College at a Discount, part two.

Image via Wikipedia

A couple of weeks back, National Louis University of Chicago offered the first coupon for college, via Groupon. See the story here. While many — or most — colleges provide a discounted tuition offering grants and loans through financial aid letters sent with an acceptance, it’s rare that a prospective student catches a glimpse of the actual discount prior to application.

Seton Hall University, a private Catholic university in New Jersey, stepped into more transparent territory in college discounting this week, offering a specific cut off the top for their best applicants. See the New York Times article, College Offers Top Applicants Two-Thirds Off..

“The primary motivation has been that as we go through what looks like a double-dip recession, we wanted to help our students,” Seton Hall’s president, Gabriel Esteban, said of the new approach. But in addition, he said, “it probably will help us in attracting a certain quality of students.”

To qualify for the discount, which would equal about two-thirds of this year’s $31,440 tuition (room, board and other fees add about $13,000 to the total annual bill), students must graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school classes and have a combined score of at least 1,200 on their math and reading SATs — but no less than 550 on either — or an ACT score of 27 or above.

See the NYT College Admissions blog, The Choice, for discussion of Seton Hall’s move. Comments on this post mention a number of other schools offering merit-based aid, but few that cut tuition to this extent.

Related articles

• Seton Hall will lower tuition rate by $21K to match Rutgers for some incoming freshmen (nj.com)

Homework: ‘Beyond Getting In’ at The Atlantic

Pardon us while the DrStrangeCollege household focuses on all the bits and pieces of applying to college via Early Action. Yes, I just wrote about the FIVE steps to applying to college, and sometime soon I may write the more detailed version, spelling out 127 steps.

Meanwhile, I would urge you to run, not walk, over to The Atlantic, to read their Special Report on College Admissions,  ‘Beyond Getting In.’

For example, see ten charts about the value of college here.

Read The Atlantic‘s take on the millions of bits written about the rankings:

The bottom line is that college rankings aren’t the monster here.They’re gnats on the back of a monster. After all, if you pay attention to college rankings, you’re already doing something rare. You’re caring enough about college to consult a ranking!
That makes you pretty elite, from the start. Thirty percent of 18-year olds don’t graduate from high school on time. Of those who graduate, half will drop of out of college. Of those who enroll, only nine percent will start at an institution that admits less than half its applicants. Only three percent will attend a school with an admission rate below one-third. The admissions rate at Harvard is six percent.

There is the US News ranking problem. And there is a college crisis. There’s a big difference. Here is the breakdown of 21-year olds in 2009. Sixty percent aren’t in college. Twenty percent didn’t graduate from high school. One percent is going to the kind of schools that make headlines in rankings.

Why is college so expensive? The former President of George Washington University, who nearly tripled tuition during his twenty years there, discusses the costs here and  here.

From The Atlantic.

And what about a nutrition-style fact box for each college? Click on the chart for that post.

More articles have been posted each day; there are nine so far and all of them, at the very least, informative. Most of them thought-provoking. Let me know what you think in comments.

Addendum: Thanks to @ksaedconsult, the Twitter feed for Kimberly Shepherd at KSA Educational Consulting, for calling my attention to the series.

Related articles

• America’s College Gap (outsidethebeltway.com)

Wednesday Weekly Reader: The College Rankings, Redux.

Recent news from the college search / admissions / finance front.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the soon-to-be-published 2012 Best College Rankings from US News & World Report. It was long and a bit ranty, but it can be found here.
Here are a few follow up (post-publication) articles and one excellent article from last February that I’d completely forgotten about…
1.  Inside Higher Ed reported on a meeting held with US News & World Report in ‘Thanks, but No Thanks.’ A committee of the NACAC [National Association of College Admission Counseling] looked at the way USN&WR composes its annual rankings, didn’t like it, discussed it with the publisher, and nothing about it is going to change, “regardless of how admissions counselors and higher education admissions officers feel about them.”

“The committee believes that the research and discussion about the imprecision of ordinal rankings in the ‘Best Colleges’ list has reached a point where not proactively acknowledging the limitations of the ranking formula through vigorous consumer education and flexible ‘ranking’ options risks misleading consumers and has compromised the journalistic integrity of the publication,” the report states.

