Academic Freebies

During the height of the college mating season, my daughter received a piece of mail from Beloit College, a wonderful liberal arts school in Wisconsin that listed its merit scholarships. The mailer contained a laundry list of Beloit’s awards that ranged from $4,000 a year to free tuition. Beloit was quite specific about who qualifies for this free cash. For a top scholarship, for instance, the school was looking for kids with an unweighted grade point average of at least 3.5, or they could be among the top 10% of their class. The school also required an SAT score of at least 1220 (on a 1600 scale) or an ACT score of 27.

There was nothing extraordinary about this scholarship notice. My
daughter received countless mailings from colleges, solicited and
unsolicited, that outlined their respective scholarship opportunities.

That frankly is the point. Merit awards have become a ubiquitous partner
in today’s courtship between colleges and high school students.
Increasingly the question to ask is not, “Do you offer merit scholarships?,”
but rather, “How generous are the ones that you provide?”
Merit money is particularly important to families that don’t qualify
for financial aid. But students who qualify for need-based financial
aid, are also eligible. If you’d like a shot at capturing some of this
money, here’s how to increase your chances:


Find the right fit. Don’t make the same mistake as the prosecutor
who tried to convince a jury to convict O.J. Simpson of murder. To
bolster his case, the prosecutor asked the ex-football star to try on the
notorious bloody glove without knowing what would happen. Of
course, as we all know, the glove didn’t fit—legal experts suggested it
had shrunk from the blood. And the chances for conviction withered
right before the courtroom television cameras.

So what does this have to do with you and your teenager? I’d suggest
that a teenager should never apply to a college without already
having a good idea of what the admissions committee is going to say
about his or her application. But more importantly, you should also
pretty much know what kind of financial package the school will ultimately
award your child. With the higher ed price tag so exorbitant,
you could be committing economic suicide if you don’t narrow your
search to schools that you believe will be generous to your child. In
fact, one of the initial questions that you should ask when looking at a
university’s or college’s glossy marketing material is this: How likely is
it that this school will extend a price break?

Know where to look for cash. A quick way to discover whether
a school awards merit money is by looking at college profiles on the
College Board’s Web site (www.collegeboard.com). Type the name of
the school into the Web site’s College QuickFinder. Once you’ve
pulled up a school’s profile, click on the Cost & Financial Aid link. This
section includes the institution’s “average non-need-based aid” per
recipient. This is another term for merit money. If you see a blank in
this space, that’s an excellent tip-off that a school doesn’t dispense
merit awards.

What the College Board’s Web site won’t tell you is what percentage
of the freshman class wins merit awards and what it takes to get
one. You can often find the answer to one or both of those questions
by visiting a school’s Web site. I’m using Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland as an example because it’s a school that
aggressively awards merit cash.

According to the College Board, Case Western Reserve’s average
merit award is $16,174. Armed with that information, I visit the
school’s Web site and learn that more than 93% of first-year students
receive some type of financial aid. The average financial aid package
is $26,989, while the cost of tuition and room and board is roughly

$44,000. The percentage of incoming students who snag a merit
award is 61%. The average award is $18,590. The school’s own figure
is more generous than the College Board’s, which is why it’s good to
double check outside figures.

The private school doesn’t provide many details on how you qualify
for this money, but the Web site does explain that even Bill Gates’
kid could qualify for a scholarship since financial income is irrelevant.
The admissions office states that scholarships are awarded to students
considered above average in the applicant pool, and it mentions that
SAT or ACT scores provide one measure. The school also notes, however,
that scores are only one measure, so many students submitting
scores below the median also receive scholarships.

Because standardized test scores are factored in, you would want
to take a look at Case Western Reserve’s range of SAT scores. For that
piece of the puzzle, head back to the school’s profile on the College
Board’s Web site and click on the SAT link. The College Board publishes
the middle 50% range of the critical reading, math, and writing
sections of the test. Few schools, at this point, appear to be using the
writing scores. At Case Western Reserve, the middle 50% of the
school’s freshmen scored between 600 and 700 on the critical reading
section and scored between 630 and 730 on the math section. That
means, for instance, that the bottom quarter of the class scored below
600 on reading, and the top 25% of the class received a score higher
than 700.

Go to the source. You can track a school’s financial aid footprints
by checking its Common Data Set. Each year, colleges and universities
compile this gold mine of statistics that includes information on
financial aid, as well as graduation rates, freshman class profile, student
retention, and many other areas.

The format for any school’s Common Data Set is identical, which
makes comparisons of different institutions a snap. If you get your
hands on this document, you’ll obtain far more data than you would
get curling up with any college guide. An easy way to find a school’s
Common Data Set is to Google the term, as well as the school’s name.
You can also type “Common Data Set” into a college’s search engine.
To illustrate what you can find in the Common Data Set, I’m going
to use Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, which is my

daughter’s school. I picked Juniata because it provides most of its students
with both need-based financial aid and merit scholarships.

