Here is a link to the online exhibit, and here you can reach my particular section of the exhibit. It was a very short final writing assignment, but it was difficult to write so concisely and to try to capture all the themes and ideas that I wanted to express. I am happy to finally get to check it out with everything in place, and hope you enjoy it too.

Here is the blurb that Prof. Zaremby wrote for the exhibit, reproduced below:

According to the late Edward Shils, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, intellectuals are those members of society “with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of the universe and the rules which govern their society.” In this position, intellectuals occupy a position apart from society, working as scholars, writers, philosophers, and social critics. Given their role studying and criticizing society, intellectuals need to balance the need to maintain a critical distance from politics with their desire to influence political life. Some intellectuals attempt to have an impact on society through their writings. Others work as educators in institutions of higher education. Others choose to enter public service. In addition to the value that intellectual engagement might offer to the political world, the decision to enter politics encourages intellectuals to consider their responsibility to society, scholarship, and the intellectual class itself.

The students who curated this exhibit chose topics that reveal the tensions that confront intellectuals in their engagement with society. Students used the holdings of the Department of Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library to illustrate the forms of engagement that intellectuals have attempted, as well as the responses to such engagement from both the intellectual and political worlds. The richness of the collection allowed students to explore a wide array of topics relating to political expertise, higher education, and the role of science and philosophy in society.In each case, the students reveal what lies at the intersection of intellectual life and political action—conflict, risk, and the potential for creative flourishing.

This exhibit is the final project for “The Intellectual in Politics,” a political science and humanities seminar taught by Justin Zaremby. In the course, students discussed authors ranging from Plato and Martin Heidegger to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Lippmann in an attempt to understand the relationship between intellectual life and political life. Students attempted to define the needs and goals of the intellectual class, whether intellectuals serve as advisors, teachers, or social critics.

It was a fun class and I really enjoyed getting to work with the archival collections. There is just a huge, amazing treasure trove of papers, photographs, and much more available to students.I had a really hard time choosing a final subject, but I just enjoyed getting to explore the personal notes and letters of important and famous people. It's a very special opportunity that I hope more Yale students take advantage of -- I had gone to the Archives before out of curiosity to do some research into Yale's history just for fun, and you don't need to go for class. It's just at the library, so there is no excuse not to go!

General Education

Alvaro with the Brain Fitness Center at SharpBrains gives us some helpful suggestions for how to keep our brains in tip top shape--he also hosted the 159th carnival!

Should parents pay for college (in whole or in part)? An interesting question... and one that I'm glad my parents answered basically in the affirmative.

Phil says that, paying for college or not, parents should do more to teach their kids patience. It took too long to read everything he wrote so I'm not quite sure, however, of what the entire post was about--I guess I'm just in such a rush all the time!

Noirlecroi is a big fan of blog carnivals, which is good, because it makes me want to link to their review of Mosaic of Thought, a book about teaching comprehension, that much more.

The Daily Grind provides a suggested Student Code of Ethics... what do you think about it?

Matthew K Tabor writes about the links between baseball and education, and they're more compelling in the context of the UFT than you might have imagined.

Great for Educators and Teachers

When, and if, to use if instead of when: tips from So You Want to Teach? about just that--teaching.

For more tongue twisting fun, consider the post about questioning questions, or at least the way teacher-questioners question. Lead from the Start ponders this and more in the context of preschool.

In case these other posts were sounding too cheery, read about this nightmare situation from Scenes from the Battleground, a blog about teaching in tough situations.

On the note of troublesome students... Siobhan has a teaser about what he's doing dealing with tough COLLEGE students.

But we shouldn't always blame the students! What about when parents make it difficult for students to stay in class by constantly moving? Bluebird's Classroom tells us about this unfortunate trend in certain seventh grade classrooms.

Any history teachers reading? History is Elementary has a post about hundreds-of-years-old fashion styles as it relates to teaching. Check it out.

Speaking of history--over at Scheiss Weekly we have a post asking whatever happened to the unsung heroes?

Does school kill poetry? Read Jennifer Ward's take on it.

Social Commentary about Education

The relationship between New York education policy, great apes, and why the teachers wants Joel Klein to understand more about teaching. All this and more at Under Assault, now!

They're not the only ones with complains about New York City schools: check out what Education Notes has to say on the subject.

SwitchedOnMom says that there should be more field trips. I totally agree.

EduWonkette wants to ask you what you think of different approaches to mitigating the achievement gap... and also to remind you to try to avoid being food poisoned.

