Our new students are here!

Yesterday, September 10, we welcomed our newest class of students to Lawrence. For those of us in the admissions and financial aid offices who have worked with these students and their families for months (or even years), we get to experience a joy that might be on par with having our birthdays and favorite holidays all rolled into one event, because seeing the whole class together at the same time is like waking up to find 450 individual presents all waiting for us.

Today, the students all sat for their class photo on the southward-facing steps of Lawrence Memorial Chapel. This photo is always a blast, because it’s usually taken at 11:30 in the morning, and, if the weather is cooperating, like it did today, everyone is squinting right into the sun, like this:

1175344_10151537673126642_1263396124_n

If you look closely in the photo, you’ll notice that our new president, Mark Burstein, has joined his class of new Lawrentians for the photo. (Hint: he’s the fella in the tie behind the purple banner.)

Last night was our New Student Convocation. One of our traditions at this event is that the dean of admissions and financial aid (i.e., the guy writing this post) gets to introduce the class to itself. Below are some highlights about the class, which I shared with them and their families last night. You will see that they are, indeed, a nifty bunch.

OK, now I’ll turn my attention on our reason for being here… which is you. Let me tell you a little bit about yourselves:

The 400 or so of you who are first-year students represent one of the largest freshman classes in Lawrence University history. You have come to us from nearly 300 high schools and home schools. Worth noting is that 260 of you are the only ones from your school, which makes you the majority. So get out there and start meeting each other.

17 of you are transfer students who have come to us from colleges as near as the University of Wisconsin right here in the Fox Valley and as far away as Bronx Community College.

In addition to our degree-seeking freshmen and transfers who become Lawrentians today, 25 of you will be with us for just this year as part of visiting exchange programs in China, Spain, the Russian Federation, and Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. We are happy that you are all here.

…

You hail from 30 states and 25 countries.

Our largest contingent—about a quarter of you—comes from our home state of Wisconsin. The next largest groups come from Illinois, Minnesota, California, New York, Colorado, Michigan, and Washington state.

About 10% of you have a parent, sibling, or some other relative who attended (or is currently attending) Lawrence. Some of you have several generations of Lawrentians in your family! That’s pretty exciting.

But here’s another exciting thing: about 10% of you are the first ones in your family to go to college.

A handful of you are so-called “non-traditional students,” in that you are either married, have children or graduated from high school a number of years ago.

…

You new Lawrentians have had an impressive array of experiences.

Some of you have overcome extraordinary health challenges, and the fact that you’re with us today as new college students is… well, the term “miraculous” is often overused, but not so in this case.

One of you has been educating Boston-area youth about food, farming, and hunger through a service-learning group you led.

One of you played the unwitting role of guinea pig in our new online deposit system when you tried, failed, tried, failed and finally succeeded in paying your deposit to attend Lawrence this fall.

One of you dazzled me and hundreds of other parents at the Einstein Middle School honors night last May with your saxophone solo on Pure Imagination from Willie Wonka.

One of you is a mother of three children between the ages of 7 and 11. Please allow me to introduce you to a room full of potential babysitters. [Note: This student sought me out later to tell me how her kids feel famous now!]

One of you shared with your Lawrence admission counselor that you knew the Lawrence University Honor Code word for word. And because we trusted you, we didn’t make you recite it.

One of you volunteers on a mushroom farm, and is particularly enamored with a glow-in-the-dark mushroom which you described as “cool but poisonous,” so you are trying to find ways to turn it into a jack-o-lantern or a night light.

One of you, a dedicated swimmer, would drive nearly two hours each way five times a week to train.

One of you created the Nerd Club at your high school, so that students who don’t feel they fit in elsewhere would have a club to join.

One of you founded a Dead Poets Society at your school in Amman, Jordan—so you could go beyond what you learned in class and even create your own works.

One of you is a world-class pentathlete (that’s fencing, swimming, show jumping, and a biathlon of pistol shooting and cross country running). You represented Team USA in Hungary and competed against athletes from 30 different countries.

One of you in this class of new Lawrentians happens to be the 16th president of Lawrence University.

It’s a great group of students, and they will do well here.

(P.S.: I look forward to seeing many of them at the Lawrence University football game vs. Lake Forest Saturday night.)

So… about that Common Application launch on August 1

Common App screenshot

Today is the big day, launch day of the brand-new Common Application for 2014. It’s a launch that promises to create a better user experience for students applying to the more than 500 member colleges (including Lawrence) that use it.

Like so many product launches before it—including the infamous live-TV event where Bill Gates experienced the blue screen of death during his own presentation—today’s launch of the new Common App has been going less smoothly than I suspect our friends at Common App (or their hundreds of clients and thousands of college applicants) would like.

