 5,000 applications for a mere 390 spots, up 25 percent from last year. Maybe by the time those folks graduate, the pickings will be better.

2002-04-09T09:05:00.000-05:00

Being admitted to the nation's selective colleges is only to get tougher as the number of applicants at these schools rises. It is happening all over:

At Union [College] 12 years ago, only 2,800 students were applying for about 550 slots. Today, that number has increased to 3,800 applicants...

It will only get tougher at the nation's 4,000 colleges and universities. The number of college students in the United States increased from 13.8 million in 1990 to 14.7 million in 1999, according to the U.S. Education Department, which projects enrollment to increase another 15 percent in the next 10 years, to 15.3 million.

Partly in response, students are sending out more applications apiece than ever before.

2002-04-09T08:57:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reports that "offers of admission to black, Hispanic and American Indian students in the University of California system have rebounded to levels above where they were before race and ethnicity were banned from the selection process" in 1998. A new "comprehensive review" policy may have had some impact on these numbers.

2002-04-09T08:48:00.000-05:00

Applications are way up at cooking schools, which have become hot destinations in our era of the celebrity chef. Applicants include many who have lost jobs during the current recession and decided to career-switch (perhaps after some days spent watching the Food Network on cable).

2002-04-09T08:38:00.000-05:00

Interesting editorial in the New York Times about "The Disappearing Scholar-Athlete." The Times states flatly that elite colleges "that claim both to shun athletic scholarships and to honor the scholar-athlete ideal" have in fact "lost their bearings" by giving far too great a weight to athletic talents in their admissions decisions. (This was the central thesis of James Shulman's and William Bowen's 2001 book, The Game of Life.) The editorial goes on to say:

The problem of academically underperforming athletes exists at leafy, historic campuses like Tufts and Middlebury, where only the brightest are supposed to be accepted. Between a quarter and a third of all students at these schools now are varsity athletes, many of them recruited on numbered "coach's lists." Some are excellent students, but between half and three-quarters of male athletes end up in the bottom third of their classes at these institutions.

Yet their athletic prowess offers them a heavy thumb on the admission scale, much more significant than being the child of an alumnus or a member of a racial minority group. Some argue that schools are right to prize talented athletes just as they do fine musicians or writers. But students with musical talent or those who put out the college newspaper tend to do better in school than other students. They also add to the intellectual and cultural stew that makes college campuses exciting. Athletes tend to segregate themselves.

Under the pressure of such criticism some colleges are cutting back on "set-aside spots" for athletes, and others are at least considering the issue.

2002-04-04T18:07:00.000-06:00

In an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, Professor Daniel S. Brown bemoans the pending changes in the SAT that will make it less of an aptitude test and more of an achievement test. He argues that the SAT-as-it-is-currently-configured is badly needed as an objective way to distinguish among candidates. In his view, application forms don't tell colleges much, and high school transcripts are pretty useless too:

An A average at one school is very different from an A average from another school. Teachers, curriculum, culture and educational objectives are so divergent as to make a quantitative measure (cumulative grade point average of 3.7 on a 4.0 scale; ranking 120 in a class of 210) meaningless.

One of Brown's interesting assertions (I happen to agree with it) is that most college education actually takes place outside the classroom:

College and university administrators know that the largest part of an education takes place outside of the classroom. The faculty, along with its staff of support personnel--the residence hall supervisors, the college nurse, the student union leadership, the dean of the chapel, the athletic director and the director of library services--facilitate the educational experience. We do this together because we know that an education that lasts is much less likely to take place in the classroom than it is in the dorms, the health center, the performing arts center, the chapel, the gymnasium and the library.

Thus the SAT purported to give us a good idea--not of a person's achievements, but of a person's possibilities; not of a student's record in the high school classroom, but in life's classroom.

Whether the SAT ever truly achieved this intention is, of course, another matter for argument.

2002-04-04T17:35:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports in a fascinating article that community colleges are aggressively recruiting international students by making some highly doubtful claims about the likelihood of transfer to schools like Harvard and Stanford. Other questionable practices include "waiving English-language requirements" and "paying recruiters commission, a practice discouraged by the best-known ethics code of the admissions trade." The reason for the transgressions is plain: foreign students represent a cash cow that these colleges can't resist. Among the offenders: Foothill College, Green River Community College, Glendale CA Community College (which includes on its website the outright falsehood that it has an "articulation agreement" that secures easy transfer to Stanford), and the Ventura County Community College District.

2002-04-03T23:48:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that "the number of people applying for [MBA] programs has soared," necessarily meaning that more applicants are being turned down and are subsequently reapplying. They naturally attempt to sharpen their application profile for the second run:

Prospective business-school students, of course, can't change their undergraduate grade-point average or transcript. But most could improve their Graduate Management Admission Test scores, application essay, letters of recommendation, work experience and business-school interview.

Giving them plenty to do in the interim year. Some business schools will provide feedback on the shortcomings of the first application.

2002-03-28T17:49:00.000-06:00

Happy days at the Yale School of Management. The former School of Organization and Management, which was "established in 1976 with the lofty but unorthodox goal of training leaders for both the public and private sectors" and which offered as its primary degree the relatively esoteric MPPM (Master's in Public and Private Management), has, under its current Dean Jeffrey E. Garten, honed its mission, shifted to the MBA, and become one of the nation's hottest business schools. Even its public-spiritedness, which used to be viewed suspiciously by hardcore business types, has become quite timely, and is bound to become even more so in the wake of Enron.

"Social entrepreneurship is very close to our roots," says Sharon Oster, the Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics and Management, who has done wide-ranging research in the nonprofit realm. "The heart of this place lies in the proposition that the barriers among the private, public, and nonprofit sectors are artificial."

Applications are up, which means that selectivity is up, too:

It has...become steadily more difficult to get in. In 1995, 32 percent of applicants were admitted; the current figure is about 17 percent. Garten would like to see the School become even more selective, with an acceptance rate of about 10 percent.

An innovative aspect of the SOM approach is the degree to which the School is interdisciplinarily integrated with the rest of its extraordinary university:

The School, by design, also encourages students to take advantage of the wider University. They are allowed to choose as many as one-quarter of their courses from non-SOM offerings, and the business school has set up joint master's degree programs the schools of medicine and public health, law, nursing, divinity, drama, and forestry and environmental studies.

2002-03-28T16:57:00.000-06:00

In a consideration of the progress of women in recent decades, published in the current New York Review of Books, Andrew Hacker puts some fascinating statistics on the table. Women have made such rapid strides in the educational arena that today, for every 100 men who graduate from college with a bachelor's degree, 131 women do. Young women are working harder in high school, doing more homework, taking tougher courses, taking the SAT at a higher rate than boys, and in general out-performing males on every measurable criterion. Furthermore, the old stereotype of women not achieving in science and mathematics is starting to crumble fast; the same academic skills that distinguish girls in other classes - attention to detail, care with assignments, attentiveness to teachers' requirements, ambition to excel - are highly applicable to the scientific disciplines. Hacker notes that "by junior high school, boys start wishing they were elsewhere and begin falling behind" - and as an ex-teacher with experience in middle school, high school, and college, that accords exactly with my informal observations. In large numbers, boys are giving up on school.

The socioeconomics of the situation are worth noting as well. Hacker points out that at family income levels above $100,000/year, boys and girls take the SAT at an equal rate. Then watch what happens:

$60,000-$80,000/year Girls: 52.8% of SAT-takers Boys: 47.2% of SAT-takers
$20,000-$40,000/year Girls: 57.8% of SAT-takers Boys: 42.2% of SAT-takers
Less than $20,000/year Girls: 62.1% of SAT-takers Boys: 37.9% of SAT-takers

These figures are dramatic, and they reveal a startling new truth:

It used to be that poorer families would allow only their sons to stay in school, while the daughters went to work. Today, the reverse is the case. Insofar as higher education will remain an avenue of upward mobility, more women - and fewer men - will be able to list the expected credentials.

