Yes, Virginia, there are blue skies in Beijing... sometimes.

你 好 from Beijing! I have been here in China since the start of September, and this week classes finally got started here at Beida (Peking University), a week behind Yale's schedule. So far my experience in the Peking University-Yale Joint Undergraduate Program has been quite good, though China has a lot to take in. This is the first of an ongoing series of letters / updates I'm going to do my best to issue regularly while I am here for the semester.

What have we done so far?

• Arrived September 1
• Settled in and explored Beijing, going on several sight-seeing trips
• From Sept 6-10 we went on a trip to Yunnan Province, which was very interesting - more on that soon!
• Classes started September 14
• Currently experiencing life here in Beijing and China!

In this post, I'm going to talk about why I'm here in China, and share some first impressions. More detailed posts to come on the other points above as well as some of what is mentioned here.

Let me just first give a brief overview of why I'm here, since I never really elaborated on it before. I have always wanted to study abroad, although the country of choice has historically been France - hence the 7 years of French, etc. However, after I had completed my language requirements with an L5 French course at Yale, I decided to take Chinese. I wasn't sure at the time (last fall) whether or not I would end up studying in China, but Yale offers a lot more resources for study in East Asia than it does for Western Europe, unfortunately.

For Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you have options like the Light Fellowship for fully-paid intensive language study available to you. I would have ideally been studying here in China this semester on a Light fellowship; unfortunately, you have to be starting 4th Semester or higher Chinese to study in a Light-approved program during the year. I didn't want to go on a summer program and sacrifice the season to 80-characters-a-night of Chinese homework, among other reasons, so that option was out. Still, there was the Yale-PKU program, which I applied to and decided to go on last spring.

I still haven't answered the questions "Why China, why now?" The reasons are straightforward: Why China? I feel very certain that the China-US bilateral relationship will be the most important one of any two nations in the coming century. No other two countries have as much combined power to effect change in the world - for good or ill. I therefore feel I have essentially a moral imperative to better understand China and its people, culture, and trajectory, because whatever course I choose to take in my life, I'm sure China will overlap to at least some degree. As for the latter question - what better time than the present?

Now, onto my (first) first impressions!

The very first thing I noticed, and the thing that I continue to notice the most, has to do with pollution and air quality. But, this topic merits its own post, so I'm going to leave it aside for now. For the moment, let me just say that while I am becoming a little bit used to it, the perpetual haze serves as a continuing reminder of what sacrifices have been made for the sake of "modernization." So, aside from that:

China is a lot less exotic - at first brush - than I had imagined. No immediate, overwhelming culture shock - not like going to Texas or Las Vegas, for example ; ) ! In all seriousness, though, although China is a very 'different' place from my familiar America, my expectations have been in line with what I've experienced, generally speaking. In places where I have been 'surprised' it has been at how accessible Beijing has been to me, with just 1 year's worth of Chinese study. No doubt, a lot of work from the Olympics 2008 buildup has paid off for me in this regard, with the subways helpfully having both English announcements and Pinyin / English station names, since I don't always know all the station title characters! (For a look at the current subway system, and how fast new additions are expected to be brought online, check out this map - dashed lines are subway lines under construction or planning).

Modern China is aptly described as a country undergoing immense changes, and in this regard there are everywhere great contradictions and idiosyncrasies. Wandering around Beijing one can be successfully lulled into thinking China is really well developed, leaping forward into the future. The truer picture of the city - as microcosm of China - is often just concealed behind thin walls, secret alleys and courtyard houses and markets hidden away out of sight. The hustle and bustle of modern construction draws much attention, but can't always distract from old and beautiful buildings several stories shorter, paint peeling and fading after decades of neglect. Other times, though, it's possible to get away from this same hustle and bustle and appreciate the thousands of years of history which lead up to today's China. There are many sites in wonderful condition. Tragically, for every great historical site - in either good or poor condition - there seems to be some complementary "10 times more beautiful and wondeful" palace or temple which was inevitably destroyed by Westerners in the 19th century or Chinese in the 20th. Many, however, have been rebuilt.

Weiming Lake, peking university - from wikimedia

This complicated situation is very obvious at our school here, Peking University, known in China as Beida, short for "Beijing Da Xue" (Beijing University, 北京大学). Beida was created from a combination of other campuses, some of which were once royal gardens; many of its buildings are old, historic, and very beautiful. Others are new modern classroom and science buildings which would not look out of place on many an American college campus or office complex. Of the former category, many have seen interior renovations, but cry out for help maintaining their facades; others are just in desperate need of repairs, period.

