Anyhow, if you are reading this and happen to be at Yale right now - great, welcome! If you're an admitted student but can't go to Bulldog Days, don't worry -- I never went, and turned out just fine.

I would especially appreciate it if you many lurking readers who have been reading my blog at one or another time during your application process - to Yale or elsewhere - came forward and said hello. If you got into Yale and have more questions, please comment or e-mail me -- one wonderful reader just did, and will get an adoring mention in an upcoming post as a prize. Whether you are Emma Watson or just some other person who was accepted, I am happy to answer questions.

And, just because you didn't get into the college of your choice, be it Yale or somewhere else, please don't log off and stop reading - I really appreciate more voices in the conversation about college admissions in general, so please stay and share your thoughts, experiences, and feelings.

[See also what I wrote last year, essentially the same but with a quote from another Yale '11]

Dear High School Senior,

I was once where you are right now. Thankfully, the pain of waiting has faded some in the last two years, but I can remember it. More importantly, I have a bit of experience surviving it and know many others who did, too. Parents, teachers, guidance counselors and others might bore you with platitudes, but really, I can't say enough that the world isn't over if you don't get into College-of-your-Choice today. If you do, fantastic! I'm really happy for you, and you should be really proud - but don't give up on High School just yet, either.

Either way, take a breather and relax a little, but don't slack off too much - remember that some point down the line you might want to take use of the things you are ostensibly learning in class, even if you think chemistry / english / physical education is pointless. If you didn't get into First Choice School early, relax -- many schools use their early rounds to snap up athletes, legacies, and other students, which is part of the reason admit rates are higher - what's more, although some schools recruit really heavily early, others try to balance this more (MIT, for example, basically caps their early round). Regular decision is still when most people find out.

So, here's the deal: make sure you get in all your other applications, and you know, even if you do get in early, it doesn't hurt to go for a few more -- you can use other acceptances to argue for better financial aid (something I wish I was able to do). Most of all, though -- and this is true whether you are accepted / rejected / deferred / waitlisted at any point in the process: the dirty secret of college admissions is that people are, in general, extremely happy wherever they end up. It's true. There is little statistical difference in happiness. If you hear people bemoaning their sad fates, that's because they're the token few--most people are too busy being happy to come out and tell you just what a good time they're having.

So... those are just a few thoughts. If you got in and are excited, got deferred and are worried, or got rejected and are really depressed, comment and join the discussion about it. Talking to others helps. You're not alone.

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!)

Midterms have consumed my life for the last couple weeks, and continue to do so, but as soon as I finish writing some papers I will be taking a train to New York for the College Board forum, where I am doing a little presentation on Saturday! Come visit me if you are there, Matt McGann (of MIT) and I will make sure it's worth your time. I'm missing the first two days because of classes / other obligations, but hey, fun all the same. Give a call, e-mail, or carrier pigeon and say hello if you're there. More updates when I get back.

My column in the Yale Herald is about 'things that outrage me' and is titled 'Snakes on a What?!' : )

The first, "Definition of rape eludes Ivy League students" is exactly what it sounds like. Here's an excerpt:

The Yale College Class of 2011 doesn’t know what rape is. Not all 1,322 of us are completely ignorant, mind you, but a disturbing number seem to be out of the loop. During the orientation program Sex Signals, a scenario played out where the actors indicated to the audience several times that consent was lacking in a sexual encounter. When asked if we thought that a rape had been committed, the barest sprinkling of hands went up. Men and women alike rose to defend the actions of the character accused of rape, arguing that the ambiguity of the situation precipitated the rape. From a legal standpoint, there could be no question in this (admittedly fictional) case—rape had taken place. But every single Sex Signals group failed to recognize a problem with the lack of consent. This graphic failure of the newest inductees into the Yale community to collectively identify a crime is deeply troubling, but it hasn’t provoked in most of us the lingering shock which compels me to write this column now. Why hasn’t it?

The second is more lighthearted, titled "A plateful of grapes makes the long nights go by." This one is perhaps more topical to the blog and touches back on my thoughts on the esthetic of schools and admissions offices from a few weeks ago. Excerpt below:

A bowl of grapes in the Pierson dining hall convinced me to come to Yale. The admissions office would no doubt like to know the secret of these grapes—their dark magic, and how they might harness it—but truth be told, it’s all very straightforward. My love of fruit compelled me. Visiting a school far from Napa in late fall only to find that, wonder of wonders, grapes were abundant in the dining halls, I was powerless to resist.

So... have a look, let me know what you think! I will be at the College Board forum in New York later this week (I have a little presentation on Saturday) so I am dying as I try to get everything done before I go. Hopefully I'll see some of you readers there!

