While high school juniors and seniors are in full-on panic mode because the college application and acceptance process is hitting the fan in earnest for both groups of students, I’m hopeful everyone can manage to remember that college is not a life or death situation. Every adult involved in the life of an upperclassman tends to make it seem as though it is, but I promise you it’s not.

Breathe, people, and read this post in the NY Times education blog, Mom U. Regular columnist, Caren Osten Gerzberg, had her daughter write the post. Nicole is a high school junior and makes some excellent points with regard to the college admissions process and how it relates to the grand scheme of things.

Seriously, you are a single, unimportant speck in the universe. No one actually gives a rat’s ass which institution of higher learning chooses you for matriculation. And in ten years, neither will you. Perspective is a priceless tool.

Further Reading:

Community College vs. University
College Comparison Tool
Awesome Parent
The Coolest College Application Essay Ever
How To (Not) Screw Up the College Apps
Avoiding Six Common College Application Slip-Ups
College Admissions Testing: For and Against
Taking Your Personality Into Account When Making Major Decisions
Media Frenzy Around High Pressure College Admissions
College Admissions—Looking Good Only On Paper

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Kay M. McClenney, whose day job involves being the director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, is a contributing writer for the NY Times blog, The Choice, which focuses on college admissions advice. Dr. McClenney just posted part 5 of a week-long series answering readers’ questions about community college.

Guidance Office Posts:

Answers About Community Colleges, Part 1
Answers About Community Colleges, Part 2
Answers on Community Colleges, Part 3
Answers on Community Colleges, Part 4
Answers on Community College, Part 5

Further Reading:

Too Much Enrollment, Not Enough Funding
The Community College Guide
Community College Before the Four-Year School
Community College vs. University

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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It doesn’t seem right to compare the streamlining of higher education to the manufacturing of fuel-efficient cars, but this Newsweek article has a few good points. I’ve posted before about some schools offering a three-year degree option for qualified (super ahead of the game) college students. It makes a certain amount of sense when the economy bites and tuition rates are biting everyone’s asses even harder.

Getting in and out more quickly means a somewhat frugal social life (unless you’re just that good). If you’re someone who views college as a strictly educational experience, then go crazy with the three-year-degree Cheez Whiz. Otherwise, maybe take your time and go for the traditional four years. Or the more realistic six years.

Some pros according to the Newsweek article:

…[S]ome forward-looking colleges like Hartwick are rethinking the old way of doing things and questioning decades-old assumptions about what a college degree means. For instance, why does it have to take four years to earn a diploma? This fall, 16 first-year students and four second-year students at Hartwick, located halfway between Binghamton and Albany, enrolled in the school’s new three-year degree program. According to the college, the plan is designed for high-ability, highly motivated students who wish to save money or to move along more rapidly toward advanced degrees.

And some cons:

There are drawbacks to moving through school at such a brisk pace. For one, it deprives students of the luxury of time to roam intellectually. Compressing everything into three years also leaves less time for growing up, engaging in extracurricular activities, and studying abroad. On crowded campuses it could mean fewer opportunities to get into a prized professor’s class. Iowa’s Waldorf College has graduated several hundred students in its three-year-degree programs, but is now phasing out the option. Most Waldorf students wanted the full four-year experience—academically, socially, and athletically. And faculty members will be wary of any change that threatens the core curriculum in the name of moving students into the workforce.

Further Reading:

Super Efficient Three-Year Degree for the Highly Motivated

The Three-Year Solution

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would have a difficult time not clueing into the fact that I have negative feelings toward helicopter parents and their whacked-out Machiavellian ways. Is ‘Machiavellian’ too harsh? Then how about fu**ed-up, ruinously obsessive, and freakishly controlling?

It’s possible that I may have issues with parents who can’t seem to allow their children to (a) be themselves, and (b) have non-goal-oriented childhoods. The parents who die with the most Ivy-League-Degreed kid don’t win. That’s not even a category. Let it go. Kids should have only the job of growing into themselves; they are not here to make their parents look good.