For example, if you search for “Lawrence” on the home screen, Lawrence University does not return in the results (even though our fellow Lawrences, Sarah and Saint, do).

Keep in mind that this is day one of a new way of applying to colleges using the Common Application.

Day two will be better.

And day seven will be even better than that.

Until then, we will Keep Calm and Avoid Employing Overused Internet Memes.

 

The Common Application essay prompts for 2014 are here!

Lawrence University is an exclusive user of the Common Application. The newly overhauled version of the “Common App” for the 2014 academic year goes live on August 1, 2013, but the Common App board has already released the new essay prompts. If you want to start thinking about the prompts, and maybe even drafting some early versions of your essay, here is what you’ll find on August 1:

Instructions. The essay demonstrates your ability to write clearly and concisely on a selected topic and helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice. What do you want the readers of your application to know about you apart from courses, grades, and test scores? Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay of no more than 650 words, using the prompt to inspire and structure your response. Remember: 650 words is your limit, not your goal. Use the full range if you need it, but don’t feel obligated to do so. (The application won’t accept a response shorter than 250 words.)

  • Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
  • Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?
  • Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
  • Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
  • Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.

I think I just strained my neck…

…sudden 180-degree turns will sometimes have that effect.

For the past few years, we have been led to believe—whether it was in news stories or even in presidential State of the Union addresses—that higher education’s purpose was (or should be) vocational: colleges should train its students how to do something, preparing them to be Useful Citizens (in other words, “quickly deployed and employed”). Disciplines like business, science, engineering, technology—you know, practical things—were offered as the pavers on the path to prosperity.

The corollary was that the liberal arts and sciences, which don’t necessarily train you how to do a particular job, are a luxury, and, therefore, a risky investment. In some cases, government reinforced that message in alarming ways, as we saw in Florida’s recent proposal to create financial incentives to study those practical things (and, as a result, create disincentives to study the arts, humanities, and social sciences).

Which brings us to a completely different piece of news that ran in the June 18 New York Times (and the cause of that neck strain—which, for the record, may be one of the more pleasant neck strains we could have experienced). Perhaps that anti-liberal arts mindset may have been a bit short-sighted:

Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm

A new national corps of “master teachers” trained in the humanities and social sciences and increased support for research in “endangered” liberal arts subjects are among the recommendations of a major report to be delivered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

The report comes amid concern about low humanities enrollments and worries that the Obama administration’s emphasis on science education risks diminishing a huge source of the nation’s intellectual strength. Requested by a bipartisan group of legislators and scheduled to be distributed to every member of Congress, it is intended as a rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford.

People talk about the humanities and social sciences “as if they are a waste of time,” said Richard H. Brodhead, the president of Duke University and a co-chairman of the commission that produced the report. “But this facile negativism forgets that many of the country’s most successful and creative people had exactly this kind of education.”  Read more…

Bias alert: the report was published by the Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Humanities, which may have a bit of a vested interest in the outcome of the report. You can see the list of committee members here. It’s a wild mashup of several dozen people from the arts, higher education, private enterprise, and government. (The CEO of Boeing and Yo-Yo Ma at a table together? Yes please.)

On the other hand, the study was requested in 2011 by a bipartisan group of legislators that included Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) and Mark Warner (D-Virginia), and Representatives Tom Petri (R-Wisconsin) and David Price (D-North Carolina), who were advocating for increases in research and teaching in the humanities and sciences—and looking for reasons to support that research with government and other agencies’ investments.

Regardless of the source or the origins of the report, this news is welcome to those of us in higher education who have been arguing that it is not an either/or world, but a both/and world: we need the liberal arts just as much as we need business and science and engineering and technology. In fact, they work together quite nicely. Creativity, innovation, collaboration, drawing meaning and understanding across apparently disparate disciplines—this is the playground of the liberal arts and sciences. Some of our greatest innovators and leaders have been liberal arts and sciences majors. As the sidebar in the New York Times piece shows, the two candidates in the last presidential election had undergraduate majors in political science (Obama) and English (Romney).

Our very own dean of the conservatory, Brian Pertl (a Lawrence University English and trombone performance major who went on to manage Microsoft’s Media Acquisitions Group before rejoining his alma mater in 2008), made perhaps the best argument for this both/and world in his recent TEDx talk called “Dancing Between Disciplines.” In typical liberal arts fashion, his argument is not so much an argument as it is a performance. (Warning: mind-blowing ideas accompanied by remarkably talented musicians included.) Check it out.

