Who goes from LA to Tulsa to see their name in lights? Ummm, me.

Those of you who know me well, have heard me rave/rant over my younger brother’s bargain travel prowess. (Here’s a WSJ article noting the time he flew to Cyprus business class for $33 when the list price was nearly $2900.) In that spirit, I, too, have enjoyed finding great fares.  So, it was to my delight that I came across an $80 round-trip from LA to Wichita, KS.  And yes, delight. You see, I’m just a handful of states short of hitting all 50.  With a trip to Kansas, I could knock another one off and with a quick drive, see an old high school buddy in Tulsa.  And with a quick drive from Tulsa, I could hit Arkansas as well.  So with nothing more than that base logic, I bought my ticket.

But no trip out of LA forgoes visiting colleges–even those in the Great Plains. And even those of you who don’t know me well, know I’m a college football junkie.  So, I wasn’t about to miss one of the 17 private universities in the country that also competes in Division I football–the University of Tulsa.  Along with Rice, it’s also one of the smallest at just under 3,000 undergraduates.  For comparison’s sake, my Ohio State Buckeyes are set within a school of over 46,000 undergraduates. Click here to read more »

No, this is not a mass hold-up in New Haven.

“And what did you tell them?/ Video killed the radio star.”

Probably no one born after, oh, 1976 would even remember that song by those musical giants, the Buggles.  (Trivial Pursuit fact: first video ever played on MTV.)

As someone who loves Pop Culture, it may seem odd that I don’t have cable or DirecTV anymore. Maybe, but technology such a Hulu allows me to remain plugged in without draining any more than necessary from my Pizza and French Fries Rainy Day Fund.  And like everything else in the world, technology continues to shapes the way college admissions works as well.

This new video, That’s Why I Chose Yale, shot with nearly 200 current Yale students, faculty and alumni (backstory here) will likely resonate well with a sizable percentage of their applicant pool if the popularity of Glee with my own students is any indication. It’s a little cheesy–aren’t all musicals?–but does a remarkable job in just 16 minutes of showing you Yale at its best. For what it’s worth, around the 7:15 mark was my favorite segment. Way better than flipping through another boring brochure that looks like the ten others you received that day. (Though those same boring brochures are often packed with valuable information if you’re seriously considering the school.) Click here to read more »

Just realized that title could be an ironic reference to my recent going AWOL on the blog.  Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and are back into the groove of things.  Anyways, word from the good people at the Common App is that the essay q’s won’t be changing for the next cycle:

“The essay prompts on the 2010-11 Common Application will be identical to those found on the current version.  We hope this information will prove helpful to you as you begin to work with juniors.”

Let’s roll, Class of 2011…

I’m kidding.  While starting your essay in October is a terrible idea, starting in January might be worse.  Late July/early August after you have had the meaningful experiences of a robust summer is probably ideal.

Attention Students: This is what happens when your load is too heavy.

As high school sophomores and juniors wrap up this semester, many of them start taking an early peek towards their course load in the year to follow.  ”How many AP courses should I take,” inevitably and unfortunately becomes the guiding question to much of the decision-making.  I say unfortunately because of the focus on raising GPAs via the bonus points that are typically added.  (This is de rigueur in California.)  The idea of taking a course because it sounds interesting or challenging seems almost quaint now.  Some of the brighter students will even shy away from art and music classes for fear of lowering their GPA by getting an “A” in a regular course that’s “worth” only 4 points and thus pulling down their 4.0+ average.

Advanced Placement classes, once open to only a very small number of top high school students around the country, have grown enormously in the past decade. The number of students taking these courses rose by nearly 50 percent to 1.6 million from 2004 to 2009. Yet in a survey of A.P. teachersreleased this year, more than half said that “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” Some 60 percent said that “parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don’t belong there.”

So yeah, saying it’s a mucked up system is an understatement.  The NYT steps up with nice series of short pieces from five different folks from the world of education and one shill from the College Board (birth mother of the AP program).  Most of them will leave you with a clear sense of how the AP program has deviated greatly from its original intent to give exceptional students a challenge within high school.  But since I’m trying to keep my focus on college admissions, the one piece I’ll direct you to specifically is by a Berkley researcher, Saul Geiser, who discusses the role of AP within the admissions process.  Says Mr. Geiser:

Click here to read more »

Famous Yale alum, Mr. Burns--Class of 1914. (Sideshow Bob is also a Yale alum.)

I’ve always had a soft spot for Yale.  Two of my favorite former students are there now, as is one of my finer former colleagues from my University of Chicago days.  I also feel their office, for reasons mostly unknown to me, continues to make the most reasonable and thoughtful decisions year in and year out.  And on a semi-related note, I think it’s one of the few universities that begins to compare with my alma mater in terms of a rigorous undergraduate education. (But yes, I’m biased.)

