WELCOME ... to my blog From time to time I will reach out to you to share essential information about the university world as it comes to my attention. I do hope you will find my postings helpful as you confront the dynamics of this evolving arena.	www.takingthenextstep.com
Florida Set for New Cut in Spending on Colleges February 20, 2012 NY Times article by Lizette Alvarez MIAMI — Florida lawmakers contend that education is essential to high-wage jobs in the state, but the Legislature is again expected to slash millions of dollars from the budget for higher education and may usher in another round of tuition increases. Read the entire article >> What College Students Need to Know February 19, 2012 NY Times Editorial The popular college rankings focus primarily on prestige as measured by the SAT scores of incoming students and how many applicants are turned away. An initiative started last fall by the Obama administration could help families go beyond these limited, and far too easily gamed, indexes to learn quickly and easily how a college stacks up against its competitors nationally on important metrics like graduation rates, what a degree actually costs and how much debt a student can expect to incur by graduation day. Read the entire article >> Reining in College Tuition February 3, 2012 NY Times Editorial This article succinctly sets forth the argument for curbing college costs. Higher education institutions are predictably cool to President Obama’s proposal to shift federal aid away from colleges that fail to control rising tuition. Even though the details of his plan, which would require Congressional approval, will not be fleshed out until later this month, the idea behind it is sound. Read the entire article >> Back to School, Not on a Campus but in a Beloved Museum January 16, 2012 By Douglas Quenqua, NY Times Wanted: 50 former science majors with an interest in teaching -- no experience, please -- and a willingness to relocate. Must be comfortable sharing a classroom with dinosaur bones and giant squid. Read the entire article >> Early Admission January 16, 2012 By Richard Pérez-Peña and Jenny Anderson, NY Times As a Broader Group Seeks Early Admission, Rejections Rise in the East Early asmission to top colleges, once the almost exclusive preserve of the East Coast elite, is now being pursued by a much broader and more diverse group of students, including foreigners and minorities. Read the entire article >> Financial Calculators September 26, 2011 Read the entire article >> The [financial] calculators will also lay bare some institutions’ methods for distributing financial aid and could lead to conversations about how those methods reflect colleges’ values. Students -- and parents, faculty members, board members or anyone else -- can experiment with the calculator to see whether an improvement in test scores or grades, or a change in a family’s financial status, would make a significant difference. And prospective students can do the same at other colleges where they might apply, leading to an increase in comparison shopping and making a competitive financial aid policy important earlier in the process than it might otherwise have been. "This is a win for the consumer, and I think long-term it's a win for institutions that actually do provide competitive financial aid," said Daniel Lugo, dean of admission and financial aid at Franklin & Marshall College, which recently launched its calculator for need-based aid. "There's going to be a shaking out. There are a lot of places that maybe on paper, from their sticker price, look like an affordable choice. Once people see what their package looks like, they’re going to get the truth about their institution." In the past, the details of financial aid awards -- or even their broad outlines -- were available to only the admissions and financial aid offices. With the calculator, and some curiosity and persistence, anyone could put together a chart of how aid is awarded, generally speaking: the difference between the award for a wealthy but high-achieving student versus an average student with more financial need, or the monetary value of a tenth of a grade point or 100 points on the SAT. Be sure to read the whole article on a new federal requirement that colleges display "net price calculators," which prospective students can use to estimate how much they will have to pay after federal or institutional grants.   Applying to colleges? Consultants can demystify the process September 2, 2011 By Susan Salisbury, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Robin Abedon, a Wellington-based certified educational planner who operates Taking the Next Step and has been on the college counseling "beat" since 1995, said some students apply to 15 to 20 colleges. "Take one good kid applying widely, and he will only pick one of those schools. But his acceptances create enormous pressure for those other kids who might have been accepted," Abedon said. Schools also are doing more marketing than ever as enrollment managers seek to increase the number of applications, one of the criteria used to rank colleges in U.S. News & World Report's annual college guide. "The colleges love to hate U.S. News & World Report. By the same token, they are afraid to ignore it. It's a dog-eat-dog world on both