Which brings us to Dave's commentary on some problems with metrics for measuring high school drop out data in California. What lessons can be learned from different measurement techniques?

General Educational Resources

SarahSpy has a great listing of free / pay-whatever days at a long list of NYC museums. Definitely worth checking out, sending along.

Life. Money. Development, writes about the seven habits of highly effective students... and how to acquire them. By clicking that link, presumably.

Web Tools for Students, Educators, and More

OEDb has some excellent (50!) tools for students and educators alike for use on the web, for research and learning. Check out their top 50 tools for researchers and students.

Bill Ferriter, 6th grade, teacher, is encouraging teachers to use RSS, in Pageflakes for Teachers, a good informative post.

CollegeDegree.com mentions 25 excellent tools for librarians. While most of these are fairly commonsensical, it doesn't hurt to be reminded of some avenues that might be missed; worth looking at for others in a similar situation.

Some fun math games, courtesy Let's Play Math.

Successful Teaching writes about blogging in the classroom-- always a great subject.

_ _ _ _ _ _

And that's it for this edition of the carnival... Submit your blog article to the next edition of the carnival of education using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. The next edition is currently set for March 12. Thanks for reading, and be sure to have a look around my site before you go!

[Brief note on my selection methodology, since concerns have arisen in the comments: some people thought I was overly selective with this carnival, but I put in almost every post that was about education... if you or someone you know was left out, it was most likely not intentional. I volunteered to host this carnival after another, for March, was already ticketed; this means that if you submitted a post BEFORE my carnival for this date was open, it may have been directed there instead and so you might not have been left out at all, you might just have to wait two weeks.]

There are many "chances" posts on College Confidential, requests from potential applicants for comments on their chances of getting into Williams and advice on how to do so. See here, here and here for recent examples. I am often tempted to reply: "Take a genetic genealogy test and, if it comes back black, join the appropriate clubs in your high school and check the right box on the Common Application."

Good advice?

I don't necessarily want to spark an affirmative action debate here as happened last year on the blog with my writings on Jian Li. What I do find interesting are the questions posed by these new technologies. As a biracial student I am particularly interested in points 4 and 5 about Williams.

4) Besides studying the trends in the number of applicants from different groups, the Record could have a lot of fun just by looking at the pictures of Williams students. There are, allegedly, 49 or so African-Americans in the class of 2011. Want to bet? I have no doubt that the admissions office is being honest --- 49 students did indeed check that box. But, could an outsider look at pictures of all the members of the class of 2011 and pick out those 49 individuals? I doubt it. The Record ought to give it a try. Background information here.

5) Don't forget that there are some administrators at the College who would actually welcome this development. The College loves to be able to claim that 10% of Williams is African-American, whatever the underlying "truth" might be. In this dimension, the College certainly practices a Don't Ask, Don't Tell philosophy. Even better would be having a 10% African-American class with average SAT scores above 1400. Not hard to do if a lot of applicants start checking that box.

I know that I would frequently be surprised to hear that "such and such is [insert minority here], actually" in the context of high school college admissions gossip. Sometimes this was something which would definitely have affected that person's life experience and background and was very relevant to who they were and their family; other times, it was surprising as well as implausible just because the link could be so tenuous.

When there are DNA test marketers who are happy to give results which will tell people they are "black" and college admissions folks happy to accept those students (see point 5) statistics take on an especially distorted relation with reality... just wanted to poll you readers and see what you all thought of this.

Also, merry Christmas and happy new year!

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:

Reasons for Optimism:

1. More people from more places are interested in adopting new tools in new ways to reach students and connect.
2. The people who "get it" are less trapped from above than they have been in the past.
3. Continuing pressure to reform admissions (ha, ha) and admit students will keep driving adoption.
4. There are more good examples every year, more success stories! People are, at the least, trying.
5. My message resonates! Students and a random cross-section of the higher education community can and sometimes do speak the same language!

Reasons for hair-pulling frustration:

1. Too little, too slow, too late--too conservative generally! Too little to achieve the full effect in many cases of adoption, too slow and too late to help out a lot of students today, and too conservative generally for reasons obvious to longtime readers of the blog.
2. Wrong perspectives guiding misconceptions: people continue to misconstrue blogs, social networking, etc in context of old techniques. This is wrong and will only end in disaster!
3. Risk-avoidance leads to counterproductive behaviors which undermine the success of institutional efforts to move forward!
4. More people and schools need more exposure to more good examples! There is nothing to be (too) afraid about and there are examples to show as much.

