Salisbury University – A Maryland University of National Distinction, announced in a press release dated June 17, 2011 that the USM Board of Regents has granted it the permission to continue with its Test-Optional Policy. According to this policy, the students need not submit SAT or ACT scores compulsorily.

It was in the year 2006 that the university had first adopted the Test-optional policy, citing reasons such as students from weaker financial background found it tough to take SAT prep courses to prepare and score well on SAT and other standardized tests. To provide a level playing field to the students, the university had then announced the minimum required GPA to be 3.5 for the admission purpose.

According to the SU President Janet Dudley-Eshbach, during the five years that the university followed the test optional policy, the performance of the students who did not submit test scores was as good as the students who did submit test scores. In fact, the graduation rates were higher amongst the test-optional students, who also scored higher percentages during the exams.

Dean of enrollment management at Salisbury University, Jane Dané, said that the test optional approach enhanced the economic diversity at the university and helped attracting academically talented students who previously could not gain admission due to high SAT score requirements. The decision to make the standardized test scores optional has enabled the admission committee to look for various other traits such as academic and scholastic skills at the school, special talents, community service etc.

The announcement has sparked a fresh debate amongst the academicians and educators over the validity of the standardized test scores in properly measuring a student’s college readiness. Many of them are of the view that the high degree of importance attached to these scores leads to denial of education opportunities to otherwise scholastically talented students, who found it difficult to give their optimum performance on a timed test.

The decision to choose between a public university and private one is a bit tricky, because on the one hand there is this allure of getting to study at cheaper cost at the public college in your state and on the other hand, graduating from the ultra posh and famous private university is a matter of imminent pride. However, these are not the only considerations that you must take into account while selecting between a private college and a public college. However, no one is denying that cost is indeed an important criterion. Before you take a decision, go through the following:

The cost factor: it is not always what it seems

Tuition fee at public colleges is cheaper than that at private colleges and this is true until following come into view: financial aid and out-of-state student status. There are many private colleges that offer handsome financial aid packages, both need and merit based, to help students finance their undergraduate college education.

On the other hand, out-of-state students are charged higher tuition compared to the in-state students, for the simple reason that their parents did not pay taxes for the state in which the university is located. (public universities are run on taxpayers’ money) Read more…

Harvard College has restored non-binding early action as part of its admission process, to enhance its recruiting program and make it easier and more accessible for students from modest economic backgrounds through the admission process.   It also announced that next year on its investment in undergraduate financial aid will increase to over $160 million.  At present, over 60% of the students from Harvard College receive scholarship aid; the average grant is about $ 38000.

In 2007, Harvard dispensed with its non-binding Early Action Program, on a trial basis and moved to a single admissions deadline, and announced at the time that it would evaluate its impact after many years.

The decision to restore the Early Action program was announced earlier this year, when the President Faust said that the best brains in the country were opting for early action and early decision programs at various other colleges and it seemed that Harvard was missing out on a really talented pool of applicants.

Some excerpts from the press release:

“We looked carefully at trends in Harvard admissions these past years and saw that many highly talented students, including some of the best-prepared low-income and under-represented minority students, were choosing programs with an early-action option, and therefore were missing out on the opportunity to consider Harvard. We have decided that the College and our students will be best served by restoring an early option,” said Dean, Michael D. Smith of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Read more…

The admissions to the class of 2015 in almost all the US colleges are done, with only waitlist students awaiting for some miracle that will get them admitted to the Harvard, Stanford, MIT or Princeton. We can easily shift the discussion to the admission decisions that the current year senior students have to make so as to secure their future for the next four years in the best way possible.

The May 7 SAT test, which is less than 10 days away is taken mostly by the high school juniors to test their aptitude or the high school seniors who intend to apply for the early action admission program of various colleges. The rationale behind taking the SAT 2 test in May or June is simple: if they do not get the perfect scores or the high SAT scores, then they can attempt it again in October, having prepared rigorously during the summer vacations. Read more…

What do I do to get into MIT? What matters more at MIT? Will a perfect SAT score guarantee my admission to MIT?

These are the questions that the high school seniors constantly ask the admission counselors and experts at every possible opportunity that they get. The admission rates are getting disconcertingly lower with each passing year and the number of applicants is increasing tumultuously. This has sparked off a level of desperation amongst the students and the parents, who are ready to do just about anything to get admission in MIT.

Consider this year’s statistics for the MIT class of 2015: only 9.6 percent of 17,909 applicants were accepted. Out of that, around 50 percent were accepted under MIT Early Action program and another 50 percent under the Regular Action. Read more…

The Pareto’s 80-20 rule is weirdly true for the acceptance rate for the admission in the best colleges in the country. May be around 20 percent of the total college ready teenager applicants in the country get admitted to the top 20 universities, while 80 percent of the applicants do not get into the top colleges.

The rather amusing part is that some colleges have even defied this index, as their acceptance rate plunged below 8 percent.

The gap between the admitted and not admitted is increasing, if we talk about such prestigious institutions as Harvard, MIT, Stanford etc. Those who are admitted experience a major ego boost, while the ones that aren’t admitted suffer a great shock to their confidence (and sometimes do not get over it completely) Read more…

Everybody dream of being THERE, the oldest and the most reputed undergraduate college in the country that boasts of being the alma mater for many US Presidents and no less than 44 Nobel Prize winners. Being there is no ordinary achievement. The acceptance rate at Harvard is reducing year or year and the number of applicants hit a record high this year. Only 6.2 percent of the total applicants were accepted for the Class of 2015 and the ones who were not selected were left nonplussed as to what went wrong.

For those who received the much awaited and dearly coveted acceptance letter, the date for fulfilling the admission formalities is nearing soon and the current batch of high school seniors, who will be taking admission in 2012, are calculating the total cost of studying at Harvard College and the financial aid available, so that they know whether it will be possible for their parents to send them to Harvard or not. Harvard is a private university and its tuition fee is amongst the highest in the country. Read more…

Even as the acceptance rates at the best undergraduate colleges in the country are declining rapidly, the number of international students (non-US citizens/residents) in the US universities is increasing. The total number of students from foreign countries who attended US colleges during the academic year 2009-2010 was a whopping 690,923. The figure represented an increase of 3 percent over the previous year’s international students admission rate. The admission procedure for the international students is more or less in sync with the domestic students with most of the universities requiring the international candidates to submit the SAT scores. Read more…

If you think we are obsessed with the acceptance rate, then think about the misery of those bright brains in the country who did not get the acceptance letter and just can’t seem to stop thinking about what went wrong with their admission application, essay or interview. Or think about the ego boost these acceptance letters can give to a few 20,000 students in the country, a feeling of superiority over their more than a million peers.

In the previous post, we discussed about the trend of declining acceptance rates in US colleges. It is not something that has happened overnight. In fact, the downward journey started some four to five years back itself, but this year the acceptance rates across the top US colleges have reached a new low, even as the number of admission application registered a new high. Read more…

You know there is something wrong out there when virtually every highly esteemed media news publication in the country is talking about the trend of declining college acceptance rates for the undergraduate courses.

Since February 2011, various stories on the plummeting acceptance rate in the country’s best colleges is making headlines on popular news sites as Yahoo! news, TIME magazine, US news, USA today etc. The websites and publications operating in the education and college admissions domain cannot get enough talking about how the colleges are trying to outsmart each other in the rankings by proving their exclusivity. Read more…