sides of the equation," Abedon said. Add to that the admissions processes that vary from school to school, such as early decision, early action, rolling admissions and regular admission, and it's easy to see why some families turn to consultants. Dawn and Paul Strenk of Parkland hired Abedon to advise their daughter Sara, now a sophomore at Stetson University. Sara plays the oboe and is majoring in music education. "She had to travel for auditions. I knew that Robin would help her with her applications. The colleges have become very picky," Dawn Strenk said. Abedon is now working with the Strenks' younger daughter, Melissa, who is a high school senior. "I want them to get the best place that fits for them. You don't want to go there and it is not the right place. You spend a lot of time and money," Strenk said. The college consultation business has been around for 30 years but did not begin to grow dramatically until five or six years ago, said Mark Sklarow, executive director of Independent Educational Consultants Association. The group's membership has grown to 1,000 from 550 five years ago, and he estimates there are about 5,000 full-time consultants nationwide. With high school guidance counselors handling as many as 700 students each, there's little time for personalized attention."When a student's need is, 'I do not know where I want to go to college,' that's far down on the list," Sklarow said. "A great consultant probably tells parents to chill," Sklarow said. "There are no great secrets that consultants know. There are no levers to push, no secret phone calls or handshakes that will get an average kid into the Ivy League. But they can help that family find a school that is just right for their particular child. Read the entire article >> Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out. September 1, 2011 By Jennifer 8. Lee, NY Times When Stephanie Kelly, a 2009 graduate of the University of Florida, looked for a job in her chosen field, advertising, she found few prospects and even fewer takers. So now she has two jobs: as a part-time “senior secretary” at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville and a freelance gig writing for Elfster.com, a “secret Santa” Web site. Read the entire article >> When Roommates were Random September 1, 2011 by Dalton Conley, NY Times Eager to throw off my nerdy past and reinvent myself at college, I wrote “party animal” on my roommate application form where it asked incoming freshmen whether they wanted to bunk with a smoker or a non-smoker. When I told my mother about this later, she laughed and bought me a T-shirt that sported the image of Spuds MacKenzie, the 1980s Budweiser beer mascot, under the words “the original party animal.” Read the entire article >> In an effort to attract more applicants, colleges market heavily to rising seniors making them believe they will be accepted once they submit an application. View these emails and mailings with skepticism. They often raise false hopes. Ivy League Colleges Solicit Students Rejected for Stake of Selectivity May 16, 2011 by Janet Lorin, May 12, 2011 - Bloomberg Nicole Ederer was delighted when Columbia University and Duke University wooed her with e-mails and letters after she scored 214 out of 240 on her preliminary SAT college entrance exam junior year. Read the entire arcticle >> In an effort by some colleges to perfect enrollment management, a practice that has been characterized as "borderline unethical" is taking place. Admission to College, With Catch: Year’s Wait April 11, 2011 by Lisa W. Foderaro - NY Times For as long as there have been selective colleges, the spring ritual has been the same: Some applicants get a warm note of acceptance, and the rest get a curt rejection. Read the entire article >> Google is better than ever, offering a new educational opportunity by getting into the science fair business. Promoting Science, and Google, to Students April 4, 2011 by Claire Cain Miller - NY Times Google is synonymous with “search engine,” and now, for students, it wants to be synonymous with “science.” The company is getting into the science fair business with its first Google Science Fair, a global competition for teenagers that spans sciences as diverse as computer engineering, space exploration and medical technology. Read the entire article >> The Internship as Inside Track March 25, 2011 by Phyllis Korrki - NY Times Read the entire article >> A constant question in today's world is: is there a practical value in a liberal arts education? At haverford, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore, there is a merger of digital education and the humanities that allows the question to be answered with a resounding, "Yes." Giving Literature a Virtual Life Published: March 21, 2011 by Patricia Cohen - New York Times BRYN MAWR, Pa. — Prof. Katherine Rowe’s blue-haired avatar was flying across a grassy landscape to a virtual three-dimensional re-creation of the Globe Theater, where some students from her introductory Shakespeare class at Bryn Mawr College had already gathered online. Their assignment was to create characters on the Web site Theatron3 and use them to block scenes from the gory revenge tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” to see how setting can heighten the drama. Read the