So those are just a few feelings I wanted to share from some of my inferences talking to people. But, on the whole, I was filled with happy fuzzy feelings, not despairing sad ones. Even if some people still had more catching up to do there were a lot who were very eager to get cracking on some new projects.

Special thanks to all the nice folks I got a chance to meet and speak with afterwards, I know I saw some more people with more questions who didn't ask them and who for time constraints or whatever else didn't stop by to chat anymore... definitely drop me a line if you are reading this! The discussion at the end was what inspired me to have renewed faith in admissions offices around the country, let's keep it up.

I don't know that I can sufficiently articulate my supreme delight and excitement for the next four years here at Yale. Based on the last 10 days this place and these people are proving to be amazing and awesome in every respect possible. Aside from the fact that I have the smallest suite at Yale, sharing my small room with someone 6' 9" (that is not hyperbole) , everything is better than I ever imagined.

The upside of the ultra-cramped room is of course that I am forced out of the room to get out and do things, socialize, study in other places, etc. Excepting those times, like right now, when I'm blogging from my room...

The list of reasons why Yale is so excellent would be obscenely long, as everywhere I look I find new reasons to be in love with this place. The classes today? Superb. I liked most of my professors that I was shopping today and was even impressed with the ones that I wasn't so fond of (personality differences?). All the courses looked interesting, though the French that I was shopping turned out to be too easy, but my very cool professor there recommended me some other very neat courses to take which I will shop post haste.

I have some more fantastic courses to look at tomorrow, too. The only problem where classes are concerned seems to be a lack of time to take all the ones that I want.

I will try to make more posts in the coming days about specific interesting / super fun things that are happening / have happened; there are almost too many to keep track. I wish Yale had a Wesleying equivalent; maybe I will have to think up a clever name and start one. In the meantime, my adventures continue!

Then I saw that some more of our good friends, this time at EphBlog, had reposted some of it (for the LACs) and so had some other blogs, so I said why not cover it myself! Those of you following logically should realize that that should do nothing to clear my conscience, but all the same I'm going to write about the rankings a little : )

I'll relate the shocking news right now: The top 3 slots are the same as last year! Gasp! In the same order, no less--Princeton, Harvard, Yale. (For complete list, see the end of this post) While we've all become accustomed to the top 10 or so's relative lack of volatility over the years, it's worth remembering the way the methodology has been changed based more on editorial discretion than statistical or scientific merit. The methodology is explained on USNews.com; I will look through it and discuss the changes they made this year in another coming post.

Steve Hsu, who writes a totally awesome blog called Information Processing (he's a physics professor at the U of Oregon), brought a Slate article to my attention back in July. It's a fun read, centered around an explanation of the various 'fudge factors' that U.S. News uses to make sure the rankings maintain a certain... standard, shall we say.

The story of how the rankings were cooked goes back to 1987, when the magazine's first attempt at a formula put a school in first that longtime editor Mel Elfin says he can't even remember, except that it wasn't HYP. So Elfin threw away that formula and brought in a statistician named Robert Morse who produced a new one. This one puts HYP on top, and Elfin frankly defends his use of this result to vindicate the process. He told me, "When you're picking the most valuable player in baseball and a utility player hitting .220 comes up as the MVP, it's not right."

The article is from 2000, and I know there have been changes since then, but the points it makes are still entirely valid as they touch on the whole history of the rankings. In 1999 Caltech was #1 but the next year dropped to #4; the reason for this was the application of special 'logarithmic adjusters,' applied only in categories where Caltech had an edge on HYP. These 'adjusters' in place, Caltech dropped back down, HYP went to the top... problem solved, from U.S. News' perspective.

...the credibility of rankings like these depends on two semiconflicting rules. First, the system must be complicated enough to seem scientific. And second, the results must match, more or less, people's nonscientific prejudices. Last year's rankings failed the second test. There aren't many Techie graduates in the top ranks of U.S. News, and I'd be surprised if The New Yorker has published a story written by a Caltech grad, or even by someone married to one, in the last five years. Go out on the streets of Georgetown by the U.S. News offices and ask someone about the best college in the country. She probably won't start to talk about those hallowed labs in Pasadena.

