College Admissions Help Blog

Pending legislation, expected to go to vote within the next week, will dramatically cut the subsidies paid by the US government to lenders who provide the funding for federal student loans. The thought is that reducing the subsidies will make more money available to students. If the government actually does set aside those savings and use them for education funding, that will be a benefit. However, the hidden costs will be the thousands of students who will end up paying higher costs as borrower benefits disappear.

What are borrower benefits? In short, lenders offer discounted interest rates to attract customers. They can offer students these lower rates because the loans are subsidized at a certain level by the government. If the government lowers the subsidies, lenders won’t offer the discounts and student will pay more.

In the end, needier students should get more (if congress keeps their promise to reinvest savings into grants), but everyone else will end up paying more. But what if the congress decides to use those funds for reducing the budget, or something else… Has that happened before?

In the end, reducing the subsidies is about politicians getting good PR for reducing the cost of an education. The reality is, the cost of college has been growing at twice the rate of inflation for more than 20 years. Whatever small savings are gained today, if any, will disappear within the year. College cost is the real issue – what do we do about that?

Boston Herald has new article on Yale Expansion.

Yale growth plan could hit Harvard
By Edward B. Colby
Friday, August 31, 2007 – Updated: 01:08 AM EST

Under a new enrollment-boosting proposal floated by Yale, the Ivy League darling of gritty New Haven might finally get within striking distance of fair Harvard.

Yale President Richard Levin told Bloomberg News that two committees are considering how it might add up to 200 students a year, a move that would make the Ivy League tussle for students even more competitive. Yale will decide next year whether to go forward with the tentative plan, which would eventually raise its enrollment from around 5,300 to 6,100 – narrowing the gap with Harvard’s 6,700.

Jack Maguire, the chairman of the Concord educational consulting firm Maguire Associates, said Yale’s move would likely mean “that Yale would end up taking students who would otherwise be attending schools just below them” in the college rankings, such as the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia. “It could have a negative impact on Harvard, but I don’t think it would be a big one. It more likely will have an impact on schools that are below the top 10,” Maguire said.

And with Penn and Columbia losing students, they in turn would claim more students from schools typically ranked a tier below them – such as, say, Tufts, BC and BU. Yet officials at those local schools weren’t much bothered by the Yale news yesterday.

“Enrollment at Boston College has remained constant for the past 20 years, and at this time we have no intention of deviating from that position,” said Heights spokesman Jack Dunn, adding that BC has capped its enrollment between 8,900 and 9,000 undergrads during that time. Over in Cambridge, Harvard spokesman Robert Mitchell said “There are no plans to increase undergraduate enrollment at this point.”

Maguire guessed that Yale would need to admit about 400 extra students to get the 200 bump in enrollment. And while he said the Yale boost would “have an impact right up and down the line, no question,” he cautioned that college admissions is a very complicated system, so the effect would not be easily seen.

“Two hundred divided by all the places those kids are applying probably wouldn’t register in our applicant pool,” noted Tufts undergrad admissions dean Lee Coffin, who added that “the big question mark this year is the change in the early decision policy at Harvard.”

Bloomberg News material was used in this report.

By Kang Shin-who, Sa Eun-young, Staff Reporters

The first five minutes are the most critical for writing the SAT essay test for U.S. college admission, James Herron, 39, head lecturer in expository writing at Harvard University, said.

“Many students start to write immediately without planning because they have just 25 minutes for the essay test. It’s very important to take the first five minutes to think about the thesis because it is crucial,” Herron said in an interview with The Korea Times Friday.

Herron visited Seoul last week to take part in the U.S. college admission strategy seminar and workshop, “2007 AHEd Edu Summit” and gave lectures on how to write a good SAT essay to 90 hopefuls for top U.S. colleges.

In the workshop, he discussed samples of their writing efforts and said that many of the problems he encountered were identical to those of U.S. students. He explained as follows.

First, they present an unsupportable thesis that isn’t really a thesis at all. It’s not arguable and not actually taking a position, which is a common mistake among U.S. students.

Second, students present evidence that they don’t fully analyze; so they drop information into the essay but don’t show how the information supports their argument.

Third, for some students, English as a second language is an issue. But students worry about that more than they need. Many students who have very good English ability still worry about little problems in their English that aren’t important. Their writing is perfectly clear but they still worry _ it’s a kind of insecurity.

