How to Choose a College - Forbes.com

On My Mind
How to Choose a College
Richard Vedder 05.19.08, 12:00 AM ET


The most popular rankings use the wrong measures.
This time of year, as they make the momentous decision of where to go to college, high school seniors are turning to popular rankings compiled by magazines like U.S. News & World Report. There are competing scorecards from the Princeton Review and Kiplinger's, but U.S. News' product is way out in front in visibility; in addition to its usual circulation of 2 million, it sells 9,000 newsstand copies and some 20,000 of its college guide book.

U.S. News evaluates educational quality by looking inside colleges at measures like faculty-student ratios, admissions selectivity, financial resources and alumni giving.

I think the U.S. News rankings ought to get a D. They're roughly equivalent to evaluating a chef based on the ingredients he or she uses. At the Center for College Affordability & Productivity, a two-year-old research organization in Washington, D.C. with a free-market bent, we evaluate colleges on results. Do students like their courses? How successful are they once they graduate? In short, we review the meal.

Our measures begin with student evaluations posted on Ratemyprofessors.com, a nine-year-old site with 6.8 million student-generated evaluations. We look at college graduation rates (as does U.S. News). We also calculate the percent of students winning awards like Rhodes Scholarships and undergraduate Fulbright travel grants. For vocational success we turn to Who's Who in America. Though imperfect, it is the only comprehensive listing of professional achievement that includes undergraduate affiliations. (Our complete listing of more than 200 schools can be viewed at Forbes.com.)

The top CCAP schools rank near the top of the U.S. News list, as the accompanying table shows. But just below the top there are some surprises. Duke, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania make the top 10 list at U.S. News but not at CCAP. Duke students don't rate their professors high enough. At the University of Pennsylvania not enough grads made it into Who's Who. Brown and Northwestern, both ranked 14 by U.S. News, and Dartmouth College, ranked 11 by U.S. News, all make it onto our top 10. The University of Alabama, which got great reviews from students, came in a number 7 on our national public university ranking; it's at position 42 on U.S. News' list.

The biggest surprises come in our list of liberal arts colleges. Wabash doesn't make the top 50 on U.S. News' list but ranks tenth with CCAP because of the awards its students won and its showing in Who's Who. Several other schools not high on the U.S. News list, including Whitman, Washington & Lee, Barnard and the U.S. Military Academy (a.k.a. West Point), are in our top 10. A number of excellent smaller liberal arts colleges do poorly on the U.S. News list but fare very well on the CCAP list, including Reed (twelfth) and Knox (sixteenth). Like other consumers, students want satisfaction and results, which is what CCAP measures.




For a complete ranking of all national universities, click here

For a complete ranking of all liberal arts schools, click here

For a complete ranking of national public universities, click here

Hopes Dim for Kids On College Wait Lists - WSJ article

Hopes Dim for Kids On College Wait Lists
Many Schools Take Fewer Backup Applicants
Because of Higher-Than-Expected First-Round Yields
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
May 16, 2007; Page D1

For a while, it looked like this might be a good year for wait-listed college applicants. But that is turning out to be wrong.

Instead, many colleges are taking few students off the wait list -- and sometimes none at all. Elite schools such as Stanford University, the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College aren't admitting any students from their wait lists this year. The University of Pennsylvania expects to admit about 25 students, down from 42 last year. State schools such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Delaware, too, are taking fewer students than last year.

The reason, many colleges say, is that they underestimated their yields -- the percentage of students accepted who decide to attend. With unexpectedly high numbers of acceptances, these schools are filling their slots quickly.

The yields surprised many schools, which had been preparing for more wait-list activity after a couple of years of tight admissions. Though it has always been a long shot to get in off the wait list at many schools, the odds have become worse in the past few years. This year, with applications pouring in, and students applying to multiple schools, admissions officers had anticipated more overlap so they were especially conservative in their yield forecasts. Many increased the number of slots offered on wait lists, expecting to then fill out their enrollment from the bench.

WAITING GAME



Plans for wait-listed students at selected schools:
• Admitting no students from their wait lists: Stanford University, University of Chicago, Amherst College

• Accepting fewer wait-listed students than last year: University of Delaware, University of Pennsylvania

• Accepting more than last year: Princeton University


(For more wait-list numbers, see below.)But at many selective schools, that scenario hasn't played out. The University of Pennsylvania had expected that 65% of the 3,614 admitted would accept -- slightly lower than last year -- because it was the first year the university switched to the Common Application, which makes it easier for students to apply online to multiple schools. But the yield came in at 67%. "Conventional wisdom...is that students are less serious with the Common Application, but that has not proven to be true for us," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania.

Yields are highly important to schools, and are closely watched by competing colleges, potential donors and status-conscious applicants as indicators of a school's appeal. But they have become harder to predict in recent years. For one, the number of seniors graduating from high school has been rising for more than a decade, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Admissions deans and high-school counselors also say students are applying to more schools because they are uncertain of where they will get in. Some counselors also point to the growing popularity of the Common Application, which makes it possible for students to fill out one application and submit it to many schools. But overall the number of applications per student has remained relatively stable at 3.9 compared with 3.6 five years ago, according to Common Application Inc., the nonprofit that administers the process for about 300 colleges.

Even a few percentage points in yield can make "a big difference" in policy, especially at small elite schools that don't admit many wait-listed students, says Christopher Avery, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and co-author of a book on college admissions. Amherst College, which had expected a 36% yield, had anticipated more wait-list admissions this year. But the Amherst, Mass., college, which saw a yield of 40%, is taking no one.

Yields will become even more volatile in the future. The Education Department predicts that the rise in the number of high-school seniors will continue until at least 2013. And next year more schools -- Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of Virginia -- will drop so-called early admissions, the system that asks students to promise to attend if they are accepted early. That will add a fresh crop of students to their regular-decision pools.

The University of Delaware, which eliminated early-decision applications last fall, has already found it harder to manage yield without the security of early admissions. Delaware admitted more students initially this year, compared with last. So now it is taking a mere 25 students off the wait list, down from 262 last year.

Next year, says Louis Hirsh, director of admissions, the university will accept fewer students initially so that it can take more students off the wait list. (Colleges generally want to be able to use the wait list to adjust the freshman class for characteristics they are lacking, such as certain majors.)

"We didn't quite know what to expect," says Mr. Hirsh. "You have to assume that the kids who would have applied early decision are still going to apply. The problem is you don't know exactly which ones they are."

To be sure, the unpredictability of yields can have the opposite effect and result in more wait-listed students getting a shot. Princeton, which took zero wait-listed students last year, says it expects to take 30 this year -- a result of a slight drop in yield, to 68% from 69% last year. Princeton is expecting to enroll a slightly larger class in 2008 as part of a long-term plan to expand the size of the undergraduate student body.


For students who were wait-listed, the uncertainty can be hellish. "I like to call it purgatory," says Katie French, a senior at Stamford High School in Stamford, Conn., who applied to five schools. She was wait-listed at Boston University, her top choice. She was admitted to Emmanuel College in Boston and rejected from the other three.

Two weeks ago, she found out she got into Boston University. But because she didn't receive financial aid, she says, she had to settle on Emmanuel. "I was an absolute wreck," says Ms. French, who later missed an Advanced Placement English exam because she was so upset.

