Stay Home & Get A Job

Some Admissions Officers Encourage More Free Time during the Summer

Written by: Heather Zimar
Published: 07/16/2008

Some admissions officers are encouraging students to take more time for personal growth in the summer, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The growing trend toward pre-college achievement, including college prep camps and enrichment programs, has surged in recent years, leaving college admissions officers and child psychologists to question whether the intensity is good for students, the Inquirer reported. In a recent paper, three Harvard officials are recommending that youth “bring summer back.”

“We have no evidence in Harvard admissions decisions over time that shows a consistent favorable judgment on packaged summer programs,” Marilyn McGrath, Harvard’s director of admissions, told the Inquirer. “You could just be a lifeguard, or spend a whole month reading Dostoyevsky, or visit your grandparents. All of those things are so rich in human terms.”

Eric J. Furda, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said he encourages “horizon-broadening,” but students also need to learn to relax. “People shouldn’t feel that this is another box they need to check- ‘Summer experience, check, I did that, now how does it look on my application?’” Furda told the Inquirer. He said he looks for motivation, and what a student gets out of a program and how he or she articulates it.

There are many opportunities across the country for summer enrichment programs and college prep camps. Julian Krinsky camps, for example, include internships, a model United Nations program and a pre-college program at Princeton. Entry fees range from $1,000 a week to more than $12,000 for a residential student staying eight weeks, the Inquirer reported.

Eileen Bazelon, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, said students need to balance achievement and time to explore. “Is it just a means to an end as opposed to, God forbid, learning something? It needs to be done in the right context, like taking general college chemistry to see if you’re really interested in science, not just to pad your resume.”

Furda recommends summer enrichment activities such as getting a summer job, making a reading list, checking out local science exhibits, or learning about art.

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Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/education/20080713_Not-fun_in_the_summertime_is_no_hit_with_college_officials.html

Tough College Admission Season

As college applications soar, so does the pain of rejection

By Deb Kollars - dkollars@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, April 11, 2008

An unusual season of disappointment, confusion and heartbreak has settled over the nation's college-bound crowd this year.

In a domino process of memorable proportions, a record-breaking crop of high school graduates has led to a record-setting stream of applications to top tier universities. That, in turn, has triggered more students than ever being placed on wait lists or rejected.

For many, it hurts.

"I told my mom, no boy can ever break my heart the way the rejection letter did," said Stephanie Yu, a senior at Franklin High School in Elk Grove.

Yu has a 4.2 grade-point average and nine Advanced Placement courses on her résumé, along with a healthy lineup of activities including swimming. She applied to five colleges, four in the University of California system: Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis and her favorite, San Diego. Her fifth application went to a state college, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Three weeks ago, the rejections started coming. In the end, there were five.

The disappointed teenager is now regrouping. She is writing letters of appeal. She is considering starting at a community college and transferring to the University of California later.

And this weekend, Yu and her parents will visit UC Riverside, which has turned up as a new option because UC guarantees all eligible California graduates a spot somewhere in the system. This week, UC mailed invitations to students such as Yu to attend Riverside or UC Merced, which are less crowded.

Other students have found themselves in an academic limbo this year: They have been accepted by some schools and must send in an acceptance deposit by May 1. But they have been put on wait lists at others and won't know until after May 1 whether they can enroll.

Sofia Cortopassi is a senior at Davis High School navigating these uneasy waters. She has a 4.6 grade-point average, strong test scores and numerous extracurricular activities ranging from opera singing to an internship in the state Legislature.

She applied to 18 colleges with strong music and political science programs. Ten said yes. Four turned her down. And four – including her first choice, Wellesley College in Massachusetts – put her on a wait list.

When the word from Wellesley came, it was such a letdown that Cortopassi waited two days before telling anyone.

She has since chosen a path both practical and philosophical. Next week she will visit two colleges that sent acceptances and that she finds appealing: Wesleyan University in Connecticut and George Washington University in the nation's capital.

"I figure, if they didn't accept me right off the bat, maybe it's not a good fit," she said of Wellesley.

Others at her school have taken things harder.

"At Davis this year, there are a ton of wait lists and a lot of rejections," she said. "Some of my friends had to take time off school just to deal with it."

According to college admissions directors and school counselors, the number of high school graduates has grown steadily as children of the baby boom era reach adulthood. The trend was expected to peak this year or next, but the intensity this winter came as a shock.

"It was the magnitude that surprised us," said Susan Wilbur, UC's director of undergraduate admissions. She said the growing count of graduates has been accompanied by an increase in students meeting UC's tough entrance requirements, creating even more competition.

