Thursday 27 October 2011

The many myths about college admissions

A dean of admissions once told me that a big part of his job is to simply dispel myths and rumors about the application process — an especially difficult task in the Washington region, where talk of college prep often starts at birth (if not earlier). He wasn’t joking. It’s true.

Last week, Valerie Strauss (author of the Post’s Answer Sheet blog) and I sat down to compose a list of seven myths about college admissions, which was published in today’s paper.

A quick recap of the myths we picked:

1) It’s best to set your heart on one school and really go for it.

2) The tuition price listed in brochures is what everyone pays.

3) The admissions department adores you.

4) It’s best to crowd your application with a volume of extracurricular activities.

5) It’s better to have a high GPA than to take difficult classes.

6) Essays don’t really matter much in the end because grades and test scores are so dominant in admissions decisions.

7) Recommendations from famous people can give an applicant a huge boost.

Let’s keep the list going past seven. I asked my Facebook and Twitter followers to share their advice, and here’s what they suggested (reframed in the form of a myth):

8) There are only three accepted topics for your essay: The person you most admire, volunteer work in a third-world nation or great insight about a current event. (HT to Smith College in Massachusetts, which advises applicants to write heartfelt essays.)

9) As long as you run spell-check, there’s no need to proof-read your essay. Plus, college officials don’t care about typos — and they love when you shorten words so your essay reads like a text message.

10) Admissions staffers are super impressed when you use big words, even if they aren’t used correctly. (HT to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and its list of hot tips for applicants.)

11) If you don’t get accepted, it’s game over. You will never ever attend that institution.

12) There’s no need to visit campus because all colleges are the same.

13) All student loans are the same, so don’t read that fine print. You have four years to learn about interest rates and deferment, so don’t worry about it now.

14) Only apply for massive scholarships worth thousands. It’s a waste of time to apply for awards only worth a couple hundred bucks.

By Jenna Johnson [Posted at 09:10 AM ET, 10/24/2011]

Friday 14 October 2011

U.S. News & World Report's Shocker-Free 2012 College Rankings

U.S. News & World Report released its annual list of America's Best Colleges today and the news is, well, not exactly surprising.

Like most every year, the Ivies are at the head of the pack, holding all four of the top spots, closely followed by the four other Ivy League schools, which all place in the top 20.
While there wasn't too much movement at the top, there were an overwhelming number of ties on the list this year. There are two universities in the No. 1 spot, five schools tied for fifth, six colleges in 62nd place, seven vying for 72nd and 10 colleges tied for 101st place, among many, many other ties.

The number of ties further calls into question the usefulness of the college ranking system, which though it is U.S. News' bread and butter, has been questioned in the past for using dubious statistics and fueling crazed competition among colleges hungry for prestige.

Nevertheless, here are this year's 10 Best Colleges in the Nation:

1. Harvard University
1. Princeton University
3. Yale University
4. Columbia University
5. California Institute of Technology
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5. Stanford University
5. University of Chicago
5. University of Pennsylvania
10. Duke University

The next five are: Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins University, Washington University in St. Louis and Brown University. (See the full list here.)

This year's list isn't much different from the past. Last year, Harvard took the top honors, followed by Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania (in a two-way tie for fifth), the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (tied for seventh) and Dartmouth and Duke (tied for ninth; the University of Chicago also tied for ninth, making it the 11th school on the list).

Sound familiar? It should. The most major change at the top this year is that the University of Chicago was bumped up from its ninth place finish last year to tie for fifth with four other schools. That move bumped Ivy League school Dartmouth out of the top 10, to an eleventh place finish.

Excluding the Ivies and other private schools, the top-ranking state schools are as follows: the University of California-Berkeley, the University of California-Los Angeles and the University of Virginia (tied for 2nd), the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the College of William and Mary, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California-San Diego, the University of California-Davis and finally, in a three-way tie for 10th, the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Other than the national rankings, U.S. News breaks their data into several other lists that may be especially useful for high school students and their families when it comes to select a college. Among them are a list, which you can find over on TIME's Moneyland site, of the schools that saddle their students with the most (and least) amount of loan debt.

Another is called A+ Schools for B Students, which provides a list of colleges where students with slightly lower grades still stand a fair shot at getting in. That list features states schools like the University of Connecticut and the University of Oregon, as well as smaller, private schools such as Baylor University in Waco, Texas and Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. Among the other lists are Best Black Colleges, which ranks the nation's historically black colleges and the best national liberal arts colleges.