For this exercise, I headed to Juniata’s five-page financial aid section
within the Common Data Set. Here’s what I learned: Of the 388
freshmen in a recent Juniata class, 347 students applied for needbased
aid. The school concluded that 310 students or 89% qualified
for need-based aid. Of that number, 304 freshmen received needbased
grants that didn’t have to be repaid. For the freshman class, the
average financial aid package was $18,763. Tuition and room and
board at the school that year was roughly $35,000.

What parents will want to know is whether the average financial
aid package contains a bunch of loans or whether it provides valuable
grants. Juniata reported that the average loan that its frosh financial
aid recipients received was $3,448 or 18% of the typical package. So
for this school, most of the aid is the desirable kind.

What I also learned by looking at Juniata’s figures is that most of
the kids who received financial aid also captured merit money. In fact,
278 students of those who qualified for need-based financial aid also
received merit money. In addition, 72 students, who were too affluent
to qualify for need-based aid, received merit awards that averaged
$12,358. The figures Juniata provided for its other students were similar
to the freshmen statistics.

When you use these figures, it’s much easier to calculate whether
a school will be affordable. If your son or daughter has assembled a list
of potential schools, print out the Common Data Set for each one of
them. Only after comparing the generosity of schools and their
requirements for merit money and financial aid, can you form a pretty
good idea of whether these schools make financial sense or whether
the hunt should continue.


Action Plan
• Investigate how generous a school is by looking at its Common Data Set numbers.
• A quick place to look for financial aid numbers is the College Board’s Web site.
Source: The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price

Stop Hyperventilating When Overlooked Academic Choices

Every spring, students and parents gasp when they read about the latest student casualties in the college admissions arms race. Each year, has seemed more difficult to get into colleges and universities as the number of high school graduates continued to mushroom. There seems to be bountiful statistics to support this phenomenon that has triggered so many panic attacks.

Recently, for instance, only 9% of applicants managed to charm their way into Yale University, while three years earlier 11% received
fat acceptance packages. During the same time period, acceptances
dropped from 16% of applicants to 13% at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and from 13% to 11% at Stanford. In illustrating just
how ridiculously impossible it is to impress the admissions gods, journalists
invariably find an Ivy reject who is a student body
president/valedictorian with perfect SAT scores and is on the verge of
discovering a cure for some horrible disease.

Reading these annual dispatches is enough to make any parents
think that their children need to be darn near perfect to have any
chance of spending four years at a first-rate school. But that’s nonsense.
In UCLA’s latest annual survey of college freshmen across the
country, more than 67% of students were attending their first choice
school. So for the vast majority of high school seniors, creeping exclusivity
is not an issue.

Even those who regrettably believe that their young lives would
end if they can’t attend one of the most selective schools on the planet
shouldn’t be discouraged. In reality, the academic bar isn’t being
raised as much as the media dispatches insist. The source of this happy
news bulletin is the Education Sector, which is a nonprofit education
policy think tank.

In examining admission statistics, Education Sector acknowledged
that the number of high schools graduates banging on college
doors has been increasing. But here’s the comforting part: The most
competitive schools are accepting more students. The Ivy League
schools, for instance, increased the number of acceptances they extended
by almost 11% between 2002 and 2006, which was greater
than the growth of high school seniors. Education Sector also looked
at roughly 60 institutions considered “most competitive” by Barron’s
Guide to Colleges and noticed the same trend. These schools accepted
199,821 student in 2002, but the number jumped by 8% to 215,738
four years later.

The increase in acceptances among select schools has been overlooked
because of the media’s fixation on applications rather than applicants.
The acceptance statistics look worse because they are
dependent on the number of applications that schools receive not the
number of applicants, which is dramatically lower. Suppose that a student
applies to five schools and gets into three. If he applies to 15
schools instead and gets into three, the result for this child is the same.

He earned an acceptance into three schools. But all the applications
he sent in made the competition look worse than it actually is.
One reason for the application creep has been the growing number
of high school graduates. In addition, more kids are applying to
more schools. In the 1960s, less than 2% of high schoolers applied to

six or more colleges, but today more than 2% are applying to at least
11 schools.

Another culprit is the number of students applying to more competitive
schools. Kevin Carey, the Education Sector’s research and
policy manager, suggests that more kids who have no chance of getting
in are knocking on the doors of the nation’s most select schools.
“There has likely been an increase in the number of unqualified students
treating the Harvard application like a Powerball ticket,” Carey
wrote in an article in The American Prospect. “An Ivy League education
can be worth millions of dollars over a lifetime. To take a shot at
one, all you need is $65 and a dream.”