Here’s the position from Robert Morse, who oversees the rankings:

As long as colleges and universities continue to weight test scores and class ranking as a crucial component of admissions criteria, Morse said, it is hypocritical for institutions to ask U.S. News not to do the same.

2. The New York Times blog on college admissions, The Choice: writes about the rankings and provides advice on how to use them.

The fact is that however much the rankings are wrapped in a gauze of science, there are any number of subjective judgements at play here, including the assembly of an “undergraduate academic reputation (100=highest)” and the various weights apportioned to students’ SAT and ACT scores, as well as rankings for institutions’ “financial resources,” “alumni giving” and even “average alumni giving rate.”

3.  Lynn O’Shaughnessy, who blogs at The College Solution, likens the rankings to a ‘Weird Beauty Contest.’

Every year, the magazine sends out three surveys to each institution in a particular category, such as national universities or liberal arts colleges. Three administrators in the office of the president, admissions and provost are supposed to fill out the surveys. The folks stuck with this chore are expected to grade each of their peers on a 1-to-5 scale. The best score is a 5 and the worst is a 1.

Any guess which schools get a heap of 5 scores?’ Beyond the automatic high scores of some schools and the crappy scores of others, what has always irked me is that universities and colleges are supposed to know what’s going on at their “peer” institutions and that’s impossible. You can’t tell me, for instance, that administrators at the University of Wisconsin can assess the academic quality of hundreds of its peers including Georgia State, University of Missouri, University of Chicago, Rutgers, MIT, San Diego State and the College of William & Mary.

4.  Given 1) that colleges doing well in the rankings have bragging rights; 2) want to publicize their ranking; 3) US News & World Report makes a lot of money from the published rankings; and  4) has a commodity to protect, we shouldn’t be surprised at the income USN&WR gains from the ‘Best Colleges’ badges shown on college websites. See Best Colleges Badge: We Sustain Its Existence, from Inside Higher Ed.

However, a recent discussion on a higher education web developers listserv reinforced the fact that some still find the “badge” to be valuable. In fact, due to the exorbitant fees that U.S. News charges to display the “best badge,” some schools have gotten creative with their web marketing. Instead of paying the $1,000 cost (web use only, 12 months) to display the award badge, some higher education web developers display a graphic of the cover of the U.S. News magazine as a way to indicate their ranking status. By the way, the cost for unlimited electronic use of the best badge for only a year is $5,500. Imagine if a majority of the 1,600 schools in the U.S. News rankings list paid for either the limited web use or even the unlimited option. It is potentially a multi-million dollar operation.

Image via Wikipedia

5.  Finally, last February the New Yorker published Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis of the Best Colleges rankings. Gladwell offers the analogy of ranking automobiles and shows how different choices, by necessity, build different ‘best’ lists. Yes, a Dodge could be better than a Ferrari, depending upon the criteria used. Unfortunately, the online article is behind the New Yorker‘s paywall. Here’s a link to the abstract. If you’re not a subscriber, this entertaining read is well worth looking up at your library.

What have you been reading? What do you think of the rankings? As always, please comment below…

Related articles

• Defining the ‘Best’ in Colleges (usnews.com)
• College Rankings That Aren’t Ridiculous: Washington Monthly (huffingtonpost.com)

How to Apply to College in 5 Steps.

1. Pick your college(s). Use one of the many college search sites available [see CollegeBoard, CollegeData, College Navigator, Unigo, for a start] and develop your own criteria (size, public/private, geographic location, type of setting, selectivity, etc.). Research further on each of your long-list colleges’ admissions pages. Whittle down to a short list that includes a couple of safety schools, a few good fits, and a reach college or two.
2. Visit the colleges on your list, if at all possible. For those you cannot visit, check their websites for virtual tours.
3. Revise your list. Steps #1 and #2 might need to be repeated a number of times.
4. Pick the type of application you will submit to each college and when: Rolling Admissions, Early Decision, Early Action, Early Action/Restricted, or Regular Admission.
5. Write the application(s) and submit with all accompanying materials by the appropriate deadline.

Some students may be able to follow these steps with minimal stress. If so, I would love to hear how they did it.

I would probably (lovingly) share their stories with Mod Squad Pete (who re-revised his Early Action list five days ago).

Related articles

• How do I compare colleges? (drstrangecollege.wordpress.com)

Wednesday Weekly Reader: Show Me The Money!

