*Top 10 Facts* about the admissions process

The New England Association for College Admission Counseling posts a list, "Top Ten Facts Students Should Know About the College Admission Process."

http://www.neacac.org/docs/top_ten_facts.pdf


By the way, I'm embedding links and posting them separately in case anyone wants to copy/paste these items and repost or send anywhere else, since the embedded links won't work in some formats. Feel free to do so.

ACT deadline; more on SAT subject tests

As previously noted, the deadline to register for the June 7 SAT (last SAT date of this school year) is next Tuesday, May 6. To register, go to www.collegeboard.com. Gordon Chalmers, college counselor at San Francisco School of the Arts, issues a reminder that the last ACT of the school year is June 14, and the deadline is Wednesday, May 7. To register, go to www.actstudent.org /.

Gordon offers further advice on the June SAT: "Juniors who have already taken the SAT I before or will take it in May should now take the SAT II Subject tests in June, especially if planning to apply to a UC. One of the three tests taken in June should be U.S. [History], and the other could be Literature. The 3rd test, if you decide to take a 3rd test, could be Biology, chem, a language or world history. Do not take Math 1, as UCs will not accept it and don't take Math 2 unless you have completed Trig."

Deadline looms for last SAT of this school year

Signup deadline is May 6 for the June SAT date, which is Saturday, June 7 — both the SAT I and subject SATs. (The SAT is given all over the world on the same day.) go to the College Board website to sign up and get more information:
http://www.collegeboard.com/splash/

Presentations by Northwestern University

Northwestern University (which despite its name is in the Chicago area — it's all relative) comes to the Bay Area for two information sessions May 18 and 19.

San Francisco
Sunday, May 18, 7:30 p.m.
Hyatt Regency, 5 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco

San Jose area
Monday, May 19, 7:30 p.m.
Sheraton Sunnyvale Hotel, 1100 N. Mathilda Ave., Sunnyvale

Registration is urged. Go to the tour web page to register:

http://www.ugadm.northwestern.edu/cgi-bin/counsel/session.cgi?region=WEST

Thanks to Terry Abad for this info!

*8 of the Best Colleges* fair is next to arrive

Another in the series of group college events comes our way May 20 and 21. "8 of the Best Colleges" (I like the rather modest name) comprises: Claremont McKenna in Claremont, east of Los Angeles; Colorado College in Colorado Springs; Connecticut College in New London; Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa; Haverford College in Haverford, Pa.; Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio; Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.; and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.

Their tour comes (close) to San Francisco on Tuesday, May 20; registration 6:30 p.m. and program 7 p.m.: Crowne Plaza Hotel near SFO, 1177 Airport Blvd., Burlingame. (There's a Crowne Plaza nearby in Foster City too, so don't get confused.)

The tour is in Berkeley on Wednesday, May 21, registration 6:30 p.m., program 7 p.m.:
Doubletree Hotel Berkeley Marina, 200 Marina Blvd.

Advance registration is requested:
http://tinyurl.com/6fwq3u

Another elite college presentation

Thanks to blog reader Belle for alerting us to another of these tours put on jointly by several elite colleges and not publicized super-widely. Pass it on!

This time it's Brown University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University and Rice University, teaming up as Exploring Educational Excellence. They'll be here soon — in Berkeley and San Jose, though not San Francisco itself.

Santa Clara:
Tuesday, April 29, 7:30 p.m.
Santa Clara Convention Center
5001 Great America Pkwy
Santa Clara

Berkeley:
Wednesday, April 30, 7:30 p.m.
Doubletree Hotel & Executive Meeting Center Berkeley Marina
200 Marina Boulevard
Berkeley

Here's what the website says:

You must register to attend and bring a copy of your registration confirmation e-mail to each event.

Click here to find out how to register: http://www.exploringeducationalexcellence.org/student.html

For college applicants with learning disabilities

Here are some resources that I have not vetted, but which look worth checking out:

An online list of colleges with programs for learning-disabled students:

http://www.college-scholarships.com/learning_disabilities.htm

The college page of the website LDonline, which provides further resources:

http://www.ldonline.org/indepth/college

A Princeton Review book, "K & W Guide to Colleges for Students with Learning Disabilities, 9th Edition"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375766332/ldonlinelearningA

(I'm posting the links as well as embedding them, for anyone who may want to copy this and pass it along to others.)