entire article >> The following articles from the New York Times make me reluctantly acknowledge that Twitter may be earning its place in the world of written communications. Imagine if Twitter could produce poetry in a genre akin to Haiku. And imagine if Twitter could be used to teach students to write a great sentence. That would be a great leap forward, as students undertake writing the good essay. Twitter, Twitter, Burning Bright March 21, 2011 by Randy Kennedy Read the entire article >> Teaching to the Text Message March 20, 2011 by Andy Selsberg I’ve been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter. Read the entire article >> College the Easy Way March 4, 2011 by Bob Herbert - OpEd, New York Times The cost of college has skyrocketed and a four-year degree has become an ever more essential cornerstone to a middle-class standard of living. But what are America’s kids actually learning in college? Read the entire article >> Public Universities Seek More Autonomy as Financing From States Shrinks March 2, 2011 by Tamar Lewin -- New York Times With states providing a dwindling share of money for higher education, many states and public universities are rethinking their ties. The public universities say that with less money from state coffers, they cannot afford the complicated web of state regulations governing areas like procurement and building, and that they need more flexibility to compete with private institutions. Read the complete article >> Bright Futures scholarship program faces $100 million funding cut March 1, 2011 by Scott Travis -- The Palm Beach Post Florida's popular Bright Futures scholarship program may suffer big cuts at the same time students are facing rapidly rising tuition at state universities. Read the complete article >> More College Graduates Take Public Service Jobs March 1, 2011 by Catherine Rampell -- New York Times If Alison Sadock had finished college before the financial crisis, she probably would have done something corporate. Maybe a job in retail, or finance, or brand management at a big company — the kind of work her oldest sister, who graduated in the economically effervescent year of 2005, does at PepsiCo. “You know, a normal job,” Ms. Sadock says. But she graduated in a deep recession in the spring of 2009 when jobs were scarce. Instead of the merchandising career she had imagined, she landed in public service, working on behalf of America’s sickest children. Read the complete article >> Harvard and Princeton Restore Early Admission February 24, 2011 by Tamar Lewin -- New York Times Harvard and Princeton each announced Thursday that they would revive their early-admission programs, allowing high school seniors who apply by next Nov. 15 to get a decision by Dec. 15 without having to promise to attend the college if admitted. Read the complete article >> In Florida, Virtual Classrooms With No Teachers January 17, 2011 by Laura Herrera -- New York Times MIAMI — On the first day of her senior year at North Miami Beach Senior High School, Naomi Baptiste expected to be greeted by a teacher when she walked into her precalculus class. Read the complete article >> Harvard Seats Sought by Record Number of Students January 14, 2011 Harvard University’s applications for undergraduate admission rose to an all-time high, making it harder than ever before to get into the college. Read the complete article >> Defending the Liberal Arts College January 4, 2011 Raynard S. Kington may not have been the likeliest choice to be president of Grinnell College. His (numerous) degrees came from research universities, and his career has been focused on biomedical research institutions in large metropolitan areas -- he was deputy director of the National Institutes of Health when he was named to lead Grinnell. Read the complete article >>
Learn Spanish, then Chinese Primero Hay Que Aprender Español. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen. December 29, 2010 By New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof A quiz: If a person who speaks three languages is trilingual, and one who speaks four languages is quadrilingual, what is someone called who speaks no foreign languages at all? Read the complete article >>
Parents Embrace Documentary on Pressures of School December 9, 2010 by Trip Gabriel It isn’t often that a third of a movie audience sticks around to discuss its message, but that is the effect of “Race to Nowhere,” a look at the downside of childhoods spent on résumé-building. Read the complete article >>
College admissions, beyond the No. 2 pencil November 21, 2010 by Robert J. Sternberg (The Washington Post) Wait list. That was the outcome of my application to Yale. It was better than the outcome at Harvard, which was a rejection, and not as good as the outcome at Princeton, which was an acceptance. I was eventually admitted to Yale, and I later had an opportunity that very few applicants ever have: I got to find out why I had been wait-listed. Read the complete article >>
