How can we untangle good intentions from invasive tendencies when it comes to college admissions? This is a question that can be asked on many fronts, but has added relevance this year with the addition of a question on the common application about disciplinary and criminal records.
The Boston Globe ran a piece two weeks ago about this tricky issue.
“I want to help the colleges, but I want to make sure we help our students in any way we can . . . Our first allegiance is to the students,” said Jim Montague, director of guidance counseling at Boston Latin School, which leaves disciplinary questions blank on the application but will answer them if college officials inquire directly. [...]
Colleges primarily want openness, said Kevin Kelly, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which like BU pushes students, but not high schools, to answer the questions if they are left unanswered. “I wish everybody would share everything,” Kelly said.
I’m not sure what it means that colleges “want openness.” Is this meant to imply that it’s some kind of trust game, and suggest that in addition to hopes and dreams we students load up our college applications with dirty secrets so that the admissions offices would take this to be an investment in our trust with the school, like some weird Skull and Bones initiation rite? Still, UMass at least is open to different methodologies from high schools.
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Reader Jay Collier recently contacted me and asked if I had ever considered publishing an OPML file of all my feed reader feeds. Feed Demon has such a feature, but I had never been able to really accurate gauge the ratio of reader-utility to pointless-egoism and had therefore refrained from posting one. But Jay inspired me to pose the question to all of you! So let me know and if there is any real interest I’ll clean up the output and share the long, long list of all the blogs I read.
I had a ‘real’ post that would have gone here, but I will run it in a day or so instead–answer the poll in the meanwhile, if you would be so kind!
{democracy:3}
Also, more people should follow Jay’s example and contact me and/or comment!
Update 11/30/07: OK, after a weeklong poll, an overwhelming response leads me to publish an OPML file of all the feeds I read. I’ll try to format something pretty and then post it next week. Thanks for voting!
College websites were rated worse this year than the last–I’m not surprised that this is the ninth straight year of decline, and you shouldn’t be either.
TargetX is generally pretty spot-on with their weekly e-mail minute (though not always) and a few weeks ago they wrote about a survey of 100,000+ college-bound students polled by the National Research Center for College & University Admissions. I don’t know much about the NRCCUA and I know little about the methodology or criteria of this survey because I don’t care to pay $1000 to find out. Point notwithstanding, their ‘enrollment power index’ purports to show approval ratings of college websites dropping year over year.
How ugly were the results? “Only 140 A’s, along with 713 B’s, 1,369 C’s, 635 D’s and 230 F’s. No sites scored in the 90’s or 80’s on the 100-point scale, only 16 scored in the 70’s, and nearly one third of the schools earned scores in the 50’s or 60’s.” Still, minimalism aside, it’s a bizarre methodology which has Lawrence University’s website as the #1 website. It’s not bad, it’s just… not great.
As I see it this is because of two things:
- Continual failure of college websites to meet basic needs, and
- The increased scope of demands made by students as consumers of this web content.
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Two weekends ago I was in New York because I was part of a panel about “Admissions in the Internet Age.” My part was a very compressed summary of my general admissions-internet-teenagers philosophy with some examples of blogs and other online tools which appeal to students and are also great for schools. I said I would try to talk about “bridging the gap” between students and admissions offices / counselors where the internet is concerned. There were a lot of great questions afterwards and the panel as a whole did a really good job; I could praise my co-panelists for ages but instead I’ll just move on and talk about my reactions… to the audience reactions?
I’m very much happier with how a lot of the higher education landscape looks now for uptake of blogs and new media (as well as integration with other tools familiar with my generation) compared with what it was even just a year ago. I’m not saying things are great, or even good, but there’s a very definite measured improvement in attitudes institutionally from what I could smell in the wind. People were very interested in what I had to say, and not just in the way the monacle and tophat crowd are interested when they go to a zoo or circus.
For ease of digestion, I’ve made a list of some of my feelings (nine of them, to be exact) for your consumption:
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I'm currently a junior at Yale University and I've been blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends since I began my college application process in 2005. I now also write about my experience here at Yale. I just got back from studying abroad at Peking University this past Fall 2009 in Beijing, China!
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