Overall, freshman applications to UC rose 9.2 percent this year, from 87,213 to 95,201.

The University of California, Davis, which last year admitted nearly 60 percent of freshmen who applied, had the biggest jump – 15.6 percent. UCLA, where fewer than a quarter of applicants were admitted last year, saw freshman applications exceed 55,000.

At elite private schools across the country, the story has been the same.

Last week, Princeton University announced the most selective "admit rate" in the school's history – 9.25 percent. Princeton had a record 21,369 applications for the class of 2012 and offered admission to 1,976 individuals.

Stanford University said 2,400 students were chosen for admission out of 25,298 applicants this year, the largest candidate pool in the school's history.

Mary Hesser, guidance director at Christian Brothers, a private college preparatory school in Oak Park, said it has been a roller coaster year for seniors.

"We got some amazing admits," she said. "UCLA. UC Berkeley. West Point. Stanford. Duke. Georgetown." The big surprise, Hesser said, was how many rejections UC sent.

"There were lots of tears in my office," Hesser said. "It was heartbreaking. These kids are well qualified. I've been writing a lot of letters of appeal."

Besides demographics, applications also have been pushed upward by the ease of applying online and the growing popularity of the "common application," an online system accepted by 300 colleges.

"Kids can apply to 20 schools as easily as 10," said Scott Hamilton, whose Future Stars College Counseling Center helps students through the application process.

Students are aware of the growing competition, so they apply to more places, he said: "Part of the frenzy is feeding itself."

It creates a tricky situation for colleges, Hamilton said. Schools typically send out more letters of admission than available slots, knowing some students will decline. The goal is to match up the number of seats that need to be filled and acceptance deposits from candidates. Admission types call this their "yield."

With so many students applying to numerous schools, predicting an accurate yield gets tougher. As a result, some colleges are expanding their wait lists.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, increased its wait list from 499 students last year to this spring's 739. Freshman applications to MIT were up 8 percent over last year – 13,396 for 1,040 slots, said Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions. He sent 1,554 acceptance letters; if that pool proves too small, he will turn to the wait list.

Walt Wild oversees college and career centers in the Roseville Joint Union High School District. He noted that the admissions crunch is only playing out in a top tier of about 75 schools. Most of the 3,000 colleges in the country have a more balanced entry equation, he said.

"The opportunity for college is definitely there," Wild said. "It's not that kids aren't getting into college. It's just more difficult with the more prestigious schools."

Despite the fierce competition, the past few weeks have brought joy and relief to many high-achieving students.

Vinh Bui, a senior at Franklin High and friend of Stephanie Yu's, was accepted at four top schools, including Stanford, and is on a wait list for Columbia and MIT.

When he learned Stanford said yes, Bui was jubilant: "I jumped around for 10 or 15 minutes."

At school, though, he hesitated to tell his friend because he knew how sad she was.

-From the Sacramento Bee

If I ruled the admissions universe

(Ward Sutton Illustration)

By Elinor Lipman March 24, 2008

I LOVE the humble fact that Mike Huckabee graduated from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark. In fact, I think I'll go teach there if they'll have me. I'd be making a statement that was neither pro-Republican nor pro-church, but something closer to woman bites dog, college-admissions style.

I don't mean to pick on OBU (ranked number two "Best Value" in the South, according to US News & World Report. Congrats!). My mission today is to celebrate the safety over the reach, to say to high school seniors, "You who are waiting anxiously for that fat envelope, please know that you'll enjoy the same success and happiness whether you end up at Bates, Bowdoin, or Ball State."

When I was 20 an older friend predicted, "Ten years from now, no one will care where you went to school. In fact, no one will ask." Ridiculous, I thought. She turned out to be right. Where you live between the ages of 18 and 22 won't define who you are. One day soon, the proud new college decal on your family car's rear window will start looking a little uncool.

I miss the good old days of relatively relaxed college strivings. During my own college outreach, my father drove me to Medford for a Jackson College (now Tufts) interview. On the ride home he said wryly, "I picture a letter that says, 'Dear Miss Lipman, due to a shortage of desks, we are sorry to inform you. . ." I laughed. I was rejected, but can't remember the sting. So different were those times that never once did he, a Harvard grad, suggest that I might want to found a club or play for a basketball team more prestigious than Lowell Hebrew Community Center's (chief rival, Pepperell Methodist) or work harder because I was a legacy.

