Many applicants to the most selective university programs share high grades, high test scores, solid recommendations and generous doses of community service and volunteer activities. Yet, if they want to set themselves apart from the pool of exceptional students, a significant research experience in STEM or the social sciences helps.
An article in the 19 February 2020 Harvard Gazette, contains one of a series of articles called ‘Focal Point’ in which Harvard faculty respond to a fundamental question: ‘If you were to write a letter to your students, what would you want them to know?” In this edition, the faculty member is a lecturer in the physics department and a co-director of Graduate Studies for Physics, Jacob Barandes, and his remarks warrant reading and can be found at Harvard Gazette.
Often students are asked about their passions: exercise, the LA Dodgers, the German language, or coding in C++?
However, a better question, according to an article by Jon Jachimowicz, Three Reasons it’s so Hard to Follow Your Passion, in the Harvard Business Review 15 October 2019, is what is your purpose? Central to the article is a Deloitte Survey of 3000 full time workers across all types of job levels. It found only a fifth were ‘passionate about their work.’
One metric for keeping score on the vibrancy of a college is its yield rate: the percent of students who have been accepted who do, in fact, attend.
In 2014, Harvard edged out Brigham Young University by 0.1%, to enjoy the highest yield in the country. BYU, which has been the yield champion in several prior years, accepts slightly fewer than half of those who apply, has a 19:1 student/faculty ratio, and tuition and room and board under $13,000. Great education, great football, and access to the Wasatch National Forest enable it to get 80% of those accepted to come.
An anonymous newsletter and website at Stanford named Fountain Hopper, has pulled together a five-step process for students to gain access to all their admissions records, including comments written by the admissions officers, under FERPA.
When FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) was enacted into law in 1974, its intent was to protect the privacy of students and ensure that students have the right to access their educational records and challenge the content, if necessary, while preventing the release of the records to unauthorized third parties.
When visiting a campus one of the last places most students want to see is the library, or, depending on the size of the school, the library system. Neglecting the library, however, is a big mistake.
Many of the main benefits students derive in college are associated with the library. Outside of class, most students spend their time in the dormitory, cafeteria, the gym, or in the library.
The world of higher education is undergoing change. At the moment the change might not be easily perceived, but it is occurring, because it must.
The primary factor behind the change is higher education’s inexorably rising costs. Over the last two decades college costs have been rising annually at 1.6% above inflation.
Getting into Harvard with its 5.9% admissions rate is like winning the lottery.
After receiving over 34,000 applications this last admissions cycle (down 2% from last year), even an admissions office as sophisticated as Harvard’s admits there is a lot more art than science in the final admissions decisions. Don’t, however, dismiss the elaborate admissions decision process Harvard runs through each fall: it goes to great lengths to ensure all candidates receive a thorough and holistic review.
Admissions officers spend a lot of time sorting through raffs of transcripts, standardized test scores, essays, recommendations, interview summaries, portfolios, and lists of extracurricular activities in search of clues of leadership, that prized trait sought by hundreds of American college campuses.
Six schools, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Amherst, and MIT are all ‘need blind’ and ‘full need’ regardless of a student’s country of origin. This means that if accepted, international students will obtain the necessary financial aid to attend. Be aware, however, that though these schools advertise themselves as being “need-blind,” which technically means that financial circumstances are not considered in the admissions process, how this might actually translate into the reality of admissions warrants consideration.