Recent news from the college search / admissions / finance front, all of it touching on money matters and some of it, all about money matters…

1.  Two academicians write in the Wall Street Journal about how parents should Get Smart About College, including recognizing their own biases. This is definitely worth reading and they make a number of good points. Unfortunately, their arguments about the ability of graduates to pay off debt need to be stacked up against another report from the WSJ this week (see #2 below).

The way people think about debt, for instance, may leave them borrowing too little, rather than the right amount. Or it could lead them to pick colleges where they have a worse chance of graduating. …

… If parents understand more about the decision biases they share with the rest of the human race, they may be able to plan and save more effectively and to help their children make more constructive choices. They should actively question all of their assumptions and be open to planning, choosing and supporting their children even in ways that don’t immediately feel “right”—like taking on more debt for a higher-tier school.

2.  Thanks to a tweet from Robert Bruner, Dean of the UVa Darden School of Business, here is a chart from the WSJ‘s Real Time Economics, showing new data from the Census Bureau and the average wages growth over the past 10 years. :

Click to enlarge.

Image via Wikipedia

3.  What does that Census Bureau data mean for college grads? Jeffrey Selingo writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education about ‘the lost decade of wages.’ Yes, it confirms that a college degree can provide ‘lifetime economic benefits,’ but the article also discusses the anger of college graduates who cannot find jobs. See this about college costs relative to household income:

Perhaps the number that should be most disturbing to colleges in the Census report is that the income of the typical American family has dropped for the third year in a row and is now roughly where it was in 1996, when adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted price of a public four-year colleges is about 1.8 times what it was in 1996.

Rising family wealth during the 2000s, helped greatly by inflated home prices, allowed colleges to continue to pump up their prices. The census numbers and the nonstop bad news on housing show those days are over. Add to that the fact that there are likely to be substantial cuts in federal student aid in the name of deficit reduction in the coming years.

And, for a glimpse of how aware college board members might be of the problem:

A higher-education admissions and marketing consultant who specializes in the private-college sector told me recently that his firm does many retreats for trustees and senior college leaders that in part highlight the average household income for the state where the college is located.

“The wealthy board members are very surprised and cabinets [of college leaders] are silently reflective and nod in agreement,” he told me. He always asks the college officials if they could afford their prices if they didn’t get the tuition remission. “Almost always they say no.”

4.  Meanwhile, has anyone been following the discussion of forgiving student debt as a way of boosting the economy? I haven’t, simply because of lack of time to pay attention to every darn thing. This from the WSJ‘s Idea Market crossed my desk today: Forgiving Student Loans: Worst Stimulus Idea Ever? That’s a very short piece, responding to a Freakonomics contributor’s assertion that it’s a terrible idea. It will only take a moment to read the post; further enlightenment on the impact of student debt on the lives of college grads, however, can be found by scanning the comments in response (50 at last count).

5.  Finally, to quote a friend: “File this one under, Duh!” Inside Higher Education just released their study of admissions practices and found that universities are more focused on finding students who can pay the full, non-discounted tuition and fees. Here’s the article, and here are a couple of paragraphs:

The pressure to add to tuition revenue also shows up in very high proportions of admissions directors who see recruiting more out-of-state students as an important admissions strategy (53 percent at public doctoral institutions and master’s institutions). Likewise, more than 30 percent of admissions directors across all four-year institutions said that recruiting more international students was an important admissions strategy. While some state universities have had success over the years at attracting out-of-state students, many experts warn that this isn’t a strategy that can be carried out instantly — and that not every state university is seen by 18-year-olds nationwide as a desirable location.

Lucido says it is important for colleges to be honest about their motivations for going for more out-of-state or international students. In many cases, he says, “this isn’t about globalization or increased educational diversity. They need the money.” He praises the University of California System (a system that could have tremendous diversity within its own state) for being forthright about this motive, but says that many others are not. (Very few colleges, even among the minority of institutions that meet the full need of admitted applicants, extend that policy to international students, so recruiting outside the United States frequently focuses on those with the means to pay.)

We looked at this same issue with Virginia public universities here, when one legislator argued our state schools should admit more in-state students at the same time the legislation continues to cut public funding.

