Is An Expensive Private College Education Worth the Money?

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Is an expensive private college education worth the money? Many have to tried to use statistically prove this one way or another. The fact is that you cannot control the most important variables: humans who graduate from college. They choices they make while attending and after college have at least as much bearing on the stats as the cost of the diploma.

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Class of 2017 Early Application Results from Highly Selective Colleges: What Do They Indicate?

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Early application acceptance numbers are in for Ivy League and other highly selective schools. Read on to check out what percent got admitted and about early trends in applications for the Class of 2017.

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Advice on College Admission, Standardized Testing from Michelle Obama

Students at Denver’s South High School played host to First Lady Michelle Obama this past Monday.  Students asked the First Lady about standardized tests, getting into college, and her advice to them as they enter the world as adults.

Here’s a snippet from the Denver Post article that reported on her visit.

The Princeton University graduate, in town for a day of mentoring, also let some of the students at South High School in on a secret: She never performed “great” on standardized tests. Straight A’s, student government, sports, teacher recommendations and her essays are what led her to the Ivy League.

But while Obama said she didn’t consider the tests a good indicator of future success, she told the students that they are “part of the system” and need to be taken seriously.

And she urged them to focus on the thing they have most control over: their grades.

“Fundamentally, the difference between an A and a B oftentimes is in your own hands,” she said, responding to a student’s question about whether it was fair to use test scores as the measure of school performance when many kids can’t speak English.

You can also view a video of her Q&A session, including some remarks about going to standardized tests at South High School.

Mark Montgomery
College Counselor


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.

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