This year, Ohio State University is trying to make the process less painful. The university decided not to have a wait list this year, after two years of admitting no one. Since the university has rolling admissions, it is easier to forecast in the spring whether it will reach its targets, says Mabel Freeman, assistant vice president of undergraduate admissions. If need be, it can take people who applied late. "There are a number of ways you can try to deal if you suddenly find that you are short," says Ms. Freeman.

At this point in the admissions cycle, students who remain on college wait lists can do little to sway their school of choice. The process will be largely over by the end of the month, though some schools admit students into June. If you haven't sent in a letter expressing your interest already, you should do so, says Jon Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School. But he says to avoid contacting the college repeatedly. "You don't want to seem too pushy."

Write to Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com1

Schools, Students Play The Waitlist Game - WSJ article April 11, 2007

Schools, Students Play The Waitlist Game
In Year of Record Applications, Many Colleges Offer More Spots
On Their Lists but Some Step Up Pressure for Commitment
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
April 11, 2007; Page D1

The college-admissions battle is shifting to the waitlist.

After issuing a grisly round of rejection letters this year, many schools have increased the number of spots offered on their waitlists in a bid to better manage their "yield" -- the percentage of accepted students who actually decide to attend. As a result, in a year of record applications, many students who applied to multiple colleges are getting offers for multiple waitlists.

COMING OFF THE BENCH


For waitlisted college applicants:
• Do send a letter expressing your interest and noting any recent accomplishments.

• Do ask your high-school counselor to convey your interest if the school calls.

• Don't say the college is your first choice if it is not.

• Don't visit if it would cost you a plane ticket, since chances of acceptance are still low.

• Don't do anything over the top, such as camping out in front of the admissions office.

The overlapping waitlists will make the next phase of the admissions process trickier for both colleges and students. Just as with the first round of acceptances, colleges don't want to make offers to students who are unlikely to accept because it will drive down their yields, which are important factors in college rankings. So they use a number of tactics -- from calling students directly to seeking early promises to attend -- to narrow down likely candidates.

In recent years, the waitlist has become "almost like a second early-decision process" as colleges grow more savvy about measuring students' interest before making offers, says Ken Fox, chairman of the admission-practices committee at the National Association for College Admission Counseling and a counselor at Ladue Horton Watkins High School in St. Louis. Already, students who have accepted slots on waitlists say they are feeling pressure to show a firmer commitment, in order to stand out when schools turn to their waitlists next month.

That can pose ethical dilemmas: Alisa Rudnick, a senior at San Francisco University High School, was waitlisted at half of the 12 colleges to which she applied. She chose to stay on the lists at two -- Reed College and Skidmore College -- but is also considering enrolling at Bard College, where she has been accepted.

"I'm in a really weird position because it's hard to declare one as your first choice," says Ms. Rudnick, who plans on writing a letter to each college to show interest. But she says she doesn't feel right telling each school it is her No. 1 option -- which is what schools want to hear when deciding who will get offers.

The waitlist has become an increasingly important part of the admissions process as schools seek to maximize their closely watched yield figures. About 35% of colleges and universities maintain a waitlist, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and the number of students offered slots on the lists has been rising. The proportion of waitlisted students actually admitted averages around 35%, according to the NACAC, but schools say it fluctuates as they make adjustments depending on how close they came to their expected yield with the first round.

Admission offers to waitlisted students will start going out in May, after schools receive "yes" or "no" answers from their first round of admissions by the end of this month. So students are encouraged to decide which waitlists they want to stay on as soon as possible, which will demonstrate interest to the schools.

Colleges say they are more uncertain than ever this year about their yield as they see more applications per student and are forced to vie for the same pool of talent. A few years ago, students applied to about six to eight colleges, but students and high-school counselors say the typical range is now 10 to 12.

To broaden its options, Amherst College offered 1,450 spots on the waitlist this year, up from 1,258. With students likely to be on multiple waitlists, "we know we are going to lose a bunch," says Tom Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid.


Northwestern University offered waitlist spots to 2,700 students this year, an increase from 1,750. "We find it more challenging than usual to model how many of the admitted students will enroll," says Keith Todd, director of undergraduate admission at Northwestern, which saw its applications increase by 19% this year to a record 21,949.

The University of Pennsylvania -- which offered waitlist spots to 2,800 people, an increase from 1,800 last year -- says it calls a handful of candidates on the waitlist and their high-school counselors after May 1 to gauge the likelihood that students will accept offers. Last year, the school made such calls to the 42 students who were admitted from the waitlist, says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions. "When you go to the waitlist, you want to have students who really want to be here," he says. "You don't want to go through the selection process all over again."

To be sure, just because a school offers more spots doesn't mean that they will take more students off the waitlist in the end. And not all schools are offering more spots. Georgetown University, for instance, offered waitlist spots to 1,774 students this year, down from 1,820 last year.

Efforts by colleges to measure commitment can be frustrating for students who are uncertain where they want to go. Alex Graber-Tilton, a senior at Wall High School in Wall, N.J., received a letter from Carnegie Mellon University offering him a spot on its priority waiting list -- which the school says is meant for students who definitely know Carnegie Mellon is their first choice. When making waitlist offers, the school promises to go to the priority list first, before its regular waitlist. But to nail down students' commitment, the school asks those accepted to make a decision quickly.

If you get an acceptance, you are expected to send a $600 deposit by May 8 to secure the slot. Since waitlist offers typically roll in throughout the month of May, that could mean committing weeks before the student hears about offers from other schools.

"It's like you've been pushed aside for someone else, but they still want to know if you want to go there," says Mr. Graber-Tilton, who plans to turn down the priority-list slot. He wants to study engineering and was also waitlisted at Rice University, as well as Harvey Mudd College where he hopes to ultimately go. Otherwise he plans on going to Case Western Reserve University, where he was accepted.

The priority waiting list "allows students who really, really want the place to come forward," says Michael Steidel, director of admission at Carnegie Mellon, which had a record 22,422 applicants this year.

For some students, losing an enrollment deposit to a school that accepted them is a no-brainer if they are later admitted from the waitlist to their top choice school. "Forgoing that is not a big deal to me when you pay thousands of dollars in tuition," says Scarlet Neath, a senior at Lamar High School in Houston. She was accepted to the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Southern California. She was waitlisted at her first choice, the University of Virginia, and plans on holding out until the end.

For those who are on the waitlist and want to stand out, deans of admissions recommend that students write a letter expressing interest and updating the school on any recent accomplishments. Many colleges say they don't advise spending money on a campus visit, given the rather small chance of being admitted.

And going overboard won't help. "Two years ago, a kid pitched a tent outside the admissions office in an effort to show his interest," says Charles Deacon, dean of undergraduate admissions at Georgetown University. Unfortunately, it rained on the third night, and "the next day, the tent was gone," he says. The student wasn't admitted.

Write to Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com2

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USEFUL WEBSITES FOR COLLEGE PLANNING

USEFUL WEBSITES FOR COLLEGE PLANNING.

1. marilyn Kaufman/college planning educator www.dreammakers4u.net
you will get a schedule of upcoming events. Marilyn’s email is mkaufman5@aol.com and her phone number is 972-248-2363.