6.  Finally, finally, in breaking news:  UVa announced today the University will offer a four year program providing students the opportunity to earn a bachelor’s degree in three years and a master’s degree in the fourth. Here’s the news blurb. Here’s the UVa website on 3+1. The money connection:  a traditional five year program for the cost of four. Of course, it also helps keep students on campus for four years instead of three or three and a half, after entering with a number of college credits from high school. Win/win?

Any thoughts? What have you been reading? As always, your comments are welcome…

Related articles

• You: Universities Seeking Out Students of Means (nytimes.com)
• The Dumbing of America: Effects of the Economy on American Post Secondary Education Practices (biojobblog.com)

Monday is Fun Day…

Today’s view from my window is a drab, grey day. Add to that:  All I could think about much of the past weekend was whether it was a bigger drag to be a high school senior (like Mod Squad Pete) or the parent of a high school senior (like, umm, me).

Pete had a long list of tasks:

1. homework for a full college-prep course load (interim grades will be reported in the next week or two),
2. his standard extracurricular load of [mostly] sports and music, including practices, lessons, concerts, and games,
3. a list of household chores (which includes doing his own laundry and driving siblings to some of their activities),
4. selling ads for journalism class (with friends, so this might have been a fun thing),
5. meeting up with a study group (also counts as socializing, right?),
6. and, the ever-present list of tasks related to getting into college (way too long to list here, but this will give you an idea).

Last week offered up a true highlight:  his jazz vocal group CD was launched — great music, great launch party, everyone is happy with the product (including Pete’s product and brochure design).

But for the most part, there’s no getting away from the list, nor the attention of his parents. And that, upon occasion, wears me out, too.

Image via CrunchBase

So, forget the latest college news for now. I’ll get to that another day.

For your entertainment:

• A highly appropriate Sporcle quiz (and if you have not yet met Sporcle and its “mentally stimulating diversions,” feel free to thank me for the time-sink).
• Followed by a YouTube tribute to Pete’s favorite saying when I succumb to the stress: “Mom. You are freaking out.”

Related articles

• One High School Senior’s To-Do List (ypulse.com)
• Back to school: Tips for high school seniors from recent grads (pennlive.com)
• In praise of Sporcle.com (ken-jennings.com)

Wednesday Weekly Reader: 5 Stories.

News from the college search / admissions / finance front.

1.  Each day this week, Jacques Steinberg‘s NYT education blog, The Choice, is featuring questions from HS students and their parents answered by the authors of College Admission: From Application to Acceptance, Step by Step. Great Q&A so far, with more to come.

The Choice has lined up the authors of a new book — which bills itself as “the ultimate user’s manual” for college applicants, and loosely follows, as its model, the “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” series — to field questions about what high school seniors and juniors (and their parents) should be doing now on the college admissions front.

2.  How financially-literate are college freshman? How do they react when they are target-marketed by their own college and their own peers? See this article from the NYT about the marketing partnerships colleges are embracing (UNC busing new students to shopping parties at Target) and the ones that surprise them (American Eagle Outfitters-paid students helping new students on move-in day).

The lines aren’t always clear. U.N.C. officials, for example, say they don’t currently have a clear handle on how many students work as brand ambassadors — but it could be several hundred or more. “I don’t think we have a good grip on it,” Mr. Crisp says. “We are going to need to get a good grip on it.”

He is blunt about the fact that student-to-student marketing has only recently come to the school’s attention. Asked how U.N.C. is handling it, he acknowledges, “Honestly, not very well.”

The challenge, he says, is to balance potential student employment opportunities against practices that could manipulate undergraduates or dilute the U.N.C. experience.

3.  USA Today’s College blog offers five steps for figuring out your college application list.

In addition to winnowing down the list, wise high schoolers must divide their application choices into three categories: reach (a category that includes schools whose admission standards are a bit higher than the student’s record, but a place where they would be thrilled to attend), match (schools where the standards are nearly perfectly aligned with the student’s academic record and where they would be happy as a student) and safety (less-competitive institutions where, if applications to the other two categories fail to produce an admission, a student is pretty much guaranteed to be accepted and will feel at home).

4.  Here’s a piece from GOOD on why textbooks are so expensive, noting students protested in 1939 when textbook prices rose to $3, and providing a look at the textbook publishing business model.

