What, you wanted Madonna or Letterman's Smile?

Last night, I attended the Los Angeles Gap Year Fair at Harvard-Westlake School.  For those not in know, the term “gap year” typically connotes a separate year spent between high school graduation and the start of college.  Sometimes the “year” may be only a few months and other times it really is a full year.  (If you want to learn more, here’s an excellent place to start: http://www.planetgapyear.com/)

Much like you’d see at a college fair, 35 outfits and organizations set up table staffed by reps to discuss everything from the well-known National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) to City Year that is a service program part of AmeriCorps to Brown Ledge Gap Year where students learn documentary film production and then create their own doc film in New Orleans/El Paso.  The wide variety was somewhat startling as compared to last year’s fair, there were nearly twice as many tables!

I’m heartened to see the growth in interest for gap years.  They’re not for everyone, but boy, for the right kid, it’s a perfect way to unwind from the stress of high school, recharge in a purposeful way, and start college one year wiser and more mature.  A mother whose daughter did a gap program spoke of her child living in a village of Senegal for several months with no electricity, running water or (gasp!) Internet.  I couldn’t help but think how much more interesting that young woman will be wherever she matriculates this fall.  She’ll have her own nuanced views on global development, the environment, African music, whatever and all informed by personal experience.  Studies have repeatedly shown that students who engage in a gap program perform better academically in college. 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 »

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 »

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 »

And you thought he was talking about rims...

Regarding their transcript, I used to tell prospective students at Caltech, “Leave the killer B’s to Wutang.”  I was usually met with blank stares either because I wasn’t referencing some unbelievably complex physic problem or because it was a lame joke.  But today, I saw the Facebook status update of an old Collegewise colleague, Christina Wright, who is now an admissions counselor at Marquette University and burst into laughter.

A word of advice to high school students: The song “Throw Some D’s On It” should not apply to your transcript.

Never have truer words been spoken.  Especially by Rich Boy.

Uh-oh. Someone hasn't read Eats, Shoots & Leaves. (H/T Depravda.com for image.)

The fall months alway bring emails like a swarm of locusts from well-intentioned friends sharing articles they came across regarding college essays. Occasionally, one does stand out for the exceptional advice it offers. However, most are filled with the most trite cliches passed off as wisdom. Some goes as far as to offer terrible advice.  Case in point, this bit from this morning’s Huffington Post which shared “advice” on why the personal statement might not actually matter:

1. I recall a public university representative confessing on a tour that the admissions people only read the full apps of seniors whose scores and GPAs were above a certain threshold. Below that line, essays worthy of fill in your favorite writer here went unread.

2. As many professional writers and lots of seniors will tell you, 500 words is a tough length; too long for glib, too short for substance.

3. The standard supportive advice is “be yourself” – but you are competing with applicants whose parents enhance “self” with the extracurricular equivalent of ‘roids, everything from international community service to a networked internship for a child whose most remarkable trait may well be his parents’ connections.

Wow. Every one of her points while perhaps true on occasion, hardly represent the essence of how this process works. Let’s break it down… Click here to read more »