2. www.fastweb.com great place to check out scholarship options etc.
3. www.collegeboard.com
4. www.elearning.makingitcount.com a representative from this company was a treasure trove of information and this site has some great ideas for financial options.
5. Carol Gene Cohen, Cohen's College Connections Her number is: 972-381-9990./ another college planning educator
6. college rating site http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm
7. www.collegeconfidential.com
8 http://www.ratemyteachers.com/
9 www.campustours.com
10 www.studentsreview.com
11 www.campusdirt.com
12 www.collegedata.com
13 www.collegiatechoice.com

Colleges Reject Record Numbers - WSJ article April 3rd 2007

Colleges Reject Record Numbers
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
April 3, 2007; Page B9

This year's college-admissions competition is turning out to be more brutal than ever -- and not just for students who applied to elite universities.

A number of top-tier state schools and smaller liberal arts colleges say they received more applications this year from well-qualified students -- and consequently are turning down a higher percentage of them.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received 20,017 applications, up from 19,736 last year. The state school's acceptance rate fell to 33.3% from 34.1%. At Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, 4,624 students applied, up 8%, yet it accepted 1,348, down from 1,395 last year, to prevent overenrollment. Even schools that admit the vast majority of applicants are becoming more selective. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, saw a record 15,836 applicants this year, up from 15,498 the year before; it accepted 73% of them, down from 78% last year.


"Students are being more intelligent about what their options are when getting into school, and they are looking in the next tier now," says Jennifer Delahunty Britz, Kenyon's dean of admissions and financial aid. "Schools that did not used to be on the radar of talented students are now on the radar."

Many Ivy League universities also drew record numbers of applicants and consequently admitted students at lower rates. The University of Pennsylvania saw applications rise 11% over the last year to a record 22,634, while its acceptance rate fell to 15% from about 17% last year. "The talent of students in the pool was so exceptional that we had difficulty making choices," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the Philadelphia school.

Dartmouth College had a record 14,176 applications, up 2% from last year. It accepted 2,165, or 15% -- its lowest acceptance rate in history. Harvard University drew a record 22,955 applicants and accepted a record low 9%. At Stanford University, the number of applications rose 7% to 23,956. It accepted 10.3%, down from 10.9% last year.

Several factors are fueling the rise in applications. One is population trends: The number of students graduating from high school has risen each year since the 1995-96 school year, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The U.S. Department of Education predicts that the trend will continue until at least 2013.

Another is the growth in international students. At UNC-Chapel Hill, for instance, recruiters went abroad for the first time this year, making trips to Shanghai and other Asian cities to promote the college. UNC had 736 foreign nationals apply this year, up from 590 last year. The university admitted 167 of them, up from about 125 a year ago.

A third is the growing use of the Common Application, a form that can be completed online and sent to a number of admissions offices far more easily than paper-based applications. More than 300 schools accept it.

The Common Application has "made it much easier for people to file 10, 15, 20 applications," says Charles Deacon, dean of undergraduate admissions at Georgetown University. Georgetown doesn't take the Common Application to try to hold down its number of applicants, he says. Still, the Washington, D.C., university saw applications rise to 16,198 from 15,067 last year. It accepted 20% of them, down from 22% a year ago.

To be sure, not all of the most-selective colleges saw a rise in applicants. Yale University's applications fell to 19,323 from 21,101 last year. Although there has been speculation that Yale's low acceptance rate last year caused fewer students to apply this year, the dean of admissions has said the decline was due to a random fluctuation, says Yale spokesman Tom Conroy.

Generally, though, college officials agree it has become more difficult to get into selective schools. As a result, some high school counselors are encouraging students to be more realistic in deciding where to apply. "It's more competitive every year," says Shirley Bloomquist, a private counselor in Great Falls, Va. "I'm seeing more parents and students look at safety schools."

Ms. Bloomquist says she now emphasizes that students should prepare for their "likely" schools, those where they have a good shot, rather than their "reach" schools. She also encourages high schoolers to start looking at colleges during their sophomore year rather than spring of junior year, when most begin the process. That gives them more time to find additional schools that may not be their top choices but still would be desirable.

Even high school seniors with exceptional grades are being careful with their expectations. Last year, "I had some really smart friends who applied to some schools they didn't get into," says James Newman, 17, the salutatorian at Lamar High School in Houston. He has a 4.82 grade point average (boosted above 4.0 by International Baccalaureate courses) and scored a 2210 on his SAT out of 2400. He is active in his church youth group and has been an Eagle Scout, vice president of the National Spanish Honor Society and vice president of the school choir.

Mr. Newman applied to Princeton University, Stanford, Middlebury College, Duke University, Davidson College in North Carolina and the University of Texas at Austin. But he learned from his friends' experiences. "I tried not to have a definite first choice," he says. "I thought it's likely I'd get rejected because it's so competitive." He was turned down by Princeton, wait-listed at Stanford and accepted by his other choices. He says he is now leaning toward Duke -- he's not optimistic about getting into Stanford.

Indeed, college officials warn they may not take many students from their wait-lists this year. "We have not gone to the wait-list for two years, and we would like to," says Tom Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid at Amherst College. Wait-lists allow colleges to adjust their freshman class if there is a shortage of students with particular strengths and characteristics who plan to attend.

Amherst currently has 1,450 students on its wait-list. Mr. Parker expects fewer than half to stay on it. Of those who do, Amherst hopes to accept 25 students.

In the past few years, colleges -- even top-level state schools -- have seen a higher-than-expected yield, or percentage of students admitted who end up attending. That means there are fewer spaces for wait-listed students.

The greater competition has made the admissions process increasingly frustrating for students, including those who don't apply to elite schools. Corey King, a senior at Urbana High School in Ijamsville, Md., who wants to study music, heard from his first choice, Berklee College of Music in Boston, via email last week. "I actually injured my hand punching my door when I found out I didn't get in," he says.

Mr. King, who has a 3.2 grade point average, is a member of his high school's rock music appreciation club and French club. He also applied to McGill University in Canada, the University of Maryland and Towson University in Maryland. "Now I'm afraid I won't get into McGill or Maryland, and I'll get stuck going to Towson," which he considers "one step above community college."

If Mr. King is turned down by McGill, he says he will reapply to Berklee next year. He says he is feeling pessimistic after the Berklee rejection, but there is one consolation: "No matter what, everyone is like, 'I'm so done with high school,'" he says.

