When a client asked me the other day about the importance of student to faculty ratios, I got to thinking about other supposed indicators of educational quality.

The other oft-cited statistic when visiting an admissions office is “average class size.” As with student-to-faculty ratios, the size of the classes at a college is assumed to reflect the quality and the intimacy of the educational experience. Small classes–so the assumption goes–are interactive and provide ample opportunity for interaction between students and faculty. The pedagogy of these classes is more a facilitated discussion than a lecture.

This assumption is generally true: small classes are more interactive. Yet I could cite numerous examples of professors I have known who stand and deliver lectures from prepared notes to a class of seven students. Just because a class is small doesn’t mean it’s any good.

The use of the “average class size” can be very misleading, however, and masks some more important facts about the quality of education delivered by a college or university.
Consider how the following scenarios have an impact on how “average class size” is calculated.

• Some of the smallest classes are taught by the least effective, least popular professors. In a world of university tenure, bad professors cannot be chased out. So they end up teaching ever smaller numbers of students, while the more effective, popular instructors see their class sizes swell.• Some of the smallest classes are in obscure subjects. Some of these are new courses professors are trying out for the first time.
• They can be experimental. And few students are willing to take risks of this sort (credits are too expensive, too dear to take such risks).
  Class sizes in some departments are much smaller than in other departments. Courses for popular majors such as history, economics, and biology may be large, while equally good courses in anthropology and art history may be tiny. Here quality of the individual course is not the issue–it’s the popularity of the major that may affect class size.
• Professors generally do not like teaching huge courses–not because they hate lecturing–but because they hate grading so many tests and term papers. So they ask administrators to cap enrollments, insisting that “small classes are better” (when, in fact, they are simply concerned about their own work load).
• Professors and administrators cap enrollments in popular courses in order to keep the average class size small. Even the most popular courses at small, liberal arts colleges are not allowed to grow large–because those colleges are protecting the ratio. In a competitive environment that values small class sizes over large ones, institutions of higher education are loath to allow classes to grow too large. So from an administrator’s point of view, the question is not so much access to great courses or the quality of the individual course (some large lecture classes in the hands of an outstanding professor can be awesome). An administrator’s job is to keep “average class size” as low as possible.

This final point leads to some very troublesome effects on college campuses. An article a few years back from the alumni magazine of my alma mater, Dartmouth College, points out that the real, untold story is how the mania to protect the “average class size” statistic is shutting students out of popular courses. The article makes the point this way:

In [the department of] economics, with 453 students registered as majors, minors, or modified majors, students get closed out of as many of 20 percent of their course choices, a rate that far exceeds the rate of closeouts campus wide, as estimated by [Dean of the Faculty Carol] Holt.

To further elaborate the point, a “small class” in the economics department at Dartmouth is 30 students: the department would likely cancel a class with such “low” enrollment. While in the department of anthropology, a “small” class might be 5 or 6 (in my department at the University of Denver, a course with fewer than 7 students was considered “uneconomic” and therefore cancelled).

(Note to future economics majors: if you really want to small classes, go to a college where economics is NOT a popular major.)

Believe me, this is not the sort of information you will hear from an admissions counselor. They will sing out their statistics on student-to-faculty ratios (8-to-1 at Dartmouth) and “average class size” is probably around 15 or so.

Student to Faculty Ratios Can Mislead

But the statistics, beautiful though they are, do not tell you the whole story. In fact, they can be grossly misleading. And they do not necessarily bear any relationship to the quality of the education being delivered.

As an alumnus, of course, I would tell you that the quality of the education at Dartmouth is more a function of the quality of the faculty and the quality of the student body. Dartmouth can afford to be more discriminating in its offers of tenure, it offers higher salaries to faculty, and the student body is one that any high-quality faculty member would love to teach. And only teachers who love to teach undergraduates would be motivated to apply for a job at Dartmouth–for there are few graduate students.