As far as facilities and infrastructure is concerned, it's clear we're not at Yale anymore. Some of the dorms here do not have any showering facilities, and students may have to walk 5-15 minutes outside to go take a shower, because the plumbing simply isn't in place. In this regard, our program has its own showers indoors - a real luxury : ). To be fair, a lot of what we see here is merely reminiscent of the kind of expansionary construction seen at college campuses in times which had both a combination of bad architectural taste and financial distress - Wesleyan until recently, anyone? Though, to be fair to our Middletown neighbor, what I'm describing here is really a whole different category. I'll take some pictures soon.

All in all, despite my well-known proclivities for highly vocal complaining, I don't have very much to really say at this time. I'm in a good "frame of expectations" right now, so while I am definitely appreciating Yale more! I'm able to have a good time here, too. Things are not perfect, but they're good enough. As time goes on, maybe this will wear thin and I'll start to get more frustrated, but on the whole things are quite OK. The myriad disadvantages and inconveniences in daily life here are small prices to pay for the chance to get to live in China and experience it first-hand, with Chinese roommates, as opposed to the isolated "international island" that all other schools experience in their study-abroad programs here with Beida. One of our professors, a Chinese graduate of Yale Law School now teaching us at PKU, told a funny joke at the opening ceremony: "PKU is my mother school, and Yale is my father, and now they have had a beautiful child, the PKU-Yale Joint Program! However, as you may know, China has a very famous one-child policy, ensuring that it remains a very unique program..."

Our Chinese roommates are all very nice, thoughtful and open to creative exchange, and I am really enjoying getting to understand China better through them and my time here. You learn a hundred times more from a month here than you could just trying to read about the place - or at least, you learn different, on-the-ground knowledge and understanding. Experiences from everyday life build on one another into a real appreciation and understanding, it seems.

China can't be reduced to a stereotype or a single two-dimensional picture. I don't expect to really "get" China after just 4 months here, but I hope to have a better grasp of the place than I did before I came, and that much seems certain.

More updates to come!

Though we have seen college blog networks come and go over the last few years, there is one especially promising network on my radar that I thought I would share with everyone today. The College Blog Network is a recent entry to the scene but more blogs join daily. It's intended to facilitate communication between student and other college bloggers (with .edu e-mail address). You can create feeds of the general college blogging firehose, get links to new blogs, compile favorites, vote for the best, etc.

I wanted to encourage all readers with .edu email addresses to both sign up their own blogs, and also to go to the site and give the current Yale blogs a "thumbs up"! You have to register, but it only takes a second to do so.

I saw that TCBN was advertising for "college blogs" on some search engines, and driving traffic in some other ways, and I hope to see some strong growth here. The site is developing a great blog widget, which you can see in action on the homepage and at rocloop.com right now. Once it is less beta-y, I might try to put it up here.

Anyway, classes are over for most people (I have one which meets during reading period) and I have 3, 20 page final papers due in the next week and a half or so, and will have to blog correspondingly less. In the meantime, check out the archives for my blog, and go look for other interesting posts on TCBN! And don't forget to bump this site and any others you find interesting : )

Step 1: Assign a 20 page long research paper, worth 70% of the course grade. Have it be due May 5th.

Step 2: On April 22nd, send out this e-mail (names changed):

Dear [course] students,

In response to queries:

The paper is due this Thursday. You may bring it to class, or if need be, bring it by 5 pm to room # of [building]. Give it to [name] at the main desk, or, if she is not there, anyone else in the office.

The papers will be graded and returned to [name] by May 11, and will be there in the fall if you don't get them this spring.

Also -- don't forget! -- in addition I want an electronic copy.

Best,

[Professor]

Step 3: Success! Fewer papers to grade because, imagining themselves to have only 2 days to complete their probably unstarted 20 page papers, the students' heads have all exploded.

Step 4: For plausible deniability, send out another e-mail, a little bit later, acknowledging your mix-up:

Dear [class] Class:

Big mistake on my part! i confounded our due date with that of my other class. The real due date is May 5, with the same procedures to be followed as in the last e-mail. Don't forget the electronic version.

Sorry!

[Professor]

Aiee!!! In all fairness, this was just a simple mixup between two classes' final paper due dates, and not some ingenious attempt to drive part of the class insane, but it certainly caused me a fair amount of moral trauma! I read of the message just before going to a meeting with another professor to discuss topics for a separate 18 page paper, and was somewhat visibly shaken... : ( Still, the "oops" e-mail did come only 15 minutes afterwards, so that limited the time in which any drastic actions could have been taken.

Still, a message to all professors around finals time: be careful, please! For the sake of your students. : )

I found...

