Student Loan Blog : undergraduate admissions

Wilkes University Puts Freshman Recruits Front and Center and Billboard-Size

Student Loan Girl — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:56:00 GMT

Wilkes University, a small, private school in northeastern Pennsylvania, is using a quirky new in-your-face $120,000 ad campaign to get the attention of today’s media- and marketing-savvy students.

The university is plastering personalized messages on billboards, pizza boxes, gas pumps, and even on MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to students it wants to make a part of its freshman class, reports Michael Rubinkam in a story by The Associated Press (“Pennsylvania College Woos Students by Putting Them in Ads,” April 30, 2008).

The “trendsetting and forward-thinking” marketing campaign appeals to the “look-at-me generation,” teens comfortable sharing all-things-personal on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, says Nancy Costopulos, chief marketing officer of the American Marketing Association.

The Message: Personalized and Not for the Shy

Wilkes features applicants in its ads who have a “mix of talents and determination” and who live in markets where the university wants to promote itself, says Jack Chielli, the school’s director of marketing. Students must also consent to having their names used.

The ads, writes Rubinkam, are meant “to convey the message that the school gets to know its students personally and pays close attention to their needs.”

To get messages with the right personal touch, 160over90, the Philadelphia marketing firm contracted by Wilkes, interviews participating students and their friends and families, uncovering likes, dislikes, hobbies, nicknames.

The agency uses the information it gleans from these in-depth interviews to design the highly personalized ads that have turned some college-bound seniors into quasi-celebrities in their high schools and communities:

“Lake Lehman senior Greg Heindel: You give your time at the soup kitchen, the firehouse, and your church summer camp. Wilkes University would like to give you something — a top-quality education.”
“Hey Kristen Pecka. Only your closest friends at Central Catholic call you Pecka-lecka-lecka. Choose Wilkes University and add 2,362 more people to that list.”
“Scranton High senior Nicole Pollock: Our goal at Wilkes University is to be as much a mentor as your mother has been. (Now, if we could only make her ravioli.)”

Each ad includes an invitation to “call a Colonel” (the school’s mascot) and provides a phone number that plays a recorded message from a current Wilkes student.

It’s the Thought That Counts

Even if targeted recruits end up choosing another school, says Chielli, he considers the ads successful as long as they continue to grab attention and get other students to think about Wilkes.

But besides drawing more students to apply, the school wants to help make it possible for them to actually attend: Nearly all students receive some form of financial aid apart from student loans to help cover the $25,000 price tag. Wilkes awards $22 million in financial aid each year.

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By the Numbers: Top 10 Undergraduate Business Schools

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:53:00 GMT

Are you a future MBA who sees yourself building the next Trump–like empire or heading up the new 21^st-century tech giant that will finally unseat Microsoft?

If you’re planning on joining the 20 percent of college students who major in business and you’re on the hunt to find the best business school for undergrads that could give you your head start on mega-mogul success, here’s some help.

We’ve got the vitals on the 10 best from BusinessWeek’s list of the country’s Top 50 Undergrad Business Programs for 2008.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia

The world’s first collegiate business school, established in 1881, and BusinessWeek’s number-one program for the third year in a row.

Previous Rank: 1
Tuition: $35,916
Full-Time Enrollment: 2,519
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 16%
School Mascot: the Quakers

McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia

Previous Rank: 2
Tuition: $8,690
Full-Time Enrollment: 652
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 34%
School Mascot: the Virginia Cavaliers

Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame
South Bend, Indiana

The Mendoza College offers undergraduate degrees in accountancy, finance, marketing, and management (with your choice of management track in consulting, entrepreneurship, or information technology).

Previous Rank: 7
Tuition: $35,187
Full-Time Enrollment: 1,626
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 29%
School Mascot: the Fighting Irish

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

Previous Rank: 10
Tuition: $19,291
Full-Time Enrollment: 708
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 37%
School Mascot: the Big Red Bears

Goizueta Business School at Emory University
Atlanta

Previous Rank: 4
Tuition: $34,336
Full-Time Enrollment: 622
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 44%
School Mascot: Dooley, the Spirit of Emory

Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Combining a liberal arts and business education, the three-year Bachelor of Business Administration program allows you to apply during your freshman year of college and begin the BBA program as a sophomore. If you’re a high school senior, you may be still be able to apply for the Ross BBA program through the Preferred Admissions process.

Previous Rank: 5
Tuition: $12,585
Full-Time Enrollment: 1,069
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 49%
School Mascot: the Wolverines

Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah

Earn your Bachelor of Science in accountancy, management, or information systems.