Write to Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com1

The Admissions Police - WSJ article

The Admissions Police
Wary of lying applicants, universities are cracking down. Jon Weinbach on background checks, plagiarism screens and the cell number that exposed a sham.
By JON WEINBACHApril 6, 2007; Page W1
Before mailing out acceptance and rejection letters over the past week, thousands of colleges and graduate schools conducted their usual reviews of test scores, transcripts and essays. But less publicly, admissions officers focused on something else: police databases, plagiarism checks and reports by private-investigators.
There's a new age of vigilance in academia. Spooked by incidents including guidance-counselor fraud in Los Angeles, blatant plagiarism at MIT and campus crime in North Carolina, colleges and graduate schools are shoring up their admissions process. In an era when applicants seek an edge with $500-an-hour "admissions consultants" and online essay-editing services, schools are using their own new methods to vet prospective students. Much like corporations that have been burned by CEO résumé scandals, universities are tapping into the burgeoning background-check industry to verify what's written -- or not -- on applications.
The University of California system, which enrolls more than 30,000 college freshmen each year, now conducts random spot checks, asking about 10% of applicants to verify activities, grades or facts from personal essays. Last year, five Division I athletic programs began using a law firm to conduct background checks on high-school recruits. And this school year, Harvard's undergraduate admissions staff added a former professional background checker. "We look at essays with a certain degree of skepticism," says Harvard College director of admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis. "We're not shy about checking further."
An Honor Code
No organization tracks admissions transgression, and university officials say most applicants are honest. But finding the exceptions has become harder as the number of college applications has grown. The Education Department projects 3.2 million Americans will graduate from high school this spring, up from 2.6 million a decade earlier. Record numbers of applications were reported this year, from the Ivy League (including Harvard and Dartmouth) to the Big 10 (Northwestern) and Pac-10 (Stanford). "You can't verify whether they put two or three years into the chess club," says Richard Shaw, Stanford's dean of admissions. "To a great extent, it's an honor code."
GO FIGURE
1
A look at strategies for college seniors to stand out during on-campus job recruitment.2
But threats to that code often start in high school. According to a 2006 survey of 36,000 high-schoolers by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles, 60% of students admit to cheating on tests, and more than 30% say that within the last year, they've copied a document from the Internet. Students are "far more brazen" today, says Michael Josephson, a former law professor who founded the institute 20 years ago. Schools at all levels, he believes, have become soft on cheating: He cites a desire to give students a second chance, a reluctance to commit resources to cracking down and the fear of crossing parents who direct anger at schools, rather than at kids, when improprieties are brought to light. "What you allow, you encourage," he says.
Last year at Campbell Hall, a 63-year-old Episcopal school in North Hollywood, Calif., long-time college counselor Vince Garcia was fired for putting false information on student recommendations. Mr. Garcia, who was well regarded by colleagues at other private schools, cited awards students hadn't won and quoted teacher comments that were false or copied from other recommendations, says the Rev. Julian Bull, Campbell Hall's headmaster.
The school subsequently rewrote recommendations for 55 students and notified colleges that had received the forms. None of the admissions decisions were changed. Mr. Garcia declined to comment on the episode or Campbell Hall's actions but says he remains "committed to working with students to find the best path -- for them -- into higher education." Mr. Garcia is now an admissions officer at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks; Matthew Ward, the school's dean of undergraduate enrollment, says the school is confident Mr. Garcia has "the appropriate level of accountability to be an asset to the team."
'We've Seen It All'
Business schools have taken the lead in cracking down. After a couple of cases of B-school admissions fraud, corporate security firm Kroll started a Global Academic Verifications division in 2003. Kroll now does résumé checks on accepted students for about 20 business schools, including Wharton and Columbia. "Fake degrees, grade inflation, employment titles or dates that aren't true -- we've seen it all," says Kroll's Brian Lapidus, who oversees the division. Medical schools have also raised their guard. Last June, the Association of American Medical Colleges asked all of its members to include criminal background checks in their admissions processes.
RED FLAGS

Does a student look too good to be true? View a sample application, with some of the telltale signs of exaggeration3 that schools say they look for.
Admissions officers say they have ways to identify heavy-handed parental editing, embellishments and outright lies. Tainted applications can be easy to spot because they lack "internal validity" -- a polished essay may raise eyebrows, for example, coming from a student with mediocre English grades. A simple Internet search can be used to spot-check athletic activities or scholastic honors. The latest innovation: downloadable SAT writing samples. Since the standardized test added a written component two years ago, colleges have been able to compare students' writing proficiency on their SAT essays -- more or less guaranteed to be their own work -- with the prose that accompanies their applications.
The pressure to create a memorable application is growing as admissions brochures trumpet the importance of factors such as leadership, writing ability and out-of-school activities. As a result, colleges have helped fan the perception that exotic pursuits and flawless essays are more important than ever. Lloyd Petersen, a former director of admissions at Yale and Vassar, says the crush of applications "forces people to do things that they wouldn't normally do."
Modeling Experience
Filling out applications, Charlie Covey mentioned his nascent modeling career. The high-school senior in Roswell, Ga., says he signed with a modeling agency in Atlanta last fall, though he hasn't yet booked a job. On the advice of a private college counselor, he added the agency to the applications' "work experience" section. "I've done headshots," says the 18-year-old, who has been accepted to the University of Georgia, University of Southern California and New York University. "I felt kind of bad because I didn't have tons of stuff like a lot of my friends."
Last year, Sonia Minden's heart fluttered when she received a solemn letter from the University of California undergraduate admissions staff. The note asked her to verify the experience she wrote about in her application essay -- an archaeological dig in Switzerland led by a Stanford professor. Ms. Minden, who had a 3.8 GPA and edited the literary magazine at Capuchino High School in San Bruno, Calif., says she thought the letter was tantamount to a rejection. It also raised suspicions among her friends. "They were like, 'did you lie?' " she says.
Ms. Minden, it turns out, was among some 7,000 applicants the UC schools randomly picked for its authentication program. The students are instructed to submit material to confirm details in one of seven application categories, such as volunteer history and personal statements. Though the program started in 2003, there's barely a mention of it on the UC application. (One sentence in the instructions notes that students may receive a "request for further information.") Susan Wilbur, the UC director of undergraduate admissions, says the point is to "send a message that we're committed to the highest degree of integrity."
Ms. Minden says the certification process was disconcerting mostly because she didn't see it coming. "It was kind of a stressful time," she says. The professor who led the dig wrote a letter on Ms. Minden's behalf, and now she is a freshman at her first-choice school, UC-San Diego.
Some transgressions are clear. A few years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked applicants to come up with their own essay question. Two picked an identical topic: "What if Superman had sex with Lois Lane?" Both students excerpted material from "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," an essay by author Larry Niven. Both were rejected. Marilee Jones, MIT's dean of admissions, calls the episode "hilarious," but worries that colleges have helped ratchet up the pressure of applications. In an effort to discourage puffery, she reduced the number of lines MIT's form gave students to list extracurricular activities. "Kids felt like they needed to fill up all of them," she says.
For all the steps colleges are taking to safeguard admissions, they're also eager to boost applications -- which in turn increases their "selectivity" rate, an important factor in school rankings. Some colleges fear that aggressive screening could scare off potential students, says John Barrie, chief executive of Turnitin.com, a Web site that high schools and colleges use to check papers for plagiarism.
The nine-year-old site, which screens more than 100,000 student papers a day, added an admissions-essay service in 2004. Over the last three years, Mr. Barrie says, the site has screened more than 27,000 admissions essays, and found 11% included at least one-quarter unoriginal material. Mr. Barrie says about two dozen schools now use the site to check admissions essays; none of the institutions would agree to be identified.
Universities are only the latest institutions to scrutinize candidates. The background-check industry has mushroomed since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as criminal and résumé checks have been added to the hiring process of the likes of Starbucks (it plans to check aspiring baristas) and Wal-Mart Stores. The National Association of Professional Background Screeners, founded four years ago, now counts more than 400 members; in the early '90s, there were only about 30 players in the business, says the trade group's co-chair, Robert Capwell.
The growing number of Web sites devoted to the admissions industry has made it easier for students to plagiarize material and trade in misleading gossip. Ivyessays.com, a professional essay-editing service, also lets students buy packages of sample essays grouped by theme, question or school. The $12 "Harvard" package includes 10 essays and five short-answer samples tailored to the school's application. (Ivyessay.com's writing is meant to be used as a sample, says editor in chief Adrienne Dowhan.) On chat boards like collegeconfidential.com, topics range from "How to impress admissions committees with your extracurriculars" to "Should I tell them that I'm Jewish?"
Telltale Cell Number
Bari Norman, an independent college counselor based in New York and Miami, says she occasionally sees parents tacitly encourage their children to stretch the truth on applications. The most troubling cases, she says, involve students who feel they're at a disadvantage because they're not lying. Last year, a white client in Miami was distraught because her friends were falsely identifying themselves as Hispanic. "She asked me, with a straight face, 'Why can't I do that?' " says Ms. Norman, a former admissions officer at Barnard College.
Admissions officials at the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley saw the desperation first-hand. In 2003, admissions director Jeff Pihakis tried to call an applicant to tell her she had gained admission. After several failed attempts, he reached a woman who gave him a cellphone number for the applicant. Looking again at the file, he saw the number he'd just been given matched the number the applicant had listed for a purported boss. That led Mr. Pihakis to uncover other fabrications, including false job titles and fake stationery for the sham company. The admissions staff ultimately investigated all 100 of the students it had admitted, uncovering four more applicants who had misrepresented themselves.
The next summer, Kroll approached the school about providing background checks. Since then, all accepted students have had to pass an "employment and background verification" -- and pay a $65 fee -- before enrolling. In the past four years, only one has been rejected. "We were hoping it would be a deterrent," says Mr. Pihakis. "And it has been."
Write to Jon Weinbach at jonathan.weinbach@wsj.com4

