Comprehensive Educational Platform

College Rankings: My Pet Peeve

September 13th, 2010

As many of you know, I’m not a fan of college rankings. I think most rankings are lame and their methodology is creaky.

When a mom emailed me yesterday complaining about the rankings, I decided to use this as an opportunity to share one of my biggest pet peeves about the college rankings of U.S. News & World Report, which frankly are the only rankings that really matter to families.

Here’s the pet peeve:  the magazine’s rankings are a beauty contest.

Reputation has always been the biggest factor in US News & World Report’s college rankings. That’s a major reason why the schools that have a great reputation – deserved or not – monopolize the top spots.

Until this year, reputation has accounted for 25% of a college or university’s ranking.  How the magazine accesses reputation is what’s crazy.

How is San Diego State Doing on a Scale of 1 to 5?

Every year, the magazine sends out three surveys to each institution in a particular category, such as national universities or liberal arts colleges. Three administrator

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Tags: College Rankings, Rankings

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Case Study: Applying Early Decision

September 9th, 2010

Yesterday I shared an easy way to to obtain early decision statistics from individual colleges and universities. Here is the post:

Finding the Success Rate of Applying Early Decision

As I promised at the time, I want to delve into the specifics of a high school senior, I’m going to call her Sarah, who wants to apply early decision to The College of New Jersey. I’d love to hear whether you think Sarah should apply ED.

Sarah has a 3.7/3.8 unweighted GPA.  She’s a very hard worker, but she’s taken only honors classes and no AP courses except an AP literature class this fall. Her combined SAT scores are around 1900. The teenager, who wants to be a special-ed teacher, is madly in love with The College of New Jersey.

Part of the family dynamics is that the girl is a twin. Her brother, a late bloomer has an unweighted 3.4 GPA, but he continues to improve academically and he earned a great SAT score — 2100. Sarah has

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Tags: Applying Early, Applying Early Decision, Decision, Early Decision

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How Generous Is This College?

September 5th, 2010

How can you tell if a college or university will cut the price for your child?

You can get an idea by looking at a school’s Common Data Set.

If you don’t know what a Common Data Set is, you’ll want to read the posts that I wrote last week on this valuable document:

Researching Colleges With the Common Data Set

Common Data Set 101

Today I want to focus on the financial aid section of any school’s Common Data Set. You’ll find all the financial aid information located in Section H of the document.  I’m going to use Macalester College in St. Paul for my example simply because I learned from Alexa, which ranks websites by Internet traffic, that the biggest concentration of people visiting my blog come from Minneapolis-St. Paul. Who knew?

To obtain Macalester College’s Common Data Set, I just Googled the school’s name and Common Data Set. Macalester has its nine most recent Common Data Set’s posted on the Institutional Research section of its website.  FYI, you can often find other information about a college on its Institutional Research site. For instance, I dis

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Tags: College

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My First College Blog Video

September 1st, 2010

It took me all afternoon, but I finally figured out how to record a video and post it on YouTube. You have no idea how long it took just to figure out how to insert a title. I’m hoping that I can now get the darn thing on my own college blog.

It’s my first video so it’s definitely not polished, but I trust that I will get better as I go along. If I

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Tags: Video

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India’s Forced Labor — Siddharth Kara

August 27th, 2010

Siddharth Kara, author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, continues his extraordinary series on CNN.com with a look at forced labor in India.

Kara has been traveling in South Asia researching bonded labor and in his latest installment he describes the labor exploitation in the stone crushing and beddi rolling industries. He writes:

One of the forms of bonded labour I researched for the first time during this trip was stone crushing in Haryana. Try to imagine lifting an 18 kg metal hammer over your head, then flailing it down with all your strength into hard stone.

Now try to imagine doing this in 40 C heat, with minimal food and water, twelve to fourteen hours a day, for a wage of $0.02 per square foot of stone you manage to crush. Finally, imagine you may receive half this wage now and then, or half of it may be deducted for debt repayment.

Beedi rolling also takes a heavy physical and mental toll on workers, who have often no other alternatives for work besides this very painstaking task.

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Tags: Forced Labor, Kara, Siddharth Kara

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Back to School — A Questionnaire from What to Do When College Is Not the Best Time of Your Life

August 23rd, 2010

David Leibow’s new book What to Do When College Is Not the Best Time of Your Life comes just in time for those returning to school, particularly for those whose experience has been disappointing.

At the beginning of his book, Leibow presents a questionnaire designed “to help you clarify whether you’re having the college experience you hoped for—and that you still could have if you made a few changes.” Below are some questions from the questionnaire and you can download it in its entirety here :

General 1. Is college a disappointment? Is it less fulfilling or fun than youthought it would be? 2. Are you having more trouble fitting in or getting adjustedthan you expected? 3. Do you think about transferring or dropping out? 4. Do you feel you’re not ready to be in college or in this college? 5. Do you feel lost, confused, overwhelmed, stressed out, or sad a lot of the time? 6. Do you get anxious or depressed when you think of returning to college at the end of a vacation or visit home? 7. Does it see

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Tags: Best Time, Life, When College

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