• the Center for Language Study has a blog (and a twitter--language labs are often very trendy)
• A lot of information about Yale's Windows server infrastructure from Ken, who works for Yale ITS.
• Beth Castle, another person who works at Yale but is not a student
• The best one of all is perhaps this old defunct blog about a Labrador retriever puppy (not to discredit the other blogs, just to showcase my love of puppies)
• Interesting academic blogs (mostly now all abandoned) on projects like ethnographies of Islam in Egypt.
• A very cool art blog called Range of Vision, from Ken, technical director of the Yale center for Digital Media Center for Arts at Yale (I was afraid it was related to DMCA--digital millenium copyright act). Married to Beth, I think? Hasn't been updated in a year.

... and a few more. But essentially, no one was home. There were a few official blogs for Yale institutions of one or another variety, but nothing really especially active. Does no one know about the blogs? Were all the bloggers abducted by aliens? Anyone with a NetID can make one. They are blocked from being indexed by search engines, which might stop some from getting involved: I know there would be opportunity for abuse, but it can be very limiting. Apparently "This service was developed in response to a number of requests from students, faculty, and staff for a publishing tool kit that would allow people to post and maintain blogs for a variety of topics." -- but I'm not sure where all these people requesting blogs went.

What doesn't exactly make sense:

What you should know. Privacy, commenting, etc. All accounts on blogs.yale.edu are considered "personal space." While many bloggers intend for their material to be widely distributed and easily accessible, we need to balance the ability to publish with the privacy of users. In line with this policy, we have disabled search engines from indexing the content of blogs.yale.edu, which means that a Google search will not find your blog. If you would like to publicize your blog you are free to do so. There is, however, an internal search engine that you can use to explore blogs.yale.edu

Why not make this a user-adjustable option? If the privacy is of the utmost concern, what's the point of enabling an internal search which could turn up results? It just feels like a bit of a strange situation here, where there is clearly uncertainty with what to do with this pilot program.

Here's the Yale Alumni Magazine's take on them:

September/October 2005
It's like traveling back in time to when only geeks knew how to navigate the Internet: in April, the university launched the pilot version of a tool that will host blogs for students, faculty, and staff. As of mid-August, though, the Yale University Weblogs site had not yet been publicized, and the early adopters were mostly IT types from around the campus. But not all the posts are about "OVID interface problems" or "Site e-mail aliases in Sakai": you can also turn up some nice pictures of a Labrador puppy named Willie and speculation about the plot of the new Dukes of Hazzard movie.

Nothing seems to have changed, although there sadly haven't been any updates about Willie for several years. Whatever happened to the development of the blogging project? The university needs to move forward in technology adoption. That's part of why I applied to be on the library policy standing university committee. We'll see how that goes.

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.

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 : )

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.

Harvard may not be doing enough, but they're at least doing better than us--and they're improving.

Other studies have also found Yale lagging behind Harvard in its numbers of Pell grant students. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education published a study in the fall showing that only 9.4 percent of Yale College students receive Pell grants, compared to 12 percent of Harvard undergraduates.

Of the 10 wealthiest American universities, the study reported, only Harvard had increased the percentage of Pell grant recipients from 2004 to 2006, from 9.4 percent to 11.9 percent.

But the Journal’s managing editor, Bruce Slater, declined to call Harvard’s increase progress.

“The gains at Harvard are not all that spectacular to begin with,” Slater said. “Although Harvard has gone up and Yale has not, I don’t think that’s significant.”

So, where's the push on this? Yale is, once again, dropping the ball--just like they did with the financial aid policy which they were finally pushed into making after Harvard beat them to it. Where is all the innovation? Jeremiah Quinlan, Brenzel's director of outreach and recruitment, could make an MIT-style blogging site if only someone would let him (and give him money, staff, and time), maybe? That would be a good transformative start--a ton of transparency for an admissions office in the Ivy League. Just waiting for a nice move--something good to write about, a step in the right direction.

And no, don't even get me started on the promise of the residential college expansion "to bring in new students."

I won't be able to personally answer that question because I'm going to have to be a guinea pig in some experiments in order to meet the pretty easy lab requirement for my intro psych course, taught by the excellent Marvin Chun. Signing up for the 'experiments server' there is a one hour intro survey which counts for a credit of participation. Some of the questions were normal, but some were pretty weirdly specific. The first two big sets were about spiders and snakes, which questions like:

If I came across a spider now, I would get help from someone else to remove it. T/F

Although it may not be so, I think of snakes as slimy. T/F

I am terrified by the thought of touching a harmless snake. T/F

I would be somewhat afraid to enter a room now, where I have seen a spider before. T/F

And I'm just thinking to myself... are most of the studies the psych department is doing this fall about spiders and snakes? Maybe this is the norm for such things; I have no idea. Some of the sociological questions were pretty creepy, too: "Its OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others." (1-7) or "Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups." Scary.