The fact that the formulas had to be rearranged to get HYP back on top doesn't mean that those three aren't the best schools in the country, whatever that means. After all, who knows whether last year's methodology was better than this year's? Is a school's quality more accurately measured by multiplying its spending per student by 0.15 or by taking a logarithmic adjuster to that value? A case could also be made for taking the square root.

But the logical flaw in U.S. News' methodology should be obvious—at least to any Caltech graduate. If the test of a mathematical formula's validity is how closely the results it produces accord with pre-existing prejudices, then the formula adds nothing to the validity of the prejudice. It's just for show. And if you fiddle constantly with the formula to produce the result you want, it's not even good for that.

Caltech is #5 this year. Happy rankings everyone...

Here's the Top 25, after the break:

Best National Universities
1. Princeton University (NJ)
2. Harvard University (MA)
3. Yale University (CT)
4. Stanford University (CA)
5. California Institute of Technology
University of Pennsylvania
7.  Massachusetts Inst. Of Technology
8.  Duke University (NC)
9.  Columbia University (NY)
University of Chicago
11. Dartmouth College (NH)
12. Cornell University (NY)
Washington University in St. Louis
14. Brown University (RI)
Johns Hopkins University (MD)
Northwestern University (IL)
17. Emory University (GA)
Rice University (TX)
19. University of Notre Dame (IN)
Vanderbilt University (TN)
21. University of California – Berkeley
22. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
23. Georgetown University (DC)
University of Virginia
25. University of California – Los Angeles
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor

Best Liberal Arts Colleges
1.Williams College (MA)
2.Amherst College (MA)
3.Swarthmore College (PA)
4.Wellesley College (MA)
5.Carleton College (MN)
6.Middlebury College (VT)
7.Bowdoin College (ME)
Pomona College (CA)
9. Davidson College (NC)
10. Haverford College (PA)
11. Claremont McKenna College (CA)
Grinnell College (IA)
Vassar College (NY)
Wesleyan College (CT)
15. Harvey Mudd College (CA)
Washington and Lee University (VA)
17.Colgate University (NY)
Hamilton College (NY)
Smith College (MA)
20. Oberlin College (OH)
United States Naval Academy (MD)
22. Colby College (ME)
United States Military Academy (NY)
24. Bates College (ME)
Bryn Mawr (PA)

The main reason I haven't been posting much on my blog the past week is that I have been doing a quick guest editing gig for IvyGate, which will finish up after this week. What have I been writing about? See for yourself:

• IvyGate, Fake News? For Shame!
• Yale '09 Biology Major Minoring in Illegal Assault Rifles Arrested, Suspended after Massive Weapons Cache Discovered
• Crimewatch: Penn Terrorized, Assaulted by Roving Gangs of 9 Year Olds
• Harry Potter Across the Ivy League
• Columbia Student Group May Be Overseas Extension of Communist Regime

Great stories all, go have a look!

Blogs Elucidate Admit Process March 9, 2007

Yale presently has no definite plans to establish an online admissions blog or moderated message board. While Director of Admissions Jeff Brenzel said Yale is “considering” an admissions blog, the University has not yet determined whether such a blog would be “truly useful.” ...

While Yale does not maintain its own blog, the admissions office does keep tabs on College Confidential’s forum traffic to observe discussion about Yale, Brenzel said. "We occasionally review online discussions of admissions to better understand how applicants are feeling about the process, but we do not post to the online forums,” he said.

Longtime readers know where I stand on admissions blogging--I have at times gone so far as to call it my favorite kind of college blog. If Yale wants to justify its self-declared position as a leader in American Higher Education I feel it has an obligation to help clean up the mess of modern college admissions, especially given its role creating that mess in the first place! That means many things but one of them includes opening more communication channels with students awash in a sea of misinformation and helping them through the process. Yale wins at least as much as the students do in this hypothetical exchange.

I had written about 1000 words from here on out about why Yale should adopt admissions blogging, but in a freak WordPress accident I lost it all. Rather than cry, I've decided to reproduce the 5-point list I made, remember to save things outside WP, and leave it at that. The title was originally"Yale Wavers on Admissions Blogging; Jeff Brenzel Foolishly Fence-Sitting" -- imagine the blockquote-referencing essay that would have followed. Yale, I might add, is no great stranger to blogging--it had student blogs on its admitted-student only website. Likewise, MIT is not some alien cousin of Yale--they're mentioned in the same CollegeConfidential breathless HYP acronyms--and its blog program succeeds famously.

