Ready to make your deposit online, only to be thwarted by internet-dwelling gremlins?

We hear that from time to time.

If you are ready to join the Lawrence community for the coming fall, and wish to pay your $400 tuition deposit online, you might find the following steps helpful to guide you:

  • Log into your Voyager account.
  • Select the link, Your Account, and you will be whisked off to the “Student Account Online” page. [If prompted to log in again, use the same information you used to log into your Voyager account.]
  • Once you successfully get into the Student Account Online, you will see a page that looks like this (presumably without all the same apps on the toolbar):

  • On this page, find the Items for Purchase box. It’s the third box down in the left column.
  • Select Tuition Deposit, and you’ll get to a page that looks like this:

  • Select Accept Admission $400 (we’re thinking positively here).
  • Select Add to Shopping Cart
  • The rest should be familiar to you if you’ve conducted a credit card transaction online.
  • Note: if you find the $11 service charge distasteful (we’re not too thrilled about it ourselves), you can either
    • submit through the same system the e-check/electronic funds transfer, for which there is no fee (woohoo!)
    • submit your deposit the good old-fashioned way by dropping (1) a check along with your (2) confirmation of enrollment card into the Business Reply Mail envelope we sent with your offer of admission.

Rest assured that Lawrence University is way more user-friendly than this process might otherwise suggest.

However you confirm your enrollment at Lawrence, just know that we’ll be delighted, thrilled, overjoyed, jazzed, [insert your own status here], that you have.
Welcome to Lawrence!

 

If you are waiting for access to your Voyager account…

You may have received a letter from our financial aid office encouraging you to apply for financial aid, and giving you a bunch of instructions about how to use your Voyager account to track your financial aid documents.

Many of you—dutiful future Lawrentians that you are—have followed our instructions only to find yourself unable to log in. Below is a summary statement of how we have heard this makes you feel:

Here’s the good news (sort of): It’s not you; it’s us.

We are still in the process of building user profiles for all of our applicants so they can use Voyager, a process that will be complete in the next couple of weeks.*

Once that process is complete, we will send you—via snail mail—your username and password.You can, however, still start the financial aid application process while you wait for your Voyager access to become available. Our priority deadline to apply for financial aid is March 1.

If you have questions about this, or need to know right now whether we have your financial aid documents, please connect with your Lawrence admissions counselor.

Honestly, get in touch with us. We’re happy to help.

*If you’re interested in technical stuff, we are exporting files from our admission system to our student record system. You’d think that would be a quick process, but when we’re dealing with thousands of applications and student records, you want to be more than 100% certain that all the data are right. We wouldn’t want to send the wrong information to the wrong people.

(Sad face designed by Tobias F. Wolf, from The Noun Project.)

What we mean when we say “Our Early Action notification date is January 15”

With our notification date right around the corner, we’d like to remind our applicants that Lawrence University still does things the old-fashioned way: we mail our Early Action admission decisions via First Class postal mail on January 15. Even though our decisions will be going in the mail next Tuesday, student decisions should arrive at their mailing addresses sometime later next week… unless the United States Post Office has developed a new super-fast way of getting their mail trucks around, in which case it might arrive sooner than that. (In spectacular fashion, we might add.)

Why postal mail? A staggering majority of our applicants we have surveