the Sam Jackson College Experience

Sorry about the downtime today–or did no one notice? I have no idea what caused it to happen, but an important Wordpress file disappeared off the server entirely and so nothing was working properly until I discovered what was missing and solved it. Really, really strange since I wasn’t FTPing anywhere near there and it only happened an hour after I had last SSH’d in.

Seymour Hersh is coming to give a nice talk and take questions this evening, P.E.A. paid a good deal of money for him to come. Not sure what exactly he’s talking about, maybe Iran? It wasn’t made very clear. Should be interesting.

As covered by the Yale Daily News, Yale University has elected to continue its Early Action program.I’m not sure I like their reasoning.

The decision was made by weighing the benefits of joining Harvard, Princeton, UVA etc. vs. sticking it out with MIT and Stanford (who both vowed to keep Early). Opinions of those watching the decision were rather mixed (Decision to keep early action earns mixed response, YDN).

The University made the right strategic decision to maintain its early option after Harvard and Princeton discontinued theirs, said Chuck Hughes, president of the college admissions counseling firm Road to College and a senior admissions officer at Harvard from 1995 to 2000. Many of the students who would have applied early to Harvard or Princeton will likely apply to Yale, said Hughes, who predicted that Yale will see a 25 to 50 percent increase in early applications next year.

Hmm, Chuck makes it sound like Yale was just looking out for #1. What about all those poor students who didn’t have the resources or know-how to apply early, the ones that Harvard and Princeton claim to be helping?

“This provision provides students the option of expressing a preference for Yale, while freeing them from the pressures associated with binding early decision programs,” he [Brenzel] said.

Because students admitted under early action are not required to accept the school’s offer until May, Brenzel said, applicants from low-income families are able to compare financial aid offers before making a decision about where to go to school. Since switching from early decision to early action in 2002, Yale has seen an increase in the number of financial aid students who apply early, Levin said. [YDN]

On the first point, couldn’t there just be some sort of standardized “first preference” checkbox on the common application? A standardized agreement which says: this school is my first choice school. Legally the signer would be obliged to send this form to only one school, but it would be completely nonbinding (assuming this is a new fantasy world where early programs do not exist). On the second point, might it not see a greater still increase if it dropped its EA entirely? I’m not really feeling convinced that Yale has the high ground when talking about whats best for applicants, particularly lower-income applicants.

An interesting problem that is on many people’s minds here at Exeter: the very best applicants poaching spots from multiple schools if they apply regular everywhere and thereby creating admissions chaos. I’ve had more than a few people, after congratulating me, express their happiness that I won’t be competing with them for slots at other schools. I’m not even the archetypal ’spot-stealing’ student, either–it’s just one fewer competitor.

In conversations with Yale admissions officers, high school counselors and administrators also expressed concern that eliminating early admissions might lead to more competitive students receiving multiple offers from top- and second-tier schools that would otherwise have gone to other students, Levin said. [YDN]

Am I happy that I had an Early Action acceptance last month? Absolutely. All the same, I don’t feel that the system can’t be improved here somehow. My real question, which I haven’t seen adequately answered by anyone at Harvard or Princeton or UVA or elsewhere, is just how eliminating early programs reduces college stress. ‘Starting the process early’ isn’t a big concern, since it’s just one application. If anything, starting the process early with just one school is a good way of ‘easing in’ to the college admissions process. There are some stress-relieving factors that would come up if everyone had only regular decision, but I think that the looming fears and threats of super-applicants applying to more and more schools might counterbalance that relief–and then some.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is coming to my school to give an assembly on January 26th. This is because he was an alum, ‘02. Phillips Exeter Academy is running some year-long assembly series for the 75th anniversary of the Harkness method at Exeter–the discussion-based teaching around a table that was made possible through the money of Rockefeller chum Edward S. Harkness. You can be sure I’ll be asking hard questions.

If this is part of the Harkness 75th series, which I expect it is, there will also be an hour long talk afterwards. The assembly will offer me maybe one opportunity to ask a tough question whose straight answer would embarrass Zuckerberg in front of the school. More realistically any question-answering would be done with the night-time talk. I’m specifically looking for questions about privacy, something that many of my peers sometimes worry about. All the same there are lots of avenues here for lots of fun.

If you have any questions you think I should try to ask, please share them! Post them in the comments.

(Sidenote: Unlike everyone else in the world, I’d like to acknowledge that though it’s his baby, Zuckerberg had a lot of help in time and money and wasn’t some genius Zarathustra. All the same he’s got the reins right now and is the frontman whenever it comes to making absurd gestures like wearing flipflops to business functions and hugely overvaluing his company while snubbing potential partners and throwing paper billions down the drain.)

This was on the front page of the Exonian today, reported by my super-excellent best buddy and fellow senior Boaz Chandrasekhar: 64% of Exonians applied early to schools this fall. This is up from 58% last year. There are 315 people in the class of 2006, 30 of whom are postgraduates. Boaz wrote “early decision” in the article but I am hoping / assuming that that is a typo and that he really meant “early” in all its various forms, not that it really matters all that much. ED probably makes for a bigger portion of the applicant pie, but there are some EA schools that are no slouches for applicants. It was also unclear as to whether or not this included ED II round school applications or not, but either way… a very formidable figure. We all made estimates earlier in the term but none of us guessed quite this high.

I’m publishing this to the web since it is, after all, already out in the world thanks to the Exonian. Very interesting. I expect that with that many people applying, some must have applied early to Columbia (which put out results yesterday afternoon) but I don’t know who they are or how many of them there were.

Crazy!

Remember how before Thanksgiving break I said I had to do all my essays and applications for every school on my list? I had two essays written then: one common application essay and one generic ’supplement open response’ essay. Fourteen schools left for which I had not yet prepared applications. Where do I stand now?

No farther along.

Or, untrue: I know now exactly how much I have to do, which is a lot. Not unimaginably-much, but still a significant amount of work.

I was supposed to have a) written all my essays and b) pared down my college list from 15 to something less than that over break. I did neither!

It’s b there which annoys me the most. I don’t have any legitimate reasons to take any school off my list right now, and reasons to keep them all. I don’t think of it as risk containment or choice-enabling, just as “these are all places that I could be happy attending.” If you have arguments FOR a particular school which might make me more inclined to favor it over the others (no negatives attacks here!) feel free to share them. I know lots of you go to school at places on my list, or at least work there–I can see you through the internet. So feel free to speak up.

In the meantime, I have essays to write. Sorry to abandon all you readers to the inhospitable wastelands of non-updated blogs, but it’s purely temporary. If I write my goal of two essays by tomorrow lunchtime, I should be back on track. As it is, most of my essays for these schools (those that remain unwritten, that is) are of the short-response variety. Could be worse!