In the same breath, however, I would criticize the quality of a Harvard undergraduate education, where the student-to-faculty ratio is an ultra-low 6-to-1, but average class sizes are generally much larger, and graduate teaching assistants perform the overwhelming majority of grading and lead almost all the class discussions. To be graduate student at Harvard is to be on top of the heap; to be an undergraduate is fun an exciting, but the teaching is just not as good.

Why would I say that?

Two reasons.  First, my experience while a graduate teaching fellow.  I was an assistant for two different courses over a few semesters.  These were 200-level courses in the economics and political science departments (international political economy and political theory, respectively).  While I enjoyed my experience, I found the lectures by the professors to be relatively boring, and I also found it weird that I was leading discussions on the readings despite my relative lack of expertise in either subject. I also was in charge of grading all papers and exams, some of which were awesome, and other were complete pieces of crap. But the professors allowed us to give nothing less than a “B” grade to anything, no matter how horrible or off the mark the work was.

The second is that a friend of mine wrote me a note about his experience in choosing and attending Harvard.  While he enjoyed his time at Harvard overall, his classroom environment not all that memorable.  Here is what he wrote:

I didn’t think very critically about which college was the right “fit”. All I knew about college was gleaned from family trips to University of Notre Dame for football games. I knew I wanted to go away to college, and I had been to Washington DC so I applied to Georgetown. I applied to University of Michigan Ann Arbor as my “safety” school. And at the last minute, my Dad told me he had spoken with a friend whose daughter had gone to Harvard and enjoyed it. So I applied to Harvard.
When I got into Harvard, I was so overwhelmed with people’s responses to that fact that it seemed to me the right thing to do to go there. I had never been to Boston and had no idea what Harvard looked like and no real appreciation for its history. In fact I almost cried when I rode into Harvard Square because it didn’t look at all like “college” to me!
It turned out to be a wonderful experience for me, not because of the undergraduate academic offerings (three or four truly exceptional courses) or the career guidance (zero) but because of the terrific students and graduate students I met and became friends with. It is a part of my life I treasure. Looking back, I’m not at all sure that I couldn’t have gotten an equally wonderful (though of course different) experience at any number of other colleges. I will say though that the Harvard name has opened many doors for me, many of which I am probably not even aware.

So how can you uncover the truth behind the statistics?

Here’s a short video I did a while back expressing gratitude for the clarity with which Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, calculated its student to faculty ratio.

The Truth Behind Student to Faculty Ratios

How can we compare and contrast the educational services offered by different institutions? How can we get beyond these simplistic numbers?

You must ask more substantive questions about how courses are taught, and not to focus solely upon the size of the class.

But there are other questions that prospective students and their parents might ask in order to understand and predict what their experience might be like if they matriculated to a particular college or university.

1. What is the “course load” for faculty members? How many undergraduate courses is each faculty member expected to teach every year? Is this number the same for all departments, or does it vary by discipline?
2. What percentage of courses is taught by adjunct or part-time faculty? Is this percentage the same across departments, or do some departments rely on part-timers more than others?
3. What percentage of courses has a waiting list? How does the college (or the individual department) determine who gets off the waiting list and when?
4. How many campus lecture halls seat 100 students? 50 students? 500 students? How many seminar rooms are there? What is the ratio of lecture halls to seminar rooms?
5. How small must a class be before it is canceled by the administration?
6. What is the most popular course on campus (or in your department)? Is enrollment in this course capped? Who gets in, and who doesn’t?

As you ask these questions, you should not permit admissions people to give vague answers. They will hem and haw. They will will be imprecise.

But these figures do exist on campus, and they exist in the office of institutional research. The administrators in this office crunch the numbers. They have the facts. If you really want to know this information, you need to ask to be put in touch with someone in the office institutional research who can provide this information to you.

Still, you must not focus solely on the statistics. Every educational institution has administrative problems like the ones at Dartmouth described above You will never be able to guarantee that your son or daughter will not be shut out of a class. You will not be able to ensure that every course he or she takes is a gem.

But if you dig deeply enough, you may be able to figure out how forthcoming and honest the faculty and administration is about the difficulty of measuring educational quality, and you will learn how they are working to deliver the quality you expect–and will be paying for.

Need to understand the data and how it applies to you?