Thankfully (as I’m this close to chucking the last vestige of professionalism right out the window) the end of the Helicopter-Parenting Era may be drawing to a close. Amy Benfer has written a gorgeously optimistic (and, yet, humorously sarcastic) article in Salon.com about the possible founder of the overly intense parenting trend, Lisa Belkin, and the new hands-off approach to raising whippersnappers:

Now Lisa Belkin certainly isn’t the only person responsible for the shameful way in which our discussion of parenting in the past decade has shifted to focus almost exclusively on the trials, tribulations, petty competitions and anxieties of a tiny group of very privileged families with children who seem to consider their individual child’s prospects of getting into the most exclusive schools more important than, say, ensuring an equitable access to education for this entire generation of children.

…Parenting trends do come and go. But it is genuinely shameful that over this past decade, women on both sides of the Mommy Wars — often self-identified feminist women — have allowed so many definitions of “good” parenting to become inextricably tied up with “affluence.” While all children need good food, healthcare, shelter and good schools, the helicopter parents, whoever the hell they were, allowed parenting to become a competition between children, in which your child’s well-being was directly proportionate to how much advantage he or she could score over the next kid. That, to me, is frankly immoral, and those are the kids I worry about. Hopefully they will grow up to be wiser — and kinder — than their own parents. More…

Now I can’t get that damn “Ding-dong the witch is dead” tune out of my day’s humming repertoire. I have Munchkin-fear, but it’s such a snappy little tune…

Previous Posts on High-Pressure Parenting (in Varying Degrees of Professionalism):

Acceptance
Awesome Parent
“Bursting the AP Bubble”
“College Panel Calls For Less Focus On SATs”
College Student Spy Cams
Find Your Happy Place
Media Frenzy Around High-Pressure College Admissions
Perpetual Perpetration
Play Doh-Smeared Credentials
Private College Counselors
Testing Season Begins

Posted by Alexa Harrington

An article in The Boston Globe describes quite nicely how the admissions panels at Amherst College and Tufts University sit down and choose which student will be matriculating at their institutions. It’s not all numbers and robot-like perfection that the panels are searching for; a student’s whole picture is pondered.

All the successful applicants to Tufts and Amherst, two highly selective liberal arts colleges, boast impressive academic credentials, but so do most of their competitors. What they share is a spark that makes them stand out from the crowd, whether through singular talents and values, fierce determination in the face of hard circumstance, or force of personality.

For high school seniors aspiring to the nation’s top colleges and universities, the inner workings of admissions offices seem shrouded in mystery, a murky process that fuels endless angst and speculation. As students nervously await their decision letters, the two highly selective colleges invited a Globe reporter to observe admissions deliberations firsthand. The sessions reveal a complex, nuanced system that is at once analytical and intuitive, rigorous and forgiving, impartial and deeply personal.

The article goes into detail about what happens during the process—what the admissions panel sitting in the meeting room together go through to decide which 3,300 applicants out of 15,000 will be attending their school in the fall. It seems to be an excruciating process.

Here’s the cool advice blurb that was included in the article:

Like Dartmouth College, Amherst also has a need-blind admissions policy. Don’t they have enough good karma built up?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image credit: Nancy Palmieri for The Boston Globe

The National Review Online has an illuminating article up pointing out the illogicality (and foolishness) of putting too much faith in the warped college rankings system. I’ve said about all I can say (using professional language) about the rankings, so I’ll hold back and let Frederick M. Hess and Thomas Gift from NRO speak wisely (and way more professionally) instead:

Some of the schools with higher rankings may truly have improved, but the most significant factor is that two of the Barron’s criteria — high-school grades and percentage of applicants accepted — don’t mean what they did a decade ago. Grade inflation, and students’ applying to more schools than they used to, have juiced the numbers to make students look more qualified and schools more selective.