Previous Rank: 8
Tuition: $3,840
Full-Time Enrollment: 1,616
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 74%
School Mascot: Cosmo the Cougar

New York University Stern School of Business
New York

Previous Rank: 9
Tuition: $36,524
Full-Time Enrollment: 2,335
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 24%
School Mascot: the Bobcats

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Previous Rank: 6
Tuition: $34,986
Full-Time Enrollment: 246
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 12.5%
School Mascot: the Beaver

McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas

Choose a major in accounting, finance, international business, marketing, management information systems, management, supply chain management, or engineering route to business for your BBA.

According to the McCombs website, more current CEOs in the S&P 500 have graduated from McCombs than from any other public business school.

Previous Rank: 13
Tuition: $8,908
Full-Time Enrollment: 3,969
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 52% (in 2006)
School Mascot: Bevo the Longhorn

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Seeing the World as Generation WWW: Mindset List Zeroes In On What It Means to Be 18

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:54:00 GMT

Who needs a time capsule when Beloit College does all the work for you?

The college in Beloit, Wis., doesn’t squirrel away any buried nostalgia, but it will help remind you of the world you came from. Its popular mindset list, which runs down the trends, figures and events that have defined each year’s 18-year-olds, aims to encapsulate the historical perspectives of its annual freshman class.

Think you’ve got a handle on the generation gap? Beloit’s Mindset List, now in its 10^th annual version, will help shed some light on how the world has changed for the average freshman.

So to help you unearth the worldview of today’s Class of 2011—most of them born in 1989—here’s a rundown of what we feel are the list’s top 25 standouts.

Beloit College’s Mindset List^® for the Class of 2011

1. What Berlin Wall?

2. Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.

3. They never “rolled down” a car window.

4. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

5. They have grown up with bottled water.

6. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.

7. Rap music has always been mainstream.

8. “Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.

9. They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.

10. Women’s studies major have always been offered on campus.

11. Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks and Bart Simpson.

12. Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.

13. Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.

14. U2 has always been more than a spy plane

15. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.

16. Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.

17. Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.

18. They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.

19. Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.

20. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympic venue, not the scene of a massacre.

21. MTV has never featured music videos.

22. They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.

23. They’re always texting 1 n other.

24. Avatars have nothing to do with Hindu deities.

25. Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.

Talk to the education finance advisors at NextStudent. They have all the information and advice you need on student loans. Check out www.nextstudent.com.

Student Loan Girl

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Oh, When the Men Come Marching In

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 01:40:00 GMT

Hurt by falling enrollment numbers and poor management of its endowment, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va., has changed its name: It’s dropped the hyphen.

Oh yeah, and the part that reads it’s just for women.

For the first time in its 115-year history, Randolph College, as it is now known, is recruiting and enrolling men, which has sent its all-female student body into an uproar.

About 70 men plan to enroll in the historically single-sex school this fall, despite the student body’s appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court to reverse the change.

And perhaps rubbing salt into the wound, the male march into coeducation will be led by a new male president, according to an article by Elia Powers that appeared in Inside Higher Ed (“Amid Controversy, Coeducation,” Aug. 23, 2007).

Boys and Art: Can Both Save Randall?

Not only is the school banking on its new coed status to save it from financial ruin, writes Powers, it’s considering “selling millions of dollars worth of art acquired with funds from a 1928 trust that were intended to form a permanent collection” to boost its endowment.

The move to sell off pieces of Randolph’s history has rightfully upset alumnae and former faculty. The college art museum’s associate director even resigned in protest.

Opponents say “if not for years of fiscal mismanagement,” the school—which is under review by its accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools—would never have had to resort to such drastic measures.

Members of the alumnae association wanted five more years to explore ways to keep Randolph’s single-sex focus, but “the college has had to dip too frequently into its $140 million endowment,” Powers wrote in another Inside Higher Ed article last year. Randolph’s board of trustees “can see the end of the straw,” says the school’s interim president and board chairwoman (“Anger Over Coeducation Plan,” Aug. 11, 2006).

Disgusted, opponents have put a 27 percent dent in financial contributions to the school by appealing directly to donors to withhold their gifts.

It’s a drop officials say was completely expected. While it may hurt now, school officials say the college has far more to gain by welcoming testosterone into the fold of this year’s 665-student class.

It’s Raining Men

While financial improprieties may have sparked the push toward coeducation at Randolph, it appears that the end of single-sex education may be on the horizon at other historically all-female schools for no reasons other than student preference, and men will be parading into even more previously male-free environments.