The college admissions counselors at Great College Advice have access to the latest higher education data to help students and families make the right decisions about their educational paths. We can guide you toward the information you need to choose the right colleges and ensure that you get the educational opportunities you most desire. Give us a call for a free consultation or fill out our contact form. We’d be delighted to get acquainted and explain how we help families make the admissions process less stressful and more successful.

Great College Advice

The post Class Size & Student to Faculty Ratios: What Research Says? first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

Sadly, there is very little research to indicate how much you could expect to earn after gaining a degree from this, that, or the other college. We do have statistics reports of averages. This one at Payscale.com is an example. But an average is not a prediction of what your son or daughter will make upon graduation. About half the kids make more than that. And half make less. Which will be your child? Above or below the average?

Even with salary averages by college, educational ROI would not be predictive for an individual student. An average is an average, after all, and how could we predict that Susie would earn above the average and that Sam would earn below that average? (Unless, of course, Susie were from Lake Wobegon…where all the children are above average…).

Plus there are kids at cheaper schools that make way more than the averages for those expensive private schools. Who made the better bet: the kid who paid less for college, or the one who paid more?

The fact is that aggregate data is unhelpful in providing clear guidance to individual high school graduates. Would you buy a Harvard degree if you were destined to earn below the salary average for that institution? What crystal ball will tell us where we will end up five, ten, or twenty-five years after graduation?

The reason for the dearth of the sort of solid research for which we all pine is that it cannot be done. Solid, scientific, and predictive research requires double-blind experiments with variables that can be controlled. When it comes to educational ROI, such controlled experiments would be impossible.

Why? Because human beings are darned complex, and too many uncontrollable variables enter the equation. What are the variables that have an impact on one’s financial success in life (other than the name of the university on one’s diploma)?

Let’s start a list.

• Educational background prior to entering college (e.g., Philips Exeter vs PS 142)
• Socio-economic status prior to entering college (e.g., New England blueblood vs. first-generation Sudanese)
• Grades earned in college (e.g., a studious 3.5 GPA or a slacker 2.4
• Major in college (e.g., engineering vs. education)
• Location a person chooses to live in after college (e.g., Santa Barbara vs. Omaha)
• The type of profession one seeks (e.g., teacher vs. neurosurgeon)
• Other skills a student develops beyond the major (e.g., the philosophy major who also studies organic chemistry)
• Jobs or internships the student might have had during college (e.g., dishing ice cream on Cape Cod vs. doing an accounting gig with PriceWaterhouseCoopers)
• Absence or presence of well-connected family members (e.g., a mom who CEO of Acme Technology and raised gobs of dough for a presidential campaign vs. a dad who drives a cab in Brooklyn)

Get the picture? Controlling for all these variables so that we could develop a scientific study that gave us meaningful comparisons to help us predict educational ROI for a particular student is virtually impossible. No aspiring academic with an understanding of research methodology would take this on.

But the biggest problem is that we can never compare a single kid who had two lives one in which he went to a high-priced college and one in which he went to a community college and later transferred to the state school.

Or the student who majored in business in his first life and then majored in English in his second.

Or the student who earned good grades in his first life, and then floated by with a C-average in his second.

Now, if we could clone people and set the clones off in two different directions that would be really cool. And conclusive. We could see which genetically identical person earned the most after having attended this school or the other. As long as those genetically identical individuals had lived identical lives in the same household to the age of 18 (if, however, the clones were “separated at birth,” we’d see our research devolve into the nature vs. nurture morass).

The fact is, folks, that we all want to be able to scientifically tote up the numbers to come up with a predictive return on our educational investment.

Can’t be done.

So we’re left with a silly, vapid argument between those who say “spend the money” and those who say “save your money.” Both are right.  Both are wrong. The argument gets us nowhere.

Fundamental principles we can consider in making the decision

Still, might there be some fundamental principles we can consider in making the decision about whether to spend tons of money on a college education? Let’s see if we can’t come up with some.