In 1987, a friend's son wrote to admissions officers explaining that he had fallen in love and was therefore distracted, so could they please excuse the C in physics? They did. He went to Yale. If he hadn't? I daresay he would be the same hero he is today, getting the wrongly convicted out of prisons through the Innocence Project.

I'm thinking of a fix along these lines, a lottery: put the names of the top 1 percent in a hat. There are your future Phi Beta Kappas. Another hat for the A-minuses with charisma who will run the country and the board rooms; another for those who test high, but get Cs in physics who will write the songs and choreograph the Broadway shows; a smaller hat for the medium-smart who promise to study and keep up; then one for the slackers every campus needs, a la public school, who show the geniuses how to get along with regular people. A blindfolded admissions officer would then pick names from each hat.

Athletes? Maybe the coaches could pick them the way they do now. Orchestras? At Lowell High School in the 1960s, you joined the band and Mr. Notini taught you how to play, talent and experience not required, and you sounded fine.

It would be a brave new yet happier world. The question, "Where'd you get in?" on the day of the national college lottery would carry no suggestion of success or failure. It would be them and not you, the defanged luck of the draw.

If I ruled this new admissions universe, I would study the applications and sniff out the resume padders whose parents could afford the semester in the rain forests. I'd want good smart kids, including the ones who didn't shine as brightly as the alleged stars at this moment in their high school lives. After all, my favorite life lesson is that Biff, the high school bully and big man on campus in "Back to the Future," ends up working under the car of his old victim, Marty McFly.

I wouldn't care what you looked like or how many teams you captained. I might require at your interview, as they do in a bartending course's final exam, that you tell a joke. Maybe I would go with the lottery, or maybe just take the first 1,000 who applied. Studies would have shown that you are all excellent, and in the end, I couldn't go wrong.

Elinor Lipman, a guest columnist, will publish her ninth novel, "The Chaperones," in spring 2009.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

Admission Consultants Working For Colleges?

Admissions Group to Tackle Conflict of Interest Issues

Many admissions officials were aghast in February to find out that some private admissions consultants — people paid by parents to navigate the college admissions process for their children — were also holding paid jobs with colleges or high schools. The situation — which other admissions officials said was an open secret — came to light when Inside Higher Ed reported on a University of Pennsylvania admissions official who had ties to a Japanese company that helped business school applicants and who ran her own admissions business. (The Penn official has since eliminated both of those non-Penn ties.)

This weekend, the board of the National Association for College Admission Counseling voted to create a special working group that will examine conflict of interest issues in the profession with the goal of providing guidance on the issues.

David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for NACAC, said that board members wanted to provide good advice to the profession while also recognizing the role of employers. “They didn’t want to cross boundaries that were the domain of employee-employer relations,” he said.

While the study was prompted by the issue of private counselors, other conflict of interest issues will be examined, such as questions about any benefits some colleges provide to high school counselors whom they want to recommend their institutions. Hawkins said that board wants to develop policies that would deal “not just with actual conflicts of interest, but the perception of conflicts of interest.”

Since discussion of the conflict of interest issue has built in the last month, some admissions experts have been saying that they hoped NACAC could provide guidance. To date, most private counselors have said that they follow the ethics rules of their association, the Independent Educational Counselors Association.

The association’s “Principles of Good Practice” state that “multiple relationships” — in which a counselor also works for a school or college or related program — “may relate or appear to create a conflict of interest.” The principles say that members must take steps to avoid such conflicts, and it specifically states that members must inform clients of their range of activities. But the principles do not bar such dual relationships — and the reporting requirements suggest a belief that these dual relationships can be managed. Members of the private counselors group could not be reached Sunday for reaction to NACAC’s action.

The NACAC board members who are studying the issue are counselors either in high schools or colleges. The committee hopes to report back to the board in June.

The following article talks about why it's important to keep your voice in your application essay. It's okay to work with a college adviser, a teacher, or a parent to get advice, but remember not to lose your voice. In other words don't have the essay read like an adult who is a professional writer penned the essay.

One book that can help you with writing your college application essay:
On Writing the College Application Essay: The Key to Acceptance and the College of your Choice

College applications can be too good

Admissions officers wary of slick essays

By Peter Schworm, Globe Staff | February 12, 2008

Sometimes it is the choice 10-cent word or two, a spot-on sublime or consummate, that is the giveaway. Maybe it is a series of suspiciously skilled turns of phrase, syntax the envy of Strunk and White, or some pitch-perfect metaphors that raise the red flags.

