Holding College Chiefs to Their Words - WSJ article

Holding College Chiefs to Their Words
By ELLEN GAMERMAN
WSJ May 6, 2009
Reed College President Colin Diver suffered writer's block. Debora Spar, president of Barnard College, wrote quickly but then toiled for hours to cut an essay that was twice as long as it was supposed to be. The assignment loomed over Wesleyan University President Michael Roth's family vacation to Disney World.

The university presidents were struggling with a task that tortures high-school seniors around the country every year: writing the college admissions essay. In a particularly competitive year for college admissions, The Wall Street Journal turned the tables on the presidents of 10 top colleges and universities with an unusual assignment: answer an essay question from their own school's application.

Read the Essays
Barnard College's Debora Spar on daily routinesCarleton College's Robert A. Oden Jr. on getting lost -- and found -- in CairoGrinnell College's Russell K. Osgood on a historical figure that has influenced him.Oberlin College's Marvin Krislov on a historical figure that has influenced him.Pomona College's David Oxtoby on an experience that was 'just plain fun'Reed College's Colin Diver on an experience in diversityThe University of Chicago's Robert J. Zimmer on "Living the Question"University of Pennsylvania's Amy Gutmann on her autobiographyVassar College's Catharine Hill on an influential person in her lifeWesleyan University's Michael S. Roth on an influential person in his lifeThe "applicants" were told not to exceed 500 words (though most did), and to accept no help from public-relations people or speechwriters. Friends and family could advise but not rewrite. The Journal selected the question from each application so presidents wouldn't pick the easy ones. They had about three weeks to write their essays.

The exercise showed just how challenging it is to write a college essay that stands out from the pack, yet doesn't sound overly self-promotional or phony. Even some presidents say they grappled with the challenge and had second thoughts about the topics they chose. Several shared tips about writing a good essay: Stop trying to come up with the perfect topic, write about personally meaningful themes rather than flashy ones, and don't force a subject to be dramatic when it isn't.

As Mr. Roth of Wesleyan, in Middletown, Conn., waited in line with his daughter for rides at Disney World, he thought about his question -- describe a person who's had a significant influence on you -- and wondered whether the topic he'd chosen for his response was too personal.

"It occurred to me, that must be the question our applicants ask themselves," Mr. Roth says. "I can write this about my history teacher or a public figure, what you'd expect, or should I write something more meaningful to me, but riskier?"

In the end, Mr. Roth decided to take a risk, telling a story of his brother who died at age five, before Mr. Roth was born. His older brother's portrait hung in their childhood home.

"I was to heal the wounds caused by the death of that beautiful little boy in the picture," he wrote. "Yet I was also to remain the trace of those wounds."

Mr. Diver of Reed, in Portland, Ore., was asked to write about an experience that demonstrated the importance of diversity to him. He described a violent episode as a young man that eroded his liberal self-image. Overhearing the mugging of a young black woman outside his home in Boston's South End, Mr. Diver, who is white, grabbed a baseball bat and hit the woman's attacker, who was Latino.

"Doubts welled up in my mind," Mr. Diver wrote. "Did I really understand what it means to live in a diverse neighborhood? Or did I just want cosmetic diversity as a backdrop for imposing my white, professional-class ways?"

The incident, which occurred in 1975, is mentioned in "Common Ground," a book by J. Anthony Lukas that told the story of three families, including Mr. Diver's, in a rapidly gentrifying and racially divided neighborhood.

Robert Oden, president of Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., was asked to evaluate the impact of a significant experience, achievement, risk or ethical dilemma that he had faced. He wrote about how life should be approached as an adventure, and described running, panicked, in the streets of Cairo when a trip to the pyramids, on the western edge of the city, went awry. "Within a few short minutes, I was lost. Utterly, hopelessly, lost and confused."

Eventually, he realized that he was safe, and concluded that around the world, "people are people," and most are kind and quick to help others.

Reed College President Colin Diver
"Did I really understand what it means to live in a diverse neighborhood? Or did I just want cosmetic diversity as a backdrop for imposing my white, professional-class ways?"