5 of Many Reasons Why Yale Should Have an Admissions Blog

1. Yale has an institutional obligation to help set the course for modern college admissions if it wants to avoid undue hypocrisy and maintain relevancy. Especially as it seeks to reach out to students who might not traditionally be coming to Yale, the article notes that an admissions blog can be an excellent resource for those high-achieving students who come from environments which don't adequately prepare or support them in the admissions process.
2. Misinformation online and off is a serious problem, especially for high profile schools like Yale. An admissions blog, as MIT and other schools interviewed agreed, is a good way to clear up confusion.
3. Competition makes this clear: Yale will be losing ground to more forward thinking institutions if it doesn't act soon as the advantages become increasingly obvious.
4. The new media lifestyle is a reality for prospective Yale students and blogs are a good way to connect now and will be even more important in the future. A community with honest and open community is really very valuable--I had some great interactions with admissions bloggers and came to respect them and saw those good interactions reflect well on their institutions.
5. Chances to Learn should always welcomed, and the admissions team can learn as much from the readership and their questions as their readers will from them. See 4; two-way communication benefits both parties.

Maybe Yale feels it is special--such a different animal that it doesn't need to worry about these things. I'm still going to New Haven this fall, blogs or not, but I think that Director of Admissions Jeff Brenzel is passing up some real opportunities here for no good reason. Harvard made big waves last year with its decision to drop its Early program (Princeton and UVA deserve some credit too); Yale can help set some trends too if it takes action on the blogging front. The other schools mentioned in the article--UChicago, Hopkins, UVA--merit applause for their efforts, but it wouldn't hurt for Yale to help put some muscle behind the transparency movement given its prominent position.

I'll put money on the line against Dean Brenzel that a Yale admissions blog would have real measurable value to the school--if he wants to take me up on that, I'll be happy to put the wager in escrow pending a survey at the end of the first year of blogging.

What's the magic of that 60/40 number? According to Kingsbury, "anecdotal evidence suggests that once a campus reaches, say, a 60-to-40 split in favor of either gender, the college becomes less attractive to applicants of both sexes."Although I like to cite all these numbers to inspire fear in my female friends, at the most elite schools it actually isn't too much of a problem, perhaps because of the way the distributions work out with the male tendency to dominate the extremes balancing out the greater number of women (For a good example of this, check out my post analyzing the 2006 SAT data and scroll to the part where I summarize the differences between male and female scores). Kingsbury writes,

At the universities that attract the most applicants, balancing the boy and girl enrollment numbers appears to happen naturally based on the admissions data. At Harvard University, for example, the pool of more than 22,000 applicants has remained equally divided between men and women, meaning that both sexes are admitted at an equal-if dauntingly low-9 percent. Harvard has seen its percentage of female undergraduates increase steadily over the past decade from 46 percent in 1997 to 49 percent in 2006. Princeton, Stanford, Rice, Duke, and Yale universities are in the same boat; ditto for the elite liberal arts colleges such as Amherst, Williams, and Middlebury.

Where then is this massive inequity in admissions numbers coming from? Girls have "the biggest challenge" against them applying to small liberal arts schools. Colleges justify leaning on the scale for boys for their institutional needs, as they have done to justify countless other goals. The same logic that can be used for affirmative action can also be used to defend legacy, athletic, and development criteria; in this case, giving men a different, lower standard.

Colleges... contend that their schools are best served by keeping things balanced. "I don't think that's an issue of equity; it's an issue of institutional prerogative [to create] a community that will best serve both the men and the women who elect to be members of that community," says Henry Broaddus, director of admission at William and Mary. "Even women who enroll ... expect to see men on campus. It's not the College of Mary and Mary; it's the College of William and Mary." [...]

"There's no easy answer as to what's legal and what isn't legal," says Marcia Greenberger, copresident of the National Women's Law Center. Even so, the continuing practice of admissions departments is worrying, says Emily Martin, deputy director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project. "It raises questions about punishing girls for their success."

It's that last part--the possibility of punishing girls for their success-which troubles me. The fact remains that even though nationwide most schools are 'open admission' and that that is the most straightforward reason women are taking so many spots in college (as more are applying) many women, especially those I know who considered / are considering top schools, find themselves discouraged by the climate which seems to exist. There can be advantageous flip sides for would-be women engineers, but what I see is that guys don't seem to have the same mental burden of a seemingly uphill battle even at those schools where the numbers make things harder for them. The reason these girls are having trouble is essentially because they were such good students: they study more, score better, and that academic performance is recognized and has to be 'accounted for' to give guys a fighting chance.

