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Summer Activities

Summer Activities

Some believe that a productive summer requires spending money to attend a leadership program or travel to a remote country and paint a school.

Two presenters, Liz Marx, a college counselor with Collegewise, an independent counseling company, and Michael Gulotta, an associate director of admissions at USC, at the recent Western Association of College Admissions Counselors (WACAC) conference at Loyola Marymount University shared their summer insights in their session, “From Surfing to Shakespeare, How Students Should Spend Their Summers.”

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The Mystique of the Elite Schools

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Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and Stacy Berg Dale, an associate at the Andrew Mellon Foundation, compared students who entered the most selective schools with those who entered less prestigious schools, beginning in 1976.  One of the students from Tulane, by 1995, had earned a third less than a comparable Yale graduate. (For more information on school and future earnings, please visit, “How Colleges and Salaries Match Up” at /wordpress/) Yet, then Krueger and Dale (K&D henceforth) made a slight adjustment. They took a student who had been admitted to an Ivy school, yet chose to attend a less select school, and discovered that twenty years later, this student had the same income level as others emerging from the Ivy school. A question arose: is it the school or the student who stands at the core of success?

The Cost of Learning

The Cost of Learning

What is the best way to improve student performance? In the United States, where student performance in science, math and reading is well below the international average (results from the 2006 Performance for International Student Assessment bear this out), we see a lots of ideas: vouchers, No Child Left Behind, publishing test results, hiring highly qualified teachers, giving the schools more autonomy, and granting incentives to teachers who perform. Now, another idea has dawned: rather than incentivize just the teacher for improving student performance, why not just go to the source of all performance issues, the student, and pay the incentives directly to him or her?