The ebb of female-only colleges didn’t come, however, without a corresponding change in all-male schools.

“The decline [in the number of women’s colleges] began 35 years ago when prestigious men’s colleges opened their doors to women, who then applied in vast numbers,” writes Lisa Wogan in Ms. Magazine (“When Wells Run Dry: Another Women’s College Opens the Door to Men,” Spring 2005).

In recent years, former women’s colleges like Wells College in N.Y., Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass., and Immaculata Women’s College outside Philadelphia have gone coed.

Why? In the face of dwindling enrollment, they had to choose to either open the door to men or shut their doors altogether.

After Wells announced it would go coed in 2005, by February of that year, Wogan writes, it had already seen its first-year applications jump more than 100 percent from 381 to 775. Of those applicants, 150 were men.

The low student-to-faculty ratios that small, single-sex liberal arts colleges provide are attractive, but if schools are forced to cut funding to student programs as they struggle to maintain minimum break-even enrollment numbers, then who really benefits?

“Even with high academic standards and generous financial assistance, market research indicates that fewer than a third of today’s college-bound women will even consider a woman’s college,” writes reporter Sean Tubbs in a Voice of America article (“Women’s Colleges Resist Co-Ed Trend,” Oct. 31, 2006).

If most women won’t even look at a brochure for an all-women’s college, then maybe it’s time to acknowledge that men may just be the equal-opportunity cash cow (or is that cash bull?) schools like Randolph need. Coeducation doesn’t have to mean the death of the qualities that attracted women to the school.

Doubters should look to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., which in 1969 became the first all-women’s college to admit men, who now make up 40 percent of its student body of 2,400. Back then, Vassar could have merged with Yale, which itself was male-only at the time, but chose to build upon its own reputation as a quality school to attract its own male student body.

Like Vassar, perhaps Randall can still embody the character on which it was founded, even if on its face, and in name, it looks a little different.

The student loan advisors at NextStudent are helpful and knowledgeable about student loans. They’re a trusted source in getting you the appropriate information about your student loan consolidation, student loan options and helping students get the college financing they need. Go to www.nextstudent.com for more information.

Student Loan Girl

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America’s “Best” Colleges of 2008: Strategies for College-Bound Students to Compose Their Own List

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Once again, U.S. News & World Report’s latest ranking of colleges and universities received hordes of criticism and its yearly flogging from university presidents and officials who take issue with the magazine’s grading system. Even despite the effort of a small group of college presidents to initiate a boycott of the magazine’s survey, school participation only diminished by seven percent this year.

Touted as having the most sought-after lists of academic rankings, U.S. News compiles 25 percent (the largest portion) of its survey from college officials’ ratings of their fellow institutions. The legitimacy of these rankings, particularly those of colleges and universities, comes under fire every year, with some administrators arguing that the ranking methods lead to distorted or spurious evaluations among competing schools attempting to vault themselves up in the standings.

As more and more students graduate high school with their eyes set on higher education, the notion of what makes a college the “best” or the “right” school for a larger and increasingly diverse pool of applicants becomes all the more complicated.

While the U.S. News listings carry a certain authority after having been around for 24 years, rank-watchers should bear in mind that the rating methodology only accounts for a few, measurable dimensions of college “quality.” There are plenty of intangibles that go into defining a total college experience, and parents and students should consider expanding the criteria for their search beyond just a ranking to get at what the numbers in a magazine can’t tell you.

· First-hand accounts. Your parents and siblings are probably more than willing to talk about their alma mater, so sit them down to get the inside scoop. Use your Facebook and MySpace time to scour groups and photos from the schools on your list and to chat with current students about their school’s programs and social activities.

· See for yourself. If you can, visit the schools on your list. Those pretty pictures on the brochure won’t give you the feel of what the midday rush is like on the quad. Explore on your own in addition to guided tours, to get a sense of the general vibe of the campus and surrounding areas. Pick up a copy of the college newspaper or check it out online. Read what other students are reading, writing, debating and thinking, and ask yourself—would you fit in here?

· No one school is good at everything. Top-50 NYU is a terrific choice if you’re an aspiring actor that wants in to their nationally renowned Tisch School of the Arts. But if you see yourself joining the Peace Corps or traveling all over the world as a service volunteer, your perfect path may be the Pre-Peace Corps, International, and Non-Governmental Service concentration offered at Tier 3 Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C.

If you’re interested in a particular major or career track, you can search schools by field of study at Petersons.com. Browse school websites to get a feel for how certain departments operate, what kinds of classes are offered, and contact professors within the department to see what kind of research is being done.

