3 of the top 12 All Time Most Viewed videos on YouTube are by Billy Ray's daughter. Come on, America!

For anyone who has seen the  rather epic battle of videos between Shoreline and Shorewood High Schools in Washington, it’s no surprise that this generation of high school students knows their way around technology pretty well.  (FWIW, my vote goes to Shorewood doing Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True.”  Shot entirely backward with even lips completed synced. See it to believe it.)  So, it was also no surprise when I recently came across this article about how Tufts has incorporated YouTube videos made by applicants directly into their decision-making.

I applaud any attempts to evaluate students on factors that don’t boil down to crude numbers like SAT scores.  At the same time,  I get nervous about this particular approach on account of two groups of kids out there.  First, there are many kids out there w/o the resources to do this.  And by resources, I don’t mean just computers and audio-video equipment.  I also mean TIME.  I watched more than a handful of these videos and several of them were flat-out terrific.  Props to those kids.  However, many of them also would have required dozens of hours of planning and production.  How many kids applying to an ultra-selective school like Tufts have that kind of time in fall of their senior year?  I certainly can’t think of too many from my own experience.  And while shooting just one might be a fun way to break up some of the drudgery of the process, I can’t imagine if a kid needed to do several of these, personalizing them for various schools.

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Tree huggers like me sometimes forget that money doesn't grow on them.

It’s with a great deal of pride that I’ve watched groups of students at the UCs recently protest fee hikes and incidents of intolerance. Their generation is often maligned as the “me-generation” but thousands of them are showing exactly how wrong that is.

My own activism tends to take place in lower-key ways. The past couple of years, I’ve been heading up to Sacramento to take part in WACAC’s annual legislative conference.  Our focus has tended to be on issues centering around providing financial support to the neediest of California’s students via programs like the very successful Cal Grants.  Last year, we were even there during the 11th hour of the budget crisis which hinged on just one Republican vote.  It was political drama at its highest. Despite being somewhat in awe of how direct democracy can be in even the world’s 8th largest economy, I still leave chagrined at how every “solution” feels like a tiny Band-Aid on gaping wound.

This morning, I was reminded that “gaping” doesn’t really do it justice.  San Andreas Fault-sized maybe? A Chicago fraternity brother sent me an opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal regarding the immense toll that public sector pensions are having on California’s finance. But since I pretend to blog about admissions, what does this have to do with that?  More than you’d ever imagine. 15,000 retired public employees with annual pensions over $100,000. Really!?! This at the same time I’m listening to stories on NPR about college kids having to use food stamps and food pantries to afford their education!?!  I’m by no means a numbers guy but additional figures were shocking:

In the last decade, government worker pension costs (not including health care) have risen to $3 billion from $150 million, a 2,000% jump, while state revenues have increased by 24%. Because the stock market didn’t grow the way the legislature predicted in 1999, the only way to cover the skyrocketing costs of these defined-benefit pension plans has been to cut other programs (and increase taxes).

Yes, it’s easy to have that knee-jerk tendency to see “WSJ” and assume this is one of their concern-trolling bits that in reality pits various liberal factions against each other. That’s unfair in this case. Education is something both parties clearly agree on.  They simply disagree on how it should be done. (In a slight aside since this is my blog and I can do that, recently disgraced Republican state senator Roy Ashburn was a huge supporter of the Cal Grants as I learned from visiting his office last year. I imagine his vote won’t be there next time.) Anyways, read on for a couple more cherry-picked excerpts that illustrate my concerns nicely, or sadly as the case may be… Click here to read more »

Wow. This is real.

Few things on Earth are as quotable as The Simpsons (except maybe Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy). And few characters on The Simpsons are as quotable as Malibu Stacy, the Barbie knockoff that little Lisa alternately loves and hates.  In addition to the post title above, Malibu Stacy has been known to say things like, “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles,” or my favorite, “Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl.”  (You can listen to fine selection of her quotes here.)

