Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall. It does not count repeated terms by the same user on the same day. This is to account for the seasonality of Wall posting in general; for example, there are fewer overall posts in the month of December.

My complaint about my previous Google Trends related efforts had been the fact that Google Trends was not targeted enough to college age students to give more precise sampling to *really* show the trends when it came to buzz about individual schools over the course of the admissions cycle. Facebook's demographics pretty much fix this problem, and the following chart is very exciting.

The greatest influence here can be seen from Harvard and Princeton dropping their early programs. Yale has a huge attention buzz boost in December, but by spring admissions time it is at parity with Princeton (Gasp!) and Harvard has a significant edge in attention. As with Google Trends data, the same incredibly eerie trend occurs where everyone talking about school A talks exactly proportionately with those talking about school B with the same upticks and downticks, with high levels of accuracy.

In general, the same observations as before apply... just nice to see them borne out in slightly cleaner data somewhere else. Read about the patterns I found in the Google Trends data by clicking here, or see below.

Compare with Google Trends data (Red is Harvard, blue is Yale).

So it's a fair question and reasonable point of comparison. How is it at Yale? Can you walk to class without tripping over roving bands of camera-wielding tourists, gawking at undergrads like they're all in a richly furnished zoo enclosure? Is Yale a tourist attraction?

In a word, no.

It's true that old campus has a fair number of tour groups circulating in lazily predictable routes, and that they can be spotted on a couple other hotspots on the campus tours which leave from the admissions office. But the individual group sizes, and the overall volume, is very manageable. We do not have people trying endlessly to sneak into our dorms or libraries--the libraries, in fact, don't require ID to enter the main areas.

Compare with Harvard where the library has regular 'incidents' when people try to sneak in just to take a look... or so I am told. The libraries at a lot of schools have this nice level of access for prospective students, so it's not that Yale is special about it, it's just a nice benefit from the medium-high volume rather than the stupidly-crowded nature of certain other schools.

Sometimes I like to join the tour groups silently, listen for a minute, then leave. This seems to really confuse prospective students, and leaves me sad that the tour guides are always giving the same semi-duplicitous accounts of Yale lore; still, it helps me stay in touch with the prospective student mindset and is good for blogging. It seems that sometimes, the worse the weather is, the better the tour, as guides work harder to make Yale appealing aside from the good weather and usual cheer of New Haven.

There are busloads of Chinese tourists / visitors who come to Yale, foreign-language tour guides leading them around campus--Yale is actually much better known in China than Harvard, a lot of the time, but when I just stopped at Harvard over spring break I did see a nice number of well-heeled Hong Kong students heading around on a big tour group.

If you stopped reading after my "in a word" explanation, and skipped to the end, don't worry! You didn't miss any super-insightful truths about Yale. There is a reasonable level of outsider interest, but because they don't go inside residential college gates it's not much of a problem at all.

Of course, I think Yale is quite worthy of being a tourist attraction... : )

Headline part-inspired by Snively @ MIT blogs, but mostly by the exact question asked by my bff Greta when visiting her this past week at Harvard.

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.

Actually, I just wanted to take a quick moment to encourage everyone to go vote in US News & World Report's 'Paper Trail 2006' rankings, specifically for 'best alternative media outlet.' Further, I would encourage you to go vote for Wesleying, Wesleyan's very active, very excellent campus activity news bulletin blog. They do a really good job and they deserve this meaningless link-baiting attempt at recognition from US News. I'm not even going to mention the other contestants, since Wesleying is tops (Something I've been saying for a while--I actually link people the blog as I try to convince them to apply to Wesleyan). Actually, I think the Bwog can be pretty interesting sometimes. But go vote for Wesleying.

Thanks to IvyGate for tipping me off to this one, I should have a 'real post' sometime tomorrow evening.