Aztecs vs. Greeks WSJ article

Aztecs vs. Greeks
By CHARLES MURRAYJanuary 18, 2007; Page A17
If "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can become theoretical physicists, then we're talking about no more than a few people per thousand and perhaps many fewer. They are cognitive curiosities, too rare to have that much impact on the functioning of society from day to day. But if "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number demarcates the top 10% of the IQ distribution, or about 15 million people in today's labor force -- a lot of people.
In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements -- medicine, engineering, law, the sciences and academia -- the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have IQs over 120. Evidence about who enters occupations where the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people with IQs of 120 or higher also occupy large proportions of positions in the upper reaches of corporate America and the senior ranks of government. People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.
Combine these groups, and the top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence.
How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.
But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized -- it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children. The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens.
We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

The culprit for educational deficit is often low intelligence.
The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities -- in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.
The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.
The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.
The encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been more true.
All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.
In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.
* * *
The goals that should shape the evolution of American education are cross-cutting and occasionally seem contradictory. Yesterday, I argued the merits of having a large group of high-IQ people who do not bother to go to college; today, I argue the merits of special education for the gifted. The two positions are not in the end incompatible, but there is much more to be said, as on all the issues I have raised.
The aim here is not to complete an argument but to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. Accept that some children will be left behind other children because of intellectual limitations, and think about what kind of education will give them the greatest chance for a fulfilling life nonetheless. Stop telling children that they need to go to college to be successful, and take advantage of the other, often better ways in which people can develop their talents. Acknowledge the existence and importance of high intellectual ability, and think about how best to nurture the children who possess it.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

What's Wrong With Vocational School? - WSJ article

What's Wrong With Vocational School?
By CHARLES MURRAY
January 17, 2007; Page A19

The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today's simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.

Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.

These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.


In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college -- enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because "vocational training" is second class. "College" is first class.

The culprit for educational deficit is often low intelligence.

Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living -- and would do better in vocational training.

Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses -- probably a majority of them -- are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient.

Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.

For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor's degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor's degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers.

The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. One glimpse of the future is offered by the nation's two-year colleges. They are more honest than the four-year institutions about what their students want and provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly. Their time frame gives them a big advantage -- two years is about right for learning many technical specialties, while four years is unnecessarily long.

Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Research resources on the Internet will soon make the college library unnecessary. Lecture courses taught by first-rate professors are already available on CDs and DVDs for many subjects, and online methods to make courses interactive between professors and students are evolving. Advances in computer simulation are expanding the technical skills that can be taught without having to gather students together in a laboratory or shop. These and other developments are all still near the bottom of steep growth curves. The cost of effective training will fall for everyone who is willing to give up the trappings of a campus. As the cost of college continues to rise, the choice to give up those trappings will become easier.

* * *
A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason -- the list goes on and on -- is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

Even if foregoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class, with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as exemplars. It will expand for the most natural of reasons: A college education need be no more important for many high-tech occupations than it is for NBA basketball players or cabinetmakers. Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript. The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.

Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults -- perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.

Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Intelligence in the Classroom - WSJ article

Intelligence in the Classroom
By CHARLES MURRAY
January 16, 2007; Page A21
Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment -- you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.
One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.
Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.
Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.
How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability -- "g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.
There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.
Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.
What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.
The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder -- the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."
This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.
* * *
To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones -- for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.
While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

