Chloe and Joey Are Juniors

Welcome back to what will, hopefully, be a very rewarding school year.  I want to begin with a post that focuses on juniors who are planning to attend college after graduation.  Two great kids whom I'm lucky to have as neighbors, Chloe and Joey, are juniors this year and in June I gave them this timeline to help them navigate all that the college bound student needs to accomplish junior year.

Recommended Junior Year Timeline

June - September 

- If you haven't taken an interest inventory through your school, I suggest you visit 

http://www.college.gov and use it to get information on careers by scrolling down and clicking "Explore Careers".  This will help you find careers that relate to different areas of interest.  This site also has a lot of financial aid information or you can go directly to http://www.careeronestop.org.

- Once you get some career ideas, you can go to http://www.bls.gov.  Scroll down the "Publications" tab to "Career Guides" and click onto the Occupational Outlook Handbook.  Another good site to use to investigate careers, especially in the math and science areas, is www.careercornerstone.org.

- Go to collegeboard.org and do a college match which will give you an idea of which specific colleges/programs you may want to consider.

-Download a college visit checklist to use when you visit colleges.  A good one is available at bigfuture.collegeboard.org.  

October - November

- Take the PSAT.

- Investigate summer programs open to juniors such as the Prudential Prestigious Awards.  Recipients receive scholarship money and attend a week long conference in Washington, D.C. in the early spring.  More info can be found at spirit.prudential.com.

- Zinch.com also has a scholarship finder.

- Notify your counselor that you are interested in summer programs such as Governor's School - www.nj.gov/govschool and New Jersey Boys State/New Jersey Girls State www.boysandgirlsstate.org.

December

- You will receive your PSAT results and should use them to continue with your SAT prep.  I say "continue" because your schoolwork, study and even general reading is all "SAT prep".  Use them to see where your strengths and weaknesses are.  There are many SAT prep books you can use and even online test prep at sites like www.grockit.com and unigo.com.

January - June

- Schedule your SAT in the spring along with Subject Tests, if necessary.

- Continue investigating/visiting colleges and programs and applying to summer programs of interest.  Virtual tours can be found on many college websites and also at www.campustour.com.

- Go to www.neighborhoodscout.com to check out the safety of the areas in which your schools of interest are located.

- Also go to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education website, theFIRE.org, to see your chosen schools' current policies "restricting individual rights, as well as that campus' advertised commitments to freedom of expression."

- Download a copy of the Common Application at www.commonapp.org. Even if your colleges of interest don't use or require it (over 400 do!), it will give you a good idea of what information will be included on most college applications.  You can begin the activity sheet portion now, if you haven't begun one already.  You can also see what the general application essay topics look like.  If you begin one now, you can most likely edit it to use senior year.  Go to www.englishclub.com to get some great tips on writing the college application essay.

There are numerous college ratings lists and guides.  A recent one I particularly like can be found in the August 12, 2013 edition of Forbes magazine.  They take the Top 300 Colleges, "rankings compiled exclusively for Forbes by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity" and give them grades based on their fiscal soundness.  They created the Forbes College Financial Grades and analyzed the balance sheets and operational strength of more than 900 four-year, private, not for profit schools with more than 500 students.  Public schools are included in the rankings but not graded.  "Combining Forbes'  Top College rating with its new Financial Grades can help you home in on not just the best schools for the buck but also those that are likely to be around for many years to come."

"Lucie Laponsky, former V.P. of finance at Baltimore's Goucher College and a higher-ed financial consultant, cautions against ignoring the financial health of the colleges you choose: 'Visible signs of financial stress can include fewer classes offered less frequently, more classes taught by adjunct professors, less money for clubs and cutbacks in the upkeep of campus facilities.'"

The next post will appear on October 23 and will include a discussion of a recently published book, 

300 Best Jobs Without a Four Year Degree in addition to a summary of a July Daily Caller post, "As College Costs Increase, Alternatives Arise".  I will also comment on another article about alternatives to college entitled, "Thinking Outside the Education Box".

Happy 2013!

It seems that at the beginning of each new year there is a plethora of lists naming the top 10 this or the worst ten of that from the previous calendar year.  There are a few categories and "winners" that might interest you.  Before we get into the lists - a word of caution.  Remember the recent dust up when it was discovered that George Washington University had "misrepresented" the data as to what percentage of freshmen in fall 2011 were in the top 10% of their high school graduating classes. (The Washington Post, November 9, 2012, "Data Errors Could Mean 'Slight Change' in GWU Ranking", by Nick Anderson)  As with any ranking it's important to know if the date on which the rank is based is accurate.  Basura in - basura out.  For you non-Spanish speakers - Garbage in (in GWU's case, inaccuracies) -garbage out.

On November 15, 2012, Colleen Kane posted "America's Deadliest Jobs 2012" on CNBC.com.  The statistics were obtained from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and used to rank jobs with the highest fatal work injury rates.  The number one "honor" fell to workers in the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting industries with a rate of 24.4 fatalities per 100,000 full time workers.  By comparison, the industry with the lowest fatality rate is education and health services with .8 per 100,000 workers.