Pulitzer prize winner Daniel Golden wrote a piece about "whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake" in last Saturday's Wall Street Journal. It focused specifically on the case of one Jian Li, a Chinese permanent legal resident who went to a NJ public school having emigrated at age 4. Mr. Li recently filed a complaint against Princeton University for rejecting him through the Dept. Education's Office for Civil Rights; he is currently a freshman at Yale. (n.b., this is not a tort case, it is a complaint about what Li feels was discrimination.)

This is an issue that throws a lot of people off sometimes, because some people confuse a) Affirmative action with b) race-based discrimination. Private universities in the United States are not required to have the same 'objective' qualifications that businesses or real estate have; race discrimination is only happening if there a pattern (in this case acceptance / rejection) unique to one race or ethnicity on the basis of unfair (nonstandard) comparisons--hence the problem with Berkeley's law program back in the early 90s, which took Asians out of the general pool and compared them against each other.

A quote from the article to start us off here:

The Office for Civil Rights initially rejected Mr. Li's complaint due to "insufficient" evidence. Mr. Li appealed, citing a white high-school classmate admitted to Princeton despite lower test scores and grades. The office notified him late last month that it would look into the case.

His complaint seeks to suspend federal financial assistance to Princeton until the university "discontinues discrimination against Asian-Americans in all forms by eliminating race preferences, legacy preferences, and athlete preferences." Legacy preference is the edge most elite colleges, including Princeton, give to alumni children. The Office for Civil Rights has the power to terminate such financial aid but usually works with colleges to resolve cases rather than taking enforcement action.

That more or less sets the stage, but doesn't answer my biggest question about Mr. Li's claims: Jian Li had a 2400 SAT I and excellent SAT IIs, but what else was there? He had good grades, so he was clearly academically qualified. Yet how else does he compare to this white applicant from his school that was accepted? Reading about this story, I just want more facts, and I can't seem to find them anywhere. While considering the subjective criteria that Princeton and other elite U.S. schools use to gauge applicants, numbers alone are not enough to form a complete comparison.

Next question: Why did Li sue Princeton, rather than Penn, Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, all of which rejected him (unfairly, he felt) after wait listing him?

"He ultimately focused his complaint against Princeton after reading a 2004 study by three Princeton researchers concluding that an Asian-American applicant needed to score 50 points higher on the SAT than other applicants to have the same chance of admission to an elite university."

I've read that study; it's a perfectly good study, but it doesn't negate the fact that at the 'top-tier' American schools stats are not the only thing being considered. This is why when affirmative action is banned in some public institutions, notably the University of California (which we have data for) the Asian-American enrollment goes up--these schools rely on stats alone much more than do these top schools.

So, here is what it looks like to me, at first glance: Li has a 2400 SAT and great stats overall, and is waitlisted at then rejected by lots of good schools before two also very great schools accept him (Yale and Caltech). What happens next I don't understand. HYPSM are known to reject plenty of perfect scorers--where exactly the basis for discrimination comes in I don't understand, because these schools do not operate on the basis of stats alone. They care about extracurricular and leadership and all these things. I can see a plausible concern in general, but not one stemming from his case alone.

"Ah," you say, "they do care about those things, but perhaps they just use them as an excuse or subjective 'reason' to reject those applicants they feel are undesirable in too great a quantity--perhaps Asians are now in the same position that Jews once were!" See again Malcomb Gladwell's old piece in the New Yorker on modern elite college admissions which alludes back to Jerome Karabel's The Chosen (I keep plugging that book because it keeps being good!). We had an assembly speaker who brought this up when discussing bias in objective hiring--people find "excuses" to hire one candidate (towards the bias, i.e. Caucasian) regardless of whether that particular 'excuse' was being sought after in the applicant process (i.e., experience, or skill, or whatever difference can be found between the two candidates). But...

Not necessarily. Show me proof--show me the memos and letters we have from old college presidents and admissions folks saying that there were too many Jews enrolling--show me that for Asian-Americans. I don't have the evidence of a technical, legal discrimination--though I am happy to see there are sort of inquiries being made about it.