1.  How big an investment is the price tag, relative to current family income? Some can easily afford a quarter of a million dollars for an education. Some cannot. So if you have the money, it’s worth it. If you don’t have it, it’s not worth it. (Remember Aesop’s fable of the “Fox and the Grapes”?). Hmmm…this is not a very satisfying fundamental principle. Next!

2.  Will you have to go into debt to finance this expensive degree? The bigger the debt burden, the less likely the return on the investment will cancel out that debt. Then again, it depends on what you end up doing after that degree. If you’re a brain surgeon or a successful venture capitalist, then who cares? You’ll be able to pay off that debt in the blink of an eye. But if you become a teacher or an unsuccessful venture capitalist, then clearly the investment wasn’t worth it. But notice: you can’t know whether the investment was worth it until AFTER you have a successful–or unsuccessful career! This is getting frustrating, isn’t it?

3.  Speaking of which, your professional aspirations do play a role. If you plan to be a kindergarten teacher or an orchestral musician, then spending a quarter of a million bucks for an education isn’t worth it. However, if you want to be a brain surgeon, you have no choice but to go to college…and then go into debt for medical school. But here’s a contrarian thought: do you have to go to college to be a successful business executive?

Not necessarily, of course (we all know the story of Bill Gates, for whom Harvard “wasn’t worth it”). To go a step further, do you really have to go to college at all to make a lot of money? I have a cousin who went to school to learn how to do auto body work. He can now buy and sell me several times over, sends his kids to elite private schools, drives a brand new Mercedes, and has a vacation home in Vermont. Where did I go wrong….?

4.  Savvy shoppers for educational services should do some price comparisons. But the fact is that very few students pay the actual tuition sticker price. You see, because of the way financial aid (both merit-based and need-based) is allocated, each individual pays a different price for that education–especially at the colleges with heavy price tags.

So here again we have another variable for which we much provide some scientific control in our research: we need to compare students who paid full price or students who received a full scholarship. Or half a scholarship. Or something. (Oh my:  not another variable for which we need a control!)

5.  There are aspects of education that do not boil down to dollars and cents. For some, education is not merely about preparing for a profession. For some, it’s also about intellectual inquiry–pushing your capacities to the limit. There is a spiritual element to education that transcends a “market price.” This is all well and good: but it certainly doesn’t get us any closer to calculating our educational ROI. To do a calculation, we need numbers, and these folks who find an intrinsic value in education just aren’t numbers people.

The fact is that the argument as to whether or not an expensive private education is “worth it” simply cannot be won. The argument isn’t really an argument: it all boils down to one’s personal values and preferences.

Can people who go to state universities have satisfying, successful careers?

You bet. Can Ivy League graduates end up earning less than $40k per year for the past 25 years? You bet (I have a Dartmouth friend who is a respected ornithologist who lives in the Amazon, has discovered many new species, and has never made more than $40k in a year: was his Ivy League investment “worth it”?).

Advice on the worth of an expensive private college education

So in the absence of research, we need a crystal ball. Or we need good, solid, personalized advice from someone who can help a family identify their priorities. Perhaps a professional guidance counselor who can help a student explore his or her academic strengths and weaknesses.

Who can discuss “educational philosophy” with a family to find out whether the educational priority is on “getting a job” or on “leading the examined life.” What it all amounts to is “different strokes for different folks.” My job is not to win an argument. My job is to figure out which stroke you’re swimming and help keep you moving in your chosen direction.

Great College Advice

The post Is An Expensive Private College Education Worth the Money? first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

As a college admissions consultant, I am just going to have to disagree that somehow kids today are “better” than we were.  This is not true.  We were all pretty amazing in our own right.  Sure, back in the fall of 1980, we were all more amazed by the incredible people around us than we were in ourselves.  Many of us crossed the Green every day, looked up at Baker Tower, and wondered how the heck we were so fortunate to be chosen to attend Dartmouth.

The Requirements

Today’s kids are certainly much more busy than we were.  The “requirements” for admission have seemingly gone up.  And in a sense this is because there is a perceived need to be all things to all people in order to get admitted.  But in my experience, the kids who are admitted are not superhuman.  They have focus.  They have some drive and energy.  And as a result of that focus, they have accomplished some pretty cool stuff.