Ultimately what frustrates Weil about the debate over the cost of textbooks is that government  officials complain in public about the issue, but then they’ll turn around and vote for or authorize cuts to higher education.“At the end of the day,” he says, “how disingenuous are these folks when they say they’re concerned about students and debt?”

5.  Finally, here’s a reward for sticking around. Just when I found myself fed up with whatever college or college-business related stories I was reading last weekend, I chanced upon this long, provocative, thoughtful piece by Mark Edmundson:  Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here? Edmundson, an English Professor at UVa, takes on the purpose of a college education:

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.

But then again,

Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go. Randall Jarrell once said that if he were a rich man, he would pay money to teach poetry to students. (I would, too, for what it’s worth.) In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning.

Thanks, prof, for reminding me of what we hope our students may find for themselves — not the doping out the way the place runs, but finding a life’s work that is such a passion it’s close to being play.

What have you been reading? Any comments, please add them below.

Related articles

• Seeking Your Back-to-School Questions on Admissions (thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com)

College Rankings: Ignore or dive into the deep end.

No. 1 in College Tees.

Today all of the college reporters, consultants, bloggers, and more (clearly, including me) will report or comment on the release of the US News & World Report Best Colleges Ranking for 2012.

This is big news in higher ed because:

1. Higher ed is a very, very, very big business.
2. It sells a lot of magazines for US News & World Report (a magazine that no longer exists in print but for its college-related issues) and creates a lot of press. A 2007 press release from USN&WR stated within three days of the release their website received 10,000,000 page views, compared to 500,000 average views in a typical month.
3. US colleges and universities pay very close attention to their own and their competitors’ rankings, whether they admit to it or not. Bragging rights — to prospective students and to wealthy alumni — are on the line.
4. Many, if not all, of those same colleges and universities do what they can to game the system, and the system seems quite game-able. Many of the metrics — acceptance rate, peer assessment, admissions yield, and more — are susceptible to manipulation.

Want to read more about that last point?

See Zac Bissonnette, author of Debt-Free U., for his point by point rebuttal of the USN&WR college rankings, pp. 115-128.

Andrew Ferguson, author of Crazy U., provides a more historical view of the USN&WR college rankings, including the disdain college presidents had for this ‘beauty contest’ from the beginning in 1983, to specifics on how the rankings have been gamed, pp. 37-54.  Here’s a quick clip of Ferguson’s highly entertaining prose:

The university people… cringe at the notion that their students are mere consumers rather than spiritual entities whose souls require their special nourishment. They’re appalled by the unstoppable imperialism of the market — the relentless intrusion of cost-benefit logic, even into a realm that its practitioners hoped might be kept free from the market’s vulgarities.

It’s only natural, then, that they respond to this business mentality in the way they think businessmen would. They cheat.

What’s a prospective student to do? Take your pick:

1. Ignore them; determine what’s important to you.
2. Pay attention to the methodology; see if it fits with what’s important to you.
3. Work on your essays. [Universal advice for college seniors.]

If you really want to take a look at college rankings, go for it — just don’t forget to check out how they put them together.

1.  The granddaddy of them all:  the US News & World Report Best Colleges Rankings. Bob Morse, the director of data research, on their methodologies here.

2.  The Princeton Review offers lots of options within its rankings, including the Green Honor Roll (high eco ranking) and the Financial Aid Honor Roll (high in generosity). See their methodology here.

3.  Forbes Magazine weighs in with America’s Top Colleges, as they “try and evaluate the college purchase as a consumer would:  Is it worth spending as much as a quarter of a million dollars for this degree?” Methodology provided by the Center for College Affordability & Productivity and it can be found here.

4.   Newsweek/The Daily Beast offers a whole slew of College Rankings, each with its own methodology. For example, the International list uses data from the two international listings below (#7 and #8) along with another listing from Spain and assigns its own weight to each datapoint.

5.  The Wall Street Journal offers ‘Top Recruiting Rankings‘. Anyone surprised that more students are recruited for jobs at larger universities? Here’s how they develop the rankings. (NB: these rankings were published on 9/13/2010.)

6.  Rugg’s Recommendations used to be available in book form; now available in pdf form by email. I wrote about it here.

7.  The 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities, also known as the Shanghai Ranking, was released in August. The rankings are searchable by field or by area of study. Hard to find the methodology on their website, but Wikipedia offers it here.