Other Sources of Information

The U.S. News rankings provide a decent starting point for getting a general idea of how big-name schools compare in certain areas, but they don’t offer in-depth information or the insider’s view that would give you an idea of what day-to-day life is like on campus.

Sites like CollegeBoard.com let you search schools by location, major and cost, just to name a few, and they offer tips for planning your college career and preparing for admissions. These sites are easy to navigate and will allow you to compare your schools across specific categories..

For your parents, we recommend The Thinking Parent’s Guide to College Admissions: The Step-by-Step Program to Get Kids Into the Schools of Their Dreams.

Talk to the education finance advisors at NextStudent. They have all the information and advice you need on student loans. Check out www.nextstudent.com.

Student Loan Girl

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Creativity, Practicality and Wisdom—The New Face of Admissions?

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 18:33:00 GMT

Like the Educational Testing Service, which is piloting a new “Personal Potential Index” (discussed in our July 9 blog) that’s designed to evaluate a college applicant’s non-academic strengths and weaknesses, Tufts University has rolled out a pilot admissions program aimed at identifying applicants who possess desired qualities that wouldn’t necessarily be reflected in standardized test scores or in high school GPAs. These two pilot programs are representative of one of the current trends in admissions practices reform, a “holistic” approach that encourages schools to look beyond just numbers and evaluate applicants at a deeper level.

Where ETS’ Personal Potential Index is currently focused on graduate school candidates, Tufts University’s pilot project, known as “Kaleidoscope,” is targeted at undergraduate applicants. The Kaleidoscope program, examined in a recent article by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed (“New View of Admissions, July 11, 2007), allows undergraduate applicants to write additional, voluntary essays in response to non-traditional prompts. These supplementary essays are then used to identify applicants “who are creative, who possess practical skills, or who have wisdom about how to promote the common good—characteristics Tufts says are consistent with its vision of higher education, but which may not be reflected in SAT scores or high school grade point averages.” This way of thinking “represents one of the most significant shifts in undergraduate admissions policies for a competitive research university,” Jaschik writes.

Academic Potential Not Strictly in the Numbers

Kaleidoscope revolves around the several factors besides grades and test scores that can be predictive of academic success. Although Kaleidoscope is meant to identify intangible attributes that can’t be objectively quantified, it can actually make the admissions process less subjective. This may seem counterintuitive, but take, for example, applicants who have similar grades and test scores. With Kaleidoscope, as Jaschik explains, when trying to differentiate between these similar candidates, “admissions committees are relying on something real, not just an impression, when they argue that an applicant has creativity.” Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admissions at Tufts, regards Kaleidoscope as adding another layer of information to the application process. “I think we now have a more nuanced understanding of our students,” he’s quoted as saying in Jaschik’s article.

Uncovering Unconventional Talents

Much like reality TV shows such as “American Idol” or “So You Think You Can Dance” that force aspiring singers and dancers to prove themselves outside their niche specialties and show versatility, Kaleidoscope is moving students beyond academic safety nets and standardized comfort zones. Forget routine questions about naming a person you admire or describing a moment that changed you. Kaleidoscope topics for this year include:

What is more interesting: Gorillas or guerillas?
Use an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper to create something. You can blueprint your future home, create a new product, design a costume or a theatrical set, compose a score or do something entirely different. Let your imagination wander.

The use of Kaleidoscope doesn’t supersede an academic review. Coffin says Tufts continues to value “academic superstars” and to reject those who show they may not be able to keep up with the workload “even before any review of their Kaleidoscope essays.” Rather, the school looks to the optional essays to help distinguish among those applicants clustered in the “upper middle” who have demonstrated they have the potential to succeed academically but may rely more on their ability to think outside of the box than on standardized prowess in the classroom.

While some people may question whether Kaleidoscope admissions will result in a drop in academic quality, so far, the results haven’t borne out that concern. According to Jaschik, the scores of admitted students who benefited from the new system aren’t statistically different from those who didn’t. And in fact, mean SAT scores are up slightly. It’s important to Coffin, Jaschik writes, “for people to see that this new approach is not mutually exclusive with tough academic standards.”

The student loan advisors at NextStudent are helpful and knowledgeable about student loans. They are a trusted source in getting you the appropriate information about your student loan consolidation, student loan options and in helping students get the college financing they need. Go to www.nextstudent.com for more information.

Be sure to tune in next Thursday for my next blog on student loan advice.

Student Loan Girl

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