Grade inflation, dubbed “high schools’ skeleton in the closet” by Lehigh University education professor Perry Zirkel, has been a creeping phenomenon for two decades.

Also, whereas college-bound students used to limit applications to a few top choices, it is not unusual for students today to apply to many more. UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute has reported that the percentage of high-school seniors who applied to four or more colleges increased by more than a quarter from 1996 to 2006 and now stands at over 60 percent….. when students in general submit more applications, colleges in general get to reject more applicants — making schools across the board more “selective” by the Barron’s criteria.

And that is why trusting the evil genius rankings machine is a mistake. Be aware of who’s in charge and make decisions accordingly.

Previous Posts, Venting Language Included:

Acceptance
College Rankings
Unigo.com
New System for Ranking Colleges

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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For prospective college students who leave high school fully prepped to jump head-first into college, there’s a new money-saving three-year college degree option. Tennessee Senator, Lamar Alexander, likens it to the fuel-efficient car version of a college education. These days, that does seem tempting.

Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY is one of the first schools to offer a three-year degree option, but Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, is hoping more private schools will follow suit:

“Three-year degrees are a very important option, and I think we’ll be seeing more of them,” she said. “They won’t serve a large proportion of students since a three-year degree requires that you finish high school college-ready, enroll full-time and be focused.”

I’m tempted to scoff at the crazed intensity of cramming a college degree into three years, but I think it might be gauche to deride saving $40,000 in this day and age. My only concern, as per usual, is the thought that after thirteen years of working their booties off to get into college, kids who go the three-year-degree route will have no time to stop until they graduate and will then realize there’s a whole world out there that they haven’t had five minutes to really consider. I concede that it’s possible I’m the only one concerned about the mental and emotional well-being of high school and college students, but I feel it’s worth mentioning.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Sometimes, while spelunking the Internet for information related to a blog post I’m writing, I come across interesting bits I haven’t read yet. (I only have two eyes, there are still only 24 hours in a day, and I have not yet received the super-human reading powers I ordered weeks ago).

Included in these finds is an opinion piece in the LA Times written by a self-proclaimed AP drop-out. Tom Stanley-Becker was a junior at the University of Chicago’s University High School when he wrote the article in May 2008, so–according to my awesome calculus skills–he’s currently a senior at said high school.

His piece explains why he ditched his AP coursework on favor of normal classes where he felt he’d have time to actually learn the material, instead of doing “learning” the AP way and memorizing a phenomenal collection of facts for the AP exams.

The overriding goal is to crack the AP test. That means taking a lot of practice tests — week after week, filling in those bubbles in class. It means researching past AP exams to predict what will be on the test. It means answering model AP essay questions for homework. It means brute memorization. My classmates ask: Will there be more questions on the American Revolution or World War I? What do we really have to know about mercantilism? Their unspoken question is: If I blow the AP test, can I still get into a good college?

Adults (like me) yammer on and on about the best and worst ways for kids to be taught. It was refreshing and intriguing to hear a student write less-than-favorable things about AP classes. While I’m a staunch supporter of education, learning, and getting into college (if that’s where a kid wants to go), I have historically had a hard time with the unhealthily intense focus that parents and high school students seem to have with Getting Into College. I have a slew of foul language and inappropriate utterances that are just begging to tumble forth whenever I think about the hoop-jumping and the high pressure.

To the parents I say: Back off a little. Chances are good your kids will survive even if you’re not there breathing down their necks and wiping their proverbial asses.

To the kids I say: There are only eight Ivy League schools. Chances are really good that you won’t get into one of those no matter how many hoops you can jump through at once while blindfolded and balanced on a tightrope fifty stories up. However, there are over 6,000 colleges and universities in the United States of the non-Ivy variety, and you have an excellent chance of getting into one of those.

Further Reading:

National Center for Education Statistics: (see Table 1 for reassuring info)

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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