The newest edition of the Carnival of College Admission. is now open for visitors at Peter Baron’s “On Boarding Schools” blog at AdmissionsQuest.
As usual, it’s a compendium of what bloggers are saying about college admissions, financial aid, and the like. You’d better have a look to see what all the fuss is about!
Mark Montgomery
Carnival Barker
Are Advanced Placement Courses Good for College Admission
AP courses are among the most rigorous offered in American public high schools. But how good are they? Lots of kids take them–and fail the exams. So how good are AP courses for college admissions? As with most things, the answer depends on a number of factors. This article helps you to evaluate the value of AP courses at your school.
Continue readingWhen Is the Best Time to Visit a College Campus?
When is the best time to visit a college campus? A campus visit can happen whenever it’s most convenient.
Continue readingMontgomery guides students, parents though college admissions maze
Montgomery Guides Students, Parents Through College Admissions Maze
by Rosemary Fetter
The Villager Newspaper
9 October 2008, p. 26
Reprinted with permission.
For many high school students and their parents, selecting the right college can be very confusing and even anxiety producing. There are so many choices to be made: Public or private college? In-state or out of state? Conservative or liberal? And the tasks seem endless, from choosing the right high school courses, to registering and studying for tests, researching colleges, completing applications, writing essays, college visits and interviews.
Montgomery Educational Consulting helps to de-mystify the process, providing expert advice to students and their families as they navigate the college selection process.
“I do the same thing that a college counselor does, but on a much more personal level,” said Mark Montgomery.
The counselor in an average public high school serves more than 300 students, and the ratio is even higher in larger schools. Counselors have little time to provide the individual attention that is often needed.
“I work with students and their parents to develop a college plan based on the student’s abilities, needs, interests and aspirations,” he said. “I help guide them through the admissions process and develop a college plan and strategies for college visits. I show students how to write essays that stand out in a crowd, and, as a part of strategizing, I can also help with scholarship applications.”
A cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, Montgomery received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and his professional Teaching License and coursework in Educational Administration from the University of Northern Colorado. He has been an associate dean at the University of Denver, admissions counselor at Fort Lewis College, and external evaluator for teaching and learning programs at other universities, including Yale University and the University of Kansas.
“Since college is such a major investment, making the right choice at the beginning is important,” he said. “Colleges are becoming more and more selective. For example, last year, Harvard accepted only 7 percent of applicants, making this the most difficult year ever. Families are turning to people like me to get ahead of the game and help them understand how the admissions game works.”
In Holly Hills area,” Montgomery added, “about 25 percent of students go to a private four-year college. It’s important to find the right fit. A student came to see me recently, a liberal freethinker who was looking at a very conservative college. It worked in terms of SATs, but in terms of environment, he probably would have been miserable and transferred before long.”
Montgomery also points out that the popularity of a school does not affect the quality of education.
“Not all clients are Ivy League bound. I work with a variety of students, average kids and kids with disabilities. What’s important is to find the best fit,” he said.
Montgomery also does some pro bono work for Montbello and Adams City high schools and provides help for graduate school students and veterans from the war in Iraq.
“I generally work with two groups, those who start planning for college early and those who don’t much think about it until the last minute,” he said. “Of course, it’s always better to start early, even freshman or sophomore year, and plan your courses accordingly. But even for those who wait, there’s no need to panic. We can help.”
Duke University Administrator Blasts the Rankings Game
Today’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features a commentary by John F. Burness, a former administrator at Duke, Cornell, and the University of Illinois. Burness critiques the rankings created by US News & World Report–and by newcomer, Forbes. While the rankings titillate and sell oodles of magazines, they do little to shed light on the differences among colleges.
While the article is password protected, I will offer a short snippet here that identifies what I think are his most salient criticisms of the US News ratings:
The undergraduate magazine rankings, in contrast, give considerable weight to perception and tend to be based on annual assessments, as if undergraduate-program innovations or tweakings manifest significant change in two semesters. But if the objective is to sell magazines, manifesting change is important. U.S. News has artfully—in the guise of improving the veracity of its rankings—made one or more changes in its methodology every few years, which enables it to argue that there is some shift in the quality of institutions that the new methodology has captured. The cynic in me says that the changing of the methodology is more a strategy for getting different results in the rankings, which helps the publication sell more copies. If the rankings stayed constant, why buy the magazines?
Moreover, the precision that U.S. News purports its methodologies reveal is, on the face of it, rather silly. If you look at the top 10 institutions, you will see that some of them are separated by small fractions of a percent. In the Olympics, those fractions make a difference, but it’s hard to understand how in the real-life breadth of activities of a university, they make any difference at all to a student. I have talked with many people at U.S. News who share my skepticism and, in some cases, are embarrassed by the magazine’s rankings. But they recognize that the rankings are a significant moneymaker. (The magazine has created separate rankings of graduate and professional programs, as well as research hospitals, not to mention books based on the rankings.)