Reed College President Colin Diver, who wrote about an experience that demonstrated the importance of diversity.
Mr. Oden says he found it tough to write an essay that didn't sound a little crazy in its attempt to be interesting. "I can think of writing an essay that would be batty and daft and wild, and I can think of writing a very conventional essay that would be neither," he says. He went with Cairo because it was a specific story, set in a particular place, with details he remembered vividly.

With the assignment of picking a person who inspired him -- from fiction, history or a creative work -- Grinnell College's Russell Osgood chose history, writing about 18th-century Anglo-Irish political figure Edmund Burke. Mr. Osgood, who announced this week that he will step down in 2010, drew parallels between his experience as president of Grinnell, in Grinnell, Iowa, and Mr. Burke's philosophy.

"...Burke, like David Hume, believed that change is best accomplished by a gradual movement in structures and institutions rather than by violent upheaval. When I arrived at Grinnell as a new president in 1998, there was concern, even apprehension, about me and the possibility of change," he wrote. In response to those concerns, Mr. Osgood says he told people that any change he brought to the college would occur "thoughtfully and after learning and listening." He says he wanted to act in a way that was consistent with Burke's philosophy.

Given the same question, Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, says he briefly wondered if he should write as if he were a high-school senior, but then concluded he'd write a better essay if he looked back on his experiences from an adult perspective. He described a trip he took a few years ago to South Africa's Robben Island, where anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was imprisoned:


Courtesy Wesleyan University
"Contemplating Nelson Mandela's life can make one weep at the inhumanity and cruelty he experienced. But it is also inspiring," Mr. Krislov wrote, adding that he was especially impressed by a school Mr. Mandela and his colleagues created while they were in prison. "I was deeply moved by their faith even under horrific circumstances in education as the path to social change and uplift."

One of the most challenging questions came from the University of Pennsylvania application: Write page 217 of your 300-page autobiography. President Amy Gutmann focused on her professional accomplishments, including creating a vision for the school, dubbed "the Penn Compact," when she became the university's president in 2004. "No sooner had I begun writing my presidential inaugural address than the political philosopher in me took over," she wrote. "Instead of delivering the standard omnibus address that no one will remember, why not propose a new social contract to put the ideals of higher education into ever more effective practice?"

Some presidents, like many high-school students, wrote about their extra-curricular activities. "What I love about bicycling is how close I am to the countryside, moving slowly enough to see everything, and able to stop when a spot beckons," wrote David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Others took the opportunity to focus on academic policy: "We need to adjust to the new economic realities while maintaining our commitment to access and affordability," wrote Catharine Hill, president of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The question for University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer was simply a quote by poet Rainer Maria Rilke translated from the German: "At present you need to live the question." His interpretation: "Living the question is not simple. It entails the intensity of argument and engagement. It demands intellectual risk-taking and a preference for analysis, inquiry and complexity over easy solutions or comfort."

Ms. Spar, president of Barnard College in New York, says the application exercise reminded her how difficult it is for students to write an original essay, especially when so many are answering the same questions from the common application.

"In an ideal world, I'd rather go back to the system where colleges ask more idiosyncratic questions, because really what you want to find out is, why is this particular kid a good fit for this particular school?" she says.

When she sat down to write, she rejected one of her first ideas, which was to describe her running and swimming routine. "That struck me that'd be a very, very boring and self-aggrandizing essay to write," she says.

So Ms. Spar, who once wrote a graduate-school application essay about talking backwards, used a trick familiar to many survivors of the college essay ordeal: She turned her question on its head. Asked to describe an ordinary-seeming daily routine or tradition that held special meaning for her, the working mother wrote instead about her lack of routine. She described a typical chaotic day: she was juggling preparations for a black-tie event with the needs of her three kids. Meanwhile, her husband was stuck in a snowstorm in Buffalo, N.Y. and the family cat was found with a "writhing" chipmunk inside the house.