Let me put it even more strongly than that. At all but the wealthiest income levels, families are betting on their daughters, not their sons, to sustain and advance the family's overall economic progress in the future, and they are investing their educational dollars accordingly. Inside of two generations, women have become the standard-bearers and the future hope of their families.

My guess? The glass ceiling is not just going to break within the next 20 years. The glass ceiling is going to shatter.

2002-03-28T15:46:00.000-06:00

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, political commentator and college basketball fan Albert R. Hunt calls attention (once again) to the shameful graduation statistics of many NCAA Division I basketball and football programs (over a five-year period in the 1990s, "there were [36] major college programs where not a single African-American basketball player graduated"). He notes acidly:

Sports fans go into contortions over these criticisms. The graduation statistics are misleading, sports still provide opportunities for minority kids, most coaches are making an effort, and who-cares-it's-a-game.

That's an air ball. If it's only entertainment, it should be taken out of this educational venue and professional minor leagues should be set up.

Hunt realizes that major reforms are unlikely, given the entrenched nature of the problem and the deep public attachment to teams whose connection to the universities they purportedly represent is essentially fictional. He does call for "total transparency":

Every school should publicly reveal its graduation rates; the salaries of coaches; whether they have segregated athletic dorms; and any other information that goes to their supposed mission...the sunlight of publicity commands one's attention.

2002-03-27T10:01:00.000-06:00

Hallowed Oxford University is being rocked by a major admissions scandal. The BBC's lead is worth quoting:

Two Oxford University academics have stepped down after they were accused of offering student places in return for substantial cash donations. The Reverend John Platt and Mary-Jane Hilton, both fellows at Pembroke College, are to leave their posts "with immediate effect", the university announced in a statement on Sunday. Their resignations follow an undercover investigation by the Sunday Times, in which a reporter posed as a wealthy banker trying to secure a place for his son. The investigation claimed Mr Platt, a senior college fellow, agreed to create an extra place on a law course in return for a donation and hinted that similar deals had been struck in the past. It said Mary-Jane Hilton, the college's chief fund-raiser, had suggested a figure of £300,000 for the donation...

According to the Sunday Times Mr Platt advised paying the money through a secret trust to avoid leaks to the press. It reports him as saying: "You must understand that this is absolutely confidential. If this story gets out, we'd all be blown away."

Oxford vice-chancellor Colin Lucas, mortified as he should be, commented that "I don't think that the fundraisers of the university or the colleges should have anything to do at all with admissions. That is totally wrong."

2002-03-27T09:50:00.000-06:00

Students at state universities across America are facing substantial tuition hikes, reaching double digit percentages in many cases. State legislators who feel they have been more than generous to higher education in recent years are crying foul on behalf of their constituents:

Illinois state Rep. Judy Erwin (D-Chicago), chairwoman of the House Higher Education Committee, said university presidents seem to have an "edifice complex," and have been granted hundreds of millions of dollars for campus renovations and new facilities.

"For the past four or five years, we've seen very substantial increases in the [Illinois Board of Higher Education] budget, and there's been huge capital expenditures," Erwin said. "How is it that we went from among the best years to a down tick that is not even that substantial compared to other states and we're now talking a 10 percent tuition increase?"

(As an aside, I must say that "edifice complex" is a neat witticism!) University administrators riposte that "there's a whole bucket of unavoidables we deal with" (another nice turn of phrase). For one thing, in a competitive admissions environment, students demand the sorts of facilities improvements that run up college budgets (and hence their own tuitions). And institutions of higher education are endlessly inventive in finding ways to spend money:

Ronald Ehrenberg, author of "Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much," argues that the pressure is too great to grow budgets because faculty have endless ideas for new programs.

"There's this absolute quest to be the best in everything that we do," said Ehrenberg, formerly a top administrator at Cornell University. "We're like cookie monsters. We try to get our hand on as many resources as we can. And the question of how can we keep rising tuition costs down is a tough one when you have a long line of students who keep knocking on your doors."

One interesting aspect of this issue to keep in mind is that, despite public perceptions to the contrary, tuitions are not anywhere near being a large university's primary source of revenue. As Loren Pope writes in Looking Beyond the Ivy League:

The tuition they get from undergraduates is pin money. For example, Johns Hopkins, with an enrollment of 3100, gets about $37 million a year in tuition, but rakes in over $200 million in research money and $353 million in defense contracts. You don't have to be a churchgoer to know that where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.

2002-03-22T20:57:00.000-06:00

The College Board, which owns and administers the SAT I examination, is exploring revisions to the test which would take effect for the class of 2006 (this year's freshmen). Among the possible changes: a writing exam, more advanced mathematics problems (these would be phased in gradually), de-emphasis or elimination of verbal analogies. The sudden move comes largely in response to the University of California's proposal to drop the SAT I "in favor of a standardized test more closely linked to the state's high school curriculum," according to the Wall Street Journal. The College Board is frantic to keep California's business (the state is their biggest market); the ACT would like to grab it as well.

I think it is safe to say that there is little idealism involved in the possible changes, only an attempt to adjust to business conditions and the public perceptions that affect them. There have been criticisms of the SAT I as culturally or economically biased for quite some time, although it must be said that there is no such thing as a standardized test without its critics. The very thought that some students are going to score higher seems to offend a certain egalitarian streak in the American national personality; in other countries, they don't seem to give such disparities a second thought.

2002-03-21T14:14:00.000-06:00

Top state universities are becoming tougher to get into every year. A good example is the University of Georgia, where applications are up 10 percent this year, and the competition is tightening in other ways as well:

''Not only is the size up, but the quality continues to rise,'' UGA Admissions Director Nancy McDuff said. ''Unfortunately, the university is unable to grow at the same rate that the number of high school seniors is growing.''

The three key factors influencing the difficulty of American college admissions are:

1. Increasing number of applications for the same number of slots, due to rising student populations and the ease of Internet applications

2. The ever-increasing quality of the top tier of American high school students

3. The ever-increasing number of international applications and acceptances

2002-03-21T14:06:00.000-06:00

Students and families are negotiating better financial aid offers with colleges once all acceptances are in, and meeting with some success in doing so. Even if a college won't increase its own grant and scholarship total (some schools, such as Carnegie Mellon, are open to that), it may at least agree not to subtract the total of outside grants and scholarships from its own offer, and instead allow the student to use that extra money to reduce their loan amount.

2002-03-21T13:23:00.000-06:00

Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, an excellent liberal arts college, is dropping its binding early decision program (but keeping non-binding early action). It is the first school to commit to a stepback from early decision since Yale President Richard Levin proposed such a movement recently. Beloit's program had been tiny, but pulling it is still a significant action, perhaps (although by no means definitely) the first in a wave. The college has been quite forthright about what's at stake:

Many institutions use early decision as a way to improve their "yield," the number of students accepted who actually enroll, which in turn helps their national rankings, said Nancy Monnich, vice president for enrollment services at Beloit.

"We felt it was important to make a statement about the whole process and to reiterate how making a college choice needs to be informed," Monnich said, adding that Beloit didn't want to seem "self-serving."

"We're enjoying improvement in the rankings, but I want to do it honestly," Monnich said.

2002-03-21T13:14:00.000-06:00

Richard Rothstein comments in the New York Times about the fuzzy line between public and private schools in northern New England, where a number of towns have routinely paid to send all their high school age students to local private academies for more than a hundred years. Having taught in such an academy myself, I second Rothstein's notion that this is a tradition very pertinent to the debate on school vouchers.