Fair for high-end colleges coming our way

For ambitious super-achievers, five of the colleges that want your application in their inboxes are teaming up to offer a college presentation that looks rather exclusive. Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Penn (University of Pennsylvania) and Stanford have formed a project, if that's what you call it, called Exploring College Options, www.exploringcollegeoptions.org

Presentations in the Bay Area and Sacramento:

San Jose/Santa Clara
Monday, May 12, 7:30 p.m.
Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
5101 Great America Parkway
415/200-1234

Oakland/East Bay
Tuesday, May 13, 7:30 p.m.
Oakland Scottish Rite Center
1547 Lakeside Drive
510/451-1902

San Francisco
Wednesday, May 14, 7:30 p.m.
Hilton San Francisco
333 O'Farrell St.
415/771-1400

Sacramento
Thursday, May 15, 7:30 p.m.'
Doubletree Hotel Sacramento
2001 Point West Way
916/929-8855

The publicity material sounds like reservations are seriously required. Go to the website for more information and to RSVP.

Even for non-rankings fans, a tip from U.S. News

U.S. News & World Report is increasingly unpopular and controversial in the college admissions world for its influential annual college rankings, which have spawned a growing rebellion.

But the magazine's college coverage is still useful. Here's a helpful article on what to do — beyond languishing helplessly — if you're on a college's wait list.

Colleges with environmental science programs

From the Princeton Review:

It's becoming clear that the problems of the twenty-first century are the most complicated we've ever faced. But while the public is just learning about many environmental issues, students have been studying them, debating them, and working on the solutions-in any number of ways, from researching sustainable energies to community activism, to volunteering in the community, to things like just plain recycling.

Environmental Science combines study in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, exploring the relationships between these areas to acquire a greater understanding of how our environment works as a whole. Environmental Studies includes the examination of policy, law, and organizations to study how humans interact with their natural and social environments.

Interested in making a difference? Check out our selection of Environmental programs, including the schools below, and more.

Green Mountain College (Poultney, Vermont)
Environmental Studies
As an environmental liberal arts college, Green Mountain College offers students a special opportunity to integrate modern environmental thought into a traditional liberal arts or pre-professional course of study, regardless of major.

Emmanuel College (Boston, Massachusetts)
Environmental Science
Emmanuel offers Environmental Science programs focused in specialized areas of interest, with tracks in science and technology, health and safety, or pre-law and policy. As a Catholic college, Emmanuel offers a learning environment that fosters academic excellence, intellectual integrity, and a strong social conscience.

Adelphi University (Garden City, New York)
Environmental Studies
The programs in the Environmental Studies Department provide firm, integrated foundations in both the social-political-cultural and the scientific-technical areas. Adelphi is located just 45 minutes from New York City, offering the combined advantages of a major metropolitan area and a safe, suburban campus environment.

Learn more about our featured selection of Environmental Studies programs

Request information from all programs

Why take college courses while in high school?

A Q&A from the San Francisco School of the Arts' College Bulletin, by college counselor Gordon Chalmers:

Will taking college courses while in high school help me get into college?

Definitely yes, but sometimes getting to take these classes can be difficult, as first priority goes to current students enrolled at that college. Lowest priority goes to high school students. In many cases a college-level course counts as one year of a high school course (i.e. taking trigonometry at college for one semester counts as one year of high school trig), plus the grade earns an extra point in the GPA calculation the same as taking an AP or Honors course. Also, colleges love students who have successfully completed a college course, as it demonstrates that you can do college-level work. All local community colleges offer courses for high school students during the school year and summer. Go to that college's website and look for the Concurrent Enrollment Program.

The worst of times...

It just occurs to me: Why is it that our kids' most critical year in determining their college prospects — 11th grade — seems to come at a point when there's a peak in teen attitude and a plunge in maturity? Couldn't we submit the 8th-grade GPA instead? Maybe the whole process isn't based on their academic abilities and character after all, but just the timing of their adolescent hormonal stages.

College, career guidance resources

A couple of local resources:

• The San Francisco College Access Center, located at the San Francisco Main Public Library, 100 Larkin St. at Grove, provides comprehensive college preparation information and assistance. The program is open to all studentsm with particular emphasis on low-income students and those who are the first in their family to apply to college. The center's services include college application assistance, financial aid counseling and assistance, academic planningm and SAT prep.

• High School and Beyond Career and Education Planner is also offered through the San Francisco Public Library and helps students learn about career options and training.