The writing professor also advised that according to his research a longer essay usually yields better results, although the college board says the length of essay is not important.
“Dr. Les Pearlman at Massachusetts Institute Technology analyzed SAT essay answers and scores and found that there was 90 percent correlation between length of essays and the scores,” he said.

In regard to essay evaluation, the professor said test graders are instructed to give scores only after reading entire essays rather like evaluating a painting. “The tests are graded holistically, meaning that the scores are not broken down for each section, but the test as a whole is given a score. When you see a painting, you like it a lot, or not like it. You don’t like some part of it, but it’s the whole thing that you like,” he said.

kswho@koreatimes.co.kr

By ALAN FINDER
New York Times, August 17, 2007

Richard J. Cook, the president of Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, will not say precisely how he used to rate his college’s competitors when the annual U.S. News & World Report peer review questionnaire showed up in his mailbox. What he will say is, “I filled it out more honestly this year than I did in the past.” “I checked ‘don’t know’ for every college except Allegheny,” Dr. Cook said, adding that he gave his own institution an outstanding rating.

U.S. News & World Report releases its annual rankings of America’s top colleges today, under attack as never before by college officials who accuse it of using dubious statistics to stoke the intense, even crazed, competition among colleges and universities for students and prestige. Still there is little sign that the rankings race is diminishing. While more than 60 presidents of liberal arts colleges signed a letter over the last few months pledging to stop participating in the most heavily weighted component of the magazine’s rankings — the survey of colleges’ reputations — virtually none of the most select and highly ranked colleges signed on.
Indeed, the rankings are so influential, two decades after they were started, that one clause in the contract of Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, promises a $10,000 bonus if he can raise its standing. Frustrated college officials and high school guidance counselors say the magazine is not only reporting on how colleges perform, but is also changing their behavior as they try to devise gambits to scurry into the top ranks.

Take admissions. A college’s acceptance rate, or the proportion of applicants it admits, counts towards its rank, and the more selective the college is, the better. So some colleges try to increase the number of applicants they receive — and turn down — by waiving fees and dropping requirements. Some send out applications by e-mail, with most of the student’s personal information already filled in. Others send out persistent e-mail appeals to high school sophomores, with breathless subject lines like “Time is running out.”
“It’s pumping up the numbers, it’s making colleges look more selective, and it’s contributing to the frenzy,” said Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment at Dickinson College. “What if we become ridiculous and just go out to a shopping mall and hand out applications?”

Then there is that survey that asks college officials to rate other colleges and universities. The survey, which counts for 25 percent of a college’s overall ranking, is the most heavily weighted factor. That has spurred colleges to send glossy promotional brochures and updates on new programs to high-ranking officials at other colleges around survey time in hopes of impressing them. Despite such efforts, college officials say they suspect that some in their ranks deliberately downgrade their competitors to try to drive down their showing.
“I see where the temptation comes,” Dr. Cook said. “So rather than be tempted to game the system, I think it’s better to drop out.”

The magazine’s editors say that the rankings provide a valuable service and that rather than blame the magazine when colleges manipulate their numbers, people in higher education ought to look in the mirror.
“We get blamed for a lot of things that are demonstrably not our responsibility,” Brian Kelly, the editor of U.S. News, said in a interview. “I find it a little shocking, given the problems in the higher education world these days, that this is the thing, U.S. News, that these presidents choose to focus on.” Editors at U.S. News acknowledge anecdotal evidence that some colleges try to affect the rankings, but they insist it is not widespread. The editors say they have added myriad safeguards over the years from specific definitions of what counts as an application to adding questions that can sniff out fudging.

Some colleges used to drop athletes’ SAT scores from their computation of incoming students’ scores in order to increase their averages and make their institutions look more selective, Mr. Kelly said.
In response, U.S. News helped to create common definitions with organizations like the College Board so that data reporting would be standardized and harder to fudge. Still, critics say that the magazine, which does not verify information submitted by the colleges, bears some responsibility for the litany of tactics that colleges employ.

James M. Sumner, dean of admission and financial aid at Grinnell College, said a counterpart from a well-regarded institution told him that when computing average SAT scores he excluded the SAT’s of students accepted as “development cases,” whose grades and test scores are often below average but whose families are likely to make major donations. Mr. Sumner declined to identify the university. U.S. News reports the proportion of a university’s alumni who contribute money each year, as a way of measuring consumer satisfaction. Michael Beseda, vice president for enrollment at St. Mary’s College of California, said he knew someone whose college sent him a $5 bill, asking him simply to send it back so it would count as a donation. Several colleges have admitted taking a single donation and spreading it over two, three or five years, to raise their annual numbers.