2002-03-20T16:37:00.000-06:00

Everybody's got a Ph.D. these days. Well, maybe not everyone, but this Washington Post piece casts a sceptical eye on the proliferation of what used to be an academic crown jewel. The irony is that even as the numbers of Ph.D. earners and potential future professors goes up - humanities Ph.D.s shot up 11 percent between 1999 and 2000 alone - the number of tenure-track positions available continues to diminish rapidly. And what's worse, the average Ph.D. candidate in the humanities or social sciences now takes ten years to complete what's becoming a dime-a-dozen degree. Who lives so long that they can invest that amount of time in a non-starter?

The engines behind the growth of semi-meaningless Ph.D.s are all too clear. Students are trying to pile up credentials (but my advice on that is, either get a professional degree or a quick master's degree in an academic discipline, then hie thee into the job market). And graduate programs have become an economic growth market for universities, with the predictable consequence that requirements have markedly eased:

...in many ways it's easier to get a PhD today. Candidates in the past were required to possess a breadth of knowledge bearing on a given subject. Often they had to study additional languages. And their labor -- which usually took years of intense study in required courses -- was subject to review by outside scholars.

In many cases, the requirements have been eased. The University of Chicago, for instance, once expected its PhDs in the social sciences -- anthropology, economics and political science -- to read a couple of foreign languages. The division has dropped the language requirement....in many departments "[students] are totally, utterly, absolutely ignorant in fields that were once taken for granted." For instance: To receive a degree in English literature at Princeton, students not only had to know Latin, but they also had to be familiar with the history of the language -- Old English, Middle English, et al. At many grad schools, humanities students were once expected to know the history of their own disciplines, to know something about the way their fields of study developed and to possess a familiarity with pertinent work from earlier centuries. Today "that certainly is not the case," says [Theodore] Ziolkowski[, past dean of Princeton's graduate school].

It is a little difficult to figure out why, if the degrees are easier than ever to earn, candidates are taking longer than ever to obtain them. Chalk it up to modern dawdling, perhaps.

2002-03-20T16:13:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports on an MBA in wine business offered by France's Bordeaux Ecole de Management. It's as glamorous as it sounds. The program takes 13 months, costs $30,000, and trains students in every facet of the wine trade while transporting them hither and thither between France, California, Chile, Japan, and Australia. There are only 20 slots per entering class. Holding an MBA is becoming the norm for wine professionals anyway, but an exclusive and focused experience such as this is obviously a unique and highly desirable credential. The program is reflective of a trend in graduate and professional education toward highly specialized studies.

2002-03-14T18:00:00.000-06:00

With people marrying later and having kids later, there is a growing group of Americans who will be hitting retirement age at or close to the same time their children hit college age. This makes for tricky financial planning, to say the least.

"It is impossible to have children and not take on some kind of financial hardship, whether you do so when you are 25 or 40," said Daniel Hart, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J. "We are met with conflicting goals, and it's not easy to reconcile them.

"People have an image of retirement as a golden time filled with opportunities to travel, to live some place different and so on," Dr. Hart said. "The idea that anything will circumscribe that future is at least annoying and irritating and maybe offensive. On the other hand, we want to take care of our kids. It's a dilemma, and for most of us who aren't wealthy, an unsettling one."

2002-03-13T13:13:00.000-06:00

Richard Rothstein points out that the push to have more low-income students attend and graduate from college, entirely compelling as a matter of social justice, is trickier in economic terms:

...the economic rationale for producing more college graduates is murky. As a matter of social justice, low-income students should be able to compete with those from the middle class for the better jobs that require college degrees. But the number of such jobs is not expanding as fast as many people think...The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that from 2000 to 2010, 21 percent of job vacancies will require bachelor's degrees and that by 2010, about 29 percent of young people will finish college.

Rothstein points out that between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, there was an overproduction of college graduates in relation to the number of positions requiring college skills, and for that reason average wages for the college-educated dropped steadily during those two decades.

If college attendance continues to rise, then a college degree becomes the equivalent of a high school diploma in the 1950s - many people would argue that this has already happened. And in that case, the real credentializing action shifts to graduate and professional schools, and to the elite selective colleges that prepare students for them. Among the nations of the world, the United States is fairly egalitarian in terms of educational access, but that only makes the elite competition fiercer and more frenzied than ever. The more people that can offer bachelor's degrees, the greater the need to offer much more than that.

2002-03-13T12:55:00.000-06:00

The case of the kid with the supposed-but-fake 298-plus IQ, Justin Chapman, has been much in the news the past few days. Justin, who is 8, was removed from his abusive and publicity-crazy mother when he became suicidal and had to be hospitalized; he is now in foster care. Not a happy story; and the New York Times takes the opportunity to remind us that many highly gifted children, most of whose attainments are more genuine than Justin's, have a pretty miserable time of it for a variety of reasons. Recognizing giftedness is important, but there are many kinds of gift, and there is little direct correlation between giftedness in childhood and success in adulthood:

"Most prodigies do not become highly gifted adults, and most highly gifted adults were not prodigies," Dr. [Robert] Sternberg [of Yale University] said. "To succeed as a gifted adult, one must undergo a certain kind of transformation."

The Times article cites a case of a prodigy named Michael Kearney who graduated from the University of South Alabama at the age of 10 and holds two master's degrees at 18:

Had he not been allowed to zoom through secondary school and enter college so quickly, Michael said, "I would have been seriously insane."

One wonders. What sort of college experience could Michael have had? Intellectual development is not the only kind of development there is, and this sort of thing has always struck me as a (rather distasteful) stunt. As a personal aside, I have always been grateful to my mother for refusing to let my grade school accelerate me: she insisted that I have a completely normal social development as well as getting all the intellectual enrichment I needed. At the risk of editorializing, I think that's the way to go.

2002-03-13T12:29:00.000-06:00

The College Board is offering students an online option of finding out their SAT scores eight days early for a $13 fee. This expedited service has been available by telephone for a number of years. The College Board claims the additional fees are justified:

"I must admit that some students have said, `If I can see them free in a few days, why are you charging me now?"' [executive director Brian] O'Reilly said. "The answer is that designing a Web site costs money, and while we try to keep the service fees low for things that are required to participate, we peg fees at a slightly higher rate for optional services, to help subsidize the other fees."

Others, of course, disagree.

2002-03-09T13:19:00.000-06:00

A very nice letter in the Dear Abby column today provides encouragement to adult college applicants:

I identified strongly with the letters from readers who graduated from college at an advanced age. Most were between 35 and 45 when they graduated. When I graduated from high school, I was ranked 150 out of a class of 152. However, at age 59, I graduated in 1990 from Baldwin-Wallace College with a 3.79 grade point average. Even at 59, I was able to advance in my work, and eventually earned $75,000 a year by the time I retired at age 71. Which goes to show you that it's never too late. -- ESTELLE IN LAKEWOOD, OHIO

2002-03-09T13:10:00.000-06:00

The Chicago Tribune ran a useful article on the challenges facing Latino students in the higher education market. Latinos have the highest high school dropout rates and the lowest college attendance rates of any major American ethnic group. Two-thirds of Latinos who do attend college go to two-year community colleges rather than four-year institutions. Linguistic, financial, and cultural factors all affect these results. Many lower-income Hispanic students grow up in a very work-directed rather than college-directed environment, as one Chicago student's experiences attest:

Senior Jose Aguayo is the last of nine children born to Mexican immigrants who moved to Chicago just before he was born. He watched some of his siblings enroll in college and then drop out, sometimes for financial reasons and other times for lack of motivation. He's determined not to do the same. "I really want to go. I want to be the first person in my family to actually graduate from college because it means I met the challenge, that I didn't let anything get in my way," Aguayo said.