Lastly, I kept finding the phrasings really funny as the later sections used the term 'close others' to describe some weird friend-romantic-family-amalgam with whom one might share secrets, turn to for support, etc.

Anyway I didn't sign up for any of the first few studies because of timing, but hopefully I'll have some fun ones to report back about. I can't get any money for anything I do for credit, but some could be fun on their own. Hopefully.

The main reason I haven't been posting much on my blog the past week is that I have been doing a quick guest editing gig for IvyGate, which will finish up after this week. What have I been writing about? See for yourself:

• IvyGate, Fake News? For Shame!
• Yale '09 Biology Major Minoring in Illegal Assault Rifles Arrested, Suspended after Massive Weapons Cache Discovered
• Crimewatch: Penn Terrorized, Assaulted by Roving Gangs of 9 Year Olds
• Harry Potter Across the Ivy League
• Columbia Student Group May Be Overseas Extension of Communist Regime

Great stories all, go have a look!

Be sure to have a look at the two stories I wrote about him and his complaint back in November 2006:

WSJ asks: ‘Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?’ [part 1]

WSJ asks: ‘Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?’ [part 2]

E-mail pasting begins here.

Jian Li, xyz@Yale.edu: 1/25/2007 11:12 PM

Hey Sam. I read your first blog entry about me. It raises the issue of subjective admissions criteria, and you've written, "I can see a plausible concern in general, but not one stemming from his case alone."

I actually wholeheartedly agree with you on that point!

A reader might be under the unfortunate and incorrect impression that I had deduced admissions discrimination as a result of my case alone. Such a deduction would not only be egotistical but misinformed - colleges regularly reject non-Asian applicants with perfect SATs. Rather, I came to the conclusion of discrimination before I even applied to college, while I was reading the Espenshade study (link). I filed this complaint not because I thought I deserved to be admitted to Princeton (I actually think they may very well have rejected to me had I applied as a white student), but because I felt that applicants deserve to be evaluated without regard to race.

Because Dan Golden only wrote about my SATs, a reader such as yourself may also be under the unfortunate and incorrect impression that I think scores should be the sole basis for admission and that I had nothing beyond my scores. On the contrary, I think that it is very important for colleges to look at things
beyond SATs such as leadership (though, as the history of Jewish admissions suggests, we must not let fuzzy criteria be an occasion for discrimination). I
think my extracurriculars were pretty good – my complaint listed state-wide rankings in math and physics competitions, 168 hours of community service
during a trip to Costa Rica paid for by a merit scholarship, captaining my high school’s high-ranking academic team, etc. – but again, the rejection of
someone of my personal qualifications would not prove discrimination, since colleges regularly reject highly-qualified non-Asian applicants. However, the
Espenshade study does prove discrimination, as does the increased enrollment of Asian-Americans at UC Berkeley after the passage of Proposition 209.

Thanks for reading this
-Jian Li

* * *

Thanks again for writing in to help clarify that confusion surrounding the complaint, and for letting me publish the e-mail on the blog. Hopefully some of my visitors will read through and get a better sense of things, maybe spread the word a bit... the media didn't do very much worthwhile digging the first time around, I don't think, which is too bad.

University officials said the strong performance of Princeton’s investments, which earned almost 20 percent last year, helped pave the way for the decision, along with generous donations by alumni and an increase in the size of the student body. Officials said a decision by trustees’ to spend more of the endowment, which totaled about $13 billion in June, also helped.

Hmm... strong investment performance, eh? Where do I recall hearing about another endowment getting really, really good returns?

Princeton’s provost, Christopher Eisgruber, who heads the university’s priorities committee, said in a statement today that the committee was “delighted that the university’s financial circumstances allowed the trustees to approve its recommendations for addressing highest priority needs.”

The committee’s recent report said that making higher education accessible to all qualified students was one of its considerations and that Princeton’s tuition increases had been “at the bottom end of the university’s peer group” in the past 10 years.

Apparently Williams froze tuition in 2000-2001, but otherwise I don't see too many places being particularly friendly about the ever-raising costs of attendance. GWU has a nice plan in place which locks tuition in place on a per-student basis, set when they first begin attending, and guarantees institutional aid won't decrease.

This comes, interestingly enough, at the same time as the release of a UCLA study about financial burdens leading people away from 1st choices. AP wire, via NYT.

