The Stress of College Admissions Means We Spend More Time With Our Kids. Good?

The Economix blog at the New York Times reports on a report (can you do that?) that concludes that the reason more and more college educated parents are spending so much time with their kids (when it would seem that it would be more rational for them to use their educations to make more money) is a result from the increasingly competitive nature of college admissions.
Interesting
Me? I’m going to skip my son’s soccer game tomorrow and make some money!
Just kidding.
Actually, as a college planner, I know that if I’m cheering him from the sidelines, he’ll feel loved, and strive to achieve, and therefore be admitted to Harvard seven years from now.
Just kidding again.
Let me know what YOU think:  More Parent-Child Quality Time? Thank Harvard – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant

Top Colleges See Little Fall in Freshman Commitments

Jacques Steinberg of the New York Times reports today that Top Colleges See Little Fall in Freshman Commitments.

Unsurprisingly, students offered admission to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Pomona are accepting those offers at more or less the same rates as in years past. All of these schools have increased their financial aid budgets this year over last to ensure that yields stay constant.

But as Steinberg admits, only a small fraction of colleges have reported yield rates, and many colleges (including the likes of Georgetown) still have room in their freshman classes. The effects of the economic meltdown on college enrollments still remain to be seen, and we’re several weeks from having a full understanding of how the economy will affect both college budgets and the experience of the students who do matriculate.

Stay tuned.

Mark Montgomery
Independent College Consultant


May 11 UPDATE:  According to an article in today’s issue of The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s yield was 2% lower than last year, forcing the admissions office to pull 50-60 students off the wait list. This is not a huge decline, and probably something that would have made the news, were it not for the kooky economic situation.

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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All Colleges Are Feeling Financial Squeeze…Even the Richest

According to an article in today’s New York Times, Harvard announced that its endowment has lost 22%, and may lose up to 30% by the end of its fical year in June.  Harvard depends on its endowment income for 35% of its operating budget.  So it is undeniable that the financial squeeze will affect every college, public and private, in the country.


What does that mean for individual families?  First, don’t panic  Your son or daughter is not a statistic, and you should not make rash or hasty microeconomic decisions based solely on the macroeconomic picture.  You need to do your homework, develop a careful strategy that includes financial safety schools (not just admissions safety schools), and do the best you can on those applications.


And if you are a freshman, sophomore, or junior?  Keep up those grades.  Work hard.  The more you achieve in high school, the better your chances for a solid financial aid package at a school that fits you well.


Mark Montgomery

Educational Consultant



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

In Defense of Large University Endowments

The Los Angeles Times ran an opinion piece today written by Anthony W. Marx, the president of Amherst College, in which he eloquently defended independent decision-making by independent colleges.  In the past year or so, Congress has had its knickers in a twist about the rising value of college endowments at some private colleges–even as tuition rates have continued to rise.


Now with the economic downturn, I expect the outrage about balooning college endowments will subside–because they’re not balooning very much right now.  Up until the past few weeks, the “American Way” has been characterized by debt burdens, excessive leverage, and wanton spending.  Our collective profligacy has caught up with us, and the immediate future doesn’t appear very rosy.


If we remember Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants, we can think of Congress and the rest of the outraged public (or, the grasshoppers) complaining that private colleges (the ants) were unnecessarily stuffing their mattresses with investments.  Well, winter has now come, and the ants are sighing with relief that they made some good decisions.


Congressional grasshoppers, left out in the cold, how have to turn their attention to the messes they neglected, rather than continuing to complain about the apparent wisdom of the ants.  Most private colleges have weathered economic storms for decades, if not centuries in some cases.  While some colleges have gone under (and a few of the more spenthrift colleges may lose their shirts in this downturn), we don’t hear about Harvard or Yale or Vanderbilt going belly up like AIG, Lehman Brothers, or Washington Mutual.


Undoubtedly well-endowed colleges and universities will feel the economic pain of the current crisis, and while many (like Amherst) will try to continue to offer large financial aid packages to those who need them.  It will be interesting to see, however,  if all of them will be able to make good on every pledge they made a few months ago when their endowments wer at record highs.  If university endowments have shrunk by 40% in the past year (as has the average porfolio), we may see some colleges backtracking.