As determined as he is, Aguayo acknowledges that it's tough to be one of the few in his Little Village neighborhood thinking about anything more than a two-year community college. "Some of them just don't care," he said. "As long as they can get enough money to support themselves, they don't care." At times, Aguayo feels he even needs to convince his parents that a university is worth the investment of time and money. "Since my parents don't have an education, they think you only need survival skills. They think you just need to build things," he said.

2002-03-09T12:56:00.000-06:00

The amount of grant money for students at private colleges has gone up 188 percent over the past decade, slightly easing the tuition increases that have also continued unabated during that time. Some colleges are also allowing students who obtain outside scholarships to deduct the amount of the scholarship from their loan burden, rather than from the college's own grant package, as has been the case in the past. (The old system made it somewhat pointless to spend energy seeking outside scholarships, since your grant and scholarship total as determined by the college was going to be the same no matter what.)

In part because of the spur of higher costs at private colleges, their students tend to graduate faster. And interestingly, owing to this speedier progress and the private colleges' increasingly generous grant packages, private and public college graduates leave school with virtually identical average loan burdens ($17,715 versus $16,061). This is a great selling figure for private institutions which can therefore demonstrate that public universities may not be such a bargain after all, since you're likely going to emerge with the same level of debt.

2002-03-09T12:41:00.000-06:00

High school athletes who want to continue playing sports competitively in college but whose talents are not at the "recruitable" level are increasingly turning to the nation's 396 Division III schools. These institutions are not allowed to offer even partial athletic scholarships, but they do offer great academic and athletic opportunities for true student-athletes.

2002-03-09T12:32:00.000-06:00

The Chicago Tribune notes that graduation from college in four years has become the exception rather than the norm, and that school officials are trying to find ways to reverse this. The percentage of students who graduate "on time" dropped from 45 percent in 1977 to 31 percent in 1993 (and has probably dropped lower since). 30 percent of undergraduates take more than six years (!) to graduate. This could have something to do with the "summer camp" aspects of contemporary college life, which can make it seem desirable to some students to linger on campus as long as possible instead of braving the real world. But there is a cost to the laxity:

"The longer it takes to graduate, the greater the chances that you'll never graduate," [Craig] Swan[,vice provost at the University of Minnesota] said. "Students who graduate in four years also look like a better bet to employers. We need to get these facts across."

2002-03-09T12:12:00.000-06:00

The average college graduate today leaves school carrying almost twice the debt of a graduate ten years ago, and the repayments are getting to be such a high percentage of their income that for many young professionals, the debts are unmanageable. Part of the problem may be a shift upward in lifestyle expectations during the college years; the article also notes that half of all graduates are also carrying credit card debt averaging about $3,000. At one time middle-class students may have tightened belts and scraped by to achieve the goal of an undergraduate degree, but nowadays college is promoted as a time of conspicuous consumption (Clothes! CDs! MTV Spring Break in Cancun!), and this is a difficult siren call for students to resist, even though living it up in college can mean starting one's work life under a considerable handicap.

2002-03-07T16:08:00.000-06:00

Congressman Jose E. Serrano of the Bronx is spearheading a new program that brings outstanding graduates of Hostos Community College in his district to nearby Columbia University to complete their undergraduate degrees in the School of General Studies and then obtain master's degrees in the School of International and Public Affairs, with an eye toward joining the United States Foreign Service. The initiative brings together two very disparate institutions: Hostos, which "has been a magnet for high school dropouts, single mothers and impoverished immigrants," and Columbia, which is as academically tough as it gets:

Columbia College generally takes some of the best students in the nation and throws them into a rigorous core curriculum where they must read hundreds of pages of classic literature and history a week and write extensive essays and research papers.

The four Hostos graduates who have entered Columbia so far are said to be doing well, although it would be interesting to revisit the program in four or five years and see if has accomplished genuine results as opposed to simply commanding public relations attention. The Times reporter is right to emphasize the enormous amount of high-level reading and writing that Ivy-type programs require; even well-trained students from fine high schools can be thrown by this. The "Serrano scholars" will be facing a true challenge, because raw intellectual ability no more prepares one to graduate from Columbia than raw athletic ability prepares one to qualify for the Olympics.

2002-03-07T15:28:00.000-06:00

Here's a career choice accounting graduates may not have thought of: criminal investigator for the Internal Revenue Service. Computer science and criminology majors are also being sought by the IRS, which is suffering an employee shortage (even in these times) and is recruiting heavily in order to hire 300 special agents. Remember this: government positions offer more job security than private industry jobs can.

2002-03-06T23:32:00.000-06:00

The New York Times reports that many private elementary and high schools are liberalizing financial aid to make funds more available to families in the middle income ranges:

During the 2000-2001 school year, the association of independent schools changed how parental income is assessed in the needs analysis system used by the majority of independent schools. Among the changes, it reduced the way discretionary income is figured in the formula and placed a cap on the home equity that can be assessed as wealth.

Assets do not weigh as heavily as income in the need calculation...They must exceed $75,000 before they even begin to affect parents' contributions.

Although private school costs continue to rise, so do private school enrollments as educationally motivated families continue their exodus from public education. (The best public schools are generally financed by property taxes so high that the parents are practically paying the equivalent of private school tuition anyway.)

2002-03-05T08:22:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that parents are buckling under the strain of college application costs, let alone the $140,00 four-year private-university price tags. Testing fees, application fees, prep courses, guidebooks, independent consultants, portfolio preparation - it all adds up. The biggest-ticket item, though, is one that many families fail to factor in until it's right on top of them: college visits. For students applying to a scattered group of nationally ranked schools, the travel costs for them and their families can be enormous. Few applicants feel confident selecting a school without having seen it (and rightly so).

2002-02-27T18:59:00.000-06:00

Duke University has created a bit of a fuss in the application game by becoming the first major university to ask applicants whether they sought assistance on their essays. No surprise here: most students do seek essay advice, at least from teachers and parents. (Fewer will admit to using essay-polishing services or independent consultants, although obviously many do.) Admissions officers at other colleges, and authors of books on the admissions process, sound a little sceptical of the usefulness of Duke's query:

"It sets up in the mind of the students an awkward relationship to the institution -- almost like a cop," says Peter Osgood, director of admission at Harvey Mudd College, in California. "The process is already so ridden with anxiety."

Sarah M. McGinty of the Harvard School of Education is even more blunt:

"Every aspect of the application is muddled to some degree," she says. "We know that grades are sometimes inflated and don't always mean what they seem. Do negative recommendations ever make it into the packet? Do we even need to talk about the fairness of the SAT? The whole thing is a doll with sawdust coming out of every seam."

This gambit by Duke underscores the way in which admissions has become an increasingly complicated game of appearance and reality. With the upper hand seeming to shift back and forth between the applicants and the colleges, it is no wonder that both sides engage in some fancy footwork.

2002-02-27T18:29:00.000-06:00

A unique educational opportunity for young professionals is provided through Rotary International. Rotary districts worldwide swap teams of professionals for multi-week exchange programs, with Rotary paying for airfare, housing, meals, and language training:

The program sends working people ages 25-40 overseas to live with families, meet with business leaders and learn about the economy, customs and infrastructure of another country...Team members are selected based on an application, a personal essay and a round of interviews...Selection committees look for team members who are open-minded enough to adapt to a new culture, energetic enough to be cheerful even when sleep-deprived, and patient enough to endure the constant company of four travel companions and countless Rotary chaperones.

To apply, you need not be a Rotarian; in fact, only one Rotarian joins each team, serving as a team leader. Further information is available here.

2002-02-27T16:24:00.000-06:00

The New York Times Education Life supplement commented in January about the morphing of college admissions officers into "enrollment managers," a title that smacks of an MBA influence that is very real in admissions today. Professor Glenn C. Altschuler of Cornell enumerated the goals of enrollment managers:

...to recruit and select the best undergraduates in an increasingly competitive marketplace, to raise the institution a notch or two in the influential rankings of U.S. News & World Report and to maintain steady enrollment in the freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior classes.