ABCs of College Loans - Barrons article

ABCs of College Loans
By Kathy Yakal

Barrons
December 11, 2006
ONE WAY TO JUDGE whether the resurgent democrats are making good on their recent campaign promises will be to check student-loan Websites in coming months. If interest rates and other lending conditions ease, you'll know the Dems have lived up to their word. If not, well, another round of elections isn't far off.
College access for all is one of the six major themes outlined by Congress' soon-to-be majority party in its "New Direction for America" platform. The Democrats say they want to ensure that tax deductions for college tuition become permanent and that the Pell Grant program is expanded. Federally backed Pell grants -- generally awarded to undergraduates -- are based on need and don't have to be repaid.
Perhaps dearest to the hearts of those in or about to enter college, the New Direction for America also advocates a reduction in student-loan interest rates.
If you or your children have been unable to cobble together through grants and family contributions the vast sums needed to meet the costs of today's colleges and universities, you'll likely be forced to apply for student loans -- a grueling process that U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings says is longer and more complicated than filing a federal tax form.
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Regardless of their political leanings, loads of American parents and their children will have to endure it. The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study estimates that 35% of all undergrads enrolled during the 2003-04 school year took out student loans. And the Department of Education says it will make or guarantee more than $60 billion in low-cost student loans in 2006, a $4 billion increase over 2005 levels.
College-related loans can be divided into four categories, according to the assistance experts at FinAid (www.finaid.org/loans1). These include loans that go directly to students (like so-called Stafford and Perkins programs); those for parents (generally known as Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students, or PLUS); private student loans (also called alternative student loans), and consolidation loans, which combine different types of borrowing into one program with a single rate ("Landing the Best Loan2," The Electronic Investor, June 12, 2006).
FinAid is a good source of information about financial aid in general, but it also offers dozens of calculators for specific situations. In addition, it posts a table of the most popular educational-financing programs, with loan information and links.
The Department of Education (http://www.ed.gov/3) provides a portal for students who need help understanding its Federal Student Aid options, including grants, loans and work-study assistance. You can learn about your eligibility here, fill out an application and explore the site's other helpful resources and tools. Of particular interest is the Financial Aid Wizard, which in seven steps helps you explore schools and scholarships and estimate financial aid and family contributions.
Many financial institutions offer student loans, and there are a handful of sites that allow you to compare several at once. SimpleTuition (http://www.simpletuition.com/4) makes available free of charge its database of more than 40 parent, private, GradPLUS and consolidation loans. You're asked a few questions about your needs and your target school, guided by a table of FAQs (such as, "I am an older student. Am I eligible to receive financial assistance?"), and then given a list of appropriate products.
I inquired about a $50,000 PLUS loan for a student attending Drake University in Iowa. I got a list of four loans, with annual percentage rates ranging from 7.07% from College PayWay (http://www.collegepayway.com/5), with a total loan cost of $80,789, to 8.33% from Collegiate Solutions (http://www.collegiatesolutions.com/6), with a cost of $89,705. These lenders, like most, offer "borrower benefits" such as interest-rate or principal deductions in return for things like auto-debit payments. (A box on the page warned us that Drake hasn't partnered with SimpleTuition and that other sorts of loans to meet the costs of this university therefore might be available elsewhere.)
I found ostensibly better rates on PLUS loans at eStudentLoan (http://www.estudentloan.com/7), as well as a multi-step Wizard to guide me. I was asked about the school and loan amount, the graduation date and preferred payment term, and queried about the importance of securing the lowest APR and lowest monthly payments. Again, I was apprised of four possible loans, ranging from a surprisingly low 5.0% APR ($70,996 total cost) from Wachovia (http://www.wachovia.com/8) to a high of 8.25% ($74,655 total cost) from Goal Financial (http://www.goalfinancial.net/9).
Bankrate.com (http://www.bankrate.com/10) lets you search for student loans, but in a departure from its usual comprehensiveness on other sorts of borrowings, the results were less than helpful.
I'd advise using any of these comparative services as a launching point before getting the full story from lenders' sites, as well as from your school's financial-aid office. The intriguing 5.0% rate on the Wachovia loan that appeared on estudentloan.com seemed too low for a PLUS loan. Indeed, at the bank's site, the lowest rate I found was 8.50% for Dec. 1, 2006, (though rebates are available), so clearly more questions needed to be asked.
You can also go right to the horse's mouth -- lenders' Websites.
Sallie Mae (http://www.salliemae.com/11), which specializes in student loans, is a good place to start. In fact, if you're unfamiliar with the industry, head there first for some, well, education. The site does a terrific job of explaining different types of loans and passing along tips. For instance, it's best to max out your federal student loans before you consider private ones, since the latter generally have less favorable terms. You can apply online for Sallie Mae's undergraduate and graduate, parent, training and international student loans.
Nellie Mae (http://www.nelliemae.org/12), a sister company to Sallie Mae, also offers a full line of federal and private student loans. Other good sites are Next Student (http://www.nextstudent.com/13) and Student Loan Funding (http://www.studentloanfunding.com/14).
IF YOU'RE A PARENT with pre-college teenagers and want them to appreciate the relationship between hard work and money, check out the new PAYjr service (http://www.payjr.com/15).
For kids 13 and up, parents can obtain a debit card that's accepted by any merchant that takes debit MasterCard. Parents can set up a schedule of chores on a password-protected Website. Once an agreed-upon number of tasks has been completed, a payment will kick in and money is transferred to the PAYjr card for the hardworking teen's use.
It's a pretty safe bet that this money won't go for college savings. And in this case, the Democrats -- for better or worse -- shouldn't be held accountable for the lending terms

'The Overachievers': A Look at High School Competition Misses the Bigger Problem -- Underachievers

'The Overachievers': A Look at High School Competition Misses the Bigger Problem -- Underachievers
Published: January 10, 2007 in Knowledge@Wharton

Julie is perceived by her peers as a superstar -- a brain, a jock and a beauty all in one. CJ is seen as a flirt. Taylor is the popular girl, and Sam is the teacher's pet. All are academic "overachievers." And all attended Whitman High School, one of the nation's top public schools and the setting for best-selling author Alexandra Robbins' study of contemporary American high school culture entitled, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids.

Robbins is herself an "overachieving" graduate of the Bethesda, Maryland school (barely 30, she has already published five books). Returning to Whitman a decade after she left for Yale, Robbins draws a sharp contrast between what the school was like then and what it is like now, using it as the basis for her analysis of the "competitive frenzy" that, she argues, has taken root in high schools across the country. "This is not just a book about high school," Robbins writes. "This is a book about how a culture of overachieverism has changed the school experience so drastically in even the last ten years that it has startlingly altered what it means to be a student today."

Tracking a group of juniors and seniors as they struggle to maintain their grades, excel at sports, rack up extracurriculars, ace the SAT and get into elite colleges, Robbins alternates between biography and commentary, using the daily lives of Whitman students to ground her claims about what high school does to teenagers today. Over the course of the book, Julie suffers from stress-related hair loss, CJ resorts to binge-eating and drinking to relieve anxiety, Taylor breaks down when she can't decide between Duke and Penn, and Sam cheats on a homework assignment. Their stories allow Robbins to reflect on the stressful, hyper-scheduled lives of teens growing up in a culture that is excessively focused on achievement.

Adolescence today, Robbins argues, is a highly professionalized experience in which one's resume, transcript, and scores are everything, and where both the innocence and leisure traditionally associated with childhood are nowhere to be found. Noting that the competition to get into top-ranked colleges has increased enormously in recent years, Robbins shows how teens' attempts to look good on paper have resulted in a host of disturbing trends.

Teens are more focused on productivity than on learning, for example; they also measure their self worth by comparing themselves to the achievement indices set by elite college entrance requirements. They are wracked with anxiety and they are sleep-deprived; they suffer from eating disorders, panic attacks, and depression; they cheat routinely and they take achievement-enhancing drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall illegally; they attempt suicide in growing numbers.

The picture Robbins draws is of a crushing cultural machinery that drives adolescents to the brink, flattening out their personalities and warping their characters while pressing them to become perfect, if somewhat generic, pre-collegiate products.

But Robbins is only telling part of the story. The Overachievers focuses on a small subsection of American teens -- the privileged elect whose parents care about education and who can afford to make sure that their kids go to good schools.

Whitman's website proudly notes that 80% of Bethesda's adult citizens are college graduates (as opposed to a national average of about 25%) and that they are "mainly professional and managerial." Whitman sends 94% of its graduating seniors to college -- 88% go to four year colleges, and 75% of those attend college out of state. Whitman's student body is 77% white, 13% Asian-American, 7% Hispanic and 3% African-American.

Compare those figures to national averages. A study released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this year noted that while about 70% of U.S. high school students earn a diploma, there is huge regional variation in graduation rates. Fourteen of the country's largest urban school districts -- among them Milwaukee, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Denver and Houston -- graduate less than 50% of their students on time. The worst numbers are to be found in three of the country's largest public school districts: New York graduates 38.9% of its students, Detroit graduates 21.7%, and Baltimore -- just a few definitive miles from overachieving Bethesda -- graduates a meager 38.5%.

The numbers become even more dramatic when broken down demographically: Nationally, according to the study, only 52% of black high school students graduate, and only 57% of Hispanics do.

These figures are a far cry from Whitman's, and as such they tell us something about Robbins' decision to treat Whitman as a representative case. If Whitman students take five or six AP courses and spend more than four hours each night on homework, they are the exception to the rule. The vast majority of high school students are taking it easy indeed. According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, about two-thirds of college freshmen report that they did an hour of homework a night or less during high school. One can only assume that the 30% of high school graduates who don't go on to college do even less.