For girls, making the cut might come down to something as simple as the expected field of study. As an admissions officer from a small midwestern liberal arts college puts it: "God help the female English majors who apply to this school." In fact, women hoping to study engineering will find themselves at an advantage at schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which over the past decade has admitted women at a rate that is 17 percentage points higher than for men.

So just how severely do women have the deck stacked against them at some schools? At the University of Richmond, "female applicants have faced an admissions rate that is an average 13 percentage points lower than that of their male peers just for the sake of keeping that girl-boy balance," writes Kingsbury. But lest we think that it is an exception, the piece moves on to draw from the secret US News arsenal- its rankings. Richmond is not the exception and it is not the most extreme. "Using undergraduate admissions rate data collected from more than 1,400 four-year colleges and universities that participate in the magazine's rankings, U.S. News has found that over the past 10 years many schools are maintaining their gender balance by admitting men and women at sometimes drastically different rates." Sadly no good overall rates are given by the author.

The article enunciates a sense of a sort of desperation among some small liberal arts colleges, struggling to find men to admit. Obviously I acknowledge that a gender imbalance on the basis of a lack of outreach could be a problem readily addressed- if these mystery boys would somehow be convinced to attend these schools for which they are well qualified, there should be no problem, right? The problem I observe is the means to this end:

Some colleges, like Lake Erie College in Ohio and Husson College in Maine, are making extra efforts to attract male applicants by creating football teams. Others are emphasizing hands-on learning on college tours, tweaking their advertising brochures, and reaching out to all-male high schools. Common recruiting practices like writing personalized notes or having alumni call interested students are not as effective at landing students with a Y chromosome, schools have found.

Perhaps it my limited perspective here which has me frowning when I see testosterone driven activities being used for recruitment purposes, but this bothers me not on such an objective level but more because it seems so clearly a throwback to the days of old when the Big Three put out videos to trumpet their schools which made great efforts to downplay any studying, academics, or intellectualism and instead focused on more character driven aspects of both the education and the educated. Modern military recruitment videos at least sometimes trumpet the value of getting money for college, even if it's only after a marine somehow defeats a minotaur of fire with a magical sword. You might call be crazy in my worry here, were it not for this next sentence after that last one quoted:

Male applicants are often in an advantaged position-so much so that college counselors have begun advising some boys to "emphasize their maleness," says Steve Goodman, a longtime independent college counselor. He encourages male students to submit pictures or trumpet their sports activities. "Anything to catch an admissions officer's eye."

Great-- didn't anyone remember what happened to Aleksey Vayner? In any event, the article started to end on a nicely encouraging note chastising those applicant-readers who might have been getting some smart ideas.

In the end, targeting applications to schools with historically better admit rates for either gender is a Heisenbergian exercise, where the previous year's data will influence the next year's applicant pool in unknown ways. "Students have very little control over admission in general, and their gender is something that they have no control over," says Connecticut-based independent counselor Janet Rosier. "Worrying about this aspect of an already secretive process will only cause kids more stress."

Fantastic--stop worrying, keep the stress level down. Now, remember that paragraph I quoted just above--football teams, all that hooplah about attracting guys? Hold that in your mind while you read this last piece, and you'll see why this whole article came together at the end tasting a little hollow.

Sitting in the admissions office at the University of Richmond, Marilyn Hesser agrees [with Rosier]. Students, she says, need to follow their hearts in finding the best place for them to live and study. Chasing numbers can be problematic. "We could do more to get applications from men," she says, "but that would also result in more applications from women."

Yes, you read that correctly.

To conclude: It's always tricky to come down for either sex-blind admissions versus a semi-quota based system to ensure no one demographic overshadows the other, and this modern day dilemma is novel to me because I was not applying to the smaller schools for which this was a problem so it was not something which I had seriously considered. A good friend of mine is attending a school where it is almost 75% female, and I will have to poll him a year from now about campus sensibilities. The root cause of the numbers problem seems to stem from the number of high school graduates headed towards college, and the blame for that gap can be pointed at many people. What's more important than mulling over the numbers of these college-bound is considered the many people who drop out, who choose for reasons financial or otherwise that college is not right for them, and the kids in those subgroups for whom college could become a reality if they were given some help. That said, the battle to improve U.S. education should be fought on many fronts!

Related: Alex Kingsbury spoke about her work on NPR a few weeks ago, listen in here.