The article begins by profiling Curtis Thomas, a student made able to attend Exeter thanks to its generous financial aid. Curtis is really cool, I don't know him especially well but did work with him on the Martin Luther King Day committee; in any event, I can certainly say that I'm very glad Exeter has the enormous pile of money to bring him and people in similar positions to Exeter.

Despite Exeter’s expanding commitments, which include a new promise to pay the full cost for any student whose family income is less than $75,000, the school’s endowment keeps growing. Last year — fueled by gifts from wealthy alumni and its own successful investments — it crossed the $1 billion mark, up from just over $500 million in 2002.

Exeter may be a particularly successful example, but its ballooning endowment also reflects a broader trend. In the 10 years through the 2005-6 academic year, the number of students at independent schools, which does not count parochial schools, rose just 11.6 percent, according to the National Association of Independent Schools. Over the same period, the average endowment per student, adjusted for inflation, increased by 93.5 percent.

So the rich are getting richer, both individuals and institutionally--independent school spending per student is up 40% between 1999 and 2004, versus 28% for public schools; at the high end of things, Exeter-style, things

Over a recent breakfast in Exeter’s cafeteria, Tyler C. Tingley, Exeter’s principal, said the school had commissioned a report showing that in 1980, 40 percent of American families could afford to pay tuition at Phillips Exeter, but by 2004 that number had declined to just 6 percent.

The ability of Exeter and other wealthy institutions to underwrite students helps explain why they may enjoy an advantage over other independent schools in competing for the best students. [...]

“If your selection pool is only 6 percent of the population,” Mr. Tingley, the principal, said, “that is a small percent to draw from. We are trying to create a level playing field. It used to be that we gave financial aid to 34 percent of the student body. Now it is 46 percent. We anticipate it will increase further as a result of the changes.”

Now, it's striking to see that Exeter is in the top 25 endowments for ALL private schools--including colleges. I knew many friends who were sad to realize how much they might end up lacking for resources after they left high school. Here at Yale, I'm better off, but it can still be mind-boggling. Looking at this story about rich old schools doling out big bucks for financial aid sounds positively heart-warming: for whatever income disparity there might be, and whatever wealth gap, at least attempts are being made to mitigate the difference... right?

Not so fast. At the high end of things, Exeter type schools have that flexibility. But for schools that don't run capital campaigns in the hundreds of millions of dollars range, they still want to compete for the dollars that students from rich families bring, as well as searching for the best students. Even Exeter does this. It says it looks for "students from every quarter" and it makes sure that it doesn't overlook the "extremely wealthy" quarter (not that that's 25%). For schools which don't have the same resources, what can this mean?

“Private school is a luxury, and rich families want the best facilities,” said Michael Gary, director of admissions at Exeter. “All too often fund-raising is about the buildings and the sports facilities. The schools need them to attract the wealthy families. They don’t have high on their priorities providing access to kids who can’t afford it.”

The schools that want to attract students have to choose to spend on aid or facilities if they can't compete on both--and in a financial bind, they often choose facilities. Something to remember about all of those bulging endowments. Exeter had lots of its endowment tied up only for athletic or other restricted purposes. The best of all RIDICULOUS endowed things? There is a prize, given out on prize day, to any student who receives the same prize that their mother or father received when they were a student. To my great delight, in recent years it has garnered some booing and hissing. Its recipients still shrug, and go and collect their money for being both talented at whatever achievement they're receiving... and being legacies... and the cycle continues.

Anyways, I am catching up on everything and will be back in a posting schedule soon. Also, if you know of intellectually redemptive decently-paying jobs in the Boston area, don't hesitate to let me know : )

Problems technical and logistical have stopped me from getting the time I want to post, but rest assured that I have been reading the same blogs as ever and am as up to date as always on the topics most important to you, my readership. Which, interestingly, only continues to grow even as I ignored the blog...

I've fixed the site, more or less--if you see any glaring problems please report them along with browser, etc info, and I'll try to fix them. Banner should be working again now, double-sidebar modules mostly in place... You'll notice also the Text Link Ads (aff) link on the left sidebar; I just got accepted to TLA's ad program, finally. To those of you who have expressed an interest in the past about buying adspace or links on my site, now is your chance to get in before the rush!

I'll have more to say later, but that's all for now! I'm going to do a little more blog housekeeping today and tomorrow, updating old plugins and fixing bits of the K2 nightly I just put in place, so watch out for falling pieces.

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.

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.)

