Update Announcement!

Okay, so by now most of you have realized that it is the summer. With that you've probably noticed that school is out and most of the school planning has taken a hiatus for a while. Not that parents are any less concerned or that students' goals have somehow become unappreciated or irrelevant, but everyone needs a break every once and a while.

That being said, the blog will take a short summer break so I can both focus efforts elsewhere for a few weeks and it will return in all its glory as school starts again and there is a greater need and desire for the wonderful counsel you get here.

As always feel free to send in questions and stay tuned for any answers and posts that come in the mean time.

A Better Way: Part 8

How to Speed Up a Glacier

Those suggestions for parents are mere band-aids--they just show how to make the best of a bad set of choices--most brand-name colleges really do treat undergraduates unconscionably.

What could make colleges change? Fear of losing money. Colleges, even private colleges, get a huge chunk of money from the taxpayer. So, when colleges cry for more money, we the taxpayers should be answering, "Not until you provide a quality education, not until you transform dorms from Animal House into living-learning environments, not until you can show that your graduates really do grow enough to justify the enormous cost and time."

A Better Way: Part 7

The following, in my view, are top-value colleges. In addition to a relatively low sticker price, they score well, on average, on these criteria: student quality, location, a campus culture that welcomes true diversity of ideas (not just politically correct ones), and a name that opens career doors. The larger institutions, which I've starred, do suffer from being research-first/students-second institutions, but their low price and desirability on other factors justifies their inclusion.

* Rice: A Big-Oil endowment has created an Ivy-clone college at half the price.

* UCLA: The honors program is a patch of Ivy at a State U price.
Mary Washington College: Like a small private college at a public price--in a Jeffersonian setting an hour from D.C.

* McGill: A great city (Montreal), strong students, and the Canadian 69-cent dollar makes McGill a deal.

* University of Toronto: Easier to get into than McGill.

* Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. California weather, excellent students in its strong majors (e.g., architecture, engineering), $1,500 annual tuition. Safe, quaint town.

* University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Good students, ideal location, great basketball tradition, bargain price.

* University of Virginia: Top students in a Jeffersonian setting replete with colonnades and rolling lawns.

* Santa Monica College: A nearly free two-year college that feeds many students to UCLA and Berkeley. Near the beach and L.A.

You can save the money on undergraduate education without shortchanging the child. That way you'll have money left for graduate school.

A Better Way: Part 6

What to Do in the Meantime

An expensive college simply isn't worth the money. The definitive review of the literature (Astin, 1997) finds absolutely no relationship between a college's cost and the amount of learning that accrues. And a study in the American Economic Review concluded that even in terms of earnings, "What matters most is not which college you attend, but what you did while you were there. (That means choosing a strong major, choosing professors carefully, getting involved in leadership activities, getting to know professors)...Measured college effects are small, explaining just one to two percent of the variance in earnings." A more recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (Krueger & Dale, 1999) produced similar findings: when controlling for student input variables, an Ivy League education confers no economic advantage on its graduates.

This makes sense. Sure the designer-label on an Ivy diploma opens career doors, but put an Ivy-caliber student at Podunk College, and she can accrue benefits that fully compensate. For example, although my daughter was admitted to prestigious Williams College, she turned it down in favor of an easier-to-get into public institution that cost 70% less. There, the honors program functioned as a patch of Ivy, small classes with Ivy-caliber students taught by top professors. Honors extracurriculars extended the elite experience beyond the classroom. Perhaps more important, as a top student, she was taken under wing by professors, got appointed to university-wide governance committees, and got touted for terrific post-college opportunities--she spent a year in the White House writing Hillary Clinton's daily briefings. If she had attended Williams, she would likely have been lost among its many top students--and we would have been nearly $100,000 poorer.