For many colleges and universities, admissions office space seems almost an afterthought. Too often, the office entrances are difficult to find and once found, the admissions area is hardly one of the highlights of the college tour. I’ve seen admissions officers attempt to prevent parents and students from seeing their offices by arranging meetings in open spaces on campus, or at a library or student center.

Your admissions area is your first impression, and as the old saying goes, you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression.

Let me address this question from my perspective as a student and a recent college-admissions-office-visitor. First and foremost, the admissions office is not the first impression someone has of a school when visiting. Not precisely, at least. Parents don't blindfold their kids, drive them in erratic randomized patterns, and then lead them up to the admissions office only to then 'unveil' the first impression of the entire school. There is the journey to the admissions office first, and even that little step can have a significant impact. How so?

Although I knew that there were realistic constraints for space, sometimes the positioning of an admissions office alone would seem to send a message to me. Take, for example, the University of Pennsylvania admissions office: it is very convenient and easy to find because of how central it is to campus (1 College Hall, ground floor). To get there we walked through especially nice portions of the campus and a vibrant part of Philadelphia; that was the first impression of the school. My memories of the admissions office itself are not especially great because my preoccupation at the time was coping with the 105+ degree heat wave.

The real distinction between admissions offices first and foremost is SERVICE. Yes, it was a painful heat wave at Penn and that wasn't their fault. The day before, though, the temperatures were almost as bad and I had visited both Yale and Wesleyan with my family. The biggest difference, where tour and admissions office experience was concerned (schools aside)? Wesleyan offered free bottles of water. It was also, hands down, the nicest, most accommodating, and most convincing of anywhere I visited, but that's another story. The water was part of that. I know it's not in the budgets for Penn and Yale to offer water to all the people who come and visit--they had rather bigger crowds--but those are some of the differences that we take away from tours. The little details that count.

Wesleyan-Yale isn't a very fair comparison, as I've said. So let me use another situation with slightly more even odds: Harvard vs. MIT.

I visited MIT on March 14th, 2006--it was the first school I visited. I remember the date because it was Pi Day! Anyway, I visited MIT with my friend Greta and we got slightly lost in the infinite corridor and on campus looking around for the admissions office because MIT buildings are all designated by numbers are we weren't paying that much attention since it was our spring break. Something like that. We found the office in the end and it was a messy place inhospitable to visitors--we were sent elsewhere for our tour and info talk. It felt like the reception / office ratio was off. All the same, we had a good time at MIT (read the visit report).

Compare with Harvard: we wandered over to Radcliffe yard and found the admissions office after some searching, but given Harvard's visitor volume what happened next was unfortunate. We were sent from a messy office environment to what looked like a semi-dilapidated basement auditorium where we were told about how selective Harvard was before being sent out on the worst college tour in my complete touring experience.

There were many similarities in presentation and aesthetic experience, but when I ask Greta or think myself about the MIT visit we don't think about how the office was messy. We just think about how exciting the UROP program sounded and how friendly everyone was. The aesthetic details only come into play over at Harvard when we start trying to look for something to redeem the experience.

Are aesthetics important? Sure. But they're not the most important part of the experience or 'first impression,' at least not in my mind, and it's important to remember that. I didn't see any places that were installing gold leaf in the admissions offices while cutting back on staff, but I just thought I'd share my thoughts on this all the same.

For the record, Johns Hopkins gave out free water bottles a few days later when it was equally hot.

That's why I'm a little annoyed when I read through old posts like this one, delving into the past some: TargetX mentioned in an Email Minute back in January that NACAC's annual report essentially put marketing at the top of the list for desired skills in chief enrollment offices.

Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand in the corporate and commercial worlds. It’s increasingly obvious that they go together in the academic world as well. Admissions needs to rely on the marketing expertise of its chief officer to support the sales efforts of its recruiting staff.

In today’s state of college admission, marketing and sales are no longer dirty words.

In context, I don't suppose I really take issue with what is being said: it's relating to a survey question which resulted in sixty-eight percent of colleges saying that "marketing was the most important professional qualification for chief enrollment officers at their institutions." What gets me frowning is the notion that marketing and sales tactics are necessarily ideal for college admissions. I don't generally like the whole concept of "selling" a college as a brand, whatever currency that may have today--it can detract from the student goals of making a good fit and ensuring a good match (which should be the college's goals too!).

'Sales and Marketing' reminds me of US News rankings, deception, etc. Fair? Not really. They can just as well be leveraged for good, informing students far and wide about the wonders of under-appreciated schools and programs. If marketing and sales skills are utilized in ways more suited to college admissions from the student perspective, then I'm all for them. If, however, they're used to create branding and marketing schemes that are more traditional and, shall I say, unhelpful to the end viewer, then I'm upset by the additional 'noise' put into the field.