The strategies for achieving these goals are rooted in the tools of management theory, among them survey-based research and statistical analysis, sophisticated marketing techniques, and a stress on "numbers,' the two most important of which are a college's selectivity (the percentage of applicants accepted) and its yield (the percentage of admitted students who choose to attend). To crank up the selectivity, enrollment managers encourage a greater number of applicants for the same number of spots, thereby ensuring that a low percentage of applicants will be accepted; this makes a college look highly selective, to U.S. News and everyone else. To push the yield, some colleges go so far as to reject "overqualified" students on the grounds that they will probably choose to go elsewhere, anyway. (This can lead to the awkward situation of star students being turned down by both their top choices and their safeties. I've seen it happen: a valedictorian with high 1500 SATs at one high school where I worked wasn't accepted anywhere he applied; he had to push his way in off a waiting list.) Other colleges improve yield by drawing an ever-increasing percentage of their freshmen classes from binding early decision candidates, who have to attend.

One bright note in Altschuler's article is that transferring into top schools is easier than it looks:

...the pool of qualified transfer students remains smaller than the number of vacancies, in part because administrators are reluctant to raid competitors...No matter which institution they are attending, would-be transfers may be pleasantly surprised to discover how many first-rate colleges and universities are eager to take them in.

2002-02-26T19:32:00.000-06:00

The New York Times recently reported that academic advising and counseling are more of a lost art on university campuses than ever before, with students across America rating these services unsatisfactory or worse:

...a reaccreditation team acknowledged that dissatisfaction with advising was "endemic at virtually all universities and many liberal arts colleges as well."

One problem is that advising tasks usually fall to professors for whom, as the Times delicately puts it, they are "a tertiary responsibility" (behind scholarship and teaching). Professional academic counselors scarcely exist on most campuses (unlike high schools, which all have guidance counselors, overburdened though they may be). Parents need to be concerned about this because the lack of effective guidance through collegiate terrain can delay graduation and cost plenty of time and money. Professors ensconced within their disciplines are not often much help to undecided freshmen or to major-changers ("as many as 70 percent of undergraduates abandon the major they identified when they applied to college"). Independent consultants may be a line of defense for families, especially if they have worked with the student through the high school years and the college application process. It is true that consultants will need to familiarize themselves with the ever-changing graduation and major requirements on individual campuses; but professors are often strikingly ill-informed about such matters anyway, and most questions can be cleared up by a bit of website research or a well-placed phone call. Since adequate counseling does not seem to be included in the continually increasing cost of college, many families are going to seek professional advice in this area in the coming years.

2002-02-25T18:06:00.000-06:00

A few British private schools are shifting from their A-level programs - which are considerably more specialized than comparable American high school programs - to the broader International Baccalaureate curriculum. Under the IB system,

You have to do English, a foreign language, a social science, maths, a natural science and one other subject. In addition you have to do some philosophy (if the French can do it, why not the English?), write an extended essay, and do a specified number of hours of sport, creative arts and community service.

This is in marked contrast to the A-levels, where a 16-year-old can get away with studying as few as three related subjects and can avoid large chunks of what Americans and Europeans see as core curricula. One reason for the shift is that the IB program has "greater credibility abroad":

In its efforts to turn education into a market, Britain has created a world in which nothing can be trusted. No wonder a flight to quality - to foreign quality - is now under way. And, not surprisingly, schools whose task is to nurture the offspring of the wealthy are leading the way. In banana republics elites always get out first.

2002-02-25T17:59:00.000-06:00

Brown University has joined the rest of the Ivy League in adopting a need-blind admissions policy. Under such a policy, rare in private American universities, information about applicants' financial situation is kept entirely separate from adnissions decisions, ensuring that needier applicants suffer no discrimination in the process. Brown president Ruth J. Simmons called need-blind admissions a moral imperative, affirming that instutions such as Brown have "a special obligation to the country to be available for the best minds, irrespective of the student's ability to pay."

Brown is going a step further by not requiring freshmen financial aid recipients to work; Dr. Simmons desires freshmen to "concentrate exclusively on their studies," and does not want poorer students divided from their richer classmates by different requirements.

2002-02-23T19:36:00.000-06:00

Olympic figure skating gold medalist and high school junior Sarah Hughes hails from a very college-oriented family:

Her older sister, Rebecca, 24, is a first-year law student at Columbia University after getting her undergraduate degree from Harvard. One brother, David, 20, is a Cornell sophomore; the other, Matt, 19, is an Ithaca College freshman.

Fittingly, Sarah herself is focusing beyond the Olympics:

"My next goal is to get high 1500s on the SATs," she said Friday.

2002-02-22T18:58:00.000-06:00

The prestigious Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, is experiencing a tsunami of applicants, according to its admissions directors:

...we saw a significant increase in round one applications -- up approximately 90% over last year's round one. There are a lot of factors influencing this, including the shaky economy and people who feel that this may be the right time to go back to beef up their skills.

Part-time applications are not experiencing quite the same surge, in part because businesses which traditionally paid the costs for many night and weekend students are cutting back significantly on educational expenses. The directors confirm that the job market for graduates is a bear.

The directors' interview in Business Week offers many helpful insights: Apply early; the applicant pool is getting more impressive all the time. Give attention to those essays; high GMAT scores are not enough. MBA seekers in finance should consider also obtaining the CFA (Certified Financial Analyst) designation, and vice versa; the credentials are not redundant and are doubly impressive together.

2002-02-22T18:44:00.000-06:00

Entrepreneurs and small companies are tapping community colleges and high schools to find skilled workers and interns, even in the recessionary economy, the Wall Street Journal reports. It appears that certain forms of vocational education are moving out of classrooms and onto worksites. (This makes sense in a time when shop classes are being cut at many high schools.)

2002-02-22T18:36:00.000-06:00

A surprising number of 2001 bachelor's and master's degree graduates are still waiting to start jobs they were offered last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Consultancies appear to be particularly delay-ridden. (Not unexpectedly: like ad-people and architects, consultants are canaries in the coal-mine of the economy.) Some b-schools such as Harvard frown heavily on delays and job rescensions and actually ban employers from campus for recruiting violations.

2002-02-22T18:22:00.000-06:00

As discussed here earlier, MBA recruiting is way down, so it could hardly be expected that the graduating college seniors of 2002 would escape the jobs crunch, and indeed they are not. They face the worst prospects since 1994. Many are looking far outside their field of study; others are desperately applying to graduate and professional schools. Liberal arts grads are particularly hard-hit, but even engineers are feeling the pinch. Those who are lucky enough to find employers are being offered lower starting salaries (for example, "the average high-end salary for computer science majors has fallen from around $65,000 to the low $50,000s").

2002-02-22T18:14:00.000-06:00

Resident advisers at the University of Massachusetts are considering an attempt to unionize under the representation of the United Auto Workers, which has been successful at organizing graduate teaching and research assistants. The University is pooh-poohing the effort, claiming that the advisers are students rather than workers (an argument that could be undercut by the fact the advisers receive weekly stipend paychecks and W-2 forms in addition to their free dorm rooms).

2002-02-22T18:06:00.000-06:00

The latest college faculty plagiarism scandal makes one wonder just how many of these cases are out there, and how quickly they may start to be uncovered with the use of sophisticated software. This is the higher education version of Enron-style aggressive accounting: look harder, and you see it everywhere.

