From our humor files, we bring you expert Educational Consultant, Mr. Stephen Colbert, who has advice for acing the SAT tests–and other aspects of college admission.
Continue readingStephen Colbert, Educational Consultant: How to Ace the SATs
Recommended Educational Consultant in Denver, Colorado
Who doesn’t love a compliment? Yesterday afternoon I received a nice note from the mother of one of my clients who was accepted early to Dartmouth. He’s smart, talented, and fun to hang around. I enjoyed working with him on his essays. Apparently, he felt good about the experience, too.
Here’s what his mom had to say:
Subject: Thank you!
Dear Mark,
I just wanted to say thanks for helping Alex achieve his goal of attending Dartmouth. He is very excited about this opportunity and can’t wait to get on with the next step in his life. Your help was invaluable in this achievement.
Alex enjoyed his meetings with you and I know he listened to all your great college advice. I appreciate how the two of you handled everything so smoothly. I am feeling lucky that I ran across your name on the internet. I know other families would benefit from your services. I will give you the highest recommendation when the subject of college apps comes up with the folks I talk to.
Thanks again for helping us out. I know Alex will always remember you as I hear him speak of you often.
Sincerely,
MJR
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
Ivy League Education Leaves Man Homeless
Sometimes people think that an Ivy League education will guarantee success in life. Well, it all depends on your vision of success.
Ted Pascoe and I attended Dartmouth around the same time. Now he’s homeless.
Sometimes you just have to take a stand. The non-profit program Ted runs for homeless seniors in Denver suffered a severe budget cut at the hands of the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG). Incensed, Ted has decided to join his clients–by sleeping on the streets.
Some may call it crazy. Others will call it leadership. Ted is a gutsy guy. And get this: his mom is proud of him. Not many Ivy League grads would be so lucky.
Mark Montgomery
Do Elite Colleges Produce the Best-Paid Graduates?
Is an Ivy League education worth it? Statistically, it might be–depending on what statistics we’re talking about, and how those numbers are used. A study by PayScale, described on the New York Times Economix Blog, indicates that graduates of some elite colleges make more than peers from other colleges.
I spend a lot of time explaining that each individual is not a statistic. Whether or not they earn a lot of money depends on what their major is, the skills they learn, the professions they pursue, and their general attitudes about life and money. Statistics are interesting, but they are not predictors of any one individual’s salary.
Case in point: graduates of my alma mater, Dartmouth College, have the highest median mid-career salary: $129,000 annually. Does this mean that all the folks I saw at my 25th reunion last month were making that? No! A median is a median. Half the alumni make less than that amount, half make more.
It’s nice to know that my classmates do better, statistically, than our peers who graduated from other universities. But this knowledge does not put money in my pocket. If I want to make the median or more, I can’t just rest on my diploma. I still have to work for it.
So before you invest all that money in an elite college, remember that there are plenty of folks who went to other colleges who make well above the median of their alma maters, and who make far more than the median among Dartmouth graduates.
Statistics are statistics. But they are not predictors of an individual’s financial success.
Mark Montgomery
College Planner
Do Elite Colleges Produce the Best-Paid Graduates? – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.
Holding College Chiefs to Their Words
The Wall Street Journal came up with a neat trick: asking college presidents to write essays from the application to their own college. Tough assignment!. The results were reported the other day in an article entitled, “Holding College Chiefs to Their Words”.
It’s a good read, and a helpful tonic to high school juniors who struggle to figure out what topic to choose. You can also read the completed essays on the WSJ.com website.
One of them is even from my former major adviser at Dartmouth, who is now the President of Carleton College in Minnesota. I gotta read that one!
Mark Montgomery
Keeping Perspective on Selective College Admissions
Theresa, a dear friend whom I haven’t seen in ages, called me the other day. We talked for a long time. Her son is a sophomore in high school. As his doting mother, Theresa is in a lather about his prospects for college admission.
As we hadn’t spoken in quite a while, Theresa asked me about my philosophy about college admissions. She wanted to know what I thought were the quality colleges.
Theresa is an educator at a major state university. I asked her what good education looks like, in her professional opinion. She responded, predictably, that good education is all about what happens in the classroom between a well-prepared, knowledgeable, caring, and enthusiastic instructor and the willing, capable, and hard-working student.
Moral of the story: education is not about an institution. It is a process that occurs between teachers and students, primarily. It is about learning, not about prestige.
The sad fact is that many of the most prestigious, Gotta-Get-In colleges do not deliver the best quality education—based on this bare-bones definition. They deliver a lot of atmospherics and ivy and Nobel Prize winners and fantastic facilities (for graduate students, anyway). But what happens in the classroom is not necessarily the priority of every Gotta-Got-In institution.