So, unless your annual income is under $40,000, which would make you likely to get significant cash (not loan) financial aid, or are too wealthy to care, your child should apply to colleges with a low sticker price. He will learn as much, you'll save a fortune, and you will spare your child the inordinate stress and waste of time (studying for the SAT, waking at 3 AM to do crew because it will look good on college applications) of trying to get into designer-label colleges that well may not be worth the money and effort.

A Better Way: Part 5

Instill Integrity in Admissions

Today's brochures and Web pages for a college's prospective students are little more than advertising. Colleges, which hold themselves out as icons of integrity, need to start acting that way. Each college brochure and Web site should be required to offer consumer information that would enable prospective students to compare colleges:

* The four-, five- and six-year graduation rate, with separate statistics for students with excellent, good, and fair high school records. (You may be surprised to know that nationwide, only 40% of freshmen at four-year colleges make it to graduation, even when given six years. Few other businesses would survive if 60% of their products fell off the assembly line before reaching the end.)

* The amount of growth from freshman year to graduation in writing, reading, math, computing, and information literacy. Again, separate statistics should be provided for students with excellent, good, and fair high school records.

* A grid showing the average cash and loan financial aid for students with different family income, assets, and high school record.

*As Lloyd Thatcher, in "College Admission: Profession or Industry," suggests, "No college, student or school is perfect. Let's be open and upfront with weaknesses as well as strengths."

* It is absurd that a student who wants to apply to Columbia, Northwestern, Penn, Georgetown, Stanford, Yale, and Cornell, must complete seven separate, extremely time-consuming applications. Most colleges are looking for the same thing: academic potential, extracurricular depth, and the ability to contribute to the campus and larger community. A student should be able to apply to any seven schools s/he wishes with one essay, listing of extracurriculars, transcript, and set of test scores submitted to the high school counselor's office on a nationally-agreed on date. The packet would then be e-mailed to any seven colleges designated by the student.

A Better Way: Part 4

Build in One-on-One

We grow greatly from one-on-one relationships. Yet, because of the expense, colleges provide very little one-on-one. Students criticize advising (and lack of parking) more than any other aspect of undergraduate education. At most colleges, professors schedule office hours only 2-3 hours a week! Colleges that care must have well-trained academic, career, and personal advisors, available in person and online. To ensure ample availability without undue cost, peer counselors could be used for routine concerns.

A Better Way: Part 3

Create true living-learning environments

Residence hall life must be far more organized. Many, if not most, freshmen are living away from home for the first time. Put all these newly liberated, often scared, kids in one hall with little structure, and you have a prescription for failure. So many freshmen end up living an Animal-House existence or, overwhelmed by it, sit depressed in their dorm rooms. Colleges should provide a rich array of residence hall programs during evenings and weekends, some of which would be required. Some faculty would live among the students. Drugs and underage drinking, a major cause of problems in dorms, currently winked at by many colleges, should be strictly prohibited. If colleges care at all about their students, they cannot brush aside the fact that 42% of all college students binge drink. A once-a-year no-anti-drinking seminar is not enough. The truly caring college would create a dorm culture satisfying enough that alcohol abuse would become, for most students, superfluous.

A Better Way: Part 2

Develop and hire instructors that specialize in undergraduate education

When live faculty are used, they should be specifically trained as undergraduate instructors. Today, the typical professor is trained and interested in research and arcana, not the education and nurturing of undergraduates. Within each undergraduate major, colleges should offer a specialization in undergraduate pedagogy. Faculty hired to teach undergraduates would be these bachelors-degree holders rather than the research-types currently used.

A Better Way: Part 1

Here's my vision for what colleges should do.

Use Virtual “Teachers”

Today, in most of the nation's 3,500 colleges, introductory courses, for example, Introduction to Biology, are taught primarily by an instructor, good, bad, or indifferent, lecturing to students umpteen rows away. You can often get a decent grade just by cramming for a midterm and a final, even though you'll have forgotten 3/4 of what you learned within days of semester's end.