As Washington Post education columnist Jay Matthews notes in his review of The Overachievers, the national picture of high school education is starkly different from the picture Robbins draws of Whitman. The National Assessment of Education Progress -- otherwise known as "The Nation's Report Card" -- shows that 17-year-olds' reading and math ability has been stagnant for the past 30 years; one likely reason is that teenagers spend far more time watching television and surfing the Internet (about 3.5 hours per day) than they do on homework (42 minutes per day) or recreational reading (seven minutes per day).

If the story of Whitman is one of high-stress overachievement, the national story is one of low expectations and diminishing returns. Only about 70% of today's high school graduates actually do go to college, and of those, nearly half will not graduate. And, again, the numbers are even worse when broken down demographically. Whereas more than 50% of children from wealthy families can expect to graduate from college, only 6% of low income students will earn a bachelor's degree by the time they are 24. Nationwide, says a new report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 18 out of every 100 ninth graders will graduate from college.

Though Robbins qualifies her claims about Whitman's typicality -- "Whitman could be any competitive school, public or private, almost anywhere in the country" -- the truth is that such schools are outnumbered by schools that are not competitive at all. And while Robbins spoke with students at schools in Kentucky, Vermont, New Mexico, Washington State, North Carolina, Illinois, and Texas in order "to make sure the views in this book represented as broad a range of students as possible," what she was really doing was tracking a small and exceptionally privileged cross-section of teens from state to state.

For all Robbins' claims to be describing a national trend, it's crucial to keep in mind that this "trend" exists for a small minority of high school students, and that these students are in turn those who have the highest expectations for college and career. While it's important to understand this trend, and important, too, to consider how the teens caught up in it might be affected -- even damaged -- by it, it's also important to understand that we can't get a clear picture of what's going on in American high schools if we don't take other, broader educational trends into account. Even more to the point: We can't begin to think about what kinds of changes in education policy we might need until we have an accurate understanding of American high school culture as a whole.

This is where Robbins' argument breaks down. Instead of presenting The Overachievers as what it is -- an anthropological study of an exceptional adolescent niche -- she casts her work in terms of policy analysis and ends the book with a series of sweeping recommendations for reform. These range from the mundane to the intriguing to the radical, and vary considerably in their wisdom and practicality.

Mundane: Students and parents should focus on mental health and well-roundedness. Intriguing: High school start time should be later in the morning, to accommodate teens' biologically unique sleep patterns; colleges should eliminate early decision, which creates outrageous pressure and favors those who do not need financial aid. Radical: Colleges and universities should boycott the rankings and scrap the SAT; high schools should drop class rank, de-emphasize testing, and limit AP courses.

Robbins may be right about things like early decision (which a number of elite schools have recently abandoned) and the need for students, parents, and teachers to remember that there is more to life than grades, scores, and acceptance letters. She's also right that the major college rankings are often rigged, and rarely measure the actual quality of undergraduate education and experience; she gives good advice when she tells parents and students to look beyond the top 20 schools to find the one that is right for them. And she just might be right about changing high school start time. But she flounders when she recommends policy shifts that would, to her mind, take the pressure off America's stressed-out teens.

If it makes sense to steer highly competitive students at highly competitive schools away from taking excessive numbers of AP courses, for example, it makes no sense to advocate a national move away from AP courses; there are more schools that could benefit from the curricular sharpening such courses can offer than there are schools that really need to cut back. And while it makes sense to tell parents and teachers who push teenagers too hard to back off, it makes no sense at all to recommend relaxation for those vast numbers of teens who are already slacking along at less than an hour of homework a night. Those kids need to learn to push themselves -- and in order to learn to do that, they need to be pushed by their parents and teachers.

Similarly, the SAT may not be an ideal guide to prospective college students' success -- but at least it allows admissions officers to begin to differentiate students whose padded resumes, boilerplate essays, and inflated grade point averages all look depressingly alike.

Such unevenness is to be expected when an author overreaches in the way Robbins does. Had she confined her recommendations to the demographic she is studying, she would have made some important points. But Robbins' attempt to generalize from her study of a select and unrepresentative fraction of American teens shows both a lack of restraint and a lack of understanding. Like the overachievers she writes about, Robbins confuses the minor daily struggles of the enormously advantaged with a pressing national problem; like the overachiever she acknowledges herself to be, she loses sight of what is reasonable in her effort to push her work to ever greater heights.

Robbins' error is ultimately symptomatic of the culture she writes about, and of which she admits she is a part; it is an error that flatters the people she writes about -- who are, significantly, also the people who read her work and who are responsible for her spot on the bestseller list. But as profitable as that error may be for Robbins, it is a costly error all the same. We should not be fooling ourselves into thinking that the problems facing American secondary education are the problems Robbins describes -- and to the extent that her book eases our ability to ignore the bigger, more troubling picture, it is part of the problem, not the solution.

Common mistakes can cost families thousands in college aid - USA Today article

Common mistakes can cost families thousands in college aid
USA TODAY
Sandra Block
Posted 12/25/2006 9:47 PM ET

The Greek historian Xenophon once observed that "fast is fine, but accuracy is everything." That's good advice for knife throwers, and it's also pertinent if you're planning to apply for financial aid for a college-bound child.
To qualify for federal financial aid, as well as state aid and grants from many colleges and universities, you must file a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. The Education Department will begin accepting applications for the 2007-08 academic year on Jan. 1. Financial aid experts typically urge families to file as early as possible. This year, though, it's important to take your time. Otherwise, you might overlook recent changes in the law that could increase your chances of getting financial aid.

The biggest change concerns the way state-sponsored 529 college savings plans are treated. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, signed into law in February, clarifies that 529 plans are considered the parents' asset for purposes of calculating financial aid — even though their dependent child is usually named as the beneficiary. Likewise, the law states that prepaid college tuition plans and Coverdell education savings accounts are the parents' assets.

The distinction is crucial, because student-owned assets can torpedo your child's eligibility for financial aid. In calculating how much a family can afford to pay for college, the federal formula for the 2007-08 school year counts 20% of assets owned by the student. For parent-owned assets, the maximum assessment is much lower: 5.64%.

Under the new law, custodial 529 plans owned by a dependent child aren't counted at all, says Joe Hurley, founder of SavingforCollege.com. Custodial 529 accounts are usually created when parents transfer a Uniform Gifts to Minors Act account to a 529 plan. (UGMA accounts allow parents to invest in mutual funds, stocks and other securities on behalf of children who can't legally invest on their own.)

Hurley believes the treatment of custodial 529 plans is an unintentional loophole that Congress will eventually close. But even if it does, custodial 529 plans will most likely be treated as the parents' assets, he says.

Kalman Chany, author of Paying for College Without Going Broke, worries that many families will inadvertently report 529 savings plans, particularly those in custodial accounts, as student assets on their FAFSAs.

Families may also miss a change in the law that affects small-business assets, Chany says. Parents who are business owners are no longer required to report the company's net worth on the FAFSA if the business is family owned and controlled and has fewer than 100 full-time employees.

The government rarely corrects FAFSA errors that reduce the amount of aid a family is eligible to receive, Chany says. "A few mistakes could cost you thousands of dollars."