Theresa and I bandied these ideas around for quite some time, and we shared some interesting personal insights about our own educational experiences…both as students and as teachers.
A few hours after we hung up the phone, I came across an article written by Gregg Easterbrook, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly who has been a fellow at the Brookings Institution. He wrote an article for Brookings in 2004, entitled “Who Needs Harvard?”
I recommend it to my readers who want a glimpse of how I think about prestige and the Gotta-Get-In colleges. I don’t think Harvard and the rest of the top 25 most selective colleges are all bad: I attended one and taught at another, and I’m proud of my associations with both. Furthermore, several of the top 25 are truly outstanding—places I might be delighted to see my kids or my nieces and nephews attend.
What I decry is the notion that entry into the top 25 becomes a life-or-death pursuit for many kids—and their parents. We all must keep things in their proper perspective: an excellent education can be had a literally hundreds of institutions around the country.
And the quality of a student’s education has much more to do with the initiative, intelligence, and focus of the student than with the quality of the institution she attends.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
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State Universities vs. Private Colleges–A Professor Reflects
During a recent visit to the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, I caught up with an old friend, Professor Bill Worden. He is now a professor of Spanish and director of graduate studies.
Bill was educated at elite private institutions in the Northeast (Dartmouth, Brown), but he teaches at a large, public university.
During our conversation he reflected upon his experience, and about his understanding about the quality of students at both kinds of educational institutions.
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Large State University vs. Small Private Colleges–Which Is Best?
As I traveled around the Deep South last week visiting colleges, I was happy to feel some of my old stereotypes melt away. To be sure, southern colleges reflect their geography and the culture of people of the region. But academically speaking, there are many fantastic schools, excellent students, talented professors, innovative programs, and beautiful campuses. It’s a pity that more of my clients from the West, the Northeast, and the Midwest generally will not consider colleges in the South.
I asked my friend Bill Worden, a professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, about these prejudices. Bill and I were pals at Dartmouth, and he grew up in Massachusetts. He received his doctorate at Brown. So when he landed a job a UA, he had to make some adjustments in his academic worldview.
So I asked him about his experiences at the University of Alabama, and his impressions of his students, and his discoveries large, public universities in some parts of the United States.
The point is that all types of universities offer excellent educational opportunities to those who take advantage of them. What’s important is finding the college or university that fits you best–a place where you feel comfortable and welcome. For many, the flagship university of your home state may be the best fit for you. For many others, however, a smaller, more intimate setting may be best.
But whatever you deem best for you, don’t let parochial views of your peers, neighbors, or acquaintances influence your priorities too much. Take the time to investigate the types of schools that fit you best. Be willing to think outside the box and look at other regions of the country. Don’t make uninformed judgments based on stereotypes. Determine your own, personal educational priorities, and take the time to find the best college for you.
Mark Montgomery
College Counselor and Southern College Enthusiast
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More College Rankings: Best Global Universities
The Times Higher Education in the UK recently released its rankings of the top 200 universities in the world. Seven out of the top 10 are American universities. Can you guess which ones are near the top of the list?
I did my undergraduate work at number 54, earned my doctorate at number 157, was a graduate teaching fellow at number 1, and was a professor for four years at number 39.
Not too shabby.
Mark Montgomery
College Consultant
Colleges Discuss the Inherent Weaknesses of ACT and SAT Tests
The big show at last week’s conference of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling was a report by NACAC examining the role of SAT and ACT tests in the college admissions process. Essentially, the report called upon colleges to look more carefully at the role of these tests, and called into question their true importance in predicting college success.
The New York Times today carries an excellent analysis of the report in an article titled, “Study of Standardized Admissions Tests is Big Draw at College Conference.”
Colleges and universities know that there is not a lot of convincing research-based evidence that SAT or ACT tests measure academic aptitude or act as good predictors of a student’s success during the first year of college.
However, many of the same colleges that question the tests’ true value will continue to use them because they are useful short cuts to comparing one student against the next.
I wrote a while back about a point raised by Dartmouth’s retiring dean of admission: while the number of applications had skyrocketed in the past decade, his admissions staff had not grown. Of course, computers have simplified much of what admissions offices used to do by hand. But my sense it that many college still rely on the SAT and ACT to make it simpler to reject those whose scores are on the lower end of the scale. And given the conclusion in the Times article, it seems that most of our most selective colleges and universities will continue to use the tests–flawed though they may be.
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