Imagine that instead, you logged onto your home computer to find one of the nation's best biology instructors teaching Intro to Biology, using simulation and demonstration equipment far too expensive for most colleges to afford. You could replay any parts of the lecture you wanted, and at any point, you could click on words that would provide a fuller explanation of what the professor was saying.

After each 30-minute instructional unit, you would take an interactive quiz. You'd participate in simulations and other experiments online, using equipment for free that you couldn't possibly access in the real world. Even the classic frog dissection could be done online. Think of all the hassle, blood and gore that would be saved--not to mention the millions of frogs lives. Another benefit: the nation wrings its collective hands about the lack of minority instructors. Choose a minority instructor for the program and many thousands of students derive the benefits of having a minority biology instructor.

Using interactive teachers wouldn't completely replace the human instructor. Small classes and office hours would still be provided in person. But the large lecture, that boring vestige of the Middle Ages, so often blown-off by students who download lecture notes, would be replaced by interactive and virtual teachers, an approach that would enable every college student, rich or poor, to receive world-class education at a fraction of the cost.

Shouldn't You Get What You Pay For?

College: America's Most Overrated Product

In my job and working with thousands of students trying to better themselves and find a career I've often heard the words, "I'm paying good money for" ...

Colleges hold teenagers hostage. Because young adults need that piece of paper, colleges know students will come to them no matter how slipshod an education they provide. Employers increasingly demand a college diploma for anything above a McJob.

That insatiable demand for their pieces of paper allows colleges to sometimes provide a mediocre education without fear of losing students. And most colleges, especially prestigious ones, do provide a mediocre education because they are more interested in conducting research than in teaching undergraduates. So, for example, colleges heavily use the cheapest, least-effective method of instruction: herding hundreds of students into an auditorium to listen to a lecture by a professor whose main interest is an esoteric research area, not the basics that undergraduates need to know. Small classes are taught mainly by graduate students, often teaching for the first time. Residence hall life is rarely the living-learning environment so often advertised in colleges’ brochures.

It is ironic that the most prestigious, most expensive colleges are the ones most likely to provide a poor undergraduate education. They can only get away with it because of the institution's designer-label (acquired from its research, not its undergraduate education), and because the students are bright enough to create an interesting experience despite the college's neglect. How obscene to charge $30,000 a year and shortchange our nation's best and brightest.

How to Change it? ...

When to Choose a Major

One of the most important decisions you will make when embarking on your college career is what you will select as your major. Despite the importance of this decision, many undergraduates come to this conclusion very early, some before they even set foot on campus.

There are, in fact, a number of things that should be considered before deciding on a major. Remember, college is more than a trade school. The goal of higher education is to give you a skill set that will help you in the workplace, but it is also designed to make you more of a well-rounded person. You should spend your first couple of semesters taking a variety of courses that interest you, not just fill your core requirements. Not only does this give you more options, but it also gives you information down the road if you decide on a minor.

Please keep in mind that if you do go to college with a major in mind that you find that it is not a good fit for you. You may want to change, but you should try to find this out earlier rather than later…

This is also important because changing your major midway through college can cost you time and money. If you decide in your second or third year that your current major isn’t right for you, you may have to postpone your graduation date and pay for the extra time you are in school.

Benefits of Taking a Year Off

Many students head off to college right after high school because that's the customary path. But if you are thinking that you are not quite ready for college, then you may want to consider taking a year off to explore foreign countries, gain work experience, or improve upon your studying skills. Check out the following benefits of taking a gap year before you begin college.

You will become more mature. Students who take a year off before they enter college mature earlier than their peers who come straight to college from high school. Taking a year off to travel foreign places or work full-time will give you real world experience. Think about how much you would mature if you got to travel to Ghana by yourself and teach English to school children or if you got to explore South East Asia by working in the rain forests. On so many levels, you develop a certain maturity when traveling on your own and experiencing new people and customs. That maturity will allow you to become excited about going to college and allow you to get through the social and intellectual stressors of the four or more intense years to come.