I admit that I do sometimes use the rankings in my research of colleges, primarily because parents often ask me how this or that college is ranked in this or that category.
But I never let the rankings dictate which colleges I may (or may not) recommend for a particular student. For each student, there may be any number of great colleges that will amply fill their needs and aspirations.
First I get to know those needs and aspirations. Then I recommend colleges that will best suit the individual student.
Mark Montgomery
Independent College Counselor
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Carnival of Family Life–Take a Tour of the Midway
The newest edition of the Carnival of Family Life is up at lohud.com (or “Lower Hudson Valley,” for the cognoscenti).
My favorite post his week is by Angela Norton Tyler. She presents a remarkable piece, with teh equally remarkable title, 10 Ways to Make Certain That Your Kids Hate School, Become Lazy & Dependent Learners, Drive Their Teachers Crazy, & End Up Living in Your Basement Until They Are 40 . You can visit Angela at Homework. Dinner. Life. The story is about her realization that she has been doing too much for her daughter. Parents: food for thought, even as your youngsters enter the college admissions phase of their educational journey.
Mark Montgomery
Great College Counseling
Carnival of Family Life, Newest Edition
Today’s Carnival of Family Life is hosted by Write From Karen. This Carnival is tremendous. The wealth of information is overwhelming. Karen does an outstanding job of organizing the posts.
Here are a couple of my favorites:
David B. Bohl presents What Can Your Kids Teach You About Technology? posted at Slow Down Fast Today!, saying, “Technology. The word itself is enough to strike fear into the hearts of those of us old enough to remember when a three-day turn around on postal mail was considered speedy communication, especially after spending some time with today’s young technological savants.”
hank@myinvestingblog.com presents What Effect Does It Have On The Economy When Companies Stop Offering Student Loans? posted at My Investing Blog, saying, “Thought it worth while, finding $$$ for your college aged student might be getting tougher!”
Trevor McKay presents Detection of Early Alzheimers posted at The Alzheimers Resource Centre. This one has nothing to do with College, but I found it interesting, because my mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at age 60. And, to make this disease more fun, my mother-in-law was diagnosed at age 58. I think I’d be pretty good at detecting early Alzheimer’s. Not exactly a skill I had hoped to develop, but…there you have it.
Enjoy the Carnival!
Mark Montgomery
Great College Advice
Student-to-Faculty Ratio: Is It Really An Important Statistic?
Student-to-faculty ratio is generally considered to be an indicator of the quality of the educational experience at a college. The lower the ratio, the more personal and intimate the experience ought to be. And yet some colleges have very low ratios and enormous class sizes. Plus, these statistics are easily manipulated by campus administrators.
But what do they really tell us about the quality of a campus. I spent some time on a campus recently and asked students and faculty about the student to faculty ratio. Everyone said it was important, but no one could explain why it’s an important indicator.
Have a look at what I posted on YouTube.
Check out these links for more insights about student-to-faculty ratios and average class size as indicators of educational quality.
And if you want to explore the unintended, negative consequences of having small classes and low student-to-faculty ratios, check out my explanation.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant and College Planner
Carnivals, Old and New
The latest edition of the Carnival of Education is up today at the Elementary Educator, and it’s full of interesting posts, as usual.
In addition, the third edition of a new carnival, the Carnival of College Admission is up. I’m happy to see this Carnival get going–so happy, that I’ll be hosting it next week.
This week’s Carnival of College Admission has articles on extracurricular activities, writing the personal statement, and notes on a couple of plays written by students about the thrills and chills of the whole admissions process.
So have a look around and consider adding your own post to the Carnival. You can submit your entry by using the handy-dandy form.
Mark Montgomery
Great College Advice from
Montgomery Educational Consulting
Changes in How US News Calculates Rankings
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 the rankings the next time they come out.
Many members of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling are outraged, largely because they believe the rankings are misleading, counterproductive, and based on faulty methodology. College counselors generally want students to make college choices that reflect their values, educational needs, and no on someone else’s opinion of what is good or bad.
I agree.
Opinions are opinions, even if they come from experts. Every time I am asked, “what’s the best college,” I always answer, it depends on who’s asking. For me, the best college might be a small, private liberal arts college. For you, it might be a large, public university.
The answer depends on the criteria that are important to you, not the criteria that some editor at US News cooked up.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
GreatCollegeAdvice.com