Many of the tactics used by colleges involve admissions because they have more control over it than they do over other factors in the rankings, like endowments or reputation. One gambit involves the so-called “snap-app” or “fast-app,” an application sent by e-mail to high school seniors in which their personal information is already filled in by the college. The University of Portland in Oregon, Ursinus College in Pennsylvania and the University of Vermont are among those to use this kind of application. Washington & Jefferson College, a liberal arts college outside Pittsburgh, began five years ago to seek more applicants by dropping fees and some requirements, and searching for high school students relentlessly through an e-mail effort. The college switched to a two-part application; the first part can take as little as five minutes to fill out, and in some cases is counted as a completed application.

About 1,100 students applied in 2002 to Washington & Jefferson. This year, nearly 7,400 did. The acceptance rate plummeted, almost in half. College officials acknowledge that they wanted to go up in the rankings but also say that increasing the pool of applicants was part of an overall strategy, along with building new dormitories and a fitness center and adding academic programs, to help Washington & Jefferson enroll better and more diverse students and to grow to 1,550 students from 1,100. “It’s worked,” said Alton E. Newell, the vice president for enrollment. “My institution is a better place, a healthier place, a more vibrant place.”

But to many college and university officials, Washington & Jefferson and other colleges that have engineered huge increases in applicant pools in recent years, are recruiting vast numbers of students primarily to reject them. The gambits enable an institution to appear more selective, but it is unclear that they can significantly affect a ranking. The U.S. News editors argue that a college’s acceptance rate counts for only 1.5 percent of the overall evaluation. Washington & Jefferson, for instance, has generally stayed in the same ranking range in the 90s and low 100s among liberal arts colleges. Last year it shared 104th place on the list with several other campuses. Then again, does all this really measure an education? Mr. Beseda of St. Mary’s said, “I think what the rankings do is to poison the sense of what a genuine education is. False gods get worshiped.”

Part of your education should be learning all your options for paying for your dergee. A great resource is the Financial Aid Podcast – a daily online radio show discussing all thing related to financial aid. Visit:

http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com to subscribe, listen online or read about what is happening in the financial aid world.

They offer a great Primer on Financial Aid – 5 individual podcasts discussing the 5 most important aspects of paying for college.

By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Published: July 29, 2007
New York Times

Should an undergraduate studying business pay more than one studying psychology? Should a journalism degree cost more than one in literature? More and more public universities, confronting rising costs and lagging state support, have decided that the answers may be yes and yes. Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit. And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say. “It is something of a trend,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Even as they embrace such pricing, many officials acknowledge they are queasy about a practice that appears to value one discipline over another or that could result in lower-income students clustering in less expensive fields. “This is not the preferred way to do this,” said Patrick V. Farrell, provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If we were able to raise resources uniformly across the campus, that would be a preferred move. But with our current situation, it doesn’t seem to us that that’s possible.”

At the University of Kansas, which started charging different prices in the early 1990s, there are signs that the higher cost of majoring in certain subjects is affecting the choices of poorer students. “We are seeing at this point purely anecdotal evidence,” said Richard W. Lariviere, provost and executive vice chancellor at the university. “The price sensitivity of poor students is causing them to forgo majoring, for example, in business or engineering, and rather sticking with something like history.” Private universities do not face the same tuition constraints and for the most part are avoiding the practice, educators say, holding to the traditional idea that college students should be encouraged to get a well-rounded education.

Richard Fass, vice president for planning at Pomona, a private liberal arts college in California, said educators there considered it fundamental for students to feel part of the larger college, not segmented by differential costs. “The entire curriculum is by design available to all students,” he said. Some public university officials say they worry that students who are charged more for their major will stick to the courses in their field to feel that they are getting their money’s worth. “I want students in the College of Engineering at Iowa State to take courses in the humanities and to take courses in the social sciences,” said Mark J. Kushner, the dean of that college. To address problems like climate change, Mr. Kushner said, graduates will need to understand much more than technology. “That’s sociology, that’s economics, that’s politics, that’s public policy.”
Undergraduate juniors and seniors in the engineering school at Iowa State last year began paying about $500 more annually, he said, and the size of that additional payment is scheduled to rise by $500 a year for at least the next two years.

