Research Opportunities
Ralph Becker
The Importance of High School Research

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.

The Importance of High School Research

The New UC Personal Insight Questions

The New UC Personal Insight Questions

After years of steady service, the UC Personal Statements are being retired, replaced by a set of Personal Insight Questions.

To inveterate college counselors in California there are likely twangs of nostalgia associated with losing, “Tell us the world you come from…” and coaxing a story out of an applicant to fill the page and expose his or her soul todiscerning, oftentimes, overloaded readers from the UC admissions offices.

The good news is that the new UC Personal Insight Questions might also serve to begin and structure the college application process.

Skyping the College Interview

Skyping the College Interview

The use of Skype for admissions interviews is becoming ever more prevalent. 

Wake Forest on its website tells you, “We take interviews personally… Whether face-to-face or via webcam, it is our priority to put a personality with a name in our search for future Wake Forest students. The interview provides us with a personal and unrehearsed component to the admissions process…”

The Importance of Internships

The Importance of Internships

Is there no one thing that contributes to a successful college experience?

About a year ago in the article Motivating College Students, I referenced a book by Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takucs, How College Works, which actually boiled down the successful college experience to one key element: someone needs to spark a student’s motivation.

The same type of searching applies to internships as well. Most of the time it is unclear  what type of internship one wants, with what type of people, in what kind of organization, and doing what type of jobs.

The University of Utah’s Bargain Honors Program

The University of Utah’s Bargain Honors Program

High-quality education in the form of Honors Colleges in Public Universities is becoming ever more common. Within the University of California system most have, including UCLA, UCI, and five of the six colleges of UCSD, special honors programs. The reason behind the growth of these honors programs is public universities want to keep their best students at home, in state, and challenged by a curriculum many believe can only be obtained from the most selective universities.

 

The Economist’s College Ranking

The Economist’s College Ranking

Several years ago the Department of Education proposed its own college rankings. Many institutions serving the postsecondary market in the United States demurred.   

Consequently, the Obama Administration decided not to go forward with the ranking. It did, however, make its treasure trove of data available on the Education Department’s College Scorecard website, which went live September 12th.

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The Coalition for Access

The Coalition for Access

A number of colleges don’t like the current admissions process.

What ignited their angst and reform desires was the launch of the new Common Application (called CA4) in 2013, which was so buggy that early application deadlines had to be extended, and worse, many colleges were exclusively tied to the Common Application: they had no alternatives.

 

Udacity and the Evolution of Nanodegrees

Udacity and the Evolution of Nanodegrees

The problems facing higher education today are legion: escalating tuition costs; spiraling student debt; political correctness; underachieving students; professorial emphasis on research to the detriment of undergraduate teaching; adjunct professors earning starvation wages, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

One company, however, within the MOOC (massive open online courses) ranks, Udacity, appears to have latched onto a solution that addresses many of the abovementioned ills: its nanodegree programs.

Major Leverage

Major Leverage

Some students go into the admissions process with the strategy of declaring a strange, off-the-beaten-track type major that will bolster their chances of getting into a selective school which otherwise would likely reject their candidacy.

The idea is once they’re in they’ll change their major with the advantage of being in the system not outside of it. For most of the liberal arts colleges such as Middlebury, Pomona College, or Davidson, this strategy won’t work.

Interpreting a Survey of College Admissions Directors

Interpreting a Survey of College Admissions Directors

The life of an admissions director is not an easy one; a look through The 2014 Survey of College Admissions Directors confirms this reality.

The survey was conducted by Gallup (of political polling fame) using questions created by Inside Higher Education, a very useful online postsecondary news website.  A statistically significant response of admissions directors, only one per school, from a range of colleges and universities, addressed recruiting, standardized tests, financial aid and student debt among a number of issues.

 

Researching a College: Grinnell a Case Study

Researching a College: Grinnell a Case Study

The better you know prospective campuses, the better you can figure out which might fit in with your postsecondary expectations. If you don’t have any or few expectations formed as yet, doing some research will get your thoughts of college into motion.

A good place to begin a search is with guides such as Fiske, Princeton Review, The Ultimate Guide to America’s Best Colleges, and the Yale Daily News Insider’s Guide to Colleges.