the Sam Jackson College Experience

I will keep this short and focus on the content here, folks, because it’s amazing. A few years back I wrote an angry letter to Yale Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzel for not being forward-looking enough with the admissions office. I will soon have to draft him a letter of congratulations for his support of this great  student-led, student-created effort to create a fantastic Yale admissions music video. Much of what I’ve ever said on the blog about engaging branding and effective marketing comes together here in one fell swoop. More analysis of this later, and praise for the enterprising students who developed the video. For now, have a look and share your comments! You won’t regret it.

Or, “It’s not lying when admissions office does it” –

Just wanted to quickly highlight something which is not gross lying, but just mild misrepresentation. The Yale Admitted Students website has fantastic images of student rooms which are really really scrumptious and gorgeous and make you feel like everyone at Yale lives in wonderful palaces — also, that they all clean their rooms. I was stunned when I first saw them and asked the admissions office if they were real rooms of undergrads or if they were staged photos (when I was applying) and I was told, no, they’re all real.

And they are, in a certain sense, at least… anyway, of couse, they want to put Yale’s best face forward, and I don’t mean to say that rooms aren’t often great! I am still puzzled why they had Emma Watson stay overnight in one of the less spectacular freshman dorms, if they’d wanted to really court her; still. (Emma, if you’re reading, I hope you chose to apply and matriculate! Harvard is Azkaban and if you come to Yale I’ll never mention Harry Potter when you’re around. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions about Yale; this offer applies to prospective Yalies who aren’t movie stars, too.) Read the rest of this entry »

Regular Decision notice for the Yale Class of 2012 comes out this Monday, March 31st. This post is addressed to both the regular decision and early action members of Yale 2012, and is posted on the admitted students website as well as my own blog.

This is my first for the Yale admitted students web site, so if you are reading this there–congratulations on your admission! My name is Sam Jackson and I am a member of the Yale class of 2011. I’m from Newton, MA (right outside Boston) and I’m in Trumbull college here at Yale. Some of you may already know me from ‘real life’ or might have been reading my blog already–others know me only as some random member of Yale 2011. This post is addressed to all of Yale 2012 but also applies to anyone who is wondering whether my credibility is impacted by my new role as an ‘Undergraduate Recruitment Coordinator’ on the Yale payroll with the admissions office. I just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and explain some of my motivations in blogging.

I’ve spent the last two and a half years blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends, reaching (among others) an audience of admissions officers and professionals as well as higher education marketers. I’ve used that access to call for more honest and authentic marketing efforts and for greater transparency and access in general. I also blogged about my college admissions process since it began, and today continue to blog about life here at Yale. As all of you readers are no doubt intimately aware, applying to college sucks.

I wish it didn’t have to be like that. My efforts to convince people to change their ways haven’t exactly had an instant payoff. Right now I’m organizing a way to offer large sums of money for a scholarship to the student who can think up some of the best solutions (more on this later!) but that won’t affect what you have already had to suffer through… and I can only offer my condolences for the painful, stressful process. It’s not quite over yet, but the worst is behind you. Choosing can be maddening, but it’s better than having no choices at all… and if you’re reading this at admits.yale.edu, it means one of your choices is Yale. So, could definitely be worse.

I am blogging exactly as I always have been, only now I get paid for what I was already doing. Truthfully, I would pay Yale if it meant that I could easily reach all of you admitted students! (Coincidentally, so would a lot of other, less reputable people–Yale and other schools wouldn’t sell your information, but huge amounts of money are spent to buy up your contact information once you reach college-admissions age. When you took the PSAT or SAT, and then wondered how you subsequently got huge volumes of mail, it’s because the College Board sold your personal information if you consented to the ’student search service.’ Of course, the problems of the College Board are another story, one I chronicle often: e.g., a year ago I detailed 51 ways your SAT could be mis-scored, none of which the College Board would want you to know about, because things like that might reduce public confidence in the security of their testing procedures.)

I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes to blogging credibility. If it were about the money, after all, my main interest wouldn’t be Yale–I get an order of magnitude more money from direct advertising than I do by being paid $12.80 an hour to blog for Yale. My bread and butter has always been leveraging my cynicism and negativity towards marketing efforts and institutions which I feel are not effectively serving students–especially prospective students.

I have a few posts on my blog explaining why I matriculated to Yale, why I wanted to go, a few cheerleading Yale, etc. But I also have quite a few more calling Yale out for all the things it does wrong, and things that could be improved. In fact, the way I actually came to this position–blogging for you now–was through a post I made last July attacking the admissions office for its position on official admissions blogs– that is, blogs where the admissions officers themselves are blogging, but which can (and generally should) also incorporate student voices. This admitted students website has student blogs, but they are not publicly accessible (i.e., publicized). If you are interested in more of my writing on the subject, it’s what I’ve been writing about for years on my blog and the topic of my presentation at the 2007 College Board Forum in New York–I’ll stop ranting for now.
So… expect to see lots of posts on why Yale is failing to recruit more low-income students, problems about its admissions practices, and other problems along with all the nice things I have to say. I have lots and lots of great things to say and write about Yale–I love it here. Maybe you’re already in love with Yale, too; maybe you’re not sure yet. Either way, you have a lot to look forward to next yearm whether it’s at Yale or anywhere else.