"I pack my daughter's clothes for soccer practice and put her Hebrew homework where she has at least a remote chance of encountering it. In between, I check on the chipmunk, which is now expiring sadly on the downstairs rug," Ms. Spar wrote, later adding: "The chipmunk has died. And another day begins. Thankfully, I've never been much for routine."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com

Elite Colleges Reach Deeper Into Wait Lists - WSJ May 21, 2008

Elite Colleges Reach Deeper Into Wait Lists
Changing Applications Process
Added Uncertainty This Year;
Enjoying a Domino Effect
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
May 21, 2008; Page D1

Here's a bright spot in an otherwise brutal college-admissions season: More students are being accepted from wait lists at elite schools this year because colleges found it harder to predict how many graduating seniors would join the freshman class.

Boston College says it will admit about 250 students from its wait list, up from last year's 117. Harvard University says it will take at least 200 students, compared with 50 last year. Princeton University expects to take at least 90 students this year, up from 47. The University of Pennsylvania has admitted 90 students from the wait list this year, up from 65 last year. And Georgetown University is admitting 80, up from 29 last year.

WAITING GAME


Some factors that made the college-admissions process unpredictable:
• Large class of high-school seniors applying to college.
• Elimination of early-admissions programs by Harvard and Princeton.
• Greater availability of financial aid to middle- and upper-class students.Some state colleges and smaller liberal-arts schools are also drawing more from their wait lists. The University of Wisconsin-Madison expects to take 800 from the wait list this year, compared with six students last year. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is admitting 300 students from the wait list, up from 226 last year. Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., has so far taken 36 students off the wait list this year, up from 24 last year.

The wait-list bonanza isn't because colleges have more slots available for students -- in fact, overall enrollment levels at many schools remained the same as last year.

Instead, colleges this year faced more uncertainty in the applications process. For one thing, there's a growing population of high-school seniors -- many of whom submit applications to multiple schools. But for highly selective schools, what really affected the process was the move by two Ivy League schools to end their early-admissions programs. Also at play were policy changes that made more financial aid available to middle- and upper-class students.

"It was certainly a year in which there was more uncertainty than I've experienced in over 30 years in admissions," says Bill Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions and financial aid.

Wait-list activity at one school can affect competitors, who may lose students as a result. But such moves also trickle down and open up spots for other hopeful students. "It's like a domino effect," says Marybeth Kravets, a counselor at Deerfield High School in Illinois.

Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., for instance, has lost four students because they were accepted from wait lists at Princeton, Harvard and Columbia universities. In turn, the school has taken 16 students from its own wait list.

College officials say they expect wait-list activity to be drawn out longer this year. So some students have already accepted one college's offer only to be accepted from the wait list of the college they prefer. If they switch to their preferred college, they automatically lose the enrollment deposit -- often amounting to hundreds of dollars -- they paid to the first school.

Holding Out

Alex Jefferson, 18, illustrates the uncertainty of the wait-list game. Mr. Jefferson, a senior at Bellaire High School in Houston, Texas, applied to 12 schools. He was accepted at eight and wait-listed at two: the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University in St. Louis. He was holding out for both but sent an enrollment deposit to Northwestern University expecting that he wouldn't get off either wait list.


To his surprise, he was accepted to both. He has decided to attend the University of Pennsylvania, but there's a catch: Mr. Jefferson has decided to defer for a year to go to Israel. Still, getting into a top choice this late in the year is thrilling.

"I was in shock," Mr. Jefferson says. When an admission representative from the University of Pennsylvania called, he accepted immediately. "It's so unheard of to get off the wait list."

The unpredictable nature of college admissions began in the fall of 2006, when Harvard and Princeton announced they would eliminate early-admissions programs, leading this year's applicants who would have otherwise committed to those schools to send multiple applications to other top schools. Harvard and Princeton expected to lose a portion of their admitted students to competitors. And other highly selective schools thought that some applicants would hold out for Harvard and Princeton.

Second, as Congress pressured schools to spend more of their endowments on students, Stanford, Yale and Harvard universities altered their financial-aid eligibility requirements to include more middle- and upper-class students. And other schools in the past year have said they would cap or eliminate need-based loans in financial-aid packages and replace them with grants.

'Limited Number of Beds'

Such uncertainties led many schools to be conservative in their initial round of acceptances. Colleges say the worst-case scenario is to have more students enroll than can be accommodated with on-campus housing. "We had a limited number of beds on campus," says Janet Lavin Rapelye, Princeton's dean of admission. "We had intended to come in below our target and then use the wait list."

