I recently wrote a post blasting the idea of student-to-faculty ratios as a bogus measure of educational quality. It turns out that universities themselves don’t have a solid measure of what the ratios really are, or even keep track of the percentage of students taught by tenure-track professors–as opposed to adjunct, part-timers, or graduate students.
Yesterday [...]
That’s right, folks.
On some campuses, students actually want their universities to bill them more this year than last. It’s a matter of quality, they say. Some things you just can’t skimp on, apparently.
An article entitled “The True Cost of Tuition Freezes at Public Colleges” in yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education (registration required) focuses on public [...]
Well, folks, we made it to our Lucky 13th Edition of the Carnival of College Admission. Hard to believe we’ve been running nearly 26 weeks…almost half a year. What’s more, this Lucky 13 Edition falls near St. Patrick’s Day, when luck is sprinkled about by those jovial Irish. So we have a lot of good [...]
Read full post...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 [...]