(Whatever your level of excitement, congratulations on your admission to Yale– I am excited to find out more about everyone joining us next year!)

At the start of February I announced my desire to organize a scholarship through my site. A little more than a month later, things are really going strong. Here’s where things now stand–still working things out:

The Idea: A contest to propose the best new ideas for using new media, the internet, and technology to improve the college admissions process and/or higher education marketing in general.

The contest will be sponsored (at least in part) by some of those same agents most want to hear about the ideas for reform and who are looking for innovative solutions. They’ll have direct exposure to the ideas so that they could be better implemented! After a winner (winners? still fundraising) is chosen, their proposal / essay and other top ideas will be put online for everyone to see and learn, leading to a great dialogue about ways to make things better for both students and the college / marketing forces who want to engage them.

Participants: Current high school students, but also recent high school grads who are now undergraduates: students who have recent experience with the

The Prize: Cash towards college education! I have been working hard over the last month not just with midterms but also trying to drum up support for this scholarship idea. My original target was to get ~$500 from a wide range of individuals and organizations in higher education and college admissions fields as well as general sponsorship and donation (technology companies, anyone?). We’re getting close to that target! But wait, things get better…

The other day, I was very happy to learn that I had just won a brand new Toshiba x205 laptop in a recent Gizmodo contest! This is a really nice laptop, worth $1400, which would definitely make a great addition to someone’s dorm room. 17″ screen, 4 speakers and subwoofer, 250 GB hard drive, nice Nvidia GeForce 8700M graphics card… I know college laptop costs can be pretty significant, so hopefully this could help blunt that for whoever wins. Hopefully we will be able to find it a happy home soon! I’ll have more details when it arrives at home in a week or two.

Thanks to Toshiba for indirectly sponsoring it… I had been trying to lobby other laptop manufacturers but so far have been unable to get in touch with the right people. The Lenovo VP for USA was supposed to come to Yale this past weekend, but had to cancel–my plan had been to corner him and ask. In any event, I am absolutely still interested in looking for more partners, and if I had more to give out we could offer it to more people and really expand things.

________

So! I now have a laptop and a few hundred dollars cash ready to give away, and I’m pretty psyched. It makes me want to set my sights higher, but to do that I need more help from my readers (and people they know…). So please forward around my request for more help in organizing this scholarship, and let me know if you want to get involved or if you have any leads on people who might want to get involved. Either send me an e-mail at sam [at] samjackson [dot] org or use the contact form (or comment here)! Still hammering out more details and will solicit some prompts and start working on framing the questions for scholarship applicants soon, and things will definitely keep growing as I add participants.

For would-be sponsors: This is a really great opportunity to give something (a very small donation, even!) while getting a lot (of good publicity, exposure, and of course, useful insight and new ideas). It’s all going to a good cause and so I highly recommend getting involved! Alternately, if you feel you don’t want to give money to any random student talking about college admissions, and would rather give that money just to me, I still have open advertising inventory for the new few months, so let me know.

There has been a 14 percent decrease in the number of Yale students getting Pell grants in the last 8 years, according to Pell Institute senior scholar Tom Mortenson study, reports the Yale Daily News. Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzell disagreed by citing more limited data which statistics professors at Yale argued were statistically invalid. Instead, it seems he prefers to somewhat cherry pick his data, looking at families % with less than $60,000 a year. Quotes from the article, emphasis mine:

Mortenson said he was especially concerned about the 14-percent drop in Pell students at Yale in the past eight years, given that the percentage of Pell students at Harvard University increased by 53 percent over the same time period, according to his Dec. 2007 analysis.As the percentage of low-income children in the K-12 school system increases, Mortenson said, Yale has a responsibility to help educate these students — a responsibility that it is not meeting.

“The real question is, ‘Who is trying to deal with this huge demographic tide, and who isn’t?’” Mortenson said. “As I look at Harvard’s data, I say Harvard is, and as I look at Yale’s data, I say Yale isn’t.”

Yale’s recent announcement of an unprecedented increase in undergraduate financial aid did not change his analysis.

Mortenson called Yale’s new financial-aid initiative — which dramatically reduces the expected parental contribution from families making up to $200,000 a year and eliminates the need for student loans — a mere “public-relations gesture.”

So… there’s failure all around, but Yale is especially lagging. Brenzel does reasonably point out that some of Harvard’s success with Pell grant numbers could just be that Harvard has a better ability to get them to come, rather than special recruitment efforts; Harvard’s yields are certainly very impressive in general and a Harvard admissions letter can be pretty sticky. But that just means that Yale needs to work harder and reach out more to low income students. This might not be the fault only of the admissions office, it could be that they are not able to effectively allocate their resources to do so without compromising other parts of their mission which are valued more. Luckily, here at Yale… they don’t really have to choose! The university has the resources needed to make significant change here, and if it isn’t moving up the charts on this, it can’t point at Harvard or anyone else and try to avoid blame.

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