Also at stake for elite schools is yield -- the percentage of students accepted who decide to attend. That figure is closely monitored by competing schools, potential donors and applicants as an indication of a college's appeal.

By accepting fewer students than what they need initially and pulling from the wait list later, colleges can try to minimize the number of students who receive offers and say "no." "They can actually boost their yield," says Jon Reider, who was an admissions officer at Stanford for 15 years and is now director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School.

Students who have been wait listed and are willing to hold out for their top choices generally let the schools know. Additionally, "a lot of colleges will call the students on the wait list to see if they are interested," says John Blackburn, dean of admission at the University of Virginia. "So I think a lot of times, colleges are able to be pretty accurate in predicting which wait-list people will come."

The University of Virginia, like Harvard and Princeton, ended its early-admissions programs this year after concluding that policies put low-income and underrepresented students at a disadvantage. Critics of early-admission programs say that they don't enable low-income students to compare financial aid packages.

Impact on Yields

All three schools saw their yields decline this year, as admissions officials expected. Princeton's was about 60%, while in previous years, when the school still offered early admission, that figure was 67% or 68%. Harvard's Mr. Fitzsimmons expects the yield to be about 76% this year, down from 78%. At the University of Virginia, the yield declined to 48.8% this year from 50.8% last year -- but the drop wasn't as large as anticipated, so the school has not yet taken any students from the wait list this year, Mr. Blackburn says.

To be sure, not all schools are seeing increases in their numbers of wait-list offers. Stanford University, for instance has taken zero students from the wait list so far this year, the same as last year. "We are keeping a small number on the wait list just to respond to other wait list activity around the nation," says Rick Shaw, dean of undergraduate admission and financial aid.

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

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Colleges Reject Record Numbers WSJ April 3, 2008

Bad News U: Colleges Reject Record Numbers
Policies at Harvard, Princeton
Create Uncertainty at Elites;
Financial-Aid Picture Improves
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
April 3, 2008; Page B11

(See Correction & Amplification item below.)

The college-admissions season set records this year -- both in the number of students who applied, as well as the number of students who were rejected.

Harvard University has a record applicant pool of 27,462 and an admissions rate of 7.1%, meaning that 1,948 students were accepted -- the lowest number in the school's history and a drop from last year's 8.9%. Yale University received 22,813 applications and accepted only 8.2%, down from 9.6% last year. And at Princeton University, of the 21,369 applications, 9.3% were accepted, down from 9.5% last year.
State schools, too, are reporting a tough admissions season, with acceptance rates down at the University of Texas and the University of North Carolina, among others.

On the positive side for some students this season, schools are having a hard time predicting their all-important "yields" -- the percentage of students admitted who will actually attend. And high-school counselors are hoping that ambiguity will result in more acceptances for students who are on waiting lists -- a strategy schools use to reach enrollment targets.

"On the counseling side, this is our most promising and realistic hope for wait-list activity," says Bari Norman, director of Expert Admissions LLC in Miami. For the past couple of years, many elite schools have anticipated drawing from their waiting lists but ended up taking few or no applicants because of higher-than-expected yields.

Two factors are driving the unpredictability in this year's college-admissions process. First, both Harvard and Princeton universities eliminated their early-applicant programs this year. That means students who otherwise would have secured a spot at one of these schools in the fall also applied to other schools. Second, moves by highly selective schools to increase financial aid for middle- to upper-income students put the high tuition bills within reach of more families.

"With the change at Harvard and Princeton and all the moves made on the financial aid side, we just feel completely unable to predict what the yield will be," says Jeff Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University. "We're guessing the yield will fall some because more top students have applied to top schools." For the past couple of years, Yale's overall yield has ranged from 70% to 71%.

Yields are important to colleges because they are closely monitored by competing schools, potential donors and applicants as an indication of the college's appeal. In recent years, they have become tougher to forecast because of the growing population of high-school students and a rise in applications per student. College counselors say many students today apply at 10 to 12 schools, with some applying to as many as 20.