Time is your ally

Check the deadlines for the schools your child is interested in attending. A handful of private schools impose January deadlines for FAFSAs, but most schools don't require you to send in your financial information until February or later, Chany says.

While it's important to meet deadlines, you're usually not rewarded for filing early, Chany says. Taking your time will reduce the chance of making a costly error. There are other benefits to waiting, including:

•The size of your assets could decline in the first few weeks of the year. When you fill out the FAFSA, you report income based on the prior year's income tax return, in this case 2006. But you're supposed to report your assets and liabilities as of the date you sign the form.

For that reason, if you know you'll have to pay some large bills early in the year, you may be better off waiting to file your FAFSA, says Rob LaBreche, president of consumer marketing for College Loan Corp. Paying those bills will reduce your assets, and possibly increase your eligibility for financial aid.

•You may want to transfer a UGMA into a 529 plan before applying for aid. UGMAs, and their cousins, Uniform Transfer to Minors Accounts, are still considered the child's assets in the financial aid formula, which means they'll be assessed at 20%. One way to solve that problem is to convert the UGMA to a 529 custodial account, in which case it won't be counted at all. But this step shouldn't be taken unless you're confident it will increase your eligibility for aid, Chany says.

Here's why: To make the transfer, you'll first have to liquidate the UGMA and pay capital gains taxes on any investment gains. If you make the transfer after Jan. 1, the gains won't be included in your 2006 income, so it won't affect the income you report on this year's FAFSA. But you must file the FAFSA every year if you want to continue receiving financial aid. So capital gains reported in 2007 could reduce the amount of aid your child receives next year.

The Education Department has posted information about the changes in financial aid rules at www.fafsa.ed.gov.

Sandra Block covers personal finance for USA TODAY. Her Your Money column appears Tuesdays. Click here for an index of Your Money columns. E-mail her at: sblock@usatoday.com.

College Q&A - questions about financial aid - WSJ article

Family Money
College Q&A
Answering readers' questions about financial aid
By ANNE MARIE CHAKER
December 18, 2006; Page R6

From navigating 529s to 401(k)s, saving for college makes many of us want to dial 911.

It's a dizzying area of personal finance, and the rules for federal aid continually change with the political climate. Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled Congress lopped off nearly $12 billion from the federal student-aid program. Now, with Democrats about to take control of Congress, college affordability is back on the agenda. Big promises range from interest-rate cuts on student loans to restoring some expired tax deductions for tuition.

Meanwhile, the rising cost of college continues to outpace the overall rate of inflation, and knowing how to save wisely has never been more crucial. We hope that answering some of your queries will help clarify things a bit -- and perhaps ignite more thoughts and questions from you. As always, you can email us at reports@wsj.com3 with puzzlers we might answer in future columns.

* * *
When marrying my second wife, it was always our understanding that her kids' college education would be her and her ex's responsibility, not mine. Now we find that my finances will be assessed, potentially lowering the amount of aid available to my stepdaughter, who plans to enter college next fall. My wife cannot afford tuition on her own, and her ex's inability to contribute could jeopardize my stepdaughter's chance of going to the school she wants. How do we make the best case for financial aid?

If the child has lived the most in your household in the year prior to applying for federal aid, that makes your wife the "custodial" parent. That, in turn, makes her the one responsible for filling out the federal aid form. As her spouse, you are required to report your income and assets, too. The government considers you a source of support regardless of any previous agreement you may have had with your wife.

The problem with that rule, as you point out, is that it lets the noncustodial parent off the hook. "There are a lot of situations where this doesn't make a lot of sense," says Joe Paul Case, financial-aid director at Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.

But many private institutions, including Amherst, will focus mainly on the two natural parents, rather than the custodial household, in judging how much of their own aid to give. So while the federal formula might not be as generous in your situation, some schools can fill in any shortfalls in federal funds with their own institutional resources.

* * *
When colleges base their financial aid on parent income and assets, do they include a 529 plan in their calculations? I am contributing to such a plan that was set up in the beneficiary's grandfather's name (I am the great-grandfather) in order to avoid it being counted. Was this a good strategy?

It is indeed a good strategy when it comes to qualifying for federal aid. The federal formula for assessing how much a family can pay for college is strictly focused on the finances of parent and child. So 529 plans opened by grandparents go uncounted in the federal calculus.

In distributing their own aid, however, colleges often look at all 529 plans that name the student as beneficiary. So even if the strategy works for the federal-aid calculation, it won't necessarily work for the institution's own aid assessment.

* * *
I have an 18-year-old scheduled to enter college next fall, and have $165,000 saved, about one-third of which is in a Uniform Gift to Minors account (the rest is in a 529 plan). My adjusted gross income of over $200,000 a year makes it unlikely that I will qualify for need-based aid. Should I move funds now from the UGMA account -- containing a mix of stocks and bonds -- to a 529 plan? The advantages of having the funds in a 529 are clear, but I like the flexibility of maintaining two college pools.

You're right that your income probably puts you out of the running for need-based aid, so your planning should focus on how to maximize the amount you have available for college after taxes.

If you liquidate the UGMA to transfer that money to a 529 account, you'll pay capital-gains taxes on those funds. But from then on, that money will appreciate tax-free in the 529 account, whereas if the money stays in the UGMA, any investment gains will continue to be taxed.

Taxes aren't the only thing to consider, though. You will want to take a hard look at the returns you've achieved in the UGMA, suggests Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org4, and compare them with the returns you'd likely see in a tax-free 529 plan. If you seem to be doing a lot better in the UGMA, even with the taxes, then that's a strong reason to stick with what you've got.

* * *
Since our son was a baby, we have saved diligently for college. However, I think we made one big mistake. One of his mutual funds is not in his name; with college two years away we would like to switch it to a custodial account. Is that possible at this late date?

It's not too late to switch ownership of any college-savings funds you have, but in doing so you don't want any account to be in your son's name. That's because when you apply for federal need-based aid, only as much as 5.64% of parental savings is considered available for college, compared with 35% of savings in the child's name -- though the latter rate will drop to 20% starting July 1, 2007.

Your best bet is probably a 529 account, set up in your name and naming the child as the beneficiary. A married couple can contribute as much as $24,000 a year to a 529 without incurring gift taxes.

There is also an "accelerated gift" option that allows a donor to exceed the annual limits by averaging the gifts over a five-year period.

* * *
I have been saving for my daughter's education, but it's entirely in my 401(k) plan. I will be retiring in another four years or so. Rather than take out money now from my 401(k) as a taxable distribution to pay for her tuition, would it make more sense to finance part of her education through loans -- and repay after I'm retired (and at a lower tax bracket)?

Withdrawals from your 401(k) plan to pay for college are taxed and also carry a 10% penalty, so you may want to avoid paying for college that way.

One alternative is borrowing from your 401(k) -- that way you avoid the taxes and penalties, and the interest you pay goes right back into the account, so in essence you're paying it to yourself. However, you will still lose out on any investment gains you might have made on the amount you borrow.

Mr. Kantrowitz, the FinAid.org publisher, suggests federal loans are a better way to go, because while you will pay interest to the lender instead of to yourself, that amount is likely to be less than what you would give up in investment gains by borrowing against your retirement plan.

--Ms. Chaker is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau.

Write to Anne Marie Chaker at anne-marie.chaker@wsj.com5