No Cost Carpe College!
Do you have any high school seniors or college freshmen in your life? If so, you probably need a money tree in your backyard and perhaps even a spa day. They, on the other hand, need sage advice about how to make the most of college experience. Luckily for them (sorry, not you), Mike Metzler can help. Mike’s excellent book Carpe College! Seize Your Whole College Experience is free in e-book form from now until Tuesday, 12/2 at midnight CST. Carpe College! is chock full of sage advice on how to plan for and actually achieve the least stressful, most successful transition from high school to college possible. Discover the power behind the Carpe College mantra: Know Thyself. Have a Plan. Assume No One Else Cares. Such wisdom truly has no price but is irresistible when the price is free.
Average SAT Score By INTENDED College Major
The 2014 SAT Report on College & Career Readiness published by the College Board is a treasure trove of information. Unfortunately, when this much data intersects highly charged issues, some misinformation leaks out as well. Such is the fruit of the labor that went into Here’s The Average SAT Score For Every College Major published by Business Insider. This is not to say that the article is not worth reading, but rather that its central premise is fallacious: the College Board tracked prospective majors, not actual college graduates. Nonetheless, we can learn a lot from the article and the research that supports it with the right perspective: 1. Multi-/Interdisciplinary Studies attracted the highest average composite SAT scorers. This major describes a wide range of programs in which students are not restricted to a single area of study or occupational field. One wonders if the students who selected this…
College-Bound Buzz (October 2014)
What’s going down for the college-bound? Students in the graduating high school class of 2015 are in a collective frenzy of application preparation. If you’ve written your essay, you should make sure you’ve followed all of our 7 Steps to an Amazing College Essay. If you haven’t written that all-important essay yet, get to it!! ********* If the college application process is making your family insane, you may enjoy this New York Times writer’s call to Throw Out the College Application System: We send students to spend half a day at a testing center to take the SAT. We ought to invest equal time in sending them to assessment centers to gauge their values and their social, emotional and creative capabilities. You may also consider these 10 Ways For Parents To Stay Sane During The College Application Season. ********* In September, the Hechinger Report asserted that the real cost of…
Report (Good) AP Scores
College admissions, or at least the earliest stages of the process, comes down to numbers. Any applicant is best served by providing an admissions office the grades and test scores required for more focused scrutiny. In other words, if your numbers don’t meet the predetermined value set by a college, there’s a very good chance those admissions personnel will never take the time to discover what a special snowflake you are! Of course, even this simple step becomes complicated by the variety of sources from which your numbers are drawn. Your school, obviously, reports your grades, classes, and, where applicable, state tests like Regents in an official transcript. SAT and ACT scores must arrive in official score reports from the College Board and ACT, Inc. respectively. But what about AP classes? AP classes can complicate the admissions process. These courses represent the standard for academic rigor, which means that students…
German Colleges Free for ALL Students?
Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Amidst the usual university rankings and discussion of the rising cost of a college education in the United States comes some fascinating news out of, believe it or not, Germany: all public universities in the Deutschland are now tuition free. Exciting, right? But before you pack your teen’s bags with the latest language learning software, consider some of the specifics of this new policy and German higher education. Slate offers a comprehensive explanation, from which we’ve distilled a few important points: 1. YES… this free tuition policy applies even to international students. 2. NO… the German college experience is not like the U.S. college experience. 3. MAYBE… students with the requisite independence and fluency may find this opportunity the path to a low-cost, high-quality college education. What do you think? Can you see your son or daughter attending college in Germany?
College-Bound Buzz (September 2014)
What’s going down for the college-bound? If you’re in the high school class of 2015, you’ve ideally written most or all of you your college application essay. If not, what are you waiting for?! When the lede of a provocative New Republic article asserts, “The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it,” I can’t help but read on… As for Deresiewicz’s pronouncement that “SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely,” this is bad social science. SAT correlates with parental income (more relevantly, socioeconomic status or SES), but that doesn’t mean it measures it; the correlation could simply mean that smarter parents have smarter kids who get higher SAT scores, and that smarter parents have more intellectually demanding and thus higher-paying jobs. Fortunately, SAT doesn’t track SES all that closely (only about 0.25 on a…