Action Plan
Stay calm. The vast majority of students get accepted by their No.1 academic choice.
Source: The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price

How To Find The Hidden Truth Of Great Academic Before You Apply

On a hot summer day in 2007, Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, announced its own obituary. The college trustees voted to close the school—at least for a few years—after the class of 2008 had graduated.

The 155-year-old college, which had been founded by abolitionists, had imploded. The once proud prominent liberal arts college, was pretty much out of money, out of students (around 300 were enrolled),
and out of time.

Critiques published in The Chronicle of Higher Education
suggested that the school’s demise would hardly have been a surprise
to those with any familiarity with the school. An Antioch graduate of
the 1960s wrote this scathing observation in the Chronicle: “By the
early 1990s, its once-packed library was nearly deserted. The campus
itself was beyond seedy. Some buildings were crumbling, others were
vandalized, and many walls were spray painted with edgy graffiti. Beer
bottles and cigarette butts littered the grounds.... The library’s collection
was spare and dated, rich with pre-1970 books and serials, poor
on materials thereafter.” And esthetics and a lousy library collection
were hardly the school’s only problems.

Why dwell on the problems of a troubled school that will obviously

not be on any teenager’s list of must-see colleges in the years to come?
(Since the announcement, the trustees and the alumni have been
working to find ways to keep the historic college open.) Antioch can
serve as a warning to any students or parents, who are tempted to rely
too heavily on rankings. Here’s why: Despite Antioch’s severe problems,
those ubiquitous college guides were still praising Antioch.

The popular Fiske Guide to Colleges, 2008 edition, for instance,
devoted two and a half pages to Antioch in its tome that included more
than “300 of the country’s best and most interesting colleges and universities.”
U.S. News & World Report America’s Best Colleges, 2007
edition, singled out Antioch for its high proportion of classes that contained
under 20 students. It also listed Antioch in its compilation of 13
schools with “outstanding” internship programs.

The most over-the-top critique about Antioch came from a very
popular book entitled Colleges That Change Lives, 40 Schools That
Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges by Loren Pope, a former
education editor at The New York Times. Here’s what the book,
which I happen to greatly admire, had to say about the school in its
2006 edition: “Antioch is in a class by itself. There is no college or university
in the country that makes a more profound difference in a
young person’s life, or that creates more effective adults. None of the
Ivies, big or small, can match Antioch’s ability to produce outstanding
thinkers and doers.”

How could all these college experts have been so wrong about Antioch?
The easy answer is that any book that tries to sum up what a particular
college or university can offer by using a numerical ranking or
a two-page write-up can’t possibly provide a meaningful analysis of a
school.

Economics explains one reason why evaluations of colleges are often
superficial. Imagine spending enough time on a campus to be able
to draw a realistic picture of a school’s strengths and weaknesses. Now
multiply that amount of time by hundreds of schools. It would require
a huge commitment of man hours—and money—to compile a meaningful
analysis of hundreds of schools in a guide that’s cranked out
annually.


That explains why a lot of the analysis is done at computer terminals
far from campus quadrangles. Fiske Guide to Colleges, for example,
obtains a great deal of background from the schools through
questionnaires that it mails school administrators. Fiske also asks
these administrators to distribute a different set of questionnaires to a
cross section of students. What it sounds like to me is that institutions
do a lot of self-grading. In other words, it doesn’t sound too tough.

Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report relies too heavily on school
reputations (deserved or undeserved) rather than trying to measure
whether institutions are doing a good job of educating students.
It’s fine to use these guides as a starting point. Through these
books you may discover schools you didn’t even know existed. You can
also use them to discover what range of grade point averages and SAT
or ACT scores is typically required to be admitted to a particular
school. The guides can also share valuable financial aid information.

What you shouldn’t do is rely heavily on these books to determine
which schools you explore and which you snub. Some students believe
that if a school didn’t get a nod in the Fiske book or Princeton Review’s
The Best 366 Colleges, there must be something wrong with it. U.S.
News & World Report induces even more snob appeal. Some kids
don’t want to step foot on any campus that doesn’t crack the lists of the
top 10 liberal art colleges and national universities.

At the same time, you shouldn’t make decisions based on the marketing
material that colleges generate. The promotional assault, which
often starts after your child has taken the PSAT test (baby SAT) as
early as his or her sophomore year, isn’t just relegated to the booklets,
postcards, and letters that clog mailboxes. The deft marketing is just
as visible on college Web sites.

Finding and paying for the right academic fit is too important to
leave to superficial snapshots of colleges and universities. There is a better
alternative. In the next few chapters, you’ll learn ways to evaluate
schools and academic departments based on what is important to you.

