Universities Weblog

You spend countless hours preparing an application to your first-choice college. Finally, judgment day comes. A yes? A no? How about a maybe?

Nationwide, colleges and universities are placing larger numbers of students on wait lists. The tactic, of course, is self-serving. A college wants the right number—and right kinds—of students to fill its entering class, and it can manipulate the wait list as deposits come in. If you're high enough on the list and fit a preferred profile, you might get an offer. On average, only one in five does.

As the referenced article suggests, students can't do much to influence a decision. It might be better to consider it a "no" and focus on where you've been accepted. If you send your deposit and subsequently receive an offer from your top choice, you still can go. But don't hold your breath in the meantime.

What to do if your family doesn't help you foot the college bill? Work four jobs and take out lots of Student Loans. Oh, and sleep in the library basement.

That was an NYU student's solution to his financial woes. Instead of paying for a dorm room, he shacked up in the library and kept his personal belongings with him. And he showered in friends' rooms.

The university caught wind of his escapades via his Web site, homelessatnyu.com. He's now living free in a dorm.

You be the judge: Resourceful or pathetic?

Spring is here, and with the budding trees and warmer weather come college acceptance letters. Rejoice! But soon families everywhere will face the inevitable reality: a term bill.

Not surprisingly, financial aid is on many minds these days. Need help figuring things out? Visit the Financial Aid Supersite and College Tuition Solutions for starters. No matter your status—high school senior, college student, working adult—you'll find enough information to get you going. The sites also offer advice for a fee, but you can begin with their free newsletters.

Happy hunting.

In a tough economic climate, even graduates of elite Business Schools may be hard pressed to find jobs. Dip into the second or third tier of B-schools, and the picture is far less rosy.

A New York Times piece sheds light on the MBA Consortium, a group of 16 B-schools that have joined forces to help their students get jobs. These schools fall just below the top five or ten "core" programs from which many "prestigious" employers recruit. So if you're a student at the University of Rochester or Wake Forest, don't despair. The Consortium has your back.

But with so many graduates competing for so few jobs, is attending a second-rate B-school worth it? You could come out tens of thousands of dollars in debt (possibly heaped on your undergraduate debt), and will have foregone two years of full-time employment. And here's the kicker: You don't need an M.B.A. to succeed in business. The Apprentice's Troy McClain proved that you don't even need a college degree.

Some experts believe that B-schools serve only to sort talented people, separating the truly ambitious from the simply smart. One dean even suggested to the Times that people admitted to Harvard should use their acceptance letters to get jobs and forget the B-school altogether.

In other words, if you're really smart and ambitious, attending business school may be just a waste of time and money, even at the elite programs.

A simple exercise in stereotyping would suggest that elite private colleges enroll children of the wealthy, while state universities are home to working-class folks. Recent studies show, however, that the two populations are more similar than one might think.

According to a Higher Education Research Institute report (as cited in the New York Times), at the nation's 42 most selective state universities, 40 percent of this year's freshmen come from families making over $100,000 per year. That's more than double the national average. A sizable number of University of Michigan students come from families making in excess of $200,000. At Harvard, the Times notes, the average family income is $150,000.

Another study shows that from 1985 to 2000, the percentage of students at the 250 most selective colleges whose family earnings placed them in the bottom quartile nationally actually fell somewhat, despite widespread efforts to increase financial aid. Enrollment of middle-class students fell even more dramatically. "In many cases," the Times says, "the less wealthy students went to less selective schools, including lower-ranked campuses of state universities."

More students each year seek a college education. Competition for places at elite privates and top publics has become ridiculously intense. That competition evidently favors students from wealthy families despite higher education's purported efforts to democratize itself. Tuition continues to rise, most rapidly at public institutions. The middle-class and poor are systematically being pushed ever downward into the lower tiers of the educational spectrum.

Are we witnessing the demise of higher education's traditional role as the gateway to the American Dream?

Here's yet another example of why rich kids have a distinct advantage in the college admissions frenzy.

Several companies are now offering intensive summer programs to help kids and their families master the fine art of competing for college admission. For a measly few grand, you can spend a couple of weeks practicing your essays, gaining tips on interviewing, prepping for the SAT, fine-tuning your list of target schools, and visiting dozens of campuses. Says one such company, "Colleges don't accept people, they accept applications." How wonderfully dehumanizing.

Is it worth it? Who knows? But families are evidently willing to invest in the chance that it'll make a difference. Some college officials, though, have a different opinion. To wit:

"This is just sick," said Bruce Poch, dean of admissions at Pomona College in California. "I can't imagine how it's going to help, and it sounds like such a ridiculous waste of money that it distresses me that parents would be so obsessive-compulsive."And what about the families who can't afford such a camp? What about the kids who actually have to work during the summer, who don't have the luxury of spending a few weeks perfecting interview skills and gallivanting from one campus to the next?

Yes, those are indeed rhetorical questions.

(Source: Princeton University)So you're an Ivy Leaguer racking up A's left and right. Join the crowd.

Thanks to grade inflation, an A isn't what it used to be. Now they're as common as beer at frat parties. At Princeton, almost half the grades last year were A's. So much for the bell curve. Are students that much smarter, or are professors succumbing to the "student-as-consumer" pressures? Or neither?

Here's what troubles me about grade inflation. I would argue that students should be evaluated against each other, not against some vague notion of what an "average" student's performance might be. The typical Princeton student might be smarter and perform better academically than the national mean, however measured, so it stands to reason that most deserve higher grades. Professors coming to Princeton from a state university might be duly impressed. But if Princeton students are evaluated against their peers, then they can't all earn A's. Not even half should.

Using this rationale, we can clearly see how students stack up against their closest competition. An A at Princeton would actually mean something, and a B wouldn't be so bad. And that same A at Princeton should count for more than an A at the state U. But by eliminating competition for grades and handing out A's like Halloween candy, elite colleges are forcing employers and graduate schools to say "so what?" to a high grade point average.

Let's return to the Gentleman's C and make students earn anything more.

Memo to all overachieving high school seniors: It's time to slow down. After years of grueling study, countless co-curricular activities and endless resume polishing, you finally got into college. And you expect to continue the grind next fall. Well, don't.

College officials are urging students to relax, to concentrate on their studies, and to achieve a healthy balance of work and play. They advise picking just a couple of activities, not several. But if you've been in fifth gear for as long as you can remember, it's hard to jam it into reverse so suddenly. The good news, though, is that colleges don't expect you to overachieve, and they certainly don't encourage it.

Unless, of course, you want to get into graduate school.

Conventional wisdom suggests that high school students need to take as many Advanced Placement courses as possible to be competitive in the college admissions rat race. That's evidently not true.

Instead, college officials advise students to take the most challenging courses their schools offer. So if your school doesn't have AP courses, don't fret. Just pick the hard stuff and do well.

A recent New York Times essay explores the notion that race-based affirmative action actually benefits rich, white families. The argument here is that by focusing on racial equality, universities neglect class-based, or economic, equality. And while creating a microcosm of society by admitting more minority students doesn't necessarily displace wealthy students, trying to mirror society's financial picture would. In other words, elite colleges would no longer be bastions for the upper class, so the upper class prefers that the spotlight remain on race.

Here's an excerpt:

In the end, we like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more—it might require us to give up our money. [...]. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don't have to worry that most people can't go to them, while others get to do so because they've had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families.Does this argument have merit? Sure, but it's hardly new. Universities have long wrestled with balancing racial and economic representation. Certainly there is some overlap here, but it's not that neat.

Then again, nothing about college admissions seems to be.