On November 29, 2012, Townhall.com ran a post "2012's Worst Paying College Degrees".  They used the 2012-2013 College Salary Report from a great site - Payscale.com.  Payscale used data from its online salary database to produce a list of college degrees that go along with the "lowest median pay".  Child and Family Studies is lowest at $37,700.  Their analyst, Katie Bardaro, stated, "According to our research, people in these majors typically believe their work makes the world a better place."  Townhall is blunt in response:
    To translate, the people in these majors are perhaps so disconnected from
    reality that they do not recognize that the reason their trades provide
    so little return on their educational investment is because they really
    do not require unique ability, which is why society does not
    reward them with greater compensation.
The authors assert that higher education then "exploits" these individuals by having them pay nearly the same amount of money as students pay for degrees leading to careers that society values a lot more. This is a brilliant observation.  It would seem to take a lot more money to build labs for biomedical students than to man a program for most social work majors, yet the tuition is basically the same, perhaps with the addition of a nominal "lab fee" for the biomed students.

Paul Toscano and Colleen Kane also use data from Payscale for  their CNBC.com post of September 27, 2012, "Colleges That Bring In the Highest Paycheck 2012".  They posted the top 10 highest earning schools whose grads make an average salary of $122,500 at mid-career.  In contrast, the bottom 10 schools' graduates earn an average of $44,490 by mid-career.  A point of interest to the "earnest" student - "...the top party school by salary potential is University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign (UIUC) with a mid-career salary of $95,900."

The Business Insider published a post by Abby Rigers and Gus Lubin on November 20, 2012 entitled, "The Most Dangerous Colleges in America".  They used data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report. The ranking was based on a "combination of violent crime rank and property crime rank, with violent crime weighted four times higher".  The post can be found at www.businessinsider.com.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has praised seven colleges as "best for free speech in 2012".  They are:  James Madison University;  The College of William and Mary; University of Mississippi; Mississippi State University; University of Tennessee - Knoxville; University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania.  FIRE's president, Greg Lukianoff, has written a book, Unlearning Liberty:  Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.

Up to Speed - Review of Posts from January-June 2011

This post will also include some of the websites and books referred to.

January 8, 2011
Discussion of how students should use their PSAT results and prepare for the SAT. Websites of interest - www.collegeboard.org, www.grockit.com. SAT study guides are available at www.amazon.com.

January 19, 2011
Discussion of how to use www.collegeboard.org

January 26, 2011
Discussion of whether to choose a two or four year program

February 2, 2011
Information on NJ Boys and Girls State Programs www.boysandgirlsstate.org

February 16, 2011
Discussion of features of www.unigo.com, specifically College Match

March 2, 2011
Choosing a College, continued. The book, The Best 373 Colleges,
is featured.

March 16, 2011
Discussion of "feeder schools", undergraduate schools from which many graduate programs accept students

March 30, 2011
Virtual campus tours, college rep visits and college fairs www.campustour.com

April 13, 2011
College admission and the Naviance guidance delivery system www.naviance.com

April 27, 2011
Suggestions for how to get the most out of a campus visit
College Visit Checklist available at www.unigo.com

May 11, 2011
Campus Safety www.neighborhoodscout.com

May 25, 2011
Intellectual freedom on campus www.theFIRE.org
Closing of the American Mind

June 8, 2011
What juniors should do during summer vacation to prepare for senior year. Good review for those who need to catch up!

June 22, 2011
Writing the college application essay www.commonap.org, www.englishclub.com

Feeder Schools

We're just about at the point where you'll have whittled down your list of college possibilities from a hundred or more to a few dozen or less. In the past few posts, I've written about finding schools with good programs in the areas of study in which you're interested. If you have a goal in mind that includes graduate study, you should consider whether your choices are good "feeder schools".

I've written about what a great resource Dr. Sowell's Choosing a College is. In it he speaks about schools that are good "feeder schools", those from which many respected graduate programs accept applicants. By reading Dr. Sowell's book, I found out that the Office of Institutional Research at Franklin and Marshall College issued a publication called, Baccalaureate Origins of Doctorate Recipients: A Ranking of 4-Year Private Institutions. I contacted the research office at Franklin and Marshall and they no longer issue the publication but Dr. Alan Caniglia was kind enough to respond to me and give me a lead that resulted in finding an article out of the University of Illinois. "Graduate and Research Programs" gives synopses of different sites that offer rankings and information about graduate programs. Studies are referenced that show which pre-professional undergraduate programs graduate the most students who get into graduate programs. I found the article at http://www.library.illinois.edu/edx/rankings/rankgrad.html The National Research Council in Washington is given as a source as it is in Dr. Sowell's book. However, these printouts are not free. Your guidance office or library might have a volume of the printouts entitled, Baccaulaureate Origins of Doctorate Recipients from US Universities.

What I found most helpful in the University of Illinois article was the synopsis of a great FREE article that was written by Elizabeth Bernstein, staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The article is entitled, "Want to Go to Harvard Law?" and was published in September 2003. It is available at http://wsjclassroom.com/college/feederschools.htm on The Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition site. (I am struck by the number of times in these posts that I've referred to something I've found through The Wall Street Journal. It is a fantastic resource!) The article gives a list of the most effective feeder colleges and the methodology by which they were chosen. It is an excellent tool for students whose career goal necessitates graduate school.

That may have seemed like a very detailed and roundabout way to direct you to a site I could have given you in one paragraph. In December I posted about "leads", detecting information from a site that leads you to another where you learn even more. That's what I did to find this information. You should be doing the same. In this advanced technological age you can find information in a matter of hours that formerly might have taken days or even weeks. I remember snail-mail and microfiche! (I just asked my 20 something daughter how to spell that word and she said, "What's that?" You kids have it easy!)