Some colleges changed their strategies as a result of the Harvard and Princeton decisions on early admissions. For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted 522 students early this year compared with last year's 390 because it saw a stronger early-applicant pool. Students who normally would have applied early to Harvard and Princeton applied to MIT's early-admissions program, which is nonbinding, meaning that even if they're accepted, students aren't obliged to attend, says Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions at MIT.

Swarthmore College accepted more students this year -- 929 compared with 890 at this time last year. Yet its admissions rate of 15% was lower than last year's 16% because of a rise in applications. "We took a few more because I think our yield might go down a bit," says Jim Bock, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Pennsylvania school.

17 Applications

Michael Zucker, 18, a senior at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Ill., illustrates how the applicant pools at elite schools can overlap. Mr. Zucker, who ranks within the top five students in his class, applied to Yale's single-choice early-action program -- which is nonbinding but doesn't permit him to apply to any other schools early. He also applied to 16 other schools with the goal of getting into six. "I refused to exclude schools before applying," he says. "I've heard enough horror stories to know that something can go wrong."

The results turned out in his favor. Mr. Zucker was accepted at 13 schools, including Yale. He was wait-listed at Columbia, Princeton and Stanford, and rejected by Harvard.

Mr. Zucker says he is likely to choose Yale but hasn't decided. The University of Chicago has offered him a $40,000 scholarship. Students have to let colleges know yes or no by May 1.

For many, the decision may hinge on financial assistance. At a time when schools face congressional pressure to spend more of their endowments to help students, many schools have said they are capping or eliminating the amount of need-based loans in financial-aid packages and replacing them with grants. Harvard, Stanford and Yale universities have revamped their financial-aid policies to include more middle- to upper-class students.


Financial aid will determine where Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons decides to go. Mr. Graves-Fitzsimmons, 18, a senior at Bellaire High School in Houston, applied to eight schools. He was accepted to five: Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.; Tufts University near Boston; American University in Washington, D.C.; Willamette University in Salem, Ore.; and the University of Texas at Austin.

Claremont McKenna and Tufts are his top choices. But he is waiting to see what kind of financial-aid packages he receives. Last month, Claremont McKenna -- with estimated tuition and fees for next year of $18,530 per semester -- announced it would eliminate student loans from financial-aid packages and give grants instead. Tufts has a similar policy for students at households with incomes below $40,000, but Mr. Graves-Fitzsimmons doesn't fall into that category.

Classmates 'Freaking Out'

"My top priority is to weigh whether the college is right for me, but also what my debt might be," says Mr. Graves-Fitzsimmons, who has a 4.6 grade-point average on a 5.0 scale. His parents have encouraged him not to rule out the University of Texas -- where in-state tuition and fees are about $4,266 per semester -- because of its affordability.

He says that he is happy with his options, but that his fellow classmates are "generally freaking out." "A lot of people are not getting in where they want to get in," he says.

Indeed, the year is shaping up to be a brutal admissions season, with state schools also reporting declining admission rates. The University of Texas received 29,288 applications, up 9%. It admitted 44%, down from 51% last year. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, applications rose 6.6% to 21,496. It accepted 32%, compared with 34.1% last year.

"This was really the ugliest year I've seen," says Marybeth Kravets, a college counselor at Deerfield High School in Illinois. More students were rejected or wait-listed this year. "Some of these larger universities just did not take very many kids."

For those who didn't make it in the fall, there's hope next spring. As colleges become more adept at enrollment management, they use spring admissions to fill the slots left by students who study abroad or graduated in the fall semester.

Schools like Middlebury College in Vermont, Colby College in Maine, and Wheaton College in Massachusetts offer spring admission to a handful of students.

Some students have found the idea appealing. Last week, Angelica Rubin, 17, a senior at Hillel Community Day School in Miami, Fla., was excited to receive a large envelope from Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

It turned out that the package contained an acceptance letter for the spring semester. "It was kind of a reach school, so I was really honored, I guess," she says.

Write to Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com3

Correction & Amplification:

Claremont McKenna College in California last month announced its policy to eliminate student loans from financial-aid packages and give grants instead. A previous version of this Personal Journal article about college admissions incorrectly said the policy change was made last fall.

‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students - NYT article

Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students
By TAMAR LEWIN
June 10, 2008

The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.

The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.

But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.