And while the vapid utterings of Malibu Stacy makes for giggles and seems like ancient history to most of the girls I work with, the very success of these same young women has had the unintended consequence of reducing the percentage of boys in college and creating a significant gender imbalance at many institutions.  So much so, it’s not uncommon to hear it regarded as a crisis.  An op-ed in today’s LAT lays it out all quite thoroughly:

After 17 years of concentrated effort to raise the academic achievement of girls, who in previous decades had often received less attention in the classroom and been steered away from college-prep courses, the nation can brag that female students have progressed tremendously. Though still underrepresented in calculus and other advanced-level science and math courses in high school, women now outnumber men applying to and graduating from college — so much so that it appears some colleges are giving male applicants an admissions boost. As a result, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is examining whether colleges are engaging in widespread discrimination against women in an effort to balance their male and female populations. Click here to read more »

In the future, we'll all wear lycra and name badges.

I couldn’t read this recent Bloomberg article packed with stats about the increase in applicant pools at most of the most selective universities, without being reminded of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes.  In “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” a young woman in the future balks at undergoing a process that makes everyone in that society beautiful–and look virtually identical.  (And in a very Twilight Zone moment, aired exactly 46 years ago today!) Despite her protestations, she ends up undergoing it anyway and emerges looking like everyone else.  One of the classic lines in the show, gravely intoned, was “When everyone is beautiful, no one will be. Because without ugliness, there can be no beauty.”

And similarly, as every school continues to report increases left and right year after year, I fear we are moving past merely Groundhog Day, and into world where everything will eventually look the same.  I mean, even my beloved University of Chicago is reporting an unfathomable 42% increase in applications this year.  Maybe I’m old school, but I rather enjoyed the days when Chicago had smaller applicant pools than other universities because it’s applicant pool was different.  Nowadays, switching to the Common App and more marketing can beef up numbers to look good to a the board of trustees and U.S News rankings.  I just wonder what it’s doing for the kids themselves not to mention the personalities and quirks of colleges themselves.

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:

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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.

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The answer was "Yes!" for hundreds of thousands.

Few people know this, but as a high school senior, I gave serious consideration to the United States Military Academy, a.k.a West Point.  I even went so far as to contact Senator John Glenn’s office in regards to the required nomination.  Being the little civic-minded nerd I was, I had already received my Eagle Scout award and an award from the governor for my volunteer work in the community.  Reality set in when I realized the commitments required post-graduation were daunting and that’s not even to speak of life as a cadet that would be a little more grueling than racking up merit badges.  (I didn’t even consider the Naval Academy because I was and am an awful swimmer.)  So, a free world-class education was not to be my destiny.

I have great respect for those men and women who join the service academies especially when their other options often include far less rigorous and demanding colleges.  (Unlike a Harvard or Stanford, you’ll never hear anyone say, “The hardest part about West Point is getting in!”)  I’ve also found it fascinating the continued role that military persons have on the American university system.  While debate rages over the role of government program in health care, you’re going to find few level-headed people who wouldn’t agree that one of the greatest governmental successes in the history of the United States was the G.I. Bill enacted after World War II.  It allowed for one of the largest class shifts in modern times.  All of sudden, huge numbers of well-traveled and well-lived men–many from working class backgrounds–flooded the campuses of schools around the country.  Even the most elite Ivies found their well-heeled prep-school boys nudged to the side by guys removed from the battlefields of Europe by just years.  It transformed America and arguably created the middle class that would keep us a superpower in the decades to come. A great review of the G.I. Bill can be found here and a small excerpt is below: Click here to read more »

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 »

"I doubt Picasso ever imagined his sketch ending up on a blog about college admissions."

Earlier in the evening, I noticed today is the birthday of the long-deceased Grantland Rice.  Not likely a name that rings a bell for most folks, but one forever etched in my mind for two reasons.  One, he was a member of my college fraternity–one of those useless facts only fraternity guys hold onto.  Two, as a college football fan, he’s the author of perhaps the most famous passage in the annals of American sportswriting.  About a game between Army and Notre Dame in 1924:

“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.”

Hyperbole?  Absolutely.  Poetry?  I think so.

I’m kicking off this blog with no expectation that anyone will remember my words a good 85 years down the road.  But I hope a few of them will stick around just long enough to give you a few good thoughts to chew on, an occasional laugh and, yes, there’ll be a little tilting at windmills.  My intentions are humble though.  I just want to share some of my thoughts about the world of college admissions.  Take a little bit of the edge off the process for some of you, add a little more insight for others.  Some days might see many posts, and some weeks none.  But one thing I can promise you, no Biblical allusions.  Mr. Rice has already put that horse out to pasture.