the Sam Jackson College Experience

Was that touch really necessary, guys? Emphasis mine.

Dear Mr. Jackson,

The information we have on file for you tells us that at one time
you intended to complete a University of Chicago application.
Usually students who are attracted to this college are people
whose applications prove to be fun to read, and we feel sorry
we never got to read yours.

Now we are prepared to close your file and wish you well as you
choose to attend some other good place. If you indeed made a
decision to forego applying to Chicago this time around, think
of us when you apply to graduate school.

If you are receiving this message despite having submitted an
application via the mail (or thought you submitted your application
online) by the January 3rd deadline, please let us know by February
6th, with some way of confirming that the application was indeed sent.

Please reply directly to this email.

Again, accept our best wishes for your future plans.

The University of Chicago
Office of College Admissions

The rest of the message was fine, obviously. Little bit cheeky there, I don’t see why I should be made to feel so bad that I’m not applying to the University of Chicago. My good friend Meredith Spoto ‘07 will be going there next year, though, so I guess I can’t stay too angry. I have lots of fondness for the place, they didn’t need to twist a dagger in my heart about my not applying, though.

This message reminds me of another question I always have: I wish there were a better way to notify schools of a noninterest. Unless it is no expense or trouble to them to maintain files like this, I expect they would appreciate it too… maybe some sort of ‘common app kill switch’ which would inform them all that you no longer were considering their school. Was there such a general purpose notification to solve Early Decision confusions? I guess this is a pipe-dream for the future of 100% digital admissions. Oh well…

Zuckerberg transcript is done, adding commentary.

Princeton University has decided not to raise its tuition for the upcoming year, the New York Times reports. Room and Board will still increase 4.2% to $10,980.

University officials said the strong performance of Princeton’s investments, which earned almost 20 percent last year, helped pave the way for the decision, along with generous donations by alumni and an increase in the size of the student body. Officials said a decision by trustees’ to spend more of the endowment, which totaled about $13 billion in June, also helped.

Hmm… strong investment performance, eh? Where do I recall hearing about another endowment getting really, really good returns?

Princeton’s provost, Christopher Eisgruber, who heads the university’s priorities committee, said in a statement today that the committee was “delighted that the university’s financial circumstances allowed the trustees to approve its recommendations for addressing highest priority needs.”

The committee’s recent report said that making higher education accessible to all qualified students was one of its considerations and that Princeton’s tuition increases had been “at the bottom end of the university’s peer group” in the past 10 years.

Apparently Williams froze tuition in 2000-2001, but otherwise I don’t see too many places being particularly friendly about the ever-raising costs of attendance. GWU has a nice plan in place which locks tuition in place on a per-student basis, set when they first begin attending, and guarantees institutional aid won’t decrease.

This comes, interestingly enough, at the same time as the release of a UCLA study about financial burdens leading people away from 1st choices. AP wire, via NYT.

Many students are settling for their second- and third-choice colleges, at least partly for financial reasons, a new survey says. The study, by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveyed more than 271,000 students at 393 colleges and universities. It found 32.7 percent of freshmen at a college other than their first choice. Almost half of those at their second choice had been accepted at their first. Of the students accepted at their first-choice university who did not enroll, a third said they could not afford it. Other reasons included geography and athletics. [emphasis mine]

Tuition costs won’t stop me from going to Yale, but they won’t make it any easier, either. We got reminder-flyers in our P.O. boxes this week about filling out the FAFSA. I wish the higher education scene could take a closer look at costs for students, particularly middle class students, rather than squeezing more money out to pay for quite lovely expansions of programs. It’s not fair to justify this just by saying “lots of this money goes to financial aid!” because tuition isn’t quite the sliding scale certain income taxes are (or could be). If a third of first-choicers couldn’t attend because of cost, that’s a problem. In the age of 4 billion dollar capital campaigns, when is it enough to take a step back and look at the burden these tuition raises are putting on students who don’t fall to the income extremes?

It was nice to see the House do some good student loans work this past week (Miller’s moustache looked great on CSPAN; we watched the vote come in) but it was too bad that the Bush administration also saw fit to continue subsidizing a student-loans company that was and is defrauding the American people. Can’t win ‘em all.

MIT has an early action telethon, where current students call every one of the early action admits and congratulate them! It’s during IAP so everyone at MIT has lots of free time, conceivably. This kind of thing is easy to set up and makes admits feel really special and loved as a new part of the MIT community.

Do other schools do this? If yours doesn’t… why not? I know MIT has fewer early admits than most (fewer than 400 students) but all the same, it shouldn’t be too hard logistically to accomplish something like that.

This is a great way to produce more warm fuzzy feelings about your school. I don’t think MIT has any problem with yields, but this can’t hurt.

edit: Kate comments to us from Yale that Yale also does this and will be calling this week. Cool!

See also: Yale University mails really nice personalized notes to the EA admit crowd.

Honestly? Dried cranberries. Fruits have wonderful powers and it was their magic which kept me strong through the hours of testing on my last sitting.

Actually, I just wanted to take a quick moment to encourage everyone to go vote in US News & World Report’s ‘Paper Trail 2006‘ rankings, specifically for ‘best alternative media outlet.’ Further, I would encourage you to go vote for Wesleying, Wesleyan’s very active, very excellent campus activity news bulletin blog. They do a really good job and they deserve this meaningless link-baiting attempt at recognition from US News. I’m not even going to mention the other contestants, since Wesleying is tops (Something I’ve been saying for a while–I actually link people the blog as I try to convince them to apply to Wesleyan). Actually, I think the Bwog can be pretty interesting sometimes. But go vote for Wesleying.

Thanks to IvyGate for tipping me off to this one, I should have a ‘real post’ sometime tomorrow evening.

Chicago’s Uncommon Application (2007-2008) is what I would call a textbook example of an excellent adcom blog (If only it had a zestier site–Blogspot is so boring!). I just thought I’d take a moment to recognize its utility to students both students and the school.

It is at once a great way to communicate with applicants (and prospective applicants) about important details (as with this deadline update after the recent quake in Asia) and moreover to convey the friendliness of the admissions team at the University of Chicago.

They do things ‘differently’ over there, or so I’m told, but it’s usually in a good way. Case in point: the deadline for RD was set at midnight, but it was midnight ‘from anywhere in the world.’ Therefore east coasters sent it in at 3 am, or rather, 12 am PST. So forth. I found this hilarious and really, really cool. It’s fun touches like this that can endear applicants to a school. Libby Pearson made a post recapping some of the noteworthy locations in a fairly representative post afterwards: UChicago applicants time-shift like crazy.

So, to reiterate what I said back in August to Karine Joly: everyone likes to see some nice honest blogging on behalf of the admissions officers (see #2). I for one would feel much more confident in my hypothetical application to UChicago if I knew that my reader had envelopes for hands, for example. This is useful knowledge, people.

p.s.: If you’re another school with a blog, don’t feel left out necessarily just because I didn’t post about you today. I just chose to cover this blog first because I really liked the picture of the envelope-hands. I’ll be posting some more retrospective appreciation posts in the coming weeks.