“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”

“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”

The report, based on federal education, immigration and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis and Sri Lankans.

Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.

The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.

“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.

“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”

The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.

The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “U.C.L.A. really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “M.I.T. means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said.

Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the nation’s population but 10 percent or more — considerably more in California — of the undergraduates at many of the most selective colleges, according to data reported by colleges. But the new report suggested that some such statistics combined campus populations of Asian-Americans with those of international students from Asian countries.

The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”

That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-to-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.

The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.”

Some have suggested that Asian-Americans are held to higher admissions standards at the most selective colleges. In 2006, Jian Li, the New Jersey-born son of Chinese immigrants, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, saying he had been rejected by Princeton because he is Asian. Princeton’s admission policies are under review, the department says.

The report also notes the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in administrative jobs at colleges. Only 33 of the nation’s college presidents, fewer than 1 percent, are Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.

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

Cleveland Clinic's Medical School To Offer Tuition-Free Education WSJ article

Cleveland Clinic's Medical School To Offer Tuition-Free Education
Move Seeks to Spur
Students' Interest
In Academic Careers
By SHIRLEY S. WANG
May 15, 2008; Page D3

The medical school run by the Cleveland Clinic will offer a tuition-free education, in the hope that a substantial reduction of post-graduation debt will encourage top students to enter academic medicine.

The medical profession has worried for years about how the high cost of a medical education -- newly minted doctors owe nearly $140,000 on average -- influences students' career choices. One-third of medical students surveyed by the nonprofit Association of American Medical Colleges say debt influences their choice of specialization.


In clinical practice, family-medicine doctors in 2006-07 earned an average $161,000 a year, radiologists earned $380,000 and orthopedic surgeons $413,000, according to Merritt, Hawkins & Associates, a health-care search and consulting firm. In the academic arena, median base compensation for family practice is $140,038, orthopedic surgery $205,904 and radiology $272,737, according to the Medical Group Management Association, a professional membership association for group-practice managers.

Interest in academic medicine has been relatively flat for about a decade, hovering around 15%, according to a yearly survey of incoming students. That number fell to 9.4% in 2007 for reasons that are unclear, said Gwen Garrison, director of student and applicant studies at the AAMC.

"[Academic] careers are...very demanding in terms of time," said Darrell Kirch, AAMC's president. "Some students feel that those kinds of demands would be difficult for them to meet while also trying to obtain some sense of work-life balance."

The Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western University will announce Thursday that beginning in July, all incoming students will be awarded full scholarships to cover their estimated $43,500 tuition. Students will still have to pay for living expenses, which the school estimates will be around $21,800 including all fees, equipment and books. The school will reduce by half whatever portion of the tuition current students are paying, after accounting for financial aid.

The scholarships will be funded initially through money generated by the school's operations and endowment, but will be fully funded by the endowment in the long run. Lerner College of Medicine, established in 2004, will require no career commitment or repayment if graduates quit or choose to practice in a clinical setting.

The school's goal is to train physician investigators who teach and conduct research on topics such as new treatments, and executive dean Andrew Fishleder said there is a need for more of these in the profession. The five-year program -- typical medical programs take four years -- incorporates research throughout, and becoming tuition-free was always part of its mission. "We hoped that debt would not hinder their ability to pursue their careers," Dr. Fishleder said.

The move also may attract more applicants to Lerner and make the application process even more competitive, Dr. Fishleder said. The school had more than 1,000 applications for its slots last year, and while the prospect of paying no tuition might attract more top-tier applicants, Dr. Fishleder said the school is already satisfied with the number and caliber of its applicants.

Whether reducing the financial burden will really spur students' interest in teaching and research careers is unclear. Some experts said medical students aren't enticed by the research field for reasons that go beyond finances.

For example, there are many differences between academic medicine and clinical practices that might prompt a student to choose one over another -- lifestyle and work-life balance, amount of patient contact and the nature of the day-to-day work, said Tom Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md..

While Lerner is the first medical school in the U.S. to forgo tuition for all students, other schools also are working to ease the financial burden. The University of Central Florida, which is establishing a medical school, announced in April that it will offer scholarships to its first class covering tuition and expenses. Yale University and some others are increasing financial aid.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com1

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