Numbers of College Applications WAY Up This Year

The New York Times reported in an article yesterday that the numbers of applications to Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, and many other colleges are way up this year. Part of this increase is due to demographics, part of it is due to the ease of electronic submissions, and part of it is due to the increased demand for a quality education.
Here is a short chart of the increases:
Harvard: 19%
University of Chicago: 18%
Amherst College 17%
Northwestern 14%
Dartmouth 10%
Cornell 8%
Princeton 6%
University of Virginia 4%
With the competition so stiff, can you afford not to have the help you need to find and apply to the college of your dreams?
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting

National Honor Roll Scam

A colleague from Japan recently wrote asking if I knew anything about the National Honor Roll. I knew very little, but was immediately suspicious when I learned it was an honor students had to buy.

Today I learned from another colleague that the National Honor Roll is, indeed, a scam, perpetrated by marketing companies that are mining data on college-bound students. The best source of information on this is another blogger who writes a blog called “The Blog That Ate Manhattan.” You can see her post here.

Parents–and kids–need to be very wary of these sorts of scams. Young eyeballs are worth a fortune to marketers, because they wield a lot of buying power and are relatively unsophisticated consumers. And parents of teens who may be grasping at ways to help their kids stand out in the college admissions process can be easily duped.

So beware of anything that looks too good to be true. It is.