And we, ourselves, accomplished more in high school than we give ourselves credit for–on the field, in the classroom, on the stage, in our communities.  Yes, today’s kids applying for college are a talented bunch. But so were we.
One last thing:  our message to kids today should not be that they should be superhuman.  Rather, we should teach them to focus on contributions and achievements in the things that matter to them. 

7 Reasons Most People Are Rejected From the Ivy League

We should not reinforce the message (that is well-established urban legend in high schools today) that kids must break their necks to do thousands of hours of service, win the state championship, write-and then star in–the school play, AND win the Intel science award.  Any one of those things, by itself, will be plenty–and if coupled with good grades/scores and good recommendations–will be enough to get accepted to a highly competitive college or university.

By reinforcing this idea that “busy is better,” we are actually driving our young people into the ground.  I work with many who never sleep, who worry incessantly, who are just, plain unhappy in high school.  Why?  Because they believe this myth:  that only the superhuman get into places like Dartmouth.  So they try to attain this mythical ideal such that they lose their focus, spread themselves too thin, and ultimately fail in their bid for the top schools.

Two things do remain true

First, it’s not easy to get into places like Dartmouth.  Second, Dartmouth people, by and large, have figured out what’s important to them.  Each of us has talent, skill, drive, and commitment.  The nice thing is that we all have different sets of those things.  And we had those things back in the spring of 1980 when we received our acceptance letters–just as a new crop of lucky kids has them in equal measure.

So my message 

Recognize that getting into Dartmouth today is essentially no different than it was in our day.  A few things have changed about the admissions process itself. But today’s young people are no more or less capable than those of yesteryear.

Educational Consultant

The post Is It Really More Difficult To Get Into the Ivy League Now Than It Used to Be? first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

Hi, I’m Mark Montgomery here with some Great College Advice, and today we’re going to talk about Dartmouth College.

There are probably at least three things you need to know about Dartmouth College. And maybe that’s prefaced by, first, the fact that I went there. So I know a lot about this school. Both good and bad, and while I’m a loyal alumnus, I’m not beyond seeing the warts on the actual institution. So it’s a great place; it’s not for everyone.

But what are some things that you need to think about as you’re examining Dartmouth College in the context of the other seven Ivy League institutions?

The Size of Dartmouth

Well, the first is it’s the smallest of all the other Ivy League schools. That means that Dartmouth College and it is the only college among the Ivy Leagues. So classes generally are going to be smaller. They are generally going to be taught by professors. While there are some professional schools at Dartmouth, they are very much disconnected from the undergraduate experience.

There is a growing number of graduate students in the arts and sciences. Shall we say, and there’s actually a change now that they’re creating a school for all of those programs. But the numbers of graduate students that are actually in the classroom with the undergraduate students? Really insignificant. Whereas at some of the other larger Ivies like Penn or Cornell, you’re going to see graduate students a lot. Not so at Dartmouth.

Dartmouth’s Location

The second thing that you might think about is Dartmouth is geographically the most remote. It’s two hours, almost exactly, by car, from Logan Airport in Boston, and it is in the woods. We talk about it, you know, the granite of New Hampshire and the woods and all that stuff. But the area of the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River is actually relatively cosmopolitan. There are lots of start-ups in the area, housing prices are kind of crazy because lots of people want to live there. There’s the Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital as well as the veterans hospital. Which makes it a medical center for all of upper New England.

It has a great arts center, the Hopkins Center, which is a magnet for artistic creativity in the region. It doesn’t feel remote. There are only a couple of stoplights. Maybe three, four stoplights in the whole town, but it doesn’t feel like it is in the boonies. Actually, it’s a relatively cosmopolitan atmosphere.

It is Conservative

The third thing is that Dartmouth has often been considered the most conservative of the Ivies. In some ways that’s true. It’s certainly the Ivy that has the greatest participation in the Greek system. So an overwhelming percentage of students, and last I heard at a reunion was that about 70% of students belong to either a fraternity or a sorority. Now, it’s definitely true that that culture, you know, it may or may not be your thing. However, there are openly gay members of fraternities, there’s actually, recently, was an openly gay president of a fraternity. It is not a completely intolerant environment.

