The post Samford’s New Program for High Achievers first appeared on Great College Advice.

Keep in mind, however, that it’s rarely a good idea to emulate someone else’s topic or writing style.  The point of asking students to write these essays for their college applications is to get a sense of who that individual is as a person.  Copying someone else’s format or incorporating others’ ideas into your own essay is a sure-fire way to muddle things up.

So, by all means, have a look at some good essays to give you a general idea of how other students have completed this highly personal, highly specific assignment.  But when you sit down to write your own, look into your own mind, your own heart, your own soul to formulate the essay that works for you.
Here is a list of college websites that have examples of college essays on them.

Johns Hopkins University‘s Office of Admission

Hamilton College’s Alumni Magazine

Tufts University’s Office of Admission

Connecticut College‘s Office of Admission

The College Board‘s advice on writing essays has a few examples with critique.

If you want a sense of how important the opening lines of your college essay can be, see my own post here, with samples from Stanford.

And if you run across other colleges and universities that public successful examples of essays, please let me know!  I’ll add them to this list.

The post Essays That Worked–Examples of Successful Applications first appeared on Great College Advice.

Dear old Dartmouth, set a watchLest the old traditions fail!Stand as sister stands by brother!Dare a deed for the old Mother!Greet the world, from the hills, with a hail!For the sons of old Dartmouth,For the daughters of Dartmouth.

Being a son or daughter of Dartmouth alumni does give an applicant a slight edge. Top schools do not really set a “quota” or target for how many legacy admits they will make in a year, but there is no doubt that having that connection is going to help.  Legacy status is not a sufficient condition for acceptance: an applicant must have the academic profile as well as other qualitative strengths to bring to the college community.  But when given the choice between admitting two qualified candidates, one a legacy and one another “good kid from a good background,” the admissions office is likely to offer admission to the legacy and a nicely written letter of rejection to the other good kid.
A recent article in the Tufts Daily does an excellent job of explaining legacy admissions.  Have a look.
Keep in mind that the lack of an alumni tie to a particular school will not generally hurt your chances of admission.  But if you do have a parent who attended, that tie might give you a slight advantage.  And when it comes to the most highly selective schools, that advantage just may make the difference between acceptance and rejection.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
 
 

The post Legacy Admission: The Alumni Advantage first appeared on Great College Advice.

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Why is it dangerous to think of college as an “investment”?

When I look at all the data on the returns of going to college and of going to one college over another, this is what I conclude: College is perhaps the best case of what economists call diminishing marginal utility you will ever find.
In other words, the long-term return on getting a bachelor degree at the lowest possible price is quite high. But  when you start to spend more than the minimum required, the marginal return plummets and it very quickly goes from being an investment to being consumption.
Think of it in terms of cars. People say all the time “A car is not an investment”. But that’s actually not true if you need a car in order to get to work. If a $5,000 car allows you to get to a job that pays you $50,000 instead of sitting at home doing nothing, that $5,000 car is a fantastic investment! But buying a more expensive car will not increase your income at all past the point that a solid reliable cheap car will. So once you’ve gotten to the price you need to get reliable transportation, any money you spend on the car stops being an investment and becomes consumption. College is exactly the same.


How important is choosing a college major in determining future financial success—or happiness?
I look at some research in the book that shows that choice of major is not nearly as significant in terms of its impact on financial success as people think: what matters its the career you decide to pursue, not what you happened to major in.
Clearly there are a few majors that really do track very directly with specific careers that you can’t get without that major. Like engineering and accounting, which are great if you want to be an engineer or an accountant. But beyond that, people shouldn’t fret too much about major. People get entry-level jobs in all sorts of fields with all kinds of degrees, and most employers are more interested in your GPA, internships, and work ethic than they are in your major.
 

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Zac offers some very strong opinions about college as an investment, and it’s hard to argue with him.  You cannot really know the value of your an expensive college education–in dollars and cents–until you have lived your entire life.  Even then, it will be virtually impossible to put a dollar value on that education in a way that isolates variables in any convincing, scientific way.  Are my earnings today a direct function of my Ivy League education?  Or my graduate degree?  Or my experience as a high school teacher making a whopping $14k per year? Or my sparkling personality?  Or the quality of friends I make on Twitter?
There is no telling. So when buying a college education, you really need to think about those other values. Does this education have other values that are not captured by economics alone?  And on the other side of the equation, is there something else I could do with these dollars earmarked for tuition that actually does pay a predictable return–in economic terms?
These are the sorts of questions that Zac–and I–encourage parents and students to really think about as they are selecting the right colleges for themselves.
 
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
 

The post Debt Free U–Investing in College and Choosing a Major first appeared on Great College Advice.

Here’s a brief overview of what I learned from DeAngela Burns-Wallace, an assistant dean of admission (and, I may add, an excellent spokesperson for Stanford).