Timothy Abbott, Dixon K. Bross, Phillip R. Brunner, Ryan M. Caro, Edward Casserley, Christopher J. Coco, Charles S. Dameron, Delphine I. Damora, Justin deBenedictis-Kessner, Laura C. Dismore, Dan C. Ge, Stephen A. Gerke, John J. Giampa, Megan E. Gilbert, Sherry Gong, Keone D. Hon, Samuel A. Jackson, Gabrielle R. Knight, Murat T. Konuk, Andrew S. Kuhn, Thomas J. Mandel, Rayford O. Mays, Yashraj S. Narang, Evan K. Rose, Jackson S. Salovaara, Sandra Sohn, Bram A. Strochic, Daniel C. Wang, Jared P. Webber, Steven H. Williams

[Seacoast Online]

Some similarities, but quite the range there in terms of who scored high enough...

Thanks again to Keone Hon's dog / mom for linking me to these names so conveniently; Maile is always a diligent reader, despite the opposable thumb issue.

I ruffled some feathers the last time I posted a list of Exonians who had won / succeeded at something (on my old personal blog) but considering these were released to the media... I'm just giving people even easier access.

Furthermore, these peoples' names are pretty meaningless unless you know them personally. Delphine is in England right now, I hope someone forwarded her what she needed.

At this college fair we had this past spring, I spent my time grabbing good-looking promotional material from schools I already had on my (then even lengthier) list while pausing to exchange playful banter with the reps from schools I did not and would not consider attending--the University of Texas, for example. How could I help myself--the rep and I shared the same last name! I will say that retrospectively it was perhaps in poor taste to make jokes about the recent construction-related deaths over at Emerson with the Emerson rep; she was good humored about it but apparently doesn't share my attitude that laughter heals all wounds, even those inflicted by several stories of scaffolding and masonry.

What I should have been doing, rather than having quite so much fun, was trying to hear more from the people at each school I was legitimately interested in. The trouble was that these tables were busy because I didn't want to go anywhere unpopular. The people from smaller colleges looked so lonely, and I felt that in the large hall full of so many schools, giving them a little attention--however false--was simply a courtesy, after some of them came from so far away. In some cases, I did learn useful information from places I hadn't known about. I didn't know much about any of the Santa Clara colleges, and so a rep there revealed a good deal of information. I still wasn't interested in going to school there, but at least I was better informed.

Now, the other day I received the packet of treats which the College Counselling Office had sent out a short while ago. In it was the most recent CCO newsletter, a reminder to do homework on colleges, a nicely formatted college list for our parents, that sort of thing. The best part, though, was a sheet labelled “Grade Distribution List.” !!! This is a lot like the sheets that departments present at faculty meeting each term, where they give the grade breakdown for their courses and overall and things–Wesley Chen would steal those sometimes and then gloat about this fantastic thievery afterwards, having ‘liberated’ the papers from the recycling bin after the closed meetings. Very extreme, Wesley.

Regardless, this pink sheet was infinitely more interesting because of how targeted it was–it was only for the Class of 2007, updated through June 2006. Fantastic bit of data at my fingertips. Now, I won’t publish the entire thing because it might make the CCO very very angry you know, as they were when the Exonian published some numbers taken from the website. Understandably this form and indeed that entire packet did not have the terms of use or privacy policy so expressly defined, I don’t really want to incur the wrath of the administration unnecessarily. I can convey the same awesome power without it. I mean, I can’t publish the actual numbers, obviously. So instead I’ve made (all by myself!) a graphical representation thereof. It’s not a graph, or a chart, obviously, because that would be a representation of the data in a human readable form. No, this is just a vague approximation (I swear to god I didn’t enter it into Excel, really) of the grade distribution.

Um, okay. Now to discuss the ah… “artistic merit” of these nondescript forms. We can call them, for the sake of discussion and plausible deniability, “bars.” No affiliation with a bar graph, mind you. Right–now, on this bit of art here, I was trying to place myself in the world [of PEA class of 2007 grade distribution current through June 2006]. If we divide this picture into thirds, you know, to approximate the golden ratio, I’d see myself right around the third “bar.” It’s pretty funny because that reminds me of something I saw earlier… no clue what might have inspired this artwork, no. It came to me in a vision.

I found myself at 9.5-9.99, in terms of cumulative GPA groupings. For those of you not from Exeter, you may be confused. Exeter works on an 11 point system, unweighted. So an A is an 11, an A- is 10, so forth and so on. To get back to a normal 4.0 system you need only multiply, then, by 4/11ths. Easy and easily mortifying). There were 49 other people in my club with me, and 37 total in the two above it.

I was fairly shocked / surprised to discover that 20% of the grade had marks below 7.9. That’s just something I never really realized. The curve is quite distorted upwards, centered around a B.