The Demographics

And of course, you also have to look at the fact that like all of the Ivies, the demographic is changing. Whereas all of the Ivies used to be dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that kind of looked like me. Actually now, according to statistics reported to the government, only 47% of students at Dartmouth are white. There are 14% who are Asians, 7% are Black or African-American, 8% are Latino or Hispanic. And an interesting 2% are actually Native Americans because Dartmouth was established way back in 1769 to educate Native Americans.

It’s a promise that they actually didn’t make good on until the 1970s when President Kemeny at the time said, “We must do what we said we’re going to do.” So they’ve made a very concerted effort to recruit Native Americans with some success. Also, we have to remember that 5% of students are of more than one race. Which is kind of the way America rolls right now. And there are 9% of students who did not declare their race on the form.

Either that’s because they were confused and didn’t know how to answer the question, or actually more likely I like to think these are guilt-ridden white Anglo-Saxon Protestant types who decide that they just are feeling too guilty about their white privilege and decide not to mark their race on the form.

So anyway, however you slice it, Dartmouth is a much more diverse place, certainly, than when I went there and certainly the generation before. So while it’s conservative, maybe because of the fraternity system, that doesn’t mean that it’s an intolerant place.

Get Outside and Explore

I would also highlight the fact that because of its remote location, it is a paradise if you’re interested in outdoor activities of any kind. They have their own skiway, they own a mountain with this really cool lodge at the bottom of it, so if you want to go hiking at any time, there’s this network of cabins and stuff. It’s really a cool place if you’re interested in the outdoors.

So Dartmouth, the smallest of the Ivy League, yes; most remote, but not in the boonies; conservative, perhaps by some measures but certainly reflective of the American population and certainly reflective of all the other Ivy League schools; and if you like the woods, it’s the place to be.

So check out Dartmouth, and if you’re interested in figuring out how to get in, let me know, give me a call.

The post Educational Consultant on Dartmouth College in the Ivy League Context first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

Columbia and Harvard saw small decreases in applications, too, while the others (Cornell, Yale, Princeton, and Brown) had modest gains in their application numbers.
Why does this happen from year to year?  Hard to know.  UPenn credits its partnership with KIPP charter schools for at least part of the increase:  more applicants applied for application fee waivers than ever before.

Dartmouth’s precipitous drop may be due to a lot of factors, including ending the practice of accepting AP (Advanced Placement) courses for credit, its lousy publicity in recent months, and the continued dominance of the fraternity system in campus social life. The director of admission, Maria Laskaris, is leading an analysis of the reasons for the decline.
Whether winners or loser, we can expect that overall it will continue to be more and more difficult to get into the Ivy League in coming years.

Great College Advice

The post The Ups and Downs of Ivy League Admissions first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

With the exception of Dartmouth, which saw a decrease in its applications of ~12.5% (which we hypothesize is due to the relatively recent bad press that the school received about its Greek life), and Cornell, who has not reported final numbers, yet, the balance of the Ivy League schools saw an increase in early applications over last year.  Harvard, for example, reported a whopping 15% more applications for the Class of 2017 than for the Class of 2016.  Other highly selective schools such as MIT (up 9%) and Northwestern (up 7%) also saw a significant increase in their early application numbers year over year.

While many schools haven’t reported their early results, here is a chart that we pulled together to give you a flavor of what’s been happening out there.  It details selected highly competitive schools and their early admissions acceptance rates.  If you follow overall admissions rates at these types of schools, you’ll see that the Early Admit Rates noted below are significantly higher than each school’s historic overall admit rates.