You will become more focused. When you take a year off to discover who you really are, you will be more focused on what you want to do with the rest of your life. Many students, who thought they knew what they wanted to major in, realized that they did not enjoy working in their presumed major after they delved into their gap year of full-time work. These students were able to take the rest of their gap year to explore different jobs in order to find out what they wanted to major in at college. If you are not exactly sure what you would like to major in, then consider taking a year off to explore different career fields.

You will be academically prepared for college. Students who lack basic study skills may run into difficulties at college. If you feel that your grades or your study skills are not up to par by the time you graduate from high school, then you may want to consider taking a gap year to improve yourself academically. Contemplate the option of enrolling in a postgraduate program to enhance your concentrated studying. There are many programs that offer refresher courses in algebra, geometry, English, etc. Some programs even offer introductory college-level classes. These postgraduate programs can help students master the art of college writing and studying and can possibly help students boost their grades before applying to college.

You will have an appreciation for college. If you are going to college because that's what your parents want you to do, then you may have a hard time appreciating what college has to offer you. A gap year may shed a new light on college. Consider the following situation: You take a year off from college to work full-time. You work long hours with very low pay. It won't take you very long to realize that in order to get ahead in life, you need a college degree. When your gap year is over, you will have a new appreciation for college and know that you really want to be there instead of just going because that is what is expected.

Remember that taking a gap year isn't for everyone. If you already know exactly what you want to major in and you think that you are mature enough for the work that comes along with college, then you probably want to continue on to college right after high school. Weigh out your options and pick the best decision for you. If you do decide to take a year off, it is best to apply to college during your senior year of high school. After you receive an acceptance to the college, you can request to have the acceptance deferred for one year. Some colleges will allow you to defer; others will request that you reapply. Be sure to make a plan and set goals for your gap year. Decide on an activity that will be beneficial for you in the long run such as volunteering in a foreign country, exploring different career paths, or improving your study skills. Whatever you decide to do, one thing is for certain: you will enroll in college a changed person.

Step #7: Paying for College

A college education costs quite a bit of money and is often one of the biggest expenses parents and college students have to incur. You can, however, receive help for college costs. This help comes in the form of grants, scholarships and student loans. While, it may take some time paying off a college degree, it is the finest investment anyone can make.

Step #6: Filling Out a Successful Application

When your teen receives an application to one of the colleges of his choice, he’ll need to do some preliminary work before filling it. Encourage him to read the entire application over and take notes on what he needs to gather up in order to answer all of the questions. He may need to ask for teacher recommendations, make copies of awards or class certificates, etc. Have him answer the entire set of questions on a separate piece of paper first, so that he can go over his answers and make any changes he feels is necessary without ruining the application paper.

Possibly an Interview Too:

Your teen may also have to attend a college interview as part of the application process. If he does, role-play the interview until your teen feels confident that he can answer any question that may be asked.

Step #5: Acing the SAT

There is only one way to ace these tests – prepare, prepare, prepare! Enroll your teen into an SAT preparatory class. Buy books and host study groups – complete with pizza. Allow your teen to take the test more than once. While a lower grade on these test will not keep your teen from attending college completely, a higher grade will get him into the college of his choice and can help with scholarship funding.

Step #4: Choose Colleges

That's right it's "colleges", not just college... Never apply to just one college; you'll be wasting your teen's time. Be sure to apply to at least two if not more. This will give your teen not only a back up plan should he not get into the first college of his choice, but it will also give him some wiggle room should he change his mind about where he wants to attend.

Step #3: Making the Grade

Education needs to be a priority in your teen's life. Colleges pay very close attention not only to your teen's grades in school, but also to the attitude your teenager has about school. Promoting a positive school experience in high school benefits your teen. They will have a great attitude about learning and it will show through on their college application and in the college interview. So remember, while good grades help, an A+ attitude toward learning will get your teen into the college of his choice.