2002-02-22T18:00:00.000-06:00

With college endowments performing iffily in the era of Enron, tuition costs are starting to spike by 4 to 10 percent at many private colleges and universities (we have already noted the increases at public universities). Tuition, room, and board costs altogether at selective colleges such as Cornell, Dartmoputh, Emory, and George Washington have ascended to the mid-30,000s. Hiring freezes are on at some schools; building plans are being delayed; programs being cut back. Less bang for your buck, in short.

2002-02-22T17:51:00.000-06:00

Harvard University announced that it will only grant advanced placement status to entering freshmen who earned the highest possible score - 5 out of 5 - on AP exams. Many universities up till now have given credit for scores of 3, 4, or 5 (60 percent of AP takers score in this range). But with the tests coming under fire and being eliminated in some schools (as noted here earlier) and with colleges' livelihood threatened by the number of multiple AP students who are able to place out of freshman year altogether and begin college as sophomores, the door is starting to shut. AP courses and exams may not lose any of their value as markers on applications, but in the future they may not be as likely to save students time and money at the collegiate level.

Some professors are wondering aloud whether AP classes, which are "taught to the test" more than any other high-school courses, actually prepare students to "grapple with conceptual questions at a college level...We want them to learn to think on their own." AP classes do tend to emphasize knowledge acquisition over analytic thinking, but it is a tricky issue. Most high school students can use all the knowledge they can get, and college is probably a more appropriate setting for deep analysis.

2002-02-18T18:24:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was the start of National Engineers Week, a yearly event that not only "highlights the important role engineers play in society," but also hopes to draw the attention of high school and college students to the possibility of engineering as a career. Demand and salaries remain high. Civil and structural engineering, chemical and electronics engineering are all hot areas.

But some specializations are especially undersubscribed and are good bets for budding engineers attempting to carve out a career niche. Jay H. Paul of the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois pointed out in a November editorial that structural engineers who focus on repair and restoration work were much called on after September 11 and, given the questionable state of the country's infrastructure, can expect to be busily employed in coming years. Yet not enough engineers are responding to the pressing need:

Every engineering firm represented at [the Third International Workshop on Improving the Performance of Repaired Concrete Structures] reported that there is a shortage of structural engineers for repairs. There just does not seem to be the required level of interest, on the part of experienced structural engineers or entry-level graduates, to perform the work.

The demand for engineers for restoration work is acute; therefore the salary demands for those with repair experience have skyrocketed. It can be a good financial decision for young graduates to join firms specializing in repairs.

Making good career decisions, and therefore good education decisions, requires much information. And the first, often overlooked step toward entering many a lucrative, satisfying career is simply knowing that it exists.

2002-02-15T17:15:00.000-06:00

The State of Florida has created two new law schools intended to attract black and Hispanic students to legal careers, one affiliated with Florida International University in Miami, the other with Florida A&M in Tallahassee (although the A&M law school will be located in Orlando):

The new law schools, now selecting their first classes, are considering applications without regard to race, and both are drawing a diverse pool of applicants, attracted by the relatively low $5,000 tuition, and the part- time evening programs.

While it is too soon to predict their racial composition, it is already clear that, given their differing history and geography, the two schools are headed down somewhat different paths, with the Florida A&M law school more likely to be mostly black and the one at Florida International University mostly Hispanic.

The Florida International law school intends to place an emphasis upon international law (befitting its name); the Florida A&M law school will stress public service ("What we're about is training lawyers interested in serving poor and lower-middle-income people").

2002-02-15T16:41:00.000-06:00

A new study commisssioned by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation has found significant flaws in the curricula and teaching of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes in mathematics and the sciences (humanities courses were not considered):

...the two-year study...said that the courses crammed in too much material at the expense of understanding and that many were taught by teachers who did not have even bachelor's degrees in the given field.

The report also said that courses in biology and chemistry had generally failed to keep pace with developments in their disciplines. And it noted that many students were poorly prepared before they started the courses, some having skipped intermediate preparatory courses so that they could squeeze advanced-placement courses onto their high school transcripts.

Given the criticisms, one of the report's key recommendations is somewhat baffling:

Yet the report recommended that advanced courses be made more accessible to minority students and to youths in rural and poor urban areas. Despite their shortcomings, it said, the courses do challenge the students who take them.

One of the report group's co-chairs notes, no doubt correctly, that although the AP and IB programs have "contributed a great deal" to American high school education, they have devolved into a tool to assist students' efforts to get into top colleges, rather than advancing knowledge for its own sake.

2002-02-15T00:16:00.000-06:00

We have all read newspaper stories about collegiate entrepreneurs running mini-empires from their dorm rooms. Now they can get academic credit for it, too. The latest issue of Emerging Business includes an informative article about entrepreneurship programs at American colleges.

2002-02-12T18:31:00.000-06:00

Jay H. Paul of the Structural Engineeers Association of Illinois has an excellent editorial in the current issue of the SEAOI Bulletin about the pressing need for engineers (and, by extension, all professionals) to become adept at written and verbal communications:

When I was in college, like many of my peers, I disliked rhetoric or any other subjects requiring written or verbal communication skills. At that time, I thought that these classes would have little value in the real world. I was wrong...

Structural engineers tend to be very bright, well educated, and extremely conscientious. They are capable of analyzing most structural challenges and developing reasonable solutions but, often, they are not proficient at verbal and written communication... It is not uncommon for engineers to be introverted and prefer crunching numbers and solving problems to interacting with people whom they don't know or who intimidate them. This behavior is generally viewed as antisocial and may have resulted in a lack of respect for our profession.

I suspect that a vast number of problems on projects occur, both during design and construction, because of a failure to communicate. We must be able to clearly present our ideas. A breakdown in communication can result in costly project errors. Our written communication must be clear, concise, and not ambiguous...

We must encourage our young engineers to improve their written and verbal communication skills, as well as their people skills. Many of us are not very outgoing people. In spite of this, we must get over any shyness and try to verbally project our ideas, as articulately as possible...When we communicate verbally, we must speak with confidence.

I stress this in my own consulting practice: I strongly believe that all high school and college students must receive adequate training not only in writing, but also in public speaking. There is no professional career in existence where a graduate can get by without explicating ideas verbally to groups of other people. Schools do a notoriously poor job of educating in this area, which is unfortunate but simply means that a student has to seek the training elsewhere.

2002-02-12T18:13:00.000-06:00

Sometimes the most promising careers are ones you have never heard of. The Wall Street Journal reports that the University of Buffalo School of Pharmacy and Pharamaceutical Science is instituting a one-year master's program in pharmacometrics, "the use of data analysis to examine factors that determine patient exposures and responses to drugs." Why is this launch newsworthy? Because there is a real demand for this specialty:

William Jusko, professor of pharmaceutical sciences, says that he gets weekly calls from several major drug companies, which are looking for graduates with this background. Starting salaries range from $55,000 to $80,000.

2002-02-11T19:00:00.000-06:00

The Gainesville Sun reports that "black freshman enrollment dropped about 40 percent last fall in the first test since the University of Florida stopped considering race in admissions decisions." To combat the trend, the university is stepping up the number of minority recruitment conferences.

2002-02-11T18:54:00.000-06:00

In a November 2001 interview on the PBS NewsHour, outgoing NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin made some crucial observations on the future of science, mathematics, and engineering education in the United States:

In the period of the most productive time of our economy, enrollment in engineering and science has gone down over 25%... People in America are walking away from Science and Math and Technology, yet it is the fuel in the furnace of our economy. It's hard to explain...You know, don't get me wrong, we need lawyers, we need accountants, but in the limits, we can't do the books for the world, and we can't do legal battles for the world, and we just can't have people managing people. We need value-added base. There is a technological tsunami that's going to be hitting us in the next five or ten years that's going to change everything. So for our young people who don't go into Math and Science and Technology, where's the future of the country? And this is where the battlefield for the hopes and dreams of America is going to be...I am very, very concerned about where our society is going. If you take a look, the enrollment in science and engineering is going down. It's going down even faster for minority Americans and women. They make up such a small fraction of the workforce. If our economy is to grow over the next decade, we're going to have to have two million additional scientists and engineers; yet if you take a look at the statistics, it isn't going to happen. White males are disproportionately represented. If we could just bring parity to how America is made up, we will solve this problem. Every American needs to worry about this. Nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology: It's going to have revolutions that's going to change everything...We've got to prepare our society for the next decade because that's where the action's going to be.