Ants will be ants.


Mark Montgomery

College Admissions Consultant




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Elite Colleges Take More Students from Waiting Lists

This was a brutal year for admissions to top colleges. The applicant pool was larger than ever before. Harvard and Princeton did away with their early decision programs. Many elite colleges, including the Ivies, Lafayette, Bowdoin, and Stanford, announced generous new financial aid policies.
And many colleges increased the size of their waiting lists, in part because of the uncertainty these changes wrought in admissions offices at these schools.
The result is that many colleges are taking many more students from their waiting lists than in the past.
Here’s a snippet from a recent article about waiting lists from the Wall Street Journal:

The wait-list bonanza isn’t because colleges have more slots available for students — in fact, overall enrollment levels at many schools remained the same as last year.

Instead, colleges this year faced more uncertainty in the applications process. For one thing, there’s a growing population of high-school seniors — many of whom submit applications to multiple schools. But for highly selective schools, what really affected the process was the move by two Ivy League schools to end their early-admissions programs. Also at play were policy changes that made more financial aid available to middle- and upper-class students.

So while this is good news for some students on waiting lists, keep in mind that the numbers are still quite small. Here are the numbers that will pulled off the waiting list at some schools:

University of Wisconsin-Madison: This year: 800; Last year 6
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: This year 300; Last year 226
Boston College: This year 250; Last year 117
Harvard University: This year 200: Last year 50
Princeton University: This year 90; Last yaer 47
Georgetown University: This year 80; Last year 29
Yale University: This year 46; Last year 50
Hamilton College: This year: 36; Last year: 24
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: This year 35; Last year: 20
Johns Hopkins University: This year: 30; Last year: 86
Swarthmore College: This year: 22; Last year: 42
Pomona College: This year: 16; Last year: 17
University of Chicago: This year: 10 to 15; Last year: 0
Stanford University: This year: 0; Last year: 0
University of Virginia: This year: 0; Last year: 150

 

Mark Montgomery
College Counselor

 

Claremont-McKenna and Lafayette: Changes in Financial Aid

Two more colleges have readjusted their financial aid policies in the wake of Harvard’s decision to woo the middle classes by offering richer aid packages (which I wrote about here). The changes were reported in Inside Higher Ed:

Two more colleges have joined the growing number pledging to eliminate loans for low-income students. Claremont McKenna College announced Monday that it would eliminate loans from the aid packages of all current and new students, effective this coming fall. Lafayette College on Monday announced that it would eliminate loans in the packages of students from families with incomes of up to $50,000 and limit to $2,500 a year the loans in aid packages of families with incomes of between $50,000 and $100,000. Lafayette also announced plans to increase the size of its faculty by 35 positions (or about 20 percent) over five years, without increasing the size of the student body.

Families concerned about paying for college should take note of these changes at many of the nation’s most selective and well-endowed colleges. They are becoming more affordable.
However, also keep in mind that these financial aid changes will also lead to higher application numbers and increasing selectivity at these colleges. Harvard’s applications were up 19% this year over last, and you can expect that all the colleges with revamped aid policies will experience similar increases next year.
Mark Montgomery
College Counselor
Montgomery Educational Consulting

More Volleyball at Colorado Crossroads

This weekend I’ll be back at the Denver Convention Center dispensing Great College Advice to volleyball players and their families participating in the Colorado Crossroads national qualifier volleyball tournament.volleyball tournament
It’s great fun talking to families about obtaining sports scholarships, the differences between NCAA Division 1 and NCAA Division 3 (see my post here), and how students can find ways to play in college–even without a full-ride scholarship.
I have to admit, too, that I’ve learned a ton about volleyball!
I’ll be there with my friend, Nancy Nitardy, a former Division 1 swim coach at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Indiana University. She helps coach kids about getting a sports scholarship. She also wrote a terrific book called, Get Paid to Play. We’ll have copies on sale at the tournament.
Mark Montgomery
Independent College Counselor