However, this really only scratches the surface, because this is only looking at the purest facts I could find about the issue. There is a bigger issue--the social ramifications of this question, and how Mr. Li's complaint jives with other proposals, initiatives, lobbying groups and so forth. The internet is buzzing about this article, actually. I'll be writing more about it, but I was just trying to skirt the 'AA good / bad' question in this post and just talk about whether or not I thought Li necessarily had a case here. As an African American Jew, I think I have a slightly different perspective on this matter than Mr. Li or some of my peers. You'll just have to wait a little bit to hear it...

In addition, Angela Henson, an Exeter and Harvard alumna, was there to offer her thoughts "not from an admissions perspective." She was not a particlarly recent alum of either but her insight was of course still valuable.

We were asked which of the two should begin first, and after much vacillation (for clearly the crowd did not want to express an outright favor for either one) someone said "Ladies first" which gave Champagne the clear to start her abbreviated stump. One word, first: I had Sally Champagne do my info session back in March when I went one fateful afternoon down into Cambridge. Truth be told, it was not my favorite info session of the last year. I was therefore pleased by the difference I heard this evening; it just goes to show how an impression can linger long after one individual's 'off day' has passed.

Champagne started by saying her school was sometimes seen as a victim of the "terrible toos" --"Too expensive, too far from home, too hard to get into." I'd never heard of Cambridge / East Coast being too far from home, but that must be because 10 miles from downtown.

Fun fashion watch: John Yoshida, class of 2008, was wearing a Princeton t-shirt! This was much joked about, and I think by the end he was regretting his decision. Mike Maruca, 2007 class president, was wearing an "Animal House" 'College' shirt himself. He got a playful rubbing about that one, too. A dreadfully high number of people were still in dress code--I assume to impress the admissions officers. All the same, it does break my heart to see people supporting that unnecessary vestige of Exeter's past. Then again, I won't drone on about my strong feelings about dress code; you can check out my whole vice presidential campaign about that.

It was Walsh's first time outside of California, apparently--he was San Francisco born and bred, and touched my heart by mentioning the similarities between the "bay area" and the "bay state" --although he was doing so in reference to Harvard, not my life.

Champagne started with numbers. 3500 courses, 40 concentrations, seminars of 12 people or fewer, etc etc. From there she went into less statistical observations, which I felt were much more valuable. I had already heard the spiel so I was just picking out little pieces which I felt echoed what I recalled from the first time I heard her speak; sadly, the index card notes to that March session disappeared in the muck of spring term.

Martin Walsh went right afterward. He was very cavalier about recognizing the spin Stanford's marketing put out; he asked if "they could say 'entrepreneurial' any more" in the viewbook. He mentioned the 'Silicon Valley' aspect of Stanford--fast moving, which is good and bad. He described an "intellectual vitality" about the place--people were were passionate about something and who generally came to Stanford with an idea already. He wanted to know why someone might get on a plane and choose to go to the west coast, as far as exeter applicants were concerned--Stanford draws more from west of the Mississippithan east.

Best of all, he acknowledged that there are "a million great schools" and that it was important to find the one feel where you could thrive. This is not the first time I've heard an admissions officer remind students they should be looking somewhere based on "fit," but I still like to hear it. It's rare. It deviates from a purely promotional script in some ways. My one word impression of Stanford, from his talk: Vitality.

Then questions; particularly boring questions this round, too many which could have been answered by a visit to the website or print materials of either school. I asked the same interdisciplinary question of Champagne that I had back in March (trouble with big, excellent science departments inhibiting interdisciplinary collaboration?) but in the rush of the question stampede I didn't get a really clear answer. Too bad.

To conclude, Mike Maruca asked a ridiculous question about the problem of "ego" and "arrogance" among students at these top schools. Champagne spoke about the 'H-bomb' effect, where students won't tell people what school they attend. Single funniest moment, though? Martin closed by telling us to "enjoy the process" since it is a "very special time in our lives."

Sorry about the hiccups in posting the last two weeks--I'm at school now, yes, but thanks to my God-like time management skills, I've still been writing, I just haven't been publishing. There is a subtle but real distinction.