This was a record year for applications to Stanford.  The office of admission received 31,000 applications for admission, a whopping 22% increase over last year’s numbers.  Ms. Burns-Wallace speculated that many factors led to this increase, including the economic turmoil, continued demographic shifts, the changes in early admissions policies at some of its peer institutions, and the fact that Stanford has very rich financial aid packages, especially for those students from families of modest means.  In addition, Mr. Burns-Wallace credited the Dean of Admission, for ramping up Stanford’s recruiting efforts to attract more and more outstanding applicants.

Of these 31,000 applications, Stanford admitted only 2300, for an admissions rate of 7.6%–a figure that nearly identical to Harvard’s admit rate in 2008.  Of these 2300, Stanford is aiming for a class of 1700 first year students.

Applications at Stanford are read first by territory, and then at least one or maybe two other individual readers examine each and every file.  Then the file moves to a committee of at least four admissions officers, and depending on where the applicant falls in the process, the file may even come to a committee of the entire staff.

Stanford has a “restricted early action” admission program for those students who are certain that Stanford is their first choice.  Nine percent of early applicant were admitted, making it slightly easier (statistically speaking!) to be admitted early.  But the admissions crew was very cautious in admitted students early, in part because of the difficulty of predicting eventual numbers of applications in the regular admissions pool.  Stanford doesn’t hesitate to reject applications outright in the early pool, and 14% of early applications were deferred to the regular admissions pool.  Of those who were deferred, 10% of those were offered admission.  Ms. Burns-Wallace stressed that if an applicant is deferred to spring, it is because the admissions office feels that the candidate is a viable applicant with many strengths.

During the Question and Answer period, many of the counselors asked good questions that elicited helpful information from Ms. Burns-Wallace, and from an undergraduate student who was on hand to provide the student perspective.  Here is a rundown of the questions and the answers.

Questions and Answers

1. One counselor asked a rumor she had heard that Stanford was somehow required to admit a certain percentage of applicants from the state of Califonia.  The answer is no.  Ms. Burns-Wallace explained that 40% of the applicant pool is from California, so naturally a relatively large percentage (33% this year) of accepted students were also from California.  Obviously this is a big state, Stanford is in California, and as with other colleges, the home state of accepted students reflects the composition of the applicant pool.

   2.    Another counselor asked which programs are strongest.  The answer is that all are top notch.  Ms. Burns-Wallace stressed that the advising system at Stanford is also quite strong, so every student has the opportunity to explore a variety of different disciplines during their undergraduate program.  However, the student piped up to say that three programs, in particular, have grown in popularity in recent years:  human biology, product design, and earth systems.

   3.    In response to a question about international admissions, Ms. Burns-Wallace (herself a former Foreign Service Officer in Beijing) highlighted the deep collective international experience of the admissions officers.  Several of the admissions officers have strong overseas experience, and several have been reading international application for years.  In addition, there is an committee dedicated to international admissions.  The only difference in the process is that international applications are read with an eye to the student’s ability to pay:  international admissions is not need blind.  Few international students (about 30 this year) receive any financial assistance to attend.  It’s important to note, however, that American citizens living abroad and permanent resident aliens are considered within the “regular,” need blind admissions pool, and are not really considered “international” students.

   4.    The Stanford supplemental questions to the Common Application are super important in the admissions process.  The admissions committee is best able to discern one’s true interest in Stanford in the answers to these questions.  in addition, they are able to get a strong sense of how the student thinks.  What is important with most of these questions (as in most essay questions offered up by just about any college) is to explain not the “what” of the question, but the “why.”  Thus the committee is not looking for “right” answers to the questions.  They are looking for genuine, creative, interesting, and revealing answers that give the reader a sense of the writer.  They seek students who have original ideas, whose minds are burbling with curiosity—and the wherewithal to turn that curiosity into questions—and answers.  Stanford does not seek out intellectuals who are purely theoretical thinkers. Stanford searchers for doers, people who will relentlessly pursue solutions to problems of whatever sort.

   
   

   5.    In this vein, both the admissions officer and the student representative stressed the “entrepreneurial spirit” of Stanford.  The focus, again, is on seeking solutions, not on sitting around in contemplation of how many angels dance on heads of pins.   Stanford students are not geeks: they are smart folks who want to solve problems and create stuff.

   6.    Our hosts stressed that Stanford’s campus is big.  Huge, in fact.  Eight thousand acres.  Getting from place to place on foot can take sometime.  So having a bike on campus is key—everyone’s favorite mode of transport.  Biking is so common that lanes have been painted on the walkways and bikeways, and even a traffic circle has been installed in at least one busy biking intersection to cut down on accidents and frustration.  And this was borne out on our tour—bikers zipped in and out and around our group.  Being a pedestrian on this campus can be a bit unnerving, because everyone seems to be mounted upon a two-wheeled conveyance.

All in all, I enjoyed my visit to Stanford, and feel fortunate to have finally been able to see this renowned campus for myself.

Mark Montgomery
College Counselor

The post A Visit to Stanford first appeared on Great College Advice.

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.

Great College Advice

The post Keeping Perspective on Selective College Admissions first appeared on Great College Advice.