So, it was a lot of fun reading this story in Saturday’s NYT about a set of quadruplets who were ALL admitted to Yale under Early Action last week.  The kids sound pretty amusing and compelling and it makes for a great story. I hope Jacques will follow up with them in the spring so we learn what their final decisions are…

And in a complete aside, one of my favorites vignettes from a Simpsons episode was when Mr. Burns was trying to get his dolt of a son into Yale as a legacy. He asks the admissions officer, “So, how were his test scores?”  Her reply, “Let’s just say he spelled ‘Yale’ with a six.”  When he then asks what kind of donation he’ll need to make to ensure his son’s admittance, he’s told Yale needs an international airport.

UPDATE: Seems that some folks got a little nasty in that cesspool of humanity also known as The NYT Readers’ Comments.  Jacques wrote up a quick followup post on his post and I can’t say I disagree.  Almost as good of a read as his original post on the quads.

Princess Leia offering a campus tour of the University of Tatooine to a prospective Jedi.

I guess the only surprise is it didn’t happen earlier.  Yes, the first iPod campus tour is here and it’s being conducted by the College of Charleston. (H/T NACAC’s own Admitted blog)  Regular readers of this blog, you may remember a post last month where for a moment I was suckered into believing C of C was accepting applications by Twitter.  This time, C of C really is leading the way…

The application, titled “College of Charleston Tour,” is a free download for the iPhone and iPod Touch and is available at the Apple iTunes app store. It features Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) assistance, 18 videos of campus, and nearly 60 images of life at the College of Charleston. Click here to read more »

Looking at this picture, I'm not sure why exactly I loved Salisbury steak day in the cafeteria so much as a kid at old Waldo Elementary.

Yes, we all have that friend on Facebook whose status updates consist of nothing other than what they ate, what they’re going to to eat or “I’m hungry!”  (Really?  Because it’s lunchtime and that’s SO unusual.)  But oddly enough, with the recent changes to Facebook that makes profile information FAR more public than it was just a week ago, those folks might be onto something.  For users who don’t tighten the default settings, that means status updates, contact information, and even pictures can become part of the public domain.  And all just a quick Google away.

Most people could care less.  They’re not too worried about “My kitten Pookie sure loves his tuna. Lol!” finding its way into the permanent archives of the Internet.  But for teenagers, this could pose a unique problem.  It’s why I’ve asked all my students to keep their profile settings as private as can be.  There’s no reason a tech-savvy admissions officer really needs to see them whooping it up in Cabo over Spring Break as innocent as it might’ve been.  It’s all about context and sometimes, social networking sites like Facebook don’t provide much of it. Click here to read more »

Great. When I asked my assistant for an image of "Top Ten" this is what he pulls up. I tell you, good helper monkeys are hard to find!

Top 10 Songs of the Year.  Top 10 Athletes of the Year.  Top 10 Strains of H1N1.

The end of the year always brings enough of those “Top Ten” lists to gag a horse.  It’s doubly worse when it’s the close of a decade.  (And yes, Mr. Calendar Expert Guy, I know the decade doesn’t technically end until after 2010 b/c there was indeed a year 0 but I’m going with the flow here…) But sometimes, there’s that moment as rare as me being able to tell the Olsen twins apart when a Top Ten list comes along that is the standard of true genius.  Well, in this case it’s a “Top Fifteen.”  And the “genius” is mostly b/c I’m quoted in it several times.

That said, if you’re a sucker for lists like me, it’s worth a flip through.  Click here to check out the Decade’s Fifteen Hottest Colleges according to The Daily Beast!

For some reason, this is what I suspect an Alumni Interviewer from that prestigious Ivy League Institution, U Penn, would look like.

Oh, how I love it when Popular Culture meets College Admissions.  It doesn’t happen often enough as far as I’m concerned–probably because I can’t digest most of the WB’s teenage-angst dramas.  (In their depictions of the college admissions process, they get everything wrong.)  So, you can only imagine my thrill when watching an episode of  The Office recently and Michael Scott was called out by some high school seniors on a promise he had made a decade earlier about paying for their college educations if they graduated.  For me, it was the usual cringe-worthy moment that I’ve grown to love.  But for an education policy analyst waaay smarter than me, it was a perfect illustration of appropriate incentivizing.  And he makes a heck of an argument in a post on the best-named blog in my world, The Quick and the Ed. Click here to read more »

The first college football game played was won by Rutgers over Princeton, 6-4. According to a newspaper account, one Rutgers prof was seen waving his umbrella towards the Princeton players and shrieking, “You will come to no Christian end!” Now that's some Old (Testament) School trash-talking.

My alma mater, the University of Chicago was one of the original members of the Big Ten. The first Heisman trophy winner, Jay Berwanger, was a Maroon–yes, amongst the worst team names ever–and the teams were successful enough to inspire the original Monster of the Midway moniker. Chicago eventually dropped out of the Big Ten in the 1930’s to focus on academics leaving Northwestern as the only private university remaining in the conference. Today, there are 120 teams that compete in NCAA Division I football. Here, a nifty map of the US shows their locations. The state of New York has three Division I teams. The state of Utah? Three as well. Go figure. After poring through conference lists, I also learned that only 17 are private. Only one in seven! The remainder are all public institutions. I knew big-time football would skew towards public schools but didn’t realize how heavily.

Click here to read more »