Helpful hints for those college app logistics

My friend Faith Luber provided an organizational tip for keeping track of the many requirements and deadlines. This kind of process is essential for me. Faith's son, an alum of San Francisco School of the Arts, will graduate next month from Emerson College in Boston with a degree in film. :

I bought one of those HUGE wall calendars when we went through this. Since he applied to 14 (!) colleges, it was difficult to keep them straight. So aside from the spreadsheet I made, for checking off everything that needed to be done for each college and by what date, we tacked up the calendar sheet for every month, next to each other, on the wall. On those we wrote when things were due, audition dates, and other deadlines. It was really, really helpful to have it right there in front of us.

And, of course, you'll need months from two different years (Oct/Nov/Dec and Jan/Feb/Mar/April/May). For the year I didn't have, I used pages from months I didn't need, which had the same days/dates, and just cut out the name of the month and pasted it onto those.

Did the UC foreign language requirements catch you by surprise?

Here is an interesting summer school idea that might be especially useful for students who were not taking UC (and other college's) foreign language requirements into account:

High School Summer Intensive Mandarin Studies

Students will enhance their language skills from a beginner (with no prior Chinese experience) to a high beginner/low intermediate level. Participation in one session, with a passing grade, is the equivalent of 60 hours of foreign language course work. Students will earn 5 district course credits for foreign language from San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). Completion of two sessions, totaling 120 hours of language instruction, can receive up to an entire year of foreign language credit from SFUSD.

Registration is due by May 1st.

Resistance to those school rankings grows

I'm lurking on the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling listserve, watching college advisors from some swank schools vow to boycott the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. U.S. News surveys high school college advisors for their opinions as part of the process.

On top of the group letter from high school superintendents to Newsweek announcing refusal to participate in its high school rankings process, this is really heartening.

Here are two ways the U.S. News rankings directly harm college applicants:

-- As a poster noted in a comment the other day, colleges' "yield" is factored into those rankings — the number of students the college accepts who then decide to enroll. So a college may not accept a highly qualified applicant it thinks is perhaps TOO highly qualified and will choose a more-prestigious school. If you're that applicant and you wanted that college, you lose.

-- U.S. News judges colleges favorably if they get lots of applicants so they can reject a lot. That influences colleges to market themselves heavily to draw more applicants. Aside from issues like the cost and environmental impact of the marketing (and often the annoyance to the recipient) — and resources going into marketing instead of education — much of the marketing makes it sound to the recipient like a sure thing. Obviously that sets applicants up for disappointment, and can lead them to aim at perhaps not the best targets for them.

As for ranking high schools, the superintendents who signed that protest letter pointed out that the rankings reward schools that teach children of privilege, and penalize schools that deal with challenges through no fault of their own.

Big college fair in San Francisco April 17

College Fair 2008 comes to San Francisco on Thursday, April 17, 3-7 p.m., at the Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St. between Brannan and Townsend (South of Market). Parking sucks, so public transit is highly recommended — there's a shuttle running regularly to the College Fair from BART's Civic Center station.

Click here for more information.

One young relative (now at NYU) says that one of these College Fairs was instrumental in clarifying her choices. My cynical son is unimpressed by College Fairs so far. Most kids presumably come out somewhere in between. Go and find out!

Striving for the ivies: a sport for its own sake?

An amusing essay from the New York Times Book Review on two books about elite college admissions:

Before reading “Fat Envelope Frenzy,” I was convinced that our nation’s youth spent all their time uploading party photos to the Internet. I still think that. Yet it appears that a division of labor has been effected. Reading about Felix, who at 14 spent the summer assisting doctors at a rural orphanage in his parents’ native China; and Nabil, a top “mathlete” already familiar with the work of his potential future professors; and Lisa, a national champion rhythmic gymnast who tells Jager-Hyman that gymnastics “is like my anti-drug — not that I’d be doing drugs,” I kept thinking of poor John Stuart Mill, the original early applicant, whose father home-schooled him from the age of 3, teaching him Greek and Latin and the theories of Jeremy Bentham, but not how to feel. At the age of 20, Mill suffered a breakdown; already one of the most brilliant polemicists in England, he couldn’t say anymore what the point of it was. As he later wrote, “The whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

What’s the point of all this striving now? It’s hard to tell, because the striving itself, as a kind of sporting contest, has become so much a part of American life. Jager-Hyman is alive to some of the more outrageous aspects of the college admissions process, but she is also an eager participant. At the drop of a hat she will switch into admissions-officer mode, telling us for example that Felix, while a nice guy and a straight-A student and an accomplished pianist, is “also a member of a group” — Asian-Americans — “that is overrepresented in the Harvard applicant pool, which could be a disadvantage.” In the end, almost despite yourself, you read “Fat Envelope Frenzy” to find out who got in and who didn’t.

(The other book is THE RUNNER: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, by David Samuels.)