8.  The Times Higher Education World University Rankings (which gets the coolest logo award, hands down) offers 2010-11 listings here. The 2011-12 listings will be available October 6, 2011. At one minute past midnight. That’s probably Greenwich Mean Time, in case you want to catch it as soon as it’s posted. There are a number of links related to the methodology, but my favorite is this one, humbly titled: Robust, transparent, and sophisticated.

9.  Finally, I have a fondness for the new rankings offered by Washington Monthly, if only because they’ve taken a completely different approach, looking at outcomes, instead of inputs:

Conventional rankings like those published by U.S. News & World Reportare designed to show what colleges can do for you. Since 2005, our rankings have posed a different question: What are colleges doing for the country? Higher education, after all, isn’t just important for undergraduates. We all benefit when colleges produce groundbreaking research that drives economic growth, when they offer students from low-income families the path to a better life, and when they shape the character of future leaders. And we all pay for it, through hundreds of billions of dollars in public subsidies. Everyone has a stake in how that money is spent.

That’s why one-third of each college’s score on our rankings is based on social mobility: How committed are they to enrolling low-income students and helping them earn degrees? Our second category looks at research production and success at sending undergraduates on to PhDs. Finally, we give great weight to service. It’s not enough to help students look out for themselves. The best colleges encourage students to give something back.

Speaking of outcomes, wouldn’t most parents/prospective college customers be interested in finding out which colleges rank highly on the National Survey of Student Engagement?  Too bad those results are available only to the participating institutions.

Related articles

• Famous College Ranking Lists Failing America? (npr.org)
• WaPo Profile of Bob Morse of U.S. News (taxprof.typepad.com)

College at a discount, or Extreme College Couponing!

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The Chicago Tribune reported last week that a Chicago-based private university, National Louis University, is offering a Groupon for one of its  graduate-level courses. The course proposes to help someone who has no teaching experience, nor much exposure to teaching, determine whether this is a career path they might wish to follow.  [H/T to Jenna Johnson at the Washington Post‘s Campus Overload]

NLU is offering a discount of nearly 60 percent on tuition — the three hour course usually costs $2,232, the Groupon offers it for $950. If someone signs up for the course, gets interested in teaching, and wants to enroll in the Master’s program, they will need to apply for admission and be prepared to complete 33 more credit hours at the regular rate (an additional $24,552 + fees, housing, etc.).

I particularly like GOOD’s take on this. See the full post here.

Call me old-fashioned, but you can figure out if you want to be a teacher for free. Thanks to budget cuts, schools are pretty short-staffed, so if you want some field experience, all you have to do is call a school and ask to volunteer in a classroom. You’ll be able to talk to teachers about the pros and cons of the profession and learn how to earn your credential. Or you could head to the library and check out one of the many books written by teachers after their first year in the classroom, or read online about the issues and trends impacting the field.

Even if you count gas money, the cost of a DIY “class” will cost a tiny fraction of National Louis’ $950 sale price. True, you won’t earn three college credits for figuring out if you want to be a teacher, but students taking the class aren’t guaranteed acceptance into the school’s master’s in teaching program. If they aren’t admitted, they’ve paid a lot of money for credits they can’t use. Wouldn’t it be nice if a full education was affordable for everyone without a one-week coupon?

We’ve long been reading about net rates and tuition discounts, but this — a coupon — is a first. Given the combined conditions of tough economy, higher ed bubble, and almost nonexistent job market for college grads… do you think we’ll see more innovative discounting?

Perhaps, and especially if it gets the name of your university into the national press.

If, as has been reported, the vendor receives about 50 percent of the Groupon purchase price [there is no way of knowing the details, since Groupon says every deal is negotiated case by case], then NLU spent about $27K to offer 15 Groupons. Care to estimate how much they netted in exposure in national media and the blogosphere? See below just a few of the article links that popped up on my search…

If you were the admissions officer for a relatively unknown University, wouldn’t this tempt you?

Related articles

• College Now 57% Off [Higher Learning] (gawker.com)
• Groupon Offers Discount For College Tuition (inquisitr.com)
• The Fine Print on that Groupon Tuition Deal (studentactivism.net)
• Groupon offers cheap university tuition (techradar.com)
• Tuition too high? Chicago university offers online discount (thestar.com)
• Edsurge: Word Jousts, Groupons For Higher Ed, And The Flipped Classroom (fastcompany.com)
• Groupon Bargain for Grad-Level Education (abcnews.go.com)
• Groupon: The Future of Higher Education? (slog.thestranger.com)
• University to Offer First Groupon for Course Tuition (mashable.com)

Wednesday Weekly Reader: You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

Student Union at Oklahoma State University. Image via Wikipedia

Recent reports from the college search / admissions / finance front.