2002-02-11T18:39:00.000-06:00

As a research project for the excellent organization Chicago Youth Programs, which assists inner-city youngsters with their educational and personal growth, I undertook to discover whether there were any community colleges that offered residential programs. This was an interesting assignment because one doesn't think of community colleges and dormitories going together; nonetheless, I have found four such institutions (and there are also some private two-year junior colleges that offer housing). Joliet Junior College in Illinois is opening its Centennial Commons housing units in the fall of 2002. Middle Georgia College is a two-year residential college within the University System of Georgia. Colorado Northwestern Community College goes so far as to require freshmen to live on campus. Arizona Western College also offers a residence hall system, and "all single students are strongly encouraged to live on campus." An ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) Newsletter on "Housing and the Community College" offers additional information on this unusual topic.

2002-02-11T18:20:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports today that background-check companies and bail-bonding companies are among those hoping to obtain contracts from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to track foreign nationals who enter the United States on student visas. Although theoretically mandated by law for several years, this tracking process was in bureaucratic limbo until "the discovery that some of the September 11 hijackers came here on student visas and didn't pursue their study plans."

2002-02-11T18:12:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports today that 529 college savings plans are being put to, hmm, creative uses by financial advisers. The new rules governing these plans are so advantageous that advisers cannot resist using them as part of general estate planning:

No federal taxes on earnings if used for qualified higher education purposes

No gift-tax implications on gifts of $55,000 by individuals

Donor controls the account and can switch beneficiaries

No time limit in many states on when the 529 money must be used

Funds can be used for midcareer or postretirement education in many states

2002-02-09T17:42:00.000-06:00

In an excellent May 2001 article in the Chicago Tribune, J. Linn Allen explored the strong sense of identification that American college graduates feel with their chosen institutions:

We expect and crave bonding with our college. It is considered a necessary rite of passage...So when kids and parents stress out about the college choice, their intensity may be exaggerated, but it's not entirely misplaced. Wherever the students end up, the experience - and the name - will mark them for life.

Despite the risks inherent in the hierarchical ranking of American colleges and the craving for status that it induces, I tend to think of such bonding as a very positive thing. Allen points out that this sort of strong identification with ones school is hardly common in other countries; however, it certainly seems to affect international students who attend American universities, as witness this excerpt from a NewsHour interview with Jorge Fernando Quiroga Ramirez, the President of Bolivia:

Going to Texas A&M...I would be asked who's the president of Bolivia this week? I had eight presidents in my three-and-a-half years of college. Or what's the inflation rate this week? For a point in time we reached 25,000 percent per year. Or if you're from Bolivia, you must have cocaine. Those were the stereotypes that were applied. It was very frustrating...At least I know when my oldest daughter goes to school - hopefully Texas A&M: we have to persuade her - she won't be asked those things because democracy is solid, our economy is open and solid.

As an American-educated member of the international elite, President Quiroga is so proud of his alma mater that he wants to make sure his daughter goes there, too. That's what our universities represent to the world. The best education there is.

2002-02-09T15:55:00.000-06:00

The latest online edition of Black Collegian includes several helpful articles about graduate and professional education that could be of use to any applicants, not just African-Americans. Worth checking out.

2002-02-09T15:21:00.000-06:00

As a member of the Yale Alumni Schools Committee, I just received the Winter 2002 ASC Newsletter, containing interesting details about the Early Decision class:

Yale received 2,116 ED applications, an 18% increase from last year. With a 26% ED admissions rate, 549 students were admitted to the Class of 2006 compared with 526 last year. Here are a few statistics that may paint a better picture of the Early Decision admitted class: 45 states and 29 countries are represented; 49% are from public schools; median SAT verbal and math are 730 and 720 respectively, and the median ACT is 31.

Like any highly selective college, Yale is proud of its "over-developed" admits:

Notable admitted students include: a recruited athlete who has been trained as a Buddhist monk; one of the top three High School pole vaulters in the country who also received the award as junior
national champion for western pleasure riding and trail riding given by the 2000 American Horse Show Association; a professional voice-over artist and jingle singer who was rated #1 for Kid Audio in 1999 by Billboard Magazine; and a student who wrote and published a book at the age of ten.

Like precocious young Erik Hinterblicher, whom I discussed the other day, students such as these can make a wistful middle-ager feel that he has accomplished absolutely nothing in his life. Such is the contemporary ocean of over-achievement we all swim in.

The newsletter also offers a helpfully realistic view of how to console Yale rejects by an ASC Director. His words are pertinent:

We begin by preparing potential applicants with the realities of applying to highly selective colleges the first time and each successive time we talk with them. We need to let prospective students know, no matter how qualified we may feel they are, Yale is one of the most difficult colleges for admissions in the United States. We need to talk openly and candidly about backup choices and why the potential applicant should take as much time selecting them as they do their first choice college...at least 85% of the students applying to Yale are qualified to do Yale work, and the fact that Yale did not offer them admission should not in any way devalue all that they have accomplished.

2002-02-08T18:08:00.000-06:00

The Chicago Tribune's lead editorial today focussed on a disturbing plagiarism case in a Kansas high school. 28 students got their biology term papers online,a fact teacher Christine Pelton discovered through the use of anti-plagiarism software (discussed in this newsletter before). This would have resulted in the students receiving no credit for the assignment and flunking the course, had the school board not intervened and over-ruled the teacher:

So Pelton gave those 28 no credit. Because the project constituted 50 percent of their grades, they would flunk her class. That consequence was in keeping not only with Pelton's prior warning, but also with the school's student handbook, which says a first offense of cheating should result in no credit for the assignment.

That's when several parents complained that their little darlings had been treated unfairly. Pelton's principal and superintendent stood behind her. But the district's school board buckled. Without even speaking to Pelton, board members decided in December that the plagiarists deserved partial credit for the project, and that it should count for only 30 percent of their grades.

This had the predictable undermining effect:

"I went to my class and tried to teach the kids, but they were whooping and hollering and saying, `We don't have to listen to you anymore,'" Pelton says.

So she (understandably) quit.

The Tribune accuses parents such as the ones who complained in Kansas of helping to enable an epidemic of cheating:

A widely cited Who's Who Among American High School Students Poll found in 1998 that of 3,100 high-achieving and college-bound students, 80 percent said they had cheated on a quiz or test, or had copied someone else's homework. Worse, more than half said they didn't think cheating was a big deal.

Students have served up the same thin excuses for generations: Everybody else cheats; we have too much homework; we have too many tests; we're just trying to get into good colleges.

But there's another sorry catalyst: the failure of many parents to teach their children how cheating ultimately cheats them...Our desperation to see our children do their best shouldn't blind us to the likelihood that they are surrounded by cheating, and that they are tempted to do the same.

2002-02-08T17:54:00.000-06:00

High school student Adam Tavel writes to the New York Times about the merits of Advanced Placement courses:

I am a junior in college and am quite disheartened after reading "High School Drops Its A.P. Courses, and Colleges Don't Seem to Mind" (news article, Feb. 1).

As a bitter public high school student in Edgewater, Md., I was often confused and troubled during my adolescent years. Salvation came in the form of A.P. classes, whose survey format and engaging material challenged my young mind and soul. I never felt overly pressured by the impending test, and find myself performing much better in college than many of my peers who lack Advanced Placement preparation. In addition, I've saved thousands of tuition dollars by coming into college with more than 20 A.P. credits.