Oh, and for those non-industry types who hadn't heard about it before but are interested in the NACAC annual report, download a copy here: NACAC’s 2006 State of College Admission. I don't know if I would describe the 90+ page document as a 'fun' read, but it's definitely interesting.

I was on vacation for a week with my family in Provincetown (same as last summer!) and was so rushed to leave that I didn't put up a post. Back now!

edit note 2:40pm: a couple slight edits for clarification made to respond to commented concerns.

The College Board cancelled the January 28, 2007 SAT scores of 900 Koreans because some students previously had access to the questions. The reason test items circulated in advance is that the exam was identical to the SAT administered in December 2005.

 

Though the December 2005 SAT was not made public under "Truth in Testing" provisions, which apply to questions and answers from only four of the seven SAT administrations each year, students post items from every exam on the Internet. In addition, some coaching schools have run sophisticated operations to collect entire exams, either by sending in teams of test-takers to memorize the exam or by obtaining entire forms.

 

The College Board offered no reason to believe that the prior-exposure problem was confined to one Asian nation.

Other thoughts: it must suck to be one of those test-question memorizers. I tend to remember the ones I think I missed, which haunt me until I get my scores... at which point they continue to haunt me.

Wait, it gets better. The College Board explanation for the repeated test?

The College Board, which owns the SAT, and its contractor, the Educational Testing Service, justified the test recycling practice by claiming that it costs "probably $350,000" to create each new exam. But 326,000 students took the January SAT, paying a base registration fee of $41.50. That means test-makers took in more than $13 million at this administration. Given that huge revenue stream and the fat surpluses historically enjoyed by the College Board and ETS), the companies had no credible financial excuse for cutting corners.

The lesson from all this? Taking those practice tests could be even better than you first expected!

Oh, by the way, that official online College Board SAT prep course is still 100% free, check out my post on it from last year.

There are two reasons I didn't take the ACT, aside from its lack of trendiness here in the Northeast.

• Reason number one is that I had good SAT scores in hand by the time I had the opportunity to ever sit for the ACT.
• Reason number two is that although looking at practice books made the ACT look like a better and more fun test than the SAT, it was almost impossible to take from my then-HQ in Exeter, NH. There were one or two changes to take the ACT throughout the entire year--and both meant getting up around 4:30 and driving to Maine. I don't know how bad the situation is back home around Boston, but the unavailability of testing centers in the Northeast scuttled my desire to take the ACT.

Now you know!

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.

Here’s the long and the short of it, and this mirrors my experience just with the tufts survey: they are not only very long, but they are tediously long. People seemed to be genuinely interested in filling out these surveys and helping out, but help us help you. Long forms with redundant questions are a no-no. Complex matrix-like button pushing is also out. I think if the survey entry process could be simplified and brought up to a more professional, 2007 standard, there would be less angst on the part of participants. Throw some AJAX in, make it look less like SurveyMonkey, and you’re set. Shortening and tightening the questions wouldn’t hurt, either.

Well, a couple weeks ago Yale sent me an admitted student questionnaire and then repeatedly emailed me until I finally sent it in. Basically.

Dear Admitted Student,

Yale Dean of Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel recently sent you an Admitted Student Questionnaire. If you have already completed and returned the survey, thank you for doing so. If not, I hope you will take a few minutes to do so today. Your responses will provide invaluable information so we can best serve future.

"Awesome," I said to myself. "This questionnaire has been helpfully designed to take only a few minutes- how thoughtful of the Yale Admissions Office!" How wrong I was. I opened the questionnaire-packet to find myself confronted by about 100 questions. Allowing a mere 10 seconds per question, that survey would take nearly 17 minutes to complete. "A few" indeed. Was the survey gratuitously long? Not particularly--I still filled it out. But I was annoyed by the misrepresentative sell. Was it necessary?

And, just to re-emphasize my earlier fear: please, no surveys asking for feedback about the feedback surveys.

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.

The story concludes by offering some tips on how to soften the blow for students; the whole read is funny and novel, but this last part struck me as particularly keen. Patrick Mattimore writes:

Students have crafted psychological tips colleges might adopt instead of telling applicants about the other “talented and highly qualified” students they rejected or the fact that the admissions office is comforted in knowing that “you will have many other fine choices” of colleges. Assuaging the colleges’ guilt is not what the process is about.

The best student sensitivity suggestion this year advised admissions’ offices to adopt the relationship break-up line, “it’s not you, it’s us.” The recipient of “He’s a deny” sent a raft of improvement suggestions to Reed and concluded his five pages of suggestions by letting the school know that they should feel “free to send apology or ‘he’s an admit’” letter. He got the apology only.

No mention of Yale, though Harvard was included for “most obsequious while maintaining utter insincerity." Kudos to them, I suppose.