Back to Harvard. So they ended early admissions--what do I think about that? It doesn't affect my chances (if I apply) since I'm applying this year, but I've still got some things to say.

First, Some [cynical] people, like the sharp bunch at IvyGate, will note that the only way Harvard could make this move with confidence was because of their fabulous wealth and stupefyingly high yields; fundraisers brought in $595 million in fiscal '06 (Crimson). With the immense recognition and value of the Harvard brand, Harvard is safer than other schools in tossing early programs, because it can be reasonably assured of a strong applicant / admit pool early action notwithstanding. The Daily Pennsylvanian ran an editorial praising Harvard but noting that UPenn isn't in the same position and couldn't do the same (yet). The Ithaca Journal more or less did the same for Cornell.

Dean J over at UVA (she hides her real name on the blog, so I guess I will leave it out here too) asked last week: " The start of a revolution or brilliant PR move?" mentioning a "a tiny, cynical voice in my head that can't help but look at this as a PR/marketing move." It looks like the two of us have some tiny voices in our heads in common...The point is that Harvard has very quickly gotten a good amount of praise and attention for its move. Pick most any paper--let's say, The Christian Science Monitor--and you'll find a recent editorial praising the move. Everyone is feeling fuzzy about Harvard again.

My Existentialism teacher obnoxiously brought up the fact that Harvard dropped EA at the start of class on Tuesday because he enjoys cruelty and general taunting and felt that he could dig into the generally privileged and advantaged Exonian with that barb; I spat back some acid about the decision which he probably hadn't realized. This was the first example I saw of half-informed people succumbing to the subtle public relations / marketing impact of the decision without even recognizing it!

More significant than the impact on Harvard is the impact on college admissions nationwide. Harvard's little shakeup is only on a trial basis for now, anyways, lest it result in any unpleasant shift in applicants. But at the same time, other schools are now accelerating their discussions about EA. Yale was a leader in these sorts of college admissions reform not long ago, but now they're watching Harvard get all the credit (and prestige?) for making this sort of decision; they're waiting to see what happens to Harvard before making their move. (Yale Daily News)

So my conclusion? Harvard, citing inequality, ends Early Action. This gives them good publicity and good karma, and is the right thing to do. Other schools watch and wait. Nothing affects me since I'm applying this year. College Admissions just as fickle as ever.

Quick shout out to about.com's college blog hitting me up with the news first, a testament to my feed reader's eccentricities as much as anything else.

Guys, guys! Harvard was named #1 in the Shanghai school rankings! Check it out here: Top 500 World Universities. Wait, what's that you say? That methodology is tremendously flawed and generally just ridiculous?

I... I'm sorry, I was just trying to compensate for the terrible psychological shock the part of my brain programmed to hypervalue "Harvard prestige" has received this week--that Shanghai rating was just about the only good Harvard-related news I've been able to dredge up in a while! I mean, with the recent US News & World Report college rankings which have Harvard ranked #2 behind Princeton, and the fact that Harvard's selectivity was behind Yale's again this year? I just don't know what to do about it. Newsweek decided on "25 new ivies" which can't help but take a marketing edge off the Harvard buzz. What's worst is that Time Magazine, that beacon of truth in the world of periodicals, is running a story titled "Who Needs Harvard?" as its August 21st cover...

Bzzt. I don't know who takes Time magazine seriously, but I sure don't. The article isn't written or reasoned particularly well, and the good points it tries to make are nothing new-- the fact that you should look for the college that suits you as an individual and the complementary fact that you can get a great education anywhere you go are nothing new. So long as you apply yourself and make the best of your college experience, there is no difference in where you attend school, as a general rule. Academic studies support this; for all but the very economically disadvantaged, there is little to no difference in later-life wage earnings for Harvard, Yale, etc grads than for those who were accepted at aforesaid hyperselective institutions but decided to go to University of Miami or some other random place. (See: Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study: ESTIMATING THE PAYOFF TO ATTENDING A MORE SELECTIVE COLLEGE )