A guest blog from one of our favorite people

Marty O’Connell is a force of nature… and a college search Zenmaster. As the Executive Director of the non-profit organization, Colleges That Change Lives, she has been serving up anecdotes as antidotes to the high-stakes, high-pressure, win-at-all-costs college admission game that repeats itself year after year. We have the good fortune this week of traveling with Marty O’Connell and nearly all of our fellow Colleges That Change Lives as we make our way up the East Coast this week at a series of information nights. We will do the same in August all over the country. (For locations and dates, visit CTCL.org.)

In the meantime, we’d like to share Marty’s perspective, in her own words, about how to approach the college search. It’s a perspective she recently shared with our friends in the Southern Association for College Admission Counseling, and one that we invited her to share with you. (Thanks Marty! ihrtluhc)

We trust you will find it equal part wise, calming, and invigorating. You may even find some surprises in it.

If I made a bumper sticker for how to approach the college search process it would read: College: It’s About the Journey, Not the Destination. Too often, students will race through their secondary school years, compiling tallies of courses and AP credits completed, joining activities to lengthen their resume, taking and retaking SAT and ACT tests and always keeping one eye on the prize of the college destination. These same students arrive at college only to repeat this process with a goal of admission to graduate and professional school or the perfect first job. We live in a goal-focused society where becoming a mindful, life-long learner, instead of an educational trophy hunter is not an easily achieved state of mind. If I had the magic wand for education, my wish would be that students might approach the college search, as well as their day-to-day learning, with a greater appreciation for the long view: it is not about the race to the end, but instead what you learn from each step in the journey to get there!

Too often the college search begins with a flawed approach by using ranking lists that tout the entering class statistics, rather than focusing on what happens during the four years students are enrolled. The late author Loren Pope, of Looking Beyond the Ivy League and Colleges That Change Lives, often known as the “Ralph Nader” of college admissions, said that choosing colleges based on the entering statistics of the freshmen class is like choosing a hospital based on the health of those in the ER—it’s the treatment that really matters; in the case of college, it’s what happens between the first year and graduation. Researching colleges based on student outcomes will highlight many colleges that outperform the Ivies and Name Brands but don’t have the benefit of name recognition. The research from the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium on the Undergraduate Origins of Ph.Ds finds lesser known colleges listed in the top ten in various categories of producers of future Ph.Ds, often ahead of the usual suspects.

If you had to choose a spouse or partner for life, would you like to use a publication ranking them by income, IQ scores, and reputation as reported by others who have never met the person? As a culture, we love consulting consumer guidebooks and lists for a shortcut method to choosing electronics and cars; the college search requires a more thoughtful, personal and time consuming approach. It can’t be reduced to rankings with numerical values when it requires starting with who the individual student is and why they are going to college, their needs and desires, and learning styles and interests. This self inventory is the start for finding colleges that “fit” for the individual, instead of starting with the assumption that only the “Top 20” on the USNWR and other rankings lists have any value. These ranking guides sell big, but their value (or lack of it) in the college search process can certainly be diminished if students, parents and counselors go after fit, rather than name recognition. Students and their anxious, hovering parents would do well to add some lesser-known colleges to their search process, where the chance for gaining admission is greater and the outcomes the same or better than those colleges admitting a fraction of applicants.

NSSE: The National Survey of Student Engagement is a wonderful resource for gathering information about college outcomes and provides a list of the right questions to ask during the college search. Most importantly, how quickly students engage in the academic and co-curricular life of the campus will make the difference, not only in their early success as an undergraduate, but in on-time degree completion and in reaching their goals beyond college.

The current weakened state of the economy and worry over the cost of attending a four-year college has made the option of attending community college and transferring to complete the bachelor degree a very appealing one. It can be a positive experience if a student chooses it because it is a good fit for them and not just because it will save them money. Community colleges have changed dramatically since their rapid growth in the 1960s, when because of their “open admissions” policies, they were too often erroneously labeled as options only for those with no other college choice. This is a much different case today when community colleges attract top high school students with honors programs that rival those at competitive four-year colleges. If students apply the same investigative process in considering a community college as they do with four-year colleges: visiting campus, sitting in on classes, eating a meal, meeting students and professors, they are less likely to feel like they “settled” instead of chose…

Perhaps the Irish poet Yeats had a better idea for that bumper sticker with this quote: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”…

[So, too, we will add, should be your college search.]

 Martha “Marty” O’Connell’s 35-year college admissions career includes posts at large and small colleges, beginning with Rutgers University in New Jersey and ending with McDaniel College in Westminster, MD. In July 2006 she began her role as Executive Director of the non-profit organization, Colleges That Change Lives, Inc., which has a mission to advance and support a student-centered college search process that looks beyond the college rankings industry.

(For the record, we think she is awesome.)