Many students are settling for their second- and third-choice colleges, at least partly for financial reasons, a new survey says. The study, by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveyed more than 271,000 students at 393 colleges and universities. It found 32.7 percent of freshmen at a college other than their first choice. Almost half of those at their second choice had been accepted at their first. Of the students accepted at their first-choice university who did not enroll, a third said they could not afford it. Other reasons included geography and athletics. [emphasis mine]

Tuition costs won't stop me from going to Yale, but they won't make it any easier, either. We got reminder-flyers in our P.O. boxes this week about filling out the FAFSA. I wish the higher education scene could take a closer look at costs for students, particularly middle class students, rather than squeezing more money out to pay for quite lovely expansions of programs. It's not fair to justify this just by saying "lots of this money goes to financial aid!" because tuition isn't quite the sliding scale certain income taxes are (or could be). If a third of first-choicers couldn't attend because of cost, that's a problem. In the age of 4 billion dollar capital campaigns, when is it enough to take a step back and look at the burden these tuition raises are putting on students who don't fall to the income extremes?

It was nice to see the House do some good student loans work this past week (Miller's moustache looked great on CSPAN; we watched the vote come in) but it was too bad that the Bush administration also saw fit to continue subsidizing a student-loans company that was and is defrauding the American people. Can't win 'em all.

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.

• YALE banner.
• 'Reply' card for Yale matriculation--already mailed back.
• Explanation of Financial Aid statement, preliminary financial aid packet
• Acceptance letter
• Another packet about 'Financing Your Yale Education'
• Small card reminding me to go to the admitted student website, admits.yale.edu
• A letter explaining what is necessary to accept the offer, take a gap year, etc.
• All nestled inside a 'folder' made up of a poster; the reverse has the quite well known 'community of scholars' Pierson quote.

Sorry for the shoddy photo quality, it was taken with my phone and I don't have anything on this laptop to nicely clean it up. (GIMP won't even run nicely.)

Murphy has been at Yale for 37 years, so he said he "knew where all the skeletons were." Halloween is coming up but all the same we didn't have any ghouls or skeletons appear. It was nice to see Mr. Murphy because so far I have only seen Rob Jackson--he was in charge of both my information session when I visited and the Multicultural Open House--and Murphy had some new things to say. Surprisingly, there were only 25 people there--Tuesday nights are busy, but Georgetown's session was better populated (by all seniors, mind you). The 8-9 timeframe is no struggle for most seniors, I think, so I'm still mystified as to where everyone went.

Murphy has been the director of transfer admissions for a long time, but he has also been in charge of Exeter for the last 30 years. Sometimes it seems like the boarding schools are distributed as a little "extra" to go with something else a little bit out of the ordinary--as with Martin Walsh of Stanford who said he had international and then some boarding schools--while othertimes the New England boarding schools just seem to get lumped together with the rest of... New England, or whatever respective states they're from. The whole region distribution thing is pretty curious seeming, anyways.

We began with a heavily abbreviated version of the normal info-speech; Murphy thankfully said that he was able to "assume a level of sophistication" with the audience, i.e. that we had done a little research by now on our schools.

Ryan Caro and I had an argument before it started about how we would divide up certain questions we both wanted to ask; I ended up nabbing the "mysterious new construction" question but my allusions to possible new residential colleges was buried beneath the reality of a parking lot. Yale Daily News, Yale Herald: how you have deceived me! I redeemed myself slightly with a reference to the struggles with the city of New Haven back when Murphy first arrived at Yale (1969) and that led into Town + Gown relations; nothing too exciting. Alandha Scott was shocked that we might have prepared ourselves to ask any Yale-specific questions, apparently. She later asked about competition vs. collaboration. My departmental / faculty level interdisciplinary question (yes, I always ask it) wasn't answered fully because Murphy wasn't a faculty member. I don't recall any other particularly mention-worthy questions.

The information session was good fun overall, since the small group meant that it was a very intimate discussion about all the cool things at Yale. There was a lot of talk about the Residential Colleges, which are my favorite thing about Yale. I liked the mention of the way the "architecture reintroduces you to your college mates" because it seemed very true when I visited. Murphy spent the last part of the time talking again about the application process and essays, and how to best complete the app. He has read 45,000+ applications, so everyone listened very carefully. The usual good advice: "things you find interesting" (everything!) are the best topics.

Album on my gallery has all those photos but no more. Check out the photos from all my other college visits (rather--those which I had photos for) if you feel you're lacking for some multimedia. There aren't very many pictures of me because I was always the one taking all the pictures.

Forgot what I said about the multicultural open house in general? You can find my previous entries here or in the archives:

Yale Multicultural Open House rundown: part 1, Yale Multicultural Open House rundown: part 2