This title "Who Needs Harvard?" and this publication date both are just meant to coincide with US News & World Report's ranking release; Time is just trying to hijack some of the limelight to increase sales, which is appropriate marketing but generally underwhelming. I don't like Time magazine normally and I certainly don't care for its set of education-themed articles because I feel they lack the depth these thorny issues deserve. Airy and whimsical, a Princeton grad (Walter Kirn) is certain that it was the name on his diploma which ensured him his success. Or a short interview with the author of a book about college admissions; usual bland, lifeless Time fare. The point is that this theme gets them attention, as evidenced by the fact that my grandmother mentioned it to me when we spoke on the phone today.

This article has been getting a lot of play on blogs and on the Internets in general; it's clogging up the tubes and muddying the news-waters of any other good new stories which might be trying to make their way to the front these days. It needs to stop because this lowest-common-denominator tripe doesn't merit the attention we're all giving it. Read the articles if you must, but don't bother to buy the magazine.

One more fun note: Remember how I wrote that one of Harvard's professional schools was being more trans-positive (i.e. more friendly towards trans people)? Turns out Harvard has a very specific club--the Harvard Trans Task Force! Not particularly relevant, I was just pleased to have happened upon that club today for no particular reason.

Let me preface this brief by saying that, though it is reporting on fact, it's presentation is downright hilarious. To me, at least. Maybe not to "family-minded christians" from the heartland. But, I'm one of the godless east coast liberals. So there you have it. I also like "AgapePress," that sounds very christian.

WDC MEDIA NEWS
Christian News and Media Agency
Harvard Introduces Third Gender
2006-07-25 --

(AgapePress) - Prospective applicants to prestigious Harvard Business School no longer have to be of the male or female gender. One pro-family leader in Washington, DC, is criticizing the school for legitimizing transgenderism.

Before completing an application, students looking to enter the Harvard Business School MBA program are asked to fill out an online profile that offers three choices of gender: female, male, or transgender. The form also asks prospective applicants if they would be interested in learning more about the school's "lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender" community.

Bob Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute (CFI) at Concerned Women for America, says "it's not compassionate" for Harvard to encourage people to reject their "God-given natures." But then Knight considers the source.

"I'm not surprised it's coming out of Harvard," he says, "because they've flirted with the idea that, in terms of sexuality, anything goes, and they've given intellectual respectability to it." Knight continues, sharing that he feels it is "harmful" that Harvard, one of the most prestigious colleges in America, now thinks there are three sexes instead of two. "That kind of thing trickles down to other institutions," he laments.
[continues]

So, right wing christian news source aside, that's nice! It's good to see such a prestigious institute of higher learning adopting a more welcoming policy towards people who... aren't male or female. As long as they're human, it's fine by me.

[tags]Harvard University, Harvard Business School, Harvard, trans+, transgendered, transsexual, christian news, family values[/tags]

Hello everyone! I'm new to College Confidential, so I'd just like to introduce myself. I live in California and I'm currently a junior in one of the top private schools in the nation. Here are my stats.

SAT I: 1580
SAT II: 780/800/770
GPA: 4.67
Rank: 1/432

ECs: Concertmistress of two youth symphonies, Varsity cheer (captain), Varsity basketball (captain), Varsity softball (co-captain), featured in the prestigious "Who's Who in American High School Students," recipient of Principal's Award for Best Math Student, Best Science Student and Best English Student, recipient of school's AllStar Athlete award, AIME qualifier, editor of my school newspaper, editor of my school yearbook, ASB Class President (3 years), tutor (voted "top tutor" by peers).

I am also president of the following clubs at my school: Amnesty International, Speech and Debate (Recipient of the prestigious Lincoln Award), Young Republicans and Helping Hands. I also volunteer at the soup kitchen, library and hospital.

I'm currently looking into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Penn, and my safety, Cornell. What do y'all think? Thanks in advance!!!

Full thread here. Some decent trollage.
yes I know it's not quite real but it's still TOP SHELF SATIRE.