See the full 2012 Best Colleges rankings: http://www.usnews.com/colleges.

By: KAYLA WEBLEY

Universities Seeking Out Students of Means

Money is talking a bit louder in college admissions these days, according to a survey to be released Wednesday by Inside Higher Ed, an online publication for higher education professionals.

More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August and early September.

Similarly, 22 percent of the admissions officials at four-year institutions said the financial downturn had led them to pay more attention in their decision to applicants’ ability to pay.


“As institutional pressures mount, between the decreased state funding, the pressure to raise a college’s profile, and the pressure to admit certain students, we’re seeing a fundamental change in the admissions process,” said David A. Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “Where many of the older admissions professionals came in through the institution and saw it as an ethically centered counseling role, there’s now a different dynamic that places a lot more emphasis on marketing.”


In the survey, 10 percent of the admissions directors at four-year colleges — and almost 20 percent at private liberal-arts schools — said that the full-pay students they were admitting, on average, had lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants.


But they are not the only ones with an edge: the admissions officers said they admitted minority students, athletes, veterans, children of alumni, international students and, for the sake of gender balance, men, with lesser credentials, too.


At many colleges and universities, the survey found, whom you know does matter. More than a quarter of the admissions directors said they had felt pressure from senior-level administrators to admit certain applicants, and almost a quarter got pressure from trustees or development officers.
“If external parties are trying to influence admissions decisions, that’s a concern that strikes at the legitimacy of the whole process,” Mr. Hawkins said. “We certainly have standards, but there needs to be awareness that when the economy starts to crumble, the standards may start to go out the window.”


Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy, a two-person nonprofit he founded in 2003 to improve college admissions, said the Inside Higher Ed findings were troubling.


“There’s always been elements of this behavior, but it seems to me that it’s growing,” Mr. Thacker said. “I don’t know whether to blame it on hard times or lack of courage and leadership.”

Mr. Thacker said his own research had found students becoming more cynical about higher education.


“Students say, ‘They’re cheating us, so we can cheat them,’ ” he said. “The cheat they see is that colleges are out for themselves, not for them as students. Our research, with 2,500 students, found that of all the sources of information students get about higher education, they thought the least trustworthy sources are the colleges and college reps themselves.”


While community colleges said their most important challenge in the near future was reduced state funding, all the other institutions named rising concerns from families about tuition and affordability.


Admissions directors at many public universities said in the survey that recruiting more out-of-state and international students, who pay higher tuition, was their top strategy. At community colleges and private institutions, admissions officers were more likely to say that providing aid for low- and middle- income students was their focus.


More than half the admissions officers from four-year institutions said that coaching by parents or college counselors was making it harder to really learn about applicants.

By TAMAR LEWIN


Thursday 13 October 2011

University to scrap first class degrees to combat award inflation

A leading university is to become the first in Britain to scrap traditional degree classifications.
Julie Henry ; Education Correspondent
7:30AM BST 09 Oct 2011

University College London will stop telling students whether they have received a first, second or third, and instead given them an American-style "grade point average".

It gives students a score based on all the courses they have taken as undergraduates.

The move comes after "award inflation" which has undermined the traditional undergraduate degree classification.

Official figures showed almost two-thirds of students gained a first or upper-second class degree in 2010. Some 46,825 students – one in seven – were awarded first class degrees by UK universities, double the number a decade ago.

Malcolm Grant, the Provost of UCL, said that the honours degree classification was no longer capable of providing the information that students deserve and employers require.

"There is clearly award inflation," he said. "The public assumes there is a national exam process but there is not. Every institution determines its own proportion of grades. Perversely, award inflation has been fuelled by league tables which give points to those universities with higher proportions of the top grades.

"Award inflation over the past three decades has led to student performance being essentially recognised by classification into only two main groups first class and upper second class honours. It is a crude and undistinguished model."

The Provost said that the UK system was not well recognised around the world and that a form of grade point average (GPA) would "ensure that our students' mode of study is internationally recognised."

The university, ranked 20th in the world and third in Europe in the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities, will develop and pilot its own model of GPA next year, and if successful, adopt the new approach to reporting academic achievement.

Calls for a reform of degree grades have grown in recent years. They have been fuelled by a series of university whistleblowers who claim external examiners have been "leaned on" to boost grades.

One former academic said lecturers were under pressure to "mark positively" and turn a blind eye to plagiarism – helping universities climb national league tables.

