The Chicago Tribune ran a story on Monday about the lengths to which some parents will go to get their darlings into college. The whole process of selecting and applying to college is certainly stresseful. And there is no doubt that the competition is fierce.
It’s also true that in some school communities, the competition is [...]
Read full post...A parent of a senior asked me the other day about college visits. When is the best time to visit?
The answer is, “from whose perspective?”
There are two different reasons for visiting college. The first is the student’s need to get an idea of what life would be like on that campus. Students often have a [...]
My clients who aspire toward a career in fine art know that they need to prepare a portfolio of their work to present to admissions officers. These portfolios need to show off their best work, and provide a window into their creative thought processes.
Most students interested in admission to a school of art and design [...]
Read full post...During my recent visit to the University of Wyoming, I came across two women chattering away in Mandarin Chinese. While one was Chinese, the other was from Saipan, a small island in the South Pacific that is within the US Commonwealth (like Puerto Rico or Guam). Her name is Jennifer “J.J.” Jang, and she’s a [...]
Read full post...Several recent client questions have centered upon the value of Advanced Placement (AP) tests and their importance in the college admissions process.
Conventional wisdom holds that AP courses are excellent preparation for college. They are considered to be rigorous. The general idea is that they are the equivalent of college-level, introductory survey courses.
(The Advanced [...]
US News & World Report’s infamous rankings system may include new sorts of data, according to an article today in Inside Higher Ed.
They may add survey data collected from 1600 high school counselors, who are being asked to rate colleges on a scale of 1 to 5. This data may–or may not–be used in calculating [...]
A couple of my previous posts have focused on student-to-faculty ratios and class size averages as indicators of educational quality.
By and large, my conclusion is that these statistics are not all that helpful in uncovering the quality of the educational experience for a prospective undergraduate.
So what to do? How can we compare and contrast [...]
When a client asked me the other day about the importance of student-to-faculty ratios, I got to thinking about other supposed indicators of educational quality.
The other oft-cited statistic when visiting an admissions office is “average class size.” As with student-to-faculty ratios, the size of the classes at a college is assumed to reflect the [...]
The other day I received this question from a client:
Hi, Mark. I’ve been reading college profiles, and nearly all of them cite student-to-faculty ratios, all of which fall in to a relatively narrow range of perhaps 12:1 to 20:1. How important is this statistic in choosing a college?
My short answer: not very.
The [...]
An article in today’s Inside Higher Ed reports that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s investigation into kickbacks and other shady dealings between university officials and providers of study abroad programs is alive and well. Apparently Alfred University, a small liberal arts college in western New York, has received a subpoena from the Attorney General.
Here’s a snippet:
The [...]