Action Plan
• Don’t rely on any book as the ultimate source of information on a college.
• Do your own research on colleges.
Source:The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price

Television Viewing And Academic Achievement

As Neuman (1991) noted, television is a common target for those seeking to lay blame for educational dilemmas such as poor national test scores, academic skills, and levels of literacy. Often, the assumption underlying such arguments is what has come to be known as the displacement hypothesis, that is, the notion that television viewing takes time away from homework and more productive leisure-time activities, such as reading. However, research has shown that, in truth, the relationship between television and academic achievement is not nearly so simple and direct.

Comparison Studies
When television was first introduced on a broad scale, early research compared thousands of children who lived in American or British towns where television was available to children living in nearby towns where it was not (e.g., Himmelweit, Oppenheim, & Vince, 1958; Schramm et al., 1961). These studies suggested that the presence of television did lead to significant changes in children’s use of their time, but that it made little difference in the amount of time that children devoted to homework. In addition, Schramm et al. found no change in the time children spent reading books, and whereas Himmelweit et al. initially found a decline in book reading (particularly among children who had shown only a marginal interest in reading in the first place), reading returned to pretelevision levels a few years after television was introduced. Where, then, did the time spent with television come from? Primarily, television took time away from activities that served similar functions, such as listening to the radio, going to movies, and reading comic books.

A similar study was conducted some years later by Williams and her colleagues(Williams, 1986; cf. MacBeth, 1996). They compared children in three Canadian towns: one in which television was unavailable (code-named Notel), one that received only one television station (Unitel), and one that received several stations (Multitel). As in the earlier studies, the researchers found that children who had access to television used their
time differently from those who did not. However, they also found that second-grade children in Notel scored higher on tests of reading fluency and creative thinking than children in the other two towns. The differences
disappeared 2 years after television was introduced in Notel, suggesting that the presence of television had been responsible for the effect (Corteen & Williams, 1986; Harrison & Williams, 1986).

Correlational Studies
A number of studies used correlational data to investigate relationships between children’s television viewing and their achievement in school. Williams, Haertel, Walberg, and Haertel (1982) conducted a meta-analysis using data from 23 large-scale studies, and concluded that there was a small inverse relationship between amount of viewing and achievement r = –.05). However, part of the reason why the correlation was so low was that the relationship between television viewing and achievement was not linear. Rather, it was curvilinear; children who watched 10 hours of television per week performed slightly better (not worse) than those who watched less, but as viewing increased beyond 10 hours per week, achievement declined dramatically.

Comstock and Paik’s (1991) analysis of data from the California Assessment Study argued for a more linear relationship, but further support for curvilinearity came from Neuman’s (1988, 1991) analysis of several large-scale studies. Neuman found that there was little relation between viewing and reading performance among children who watched 2 to 4 hours of television per day (i.e., 14 to 28 hours per week), but that performance was considerably lower for children who watched more than that. Similarly, some studies have suggested that there may be thresholds of viewing, beyond which excessive television viewing is associated with poorer academic achievement. Fetler (1984) found that viewing for more than 6 hours per day (i.e., 42 hours per week) was associated with lower performance in literacy and mathematics, and Potter (1987) found that television viewing was negatively related to achievement for eighth to twelfth graders who watched more than 30 hours per week.

The complexity of the relationship between television and school achievement can be attributed to several factors. One is the fact that school achievement is predicted much more strongly by variables such as IQ and socioeconomic status (both of which predict television viewing as well). Another is that the relationship between viewing and achievement differs somewhat by age (e.g., Huston &Wright, 1997; Neuman, 1991).

In addition, Comstock (1989) suggested that television viewing is inversely related to achievement when it displaces intellectually richer experiences, but positively related when it supplies such experiences. Along similar lines, I would argue for one more factor that complicates the picture and may have reduced the strength of the relationship observed in these studies. Each of the studies mentioned above looked only at how much television was viewed, and not at the nature of the television programs that children watched. Not all television programs are the same, and they do not all produce the same effects among viewers.

For example, longitudinal research byWright, Huston, and their colleagues found that preschool viewing of Sesame Street and other educational television programs predicted higher performance in subsequent tests of academic skills. By contrast, however, preschool viewing of entertainment programs predicted poorer performance (Wright, Huston, Murphy, et al., 2001; Wright, Huston, Scantlin, & Kotler, 2001; see chap. 2, this volume). As the late JohnWright was fond of saying, “Marshall McLuhan appears to have been wrong. The medium is not the message. The message is the message!” (Anderson, Huston, Schmitt, Linebarger,&Wright, 2001, p. 134).
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