Two articles of interest from the December issue of The Atlantic magazine Your Child Left Behind For years, poor performance by students in America relative to those in other countries has been explained away as a consequence of our nationwide diversity. But what if you looked more closely, breaking down our results by state and searching not for an average, but for excellence? By Amanda Ripley Imagine for a moment that a rich, innovative company is looking to draft the best and brightest high-school grads from across the globe without regard to geography. Let’s say this company’s recruiter has a round-the-world plane ticket and just a few weeks to scout for talent. Where should he go? Our hypothetical recruiter knows there’s little sense in judging a nation like the United States by comparing it to, say, Finland. This is a big country, after all, and school quality varies dramatically from state to state. What he really wants to know is, should he visit Finland or Florida? Korea or Connecticut? Uruguay or Utah? Read the complete article >> A Matter of Degrees U.S. universities are still on top, but Asia is rising. By Emily Quanbeck America’s high schools may be struggling, but its institutions of higher learning remain the destinations of choice for college and postgraduate degree-seekers the world over—for now, at least. In the 2010–11 rankings of the world’s universities by Times Higher Education in London, U.S. schools earned the top five slots (in order): Harvard, Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford, and Princeton. Of the top 20 schools, the United States held 15 slots, the United Kingdom three, and Switzerland and Canada one each. But American college and university presidents are keeping an eye on up-and-coming competitors in Asia. When The Atlantic recently asked a group of 30 American university and college presidents which countries are, in the next 10 to 20 years, most likely to attract students who would otherwise attend an American university, 24 of them named China. Sixteen named India, 15 said Singapore, 10 said Hong Kong, and nine said South Korea. Read the complete article >>
More Professors Give Out Hand-Held Devices to Monitor Students and Engage Them November 16, 2010 EVANSTON, Ill. — If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White’s “Organizational Behavior” course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall. Read the complete article >>
Essential Information for the College Bound -- Fall Newsletter 2010 November 16, 2010 It is almost Thanksgiving. WOW! It seems as though it was just summer, with my students headed for college in the Fall of 2010 digging into the application process. Thanksgiving is a special date for me. In addition to it being my favorite holiday of the year, it is the deadline I give my students for completing all applications: Early Decision; Early Action; and Regular Admissions (even though the latter may be held in readiness to submit by the beginning of 2011). And I am delighted to say that this year all of my seniors are meeting that deadline. Indeed, they have done excellent work on their applications. Hopefully, they will reap good rewards! Read the complete newsletter >>
Learning in Dorm, Because Class Is on the Web November 2010 The New York Times — GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Like most other undergraduates, Anish Patel likes to sleep in. Even though his Principles of Microeconomics class at 9:35 a.m. is just a five-minute stroll from his dorm, he would rather flip open his laptop in his room to watch the lecture, streamed live over the campus network. Read the complete article >>
Application Inflation: When is Enough Enough? November 7, 2010 The New York Times by Eric Hoover — The numbers keep rising, the superlatives keep glowing. Each year, selective colleges promote their application totals, along with the virtues of their applicants. For this fall’s freshman class, the statistics reached remarkable levels. Stanford received a record 32,022 applications from students it called “simply amazing,” and accepted 7 percent of them. Brown saw an unprecedented 30,135 applicants, who left the admissions staff “deeply impressed and at times awed.” Nine percent were admitted. Read the complete article >>
It may be easier to get into college this year... Saturday, October 30, 2010 The Daily Beast -- A major demographic shift is dramatically changing the college admissions game. Kathleen Kingsbury reports on the population dip that means it’s easier to get into college this year. Read the complete article >>
Essential Information for the College Bound Summer 2010 Not all who wander are lost, so Tolkien has told us. And so I am reminded each time I wear one of my favorite Life is Good t-shirts to enjoy some leisure time activity. So I was particularly pleased to hear these words from Soledad O'Brien, CNN anchor, recently, as she accepted the challenge of writing to her 17 year old self, 17 years later. What did she wish she had known then that she knows now? "There is opportunity - and sometimes joy - in chaos and the unknown. . . Open up the door to a little more uncertainty! Honestly, it's not a weakness to live this way." As my students in the class of 2010 prepare to go off to college, some have a planned road map to their future. Others do not. To all I say, it is good to have a plan; however, that plan might change --- one time or more. If there is no plan, as yet, there is time to develop one. Go to college allowing for uncertainty. Read the complete Summer 2010 Newsletter >>
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