1.  Inside Higher Ed:  Beyond the Standard Essay.  Robert Sternberg, the new Provost of Oklahoma State University, brought with him clear ideas about the limitations of standardized testing (from his work in Psychology and as a Dean at Tufts University).  Sternberg has spent years trying to develop ways for colleges to find prospective students with talents and qualities that may not show up in standardized test scores.

…He has argued that the right kind of essay prompts or project-oriented questions can reveal creativity, commitment to community and other qualities that might well merit admission to college — even for applicants whose test scores might be a bit lower than those of others…

Three of the questions being tested are these:

• “Music spans time and culture. Explain how the lyrics of one of your favorite songs define you or your cultural experience.”
• “If you were able to open a local charity of your choice, what type of charity would it be, how would you draw people to your cause, and whom would it benefit?”
• “Today’s movies often feature superheroes and the supernatural. If you could have one superpower, what would it be, and how would you use it? Who would be your archenemy, and what would be his or her superpower?”

For the doubters of taking a new approach to admissions…

…he suggested thinking about the state of society. “Our society has made the serious mistake of overemphasizing analytical skills in creating social stratification, with the result that we end up with people in top positions who are very analytical but who may lack creative, practical, and most importantly, wisdom-based skills,” he said. “Look at our leaders in government and finance. How many of them would you call wise?”

2.  150 Very Important Words. Consultant Mark Montgomery offers advice on how to respond to the Common Application‘s prompt to elaborate on one extracurricular activity in 150 words. While acknowledging how tough it is to write something ‘personal, meaningful, and interesting’ with so few words, Montgomery offers ten tips to help. Here’s one:

Consider elaborating on an activity that is not on the activities list or resume.  For example, perhaps your extended family shares Sunday dinner together regularly, and this ritual has had a big influence on you and helped to shape your feelings about family.  Maybe you actually enjoy mowing your lawn every week, making it look nice by paying attention to details. Perhaps you ride your bike to school every morning, and you use that time to notice details on your route, and get your head together before and after your workday.

[Think 150 words sounds like plenty of space? The two paragraphs above this — the one beginning with the number 2 and the block quote — contain 148 words.]

Courtesy of Amazon.

3.  Here’s an article from Smart Money about the unanticipated costs beyond tuition, room and board. One estimate suggests $4,000 above the quoted costs; another says to figure on 10% more than the quoted costs. Since the article is from 2010, shall we figure these estimates are low?

Colleges are trying to be creative, says Debbie Cochrane, program director for the Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit that focuses on making college more affordable. Tuition has gotten so glaringly expensive that schools are trying to raise money in less obvious ways. Besides, once a student is enrolled, there s little a family can do to avoid these fees.

4.  Education Week quotes from Robyn Hadley’s book, Within View, Within Reach: Navigating the College-Bound Journey, to provide the top ten questions students can ask colleges to help differentiate between similar-sounding programs. My favorite question is number ten:

10. What percentage of the incoming freshmen actually graduate from the college?

5.  File this under:  You have got to be kidding me. The US News & World Report blog published four reasons to be grateful you have a student loan. No, that’s not the real title. Sorry, it’s “Student Loans Pack Surprising Benefits.” Here’s part of the intro:

Among college graduates in the 2007-2008 school year, about 65 percent finished a degree at a four-year school with debt, according to FinAid.org. The average load shouldered by those students was $23,186—excluding any PLUS loans used to finance the degrees.

Read the benefits and let me know what you think. Please, if you do follow the link, don’t neglect the comments on this post, one of which includes:

…Interesting and informative article…I’ve heard that slave ships of 18th century were designed with exceptionally sleek hulls that afforded the passengers surprisingly smooth voyage…a feature that not all ships could boast of at the time…

I think the fine folks at the Institute for College Access and Success, who, by the way, sponsor The Project on Student Debt, might have a few arguments with those “benefits.”

What have you been reading? Let me know via comments, below.

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