Interestingly, our information session was given by an Exonian! Namely, E___ Macci. I’m sorry I forgot your name, class of ‘99 girl whose name I think began with E, sister to Vince Macci ‘05. I discovered her Exeter-past when, having stolen a newspaper from the paper-only recycling bin, I made a passing comment to Greta about the Exonian. “You’re an Exonian!,” I hear: why yes, of course, indeed, I am. She was a senior there at M.I.T. and gave us some lovely information and nicely answered questions. Most interesting fact? MIT has such an extensive publically accessible tunnel system that one can go from any building on campus to any other without needing to go outside. Also cute: there were Pi Day celebrations this 3/14; pie and ice cream in the student center. Most appetizing MIT feature: the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. MIT’s UROP was just really cool, and the more we learned about it the cooler it seemed.

Then we had a tour, which was a little bit redundant in its coverage but at least showed us around. We saw the athetlic facilities, the chapel, looked in at the newer buildings mostly but still caught glimpses of rooms and things. Our tour guide was very nice, though he had a questionably tasteful hairstyle. Not that that mattered; he was friendly, albeit very bad at walking backwards. He was lucky to not seriously injure himself walking into something, and hit more than a few puddles.

Pleasant!

Our Powerpoint presentations were all presented by one Ms. Tasker; we were reminded of this fact as the start of each, as the title slide included her name and “presented by.” Why anyone would want to be associated with that sordid affair, I know not why. She was fine until 10 minutes in she ran out of words and started reading off the slides.

One note on grammar: I wish the SAT asked fun grammar questions, like “What should the correct complete predicate be?” or “how do you use a semicolon, you stupid teenager?” You know, useful things.

I think I may go to the next one, which covers the reading and essay–n.b. I got a 12 on the essay when I took the SAT last spring for fun, and did fairly well on the reading… yet I persist.

Tonight there is an all-Upper meeting where we begin our journey on that yellow brick road of College Counselling into the academic institutions of our dreams. We received our counselor assignments earlier this week, and in the interest of revealing obsequious amounts of information about myself, I’ll share the fact that I have Ms. Dolan. Ms. Dolan is the director of the C.C. Office which sounds pretty good, and I hear only good rumours and gossips about her. Envy. Delicious jealousy.

If the self-deprecating whining and screams of horror were any indication, PSAT results are in. The Phillips Exeter College Counselling Office actually told everyone that they were in before they were in, just to build up the excitement!

Anyways, back to me: looking at last year's results my selection index of 228 appears pretty rosy. The Selection Index is a composite score generated from the Critical Reading, Math, and Writing sections of the PSAT / NMSQT. There's some complicated math involved, generally done by test administration actuaries or rigorous computer algorithms... (the three numbers are added). Things look even better when comparing last years scores (what were they? In the mid 70s at least) with the state-by-state scores as presented by the CollegeBoard. Oh internet, how I adore thee: Where else would I find the records of the sophomore performance from 2004? Perhaps at a College Counselling Office. Regardless, this metric further shows how well I did last year (and hopefully this year too). It does tell me that percentiles probably end up lower when adjusted for Massachusetts and rounding. There is some other interesting information in that report, detailing the majors people picked and the reported GPAs. Either way, Massachusetts is good; Newton is better.

Amusingly enough, I did better on the math section last year. It's comforting to know that my time at Exeter has seen a marked decrease in my pre-algebra skills. Fantastic. Predictably, my "words" scores have increased. To perfection. 80-68-80, baby. Which my score report will have me know means 99, 95, and 99th percentiles. Again, math is just sad, especially given last year's performance. The PSAT adds insult to injury by giving you back your test booklet, replete with mistakes for you to see and grimace at. Still, nets me 99th overall.

Here's my math (remember, I'm awful at math) though: 1.3 million taking the test qualify to be also "taking" the National Merit Scholarship Qualification test. Thus, the top 1 percent of that would be... 13,000 people. The splits selecting towards finals goes 55,000 --> 34,000--> 16,000--> 15,000-> 8,200 = win! If the percentile fallouts remained exactly the same from last year (and they did not) my 228 would be in the 99+ percentile (see the above linked results analysis taken from about a million people). Either way, this year it looks like that 13,000 spot more likely than not would guarantee me finalist status... or would it? The intricacies of the NMS elude me still. I may have forgotten to identify myself for the Black American National Achievement Scholarship, which would have been unfortunate. That would have been bad reading comprehension.

On a PSAT related note, CollegeBoard has rolled out a new program to sell information about people called MyRoad. I have tested out its Personality, Career, and Majors tests and didn't fancy them. It's free, but it's ugly. Whoever made the template is a bad person. One need only slap in the code from the PSAT score report and use their college board account and voila, another way to feed anxiety.

I'd trackback all those poor suckers on technorati wimpering about their bad scores, but they're all on livejournal, which despite having been purchased by Six Apart , doesn't support Trackback in any satisfactory way.

[tags]Trackback, Six Apart, College Board, selection index, SAT, NMSQT, sam Jackson, Exeter, Phillips Exeter Academy[/tags]