Universities are currently trialling a graduate "report card", called the Higher Education Achievement Report. It is intended to represent a more accurate picture of students' achievements while also including an overall degree classification.

A Sunday Telegraph investigation earlier this year found that the universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland's oldest university, where Prince William met Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970.

Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970.

At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970.

Many blue-chip companies will only interview graduates with a first or a 2:1. A top-class degree also makes it much easier to get a scholarship for postgraduate research.

According to Professor Nigel Seaton, a senior deputy vice-chancellor at Surrey University, the current degree classification is unfair to some students.

He said the difference in academic achievement between a student with a 2:1 and one with a 2:2 might be almost nothing – 60.1% compared with 59.9%, for instance.

"In such a case, the difference in life chances reflects no difference at all in academic achievement,” he said.

A report by a committee of MPs in to higher education standards found that different universities demand “different levels of effort” from students to get similar degrees, suggesting that top grades from some colleges were not worth the same as others.


Source :

Thursday 6 October 2011

What it takes to make it to Oxbridge

Standards may be high at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but don’t be put off from applying. 


Cambridge is the best university in the world according to international rankings 

If you have excellent GCSE results and a brace of A grades at AS level, you may be thinking about applying to Oxbridge. For many people, the very word conjures up images of Sebastians and Julias in boaters and gowns, punting and drinking champagne. But as the deadline for applications approaches (October 15) don’t be put off by the Brideshead stereotypes. Oxford and Cambridge are consistently ranked among the top five universities in the world and attract students from any background.
That said, an Oxbridge application should not be taken lightly. If you’re offered an interview you will need to prepare for it, which could detract from your A-level studies. And if you are rejected, either before or after interview, you will have to cope with the disappointment and move on.
But if you have good grades and feel able to take a pragmatic approach to your Oxbridge application, why not give it a go?
Oxford and Cambridge are renowned for their research and high-quality teaching. In the latest QS global survey of universities, the top-ranking universities in the world were Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, Yale and Oxford.
Given the calibre of students that the two universities attract, it is also not surprising that so many of our leading politicians, scientists and businessmen are Oxbridge educated. David Cameron, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher are all Oxford graduates.
Two features of the universities make them especially attractive: the first is that students are primarily taught individually or in small groups (called “tutorials” in Oxford and “supervisions” in Cambridge), rather than through lectures and large seminars. These sessions are conducted by leading experts in their field, rather than by postgraduates, allowing students to discuss their work and ideas with some of the key thinkers in the world today.
The second unusual feature of an Oxbridge education is its “collegiate” nature. Students are members of colleges, which are small communities where friendships are easy to form. Undergraduates can get involved in college-based sport, music or drama.

What profile do you need?
To have a serious chance, you will need to have secured at least six A* grades at GCSE and all As at AS level. Cambridge will also ask to see individual module scores, which should be above 90 per cent on average.
You should also enjoy reading around your subject in your own time and relish the chance to discuss ideas with your peers. If not, Oxbridge probably isn’t for you.

Who applies?
Anyone with a strong academic background, a genuine interest in their subject and a self-motivated and enthusiastic approach should consider applying to Oxbridge. There is no “type” of person who will get in. Oxbridge is the exciting and vibrant option it is precisely because of the diverse nature of its student body.

How do I write an Oxbridge-geared Ucas form – and when do I send it?
As for all other universities, you need to submit a Ucas form (including a personal statement), but by the earlier deadline of October 15. By December students will know whether they have been offered a place (either conditionally or unconditionally depending on whether they’re applying before or after A-levels).
Do not refer directly to Oxbridge in your personal statement, as it will be sent to all the universities to which you are applying.
At least 80 per cent of your personal statement should relate to your academic studies, with only a small paragraph devoted to extra-curricular activities. This isn’t because Oxbridge students do nothing but work; it is because tutors pick their students from a large number of very high-achieving applicants and are concerned with how successfully you will cope with the demanding courses. Use your personal statement with this aim in mind: to impress upon the admissions tutor that you are academically able, intellectually curious, enthusiastic and hardworking.
In recent years, the interview has become just one element in a selection process that includes written assessments and the submission of written work. Oxford will use these tests to decide whom to call for interview, so it’s worth looking at some sample papers to get a sense of what is required. Certain courses at both universities require students to take the Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA*). Cambridge will also ask you to fill out a Supplementary Application Form, which will include details of your module scores and an “additional information” section. More details about this are available on the universities’ websites.
Richard Cairns is headmaster of Brighton College

*Thinking Skills Assessment sample questions available at following URL.