the Sam Jackson College Experience

I discovered an interesting pattern while playing around with Google Trends: if you compare ‘Yale University’ and ‘Harvard University’ with the tool, there is an eerie similarity in their trend lines. Even minor up and down ticks are mirrored across search terms. See for yourself: trends chart below, Harvard in red, Yale in blue.

The trend is clearer for Google search data, but there are still some pretty strange similarities for the news references (below the main chart). I understand that every time one school does something, the other feels compelled to respond, but the fact that these trends link together so closely is very interesting. My first question was whether much of this might just be seasonal–fluctuations in the course of the admissions cycle. To test this, I compared Yale with a few other schools, trying to eliminate large sports schools as a factor. Georgetown vs. Yale produced fairly similar results to Yale v. Harvard, but not with the same level of overlap.

Years ago I did this same comparison with Phillips Exeter Academy vs. Philips Andover Academy (interestingly, historically they were once prominent feeder schools for Harvard and Yale, respectively) but the results there were not numerous enough to show any significant overlap; the numbers there were probably inflated by vanity searches from the students at either school.

Other interesting trends to take from this data: search volume for both of these terms has declined continually over the years, relatively speaking. Why is this? Is it because people are better able to use the school sites and don’t do as much searching, or is it because of a methodological feature whereby their search volume stays stable but relative to other terms decreases? It’s not clear, but it’s an interesting trend all the same.

International attention is something else to compare. If all the queries came from Australian applicants, hypothetically, that would shift things in the calendar because of their different school cycles. But more realistically, it’s just an interesting reflection of foreign interest. Harvard predictably comes out ahead, but check out these countries which are ranked by how much people are searching for Yale (Harvard comparison):

Google lets us get even more precise, though: down to city level. This is really interesting because we see the rate at which Yale students search for themselves compared to how much Harvard students search for things about Yale. If we then compare this to another chart, showing how often Harvard searches for Harvard, we see that Yale–via New Haven–doesn’t even make the top ten. In other words, Harvard is by some measures more interested in Yale than Yale is in Harvard. Inferiority complex much? : ) (Yes, I realize this is methodologically flawed… just joking).

Finally, we can compare the international chart with a language chart. English is first, then Chinese, then, surprisingly enough, Italian.

Very interesting for a few minutes googling! I highly recommend playing around with google trends and exploring interesting things about your own favorite words, or trends, or schools. Dogs and Puppies beat Cats and Kittens, etc. Have fun, and don’t draw too many sweeping statistical conclusions : )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This afternoon I had the pleasure of going to a cozy Yale Daily News workshop with David Pogue ‘85 where we all gathered around a table in the boardroom and learned about Pogue’s unusual path to becoming the technology columnist for the New York Times (from musical comedy to tech journalist!) and then had a chance to ask some fun questions. Let me quote Pogue’s bio, for those who don’t know him:

the weekly personal-technology columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. With 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world’s bestselling how-to authors. He wrote or co-wrote seven books in the “for Dummies” series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music); in 1999, he launched his own series of complete, funny computer books called the Missing Manual series, which now includes 30 titles.

So, cool guy, influential in tech circles. The story of how he gave up on composing for broadway and turned to tech journalism seemed to be yet another chapter in the big book of “noteworthy people who had no idea of where they planned to go in life and ended up somewhere very different.” You can tell when someone starts off by insinuating that their remarks will be of questionable use to a niche audience (say, student journalists) because of the bizarre path they took to their final career. I’ve concluded that more people take crazy circuitous paths to their futures than realize it having heard that routine so many times at Exeter!

He is here I assume ostensibly for the Calhoun master’s tea he went to immediately afterwards (he was in Calhoun back when he was an undergrad); he is also doing a bigger gadget show-and-tell tonight. I have to do a lot of work so I decided to spend some time before dinner catching up and missing out on the tea because I’m assuming there will be a lot of overlap, but I may make it to the show-and-tell. My question to him would be about his remarks on the NY Times being ‘with the times’ as far as internet went–given that their lame paywall on the website just went down yesterday once they realized that it would bring more organic visitors deeper into the site and increase ad revenue. So maybe I’ll get a chance to ask him later.

In any event, this is just one of the many, many, many prominent and interesting people who come to Yale each week to give lots of public talks… my calendar is full with more in the days and weeks ahead.

Some of you may be familiar with the concept of naked parties popular at college campuses across the nation but perhaps especially Yale; in any event, I thought I would attach a relevant email sent to the freshman class about something its anonymous author purports to be the first Pundit-sponsored prankish naked party of the year. I was out all afternoon participating in a fun Trumbull-freshmen-only scavenger hunt across campus, and came back to find this:

Dear Freshmen,

Some of you were visited several nights ago by upperclassmen who delivered to your suites invitations to “The Masquerade.” The invitations read:

“You and one guest are cordially invited by a distinguished group of peers to attend the Masquerade on Saturday, the Fifteenth of September. Please arrive in formal attire at the gates to the Hall of Graduate Studies at nine thirty post merediem. Tell no one and do not be late. Non Ducor, Duco.”

An image of the invitation, for your reference, is attached. Some of you may be under the impression that you have been tapped for something, or invited to a gathering hosted by a secret society, such as the Yale Society for the Exploration of Campus Secrets (YSECS).

Sadly, this is not the case. Your ‘hosts’ are the Pundits, the infamous Senior pranking society.

Should you choose to go to the gates of the HGS this evening, here is what will happen:

1) You will be led to an off-campus location by the Pundits.

2) There will be a party there.

3) Before very long, and at a certain cue, the Pundits will take off all of their clothes.

4) You will feel rather awkward, unless you’re into that sort of thing.

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First, I got a callback for one of the improv groups that I tried out for last night, The Purple Crayon! The Purple Crayon is the only group on campus that does long-form improv, which is where they take one suggestion and then create a whole show out of it. I think it’s absolutely fantastic and was blown away from the two shows of theirs that I went to. I tried out for the Ex!t Players too but that apparently didn’t go quite well enough to merit a callback. I am surprised to have gotten one for Purple Crayon as is. I don’t expect to make it past this next round of culling, but who knows? We shall find out soon enough. Icannot gush enough about how much I love the Yale improv groups, they’re all pretty uniformly fantastic.

I was also up much much too late last night working on a website for the Freshman Class Council elections, which you can see at http://www.samjackson.org/FCC. If you’re a freshperson in Trumbull reading this, please consider voting for me and joining the Facebook group! If you’re in Trumbull at all, consider voting for me for the YCC–many of my same ideas apply to both. And if you’re not in either, check it out anyways, I put a lot of time into it and puppies are involved.