Perhaps high-level classes are commonplace in tiny private schools, but for many of America's public school students, A.P. can mean the difference between apathy and a promising future.

2002-02-08T17:51:00.000-06:00

New York Times reader Ken Swenson makes a good point about using Enron as an example in business school courses:

I was surprised to see in "Enron Is Grist for Business School Courses" (Business Day, Feb. 6) that there was virtually no mention of the Enron scandal's impact on business school classes in ethics.

I recall that when I took a required course in business ethics in the late 1980's, students had very little interest in the course. Some of their "ethical" decisions astounded me, as many students were focused strictly on the bottom line, even in a class that was instituted for the purpose of offering alternate criteria and guidelines for making business decisions.

Isn't one of the lessons of Enron that business schools and business students need to pay more attention to the study of business ethics?

2002-02-07T21:41:00.000-06:00

Applications are way up this year at the Yale School of Management, according to Director of Admissions James Stevens. The institution, young as business schools go, has a particularly strong reputation in the field of non-profit management, as Stevens notes:

"...we are firmly committed to the school's mission of educating leaders for business and society. And we recently announced the Yale SOM Goldman Sachs Foundation Partnership on Nonprofit Ventures -- it's a $4.5 million gift from Goldman and the Pew Charitable Trusts, and we'll launch a pioneering business-plan competition for nonprofits. So our commitment to public and nonprofit [management] remains strong."

2002-02-07T20:53:00.000-06:00

High school seniors and their families are apparently giving greater consideration to local colleges and universities in the wake of September 11 and the recession. Proximity to home has become more attractive in an unsettled world; keeping travel and tuition costs down in an era of layoffs is also on many families' minds.

2002-02-07T20:16:00.000-06:00

Today the New York Times profiled a student who might be a parody of the over-impressive high school senior, except he's for real: Erik Hinterbichler of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Among Erik's many accomplishments: he is the valedictorian at Albuquerque High School; he holds a black belt in karate; he plays the cello; he has written a full-length fantasy novel (not yet published, however); he is a good enough football placekicker (first team USA Today All-American) to be recruited, although he hasn't been, and has nailed field goals from 55 yards. His dad is a university professor (this is not surprising; children of academics are among the most precocious), his mom a professional violist.

People sometimes wonder why parents today spend countless thousands of dollars on enrichment programs and SAT prep courses and independent consultants and essay-polishing services and boarding schools. Here's their answer. Because Erik is the competition.

2002-02-07T17:42:00.000-06:00

The New York Times recently profiled the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin West in Arizona, still a somewhat quirky place as architecture schools go. The Wright cult of personality continues strong. And the procedures are a little different from most colleges':

First-year students...bring...sleeping bags and formal wear: they bunk in primitive shepherds' tents (10-foot-square canvas pyramids) in the desert, yet dress in black tie for Saturday night dinners. Building social poise is one goal at the school...So is learning to hobnob with potential clients.

A maximum of 35 bachelor's and master's candidates can be enrolled at any one time, and like some other similarly small educational communities, especially in the West, Taliesin functions as a collective where all the students share in chores such as cooking and cleaning. (There is also a branch of the Wright School of Architecture in Wisconsin.) Although some architects sniff at the school, and for a long time it didn't even have accreditation or offer diplomas (a situation now remedied), the Wright name undoubtedly carries a cachet:

...apprentices — which is how the students are known — report that graduation leads to multiple job offers, a prospect that students at most other architecture schools can only dream of.

2002-02-06T19:35:00.000-06:00

Business school professors are incorporating Enron into their courses even though "its accounting and energy-trading practices may be too complicated for most students" (and perhaps some professors and business executives!). Professors who are drawing cautionary lessons from Enron's fall might heed this rather sad observation about former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow:

It was not as if he needed the money, his friends say; his wife, the former Lea Weingarten, is the heiress to a Houston real estate fortune. But Mr. Fastow was adamant, friends say, in his belief that the amount of money a person made was the only meaningful measure of success in business.

2002-02-05T19:06:00.000-06:00

Summer enrichment programs are becoming the norm for ambitious college-bound students, according to the New York Times and the Bergen Record.

National statistics indicate a shift toward more summer academics, with fewer teenagers holding jobs and more enrolled in school. Only 62.9 percent of teens between ages 16 and 19 were in the workforce in July 1999, the lowest since 1965, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At the same time, 26.8 percent of people in that age group were enrolled in public or private high school or college programs, up from 19.5 percent in 1994.

Partly this is a matter of sheer competition in the upper academic bracket:

"I definitely see students being more productive and more careful with the summer and the after-school hours during the year," [educational planner Ronna] Morrison said. "It can't quite be the same carefree days of summer at the beach and nothing else."...

"This is a whole different generation," said [Valerie] Ross [,director of summer programs at the University of Pennsylvania]. "I don't think that 15 years ago kids were so busy, so earnest in purpose, and so focused on the future."

The range of available programs is vast: from academic remediation to academic enrichment, from traditional outdoors camps to specialized camps focusing on marine biology or space science or entrepreneurship. They can be quite expensive, although some offer scholarships. For many students in urban areas or near universities, there are also more reasonable local, non-sleep-away alternatives.

2002-02-05T18:47:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that accounting students are indeed expressing a few doubts about going to work for Arthur Andersen in the wake of the Enron mess. But the recruiting problems of the profession go deeper than that: enrollment in accounting programs "dropped 25% between 1995 and 2000."

"Young people in high school and college perceive accounting as being a humdrum, prosaic, pedestrian profession," says Charles Smith, a professor of accounting at Pennsylvanis State University. In addition, accounting firms pay lower entry-level salaries than comparable jobs in investment banking and corporate finance.

2002-02-03T18:46:00.000-06:00

Further evidence of the admissions scramble affecting universities across America: the University of Tennessee is experiencing a surge in applicants that could amount to a 25 percent increase over last year, with - not coincidentally - "a substantial improvement in the quality of the applicant pool." The university has had no choice but to defer decision on more than 2,500 early action candidates:

Because the numbers are so high, admissions officers are looking beyond each student's academic stats to see how tough their courses were and how well they write...

''It's going to be a little harder each year,'' said Eli Fly, UT's acting president. ''More students will be graduating from high school. So admissions to this institution will be tighter.''

There is no high-quality institution of higher education in the country where admission is going to get easier over the coming years. None.

2002-02-03T18:33:00.000-06:00

Parental panic over college tutition payments (and loan repayments) is a natural enough reaction to the ongoing tidal wave of layoffs. Some colleges are willing to work with parents through crisis periods. Other families seek assistance from a company called Academic Management Services, which arranges extensions, payment plans, and loans.

2002-02-03T18:02:00.000-06:00

How would you like to be the Enron Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska? Or the Kenneth L. Lay Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston? Or the Arthur Andersen Professor of Accounting at Florida State?

2002-02-02T22:36:00.000-06:00

City College of the City University of New York, formerly the "crown jewel" of that system but lately somewhat fallen, is back on top after strengthening recruiting, installing an honors program, and reducing "the number of less well-prepared students" by re-directing them to more appropriate programs at community colleges.

2002-02-02T22:11:00.000-06:00

Harvard Dean Susan Pedersen has proposed tightening requirements for honors awarded to graduating seniors as part of an attempted crackdown on grade and credential inflation (although, let's face it, graduating from Harvard is in itself plenty of a credential, honors or no honors).

2002-02-02T21:54:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that a few colleges - notably Yale, Boston University (my two alma maters!), Emory, and Mount Holyoke - have begun offering scholarship money to foreign undergraduates. This raises the hackles of some American parents, though it is a mere trickle of a movement so far.