Mr. Kushner said he thought society was no longer looking at higher education as a common good but rather as a way for individuals to increase their earning power. “There was a time, not that long ago, 10 to 15 years ago, that the vast majority of the cost of education at public universities was borne by the state, and that was why tuition was so low,” he said. “That was based on the premise that the education of an individual is a public good, that individuals go out and become schoolteachers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers, that makes society better. That’s no longer the perception.”

Neither the State University of New York nor the Connecticut State University System use differential pricing, officials say. New Jersey, however, has done so for years, according to a spokesman, Greg Trevor. In the new school year, in-state undergraduates in the general program will pay tuition of $8,541, but engineering and pharmacy students will pay $9,484.80 and business students will pay $8,716. Various universities have adopted different versions of differential pricing to try to fight the unintended consequences it may create. Colleges that charge higher tuition for a major like business, engineering or journalism generally allow students outside the field to take some courses in the subject without paying more. “We do try to encourage crossing disciplines, to get a feel for the world,” said Randy Kangas, assistant vice president for planning and budgeting at the University of Illinois, where students studying business, chemistry and the life sciences pay higher tuition.

Most universities with differential tuition use some of the money — 20 to 25 percent — for additional financial aid to offset some of the impact. Officials at universities that have recently implemented higher tuition for specific majors say students have supported the move. Students in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, for example, got behind the program because they believed that it would support things like a top-notch faculty. “It’s very important to all the students in the business school to sustain our reputation,” said Jesse C. Siegelman, 21, who expects to graduate in December 2008. Mr. Siegelman said representatives of 26 of 28 student groups that belong to the school’s Undergraduate Student Leadership Council, of which he was president last year, voted to support the tuition proposal.

In engineering programs, the additional money often goes toward costly laboratory equipment, because students and the companies that will employ them expect graduates to be able to go to work immediately using state of the art tools, said Mr. Lariviere of the University of Kansas. “In many instances,” he said, “industry itself is demanding this.” And in business schools, professors’ salaries have risen, with some schools paying starting professors $130,000 or more, said G. Dan Parker III, associate executive vice president of Texas A&M, which he said was considering whether to charge higher tuition to undergraduate students studying business.

“The salaries we pay for entering assistant professors on average is probably larger than the average salary for full professors at the university,” Mr. Parker said of business professors. “That’s how far the pendulum has swung at the business schools, and I sure wish they’d fix it.” While several university officials said students in majors that carried higher costs could bear the burden because they would be better paid after graduation, Mr. Lariviere said he was skeptical of that rationale. He pointed out that many people change jobs several times over a career and that a major is a poor predictor of lifetime income. “Where we have gone astray culturally,” he said, “is that we have focused almost exclusively on starting salary as an indicator of life earnings and also of the value of the particular major.”

Since it costs universities more to offer some majors than it does to offer others—because professors in a certain field command higher salaries, or their department requires expensive equipment—why shouldn’t students have to pay accordingly? At some public universities, they do.

The New York Times reports that, beginning this fall, business majors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison will pay $500 more each semester than their classmates, and upperclassmen in Arizona State University’s journalism school will pay an extra $250 per semester. Last year, the University of Nebraska began charging engineering students an extra $40 for each credit hour.

College officials acknowledge that the result may be to force lower-income students into less-expensive fields. At the University of Kansas, which has been charging higher rates for business and engineering degrees since the early 1990s, anecdotal evidence suggests that poorer students are steering clear of those majors.

But officials at public institutions that use such differential pricing say their hands are tied: Raising tuition across the board is simply not politically possible.

—Jennifer Ruark
Chronicle of Higher Education

A new report entitled “College and University Ranking Systems, Global Perspectives and American Challenges” was released by the Institute for Higher Education Policy. This report is in 3 parts including a historical review of the US News rankings, a review of university rankings from around the world and an evaluation of the effect the various rankings have on students choices of colleges.

This report provides a good overview of the rankings systems and the effect they have had on higher education. If you are just starting the search for the right college and believe that rankings have a place in that search, you might want to start with this report to get another view on the ratings.

Syracuse University announced it will drop men’s and women’s swimming and diving after the 2007-08 academic year. The institution will add a women’s ice hockey team in 2008-09. Syracuse will continue to honor the scholarships of the swimmers even after the 2007-08 season.

Source: Varsity Edge

The new Common Application is online now. Check it out at www.commonapp.org and get a headstart on your applications.