As college admissions officers sift through thousands of application essays penned by eager-to-please high school seniors, they increasingly encounter writing that sparkles a bit too brightly or shows a poise and polish beyond the years of a typical teenager.

With the scramble to get into elite colleges at a fever pitch and with a rising number of educational consultants and college essay specialists ready to give students a competitive edge, admissions officers are keeping a sharp lookout for essays that might have had an undue adult influence. In some admissions offices, such submissions receive the dubious distinction DDI, short for "Daddy Did It."

Colleges are now cross-referencing student essays against the SAT writing sample, and, if doubts linger, will ask for a graded writing sample or raise their concern with the student's high school guidance counselor. Harvard even passes along suspiciously strong essays to professors for a scholarly opinion.

"There's an awful lot of talk in the admissions profession about this," said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions and financial aid. "It's very difficult to know how much of it is the student's own work. It's just very hard to spot."

The concern over heavy-handed adult involvement is mounting as the admissions essay has become a pivotal part of the application, a key way for students to stand out from the throngs of applicants with top grades and SAT scores. In the past five years, the percentage of colleges attributing "considerable importance" to the college essay has risen from 19 to 28, behind grades, strength of classes, and standardized test scores, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Admissions officers say they would almost never deny admission solely over a suspicious essay, unless they could prove it was plagiarized. There are many talented writers, and it would be a shame to misjudge them, they say. But at competitive schools that reject the vast majority of students, a hint of doubt can tilt the balance.

"The essay has over time become more important to the admission decisions, and that's trickling down to students," said Melissa E. Clinedinst, assistant director of research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

College administrators say that intense pressure to gain acceptance to selective schools has compelled parents to turn to high-priced essay editors and coaches.

"The euphemism we use is polished," said Parke Muth, an admissions dean at the University of Virginia. "If you're paying someone that much money, there shouldn't be fingerprints. But some essays have that sheen, that lemony-fresh smell that makes you wonder."

Outright plagiarism usually sticks out like a sore thumb, and suspicions can often be confirmed with a Google search. But detecting the helpful hand of a parent, guidance counselor, or writing coach, even for admissions officers who have read thousands of personal essays, takes a keen eye.

"We definitely encounter essays that seem too good to be true," said Eric J. Kaplan, interim dean of admissions of the University of Pennsylvania. "Highly sophisticated cadence and tone, perfectly polished prose, revelations that are almost profound, even for the most brilliant 17-year-old."

When an essay raises eyebrows, the first step is to judge it against the rest of the application, administrators say. A shimmering essay from a so-so English student, for example, clashes like "red stilettos and sweats," said Sarah M. McGinty, a Boston admissions consultant and author of "The College Application Essay."

"The application is a bit of an outfit, and mismatches raise questions," she said. "Good writers leave a trail of crumbs behind."

McGinty said that while she advises students on essay topics and edits their drafts, she is careful to let students write in their own voice.

In that vein, some colleges require essays on different topics and compare them, which can expose glaring discrepancies.

"Sometimes the difference in quality is remarkable," Kaplan said. "In the shorter essays, there will be no subject-verb agreement. Then the main one would be something a magazine would be eager to print."

Admissions officers say that there is nothing wrong with students receiving some outside help with their essays, such as suggestions on what to write about and emphasize, and that the vast majority of essays are the students' own. For that reason, admissions officials will only investigate when they believe adults are essentially ghostwriting the essays.

"There's a little bit of a disconnect sometimes," said Gil J. Villanueva, dean of admissions at Brandeis University. "We expect people to write like 17- and 18-year-olds, and sometimes it comes across like it could be in a book."

Admissions officers admit there is a fine line between a vigorous edit and wholesale reworking.

"We focus on the topic that will help personalize the student and help them stand out," said Larry Dannenberg, a college consultant in Framingham. "We are very, very careful to make sure that we're not writing the essay."

Admissions officers are not so sure, and some students protest that essay services can go too far. Rachel Merkin, a freshman from Wellesley at Ithaca College, said she rejected some of her coach's suggested editing, which she thought made the essay sound too mature and writerly.

"The editor definitely made my words sound good, I'll admit that," she said. "She made every word count. But I made sure I kept my voice in the essay."

Merkin's instincts were right, admissions officers say. Heavily edited essays often come across as scripted, sanitized. Essays with some rough edges are not only authentic, they are better reads.

Applicants are better off expressing themselves in their own words, admissions officers say.

"Almost the worst thing is for students to write to what they think we are looking for," said Stu Schmill, interim admissions director at MIT. "The best thing they can do is write from the heart."

© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company