the Sam Jackson College Experience

Or, “It’s not lying when admissions office does it” –

Just wanted to quickly highlight something which is not gross lying, but just mild misrepresentation. The Yale Admitted Students website has fantastic images of student rooms which are really really scrumptious and gorgeous and make you feel like everyone at Yale lives in wonderful palaces — also, that they all clean their rooms. I was stunned when I first saw them and asked the admissions office if they were real rooms of undergrads or if they were staged photos (when I was applying) and I was told, no, they’re all real.

And they are, in a certain sense, at least… anyway, of couse, they want to put Yale’s best face forward, and I don’t mean to say that rooms aren’t often great! I am still puzzled why they had Emma Watson stay overnight in one of the less spectacular freshman dorms, if they’d wanted to really court her; still. (Emma, if you’re reading, I hope you chose to apply and matriculate! Harvard is Azkaban and if you come to Yale I’ll never mention Harry Potter when you’re around. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions about Yale; this offer applies to prospective Yalies who aren’t movie stars, too.) Read the rest of this entry »

Norman Kraft of Zen Writes Inc. keeps a higher education marketing blog called “Zen and the Art of Higher Education Marketing” which I read regularly (or at least as regularly as he posts–happily, the last couple of weeks have been pretty consistent) and generally find to be very on the mark. Two weeks ago he posed an interesting question–what effect do appearances have in the context of the admissions office itself? He writes:

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.

Our good friends at IvyGate, through what I assume must be great cleverness and sneakery, posted the top 25 overall and top 25 Liberal Arts colleges in the U.S. News’ 2008 rankings earlier today. At first had ethical reservations about saying really anything on the topic since I felt I could be indirectly promoting the rankings which I criticize frequently for their negative impact on the college search and application process (as Thacker would say, for their commercializing of it).

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think sales and marketing go hand in hand with teaching, and I question whether they are the best match for honesty in college admissions.

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.

In March the Yale Daily News ran a nice little piece about the growing admissions blogging trend nationwide. The key piece in it for me was the news that Yale had no plans to start a blog or similar transparency-promoting site anytime soon. Zachary Abrahamson reports:

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.