In doing my research, I also noted that a number of the schools deferred a significant portion of their early applicants to the Regular Decision pool.  Yale, for example, deferred over 55% of its early applicants, Brown seems to have deferred around 70% and Dartmouth 35%.  Anecdotally, it seems that MIT has also deferred a tremendous number of its applicants, but we don’t have any firm numbers.
These deferral numbers indicate that the schools are getting early applications from large numbers of qualified candidates, and the schools are not prepared to say “no” until they see what the Regular Decision pool brings.  Still, the schools are also not prepared to say “yes” to these applicants, either, and historically, the number of deferred applicants who ultimately get admitted are few.
The schools that offer an Early Decision plan seem to be filling an unbelievable 40%+ of their freshman class from their early applications.  This means that students who apply Regular Decision to these very selective schools will have an even tougher go of it simply because there are fewer slots to fill.  A while ago, I wrote a blog post trying to answer the question:  Is it easier to get in if you apply early?  Many of the points in that post are relevant here.  Essentially, early applicants most definitely benefit from indicating that a school is their top pick and applying early, but only if the candidate meets the admissions standards of the school in the first place.
The sad part about this current situation is that because qualified students appear to have an advantage if they apply early to these highly competitive institutions, candidates are using early application plans as a strategy to gain admission, even if they are not sure that a given school is actually where they want or ought to go.  Especially if they apply as part of a binding ED program, then whether they are sure or not, if they get in, that’s where they will have to go.  These dynamics are forcing students to make their decisions about college several months earlier in their high schools careers when, perhaps, they haven’t had time to fully explore their options and figure out what is best for them.
The lesson is that if students believe that they might be interested in applying to highly selective schools, they should start their research early.  Applying early can be advantageous, but don’t apply early to a school simply because it is a name brand.  In doing so, other options might be shut out that would ultimately be more suitable.
Andrea Aronson
College Admissions Consultant
Westfield, NJ

The post Early Application Results from Highly Selective Colleges: What Do They Indicate? first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

• What is the audition process like?
• Do they have an all- female group, male group, co-ed group or all of the above?
• Do the groups travel? If so, how much?
•  What kinds of performances do they do?
• What types of musical genres do they sing?
• Do they make recordings?

Most college a cappella groups have websites that you can check out to learn more but better yet, look at the campus calendar of the college you are visiting to see if there is a performance happening while you are there.
Lastly, I would argue that one of the biggest factors in your consideration of joining a college a cappella group is the camaraderie you will find. Many students in college a cappella groups are involved in a variety of other activities (student government, volunteer work, sports, greek life, etc.) aside from singing. However, alumni from these groups will often tell you that the a cappella group they were in was one of the most meaningful experiences they had in college. While honing your singing skills during late night rehearsals it is easy to find yourself surrounded by life-long friends.

The post Do You Sing? Consider Joining An A Cappella Group In College! first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

Watch the video to see more or read the transcription below.

TRANSCRIPT

During a recent visit to Dartmouth College I spent a little time learning about Dartmouth’s unique “D-plan.” At Dartmouth, the campus operates on a quarter system where students have the opportunity to decide which terms they are on campus and which terms they do an off campus program. During their off-terms students may participate in a study abroad program, internship or any number of valuable educational experiences.

However, one of the interesting parts of this structure is that all students are required to have an on campus term during their sophomore summer. So, even though some students across the country may think that summer school sounds like a drag. Students at Dartmouth actually love the chance to be in Hanover, NH in the summer. There are such a wide variety of outdoor opportunities in the Upper Valley during the summer months.

Students go hiking, swimming in the Connecticut River, visit local farmer’s markets and much more. In addition, with all the sophomores together in summer it gives their class a wonderful chance to bond together. A wide variety of classes are offered to students in the summer, many specifically targeted toward sophomores. So Dartmouth students can make sure they are fulfilling specific prerequisite courses and getting to know their professors well in small classes and in a more relaxed atmosphere.

So, the next time you are thinking that summer classes may not sound like a lot of fun. Think again, and maybe even as you are considering what college to apply to it would be worth looking to see if the college offers classes in the summer.

Cara Ray
Educational Consultant

The post Dartmouth College Distinctive D-Plan Makes Summer Classes Fun first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

The post Dartmouth is the #1 Ivy for Study Abroad first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

The post Stephen Colbert, Educational Consultant: How to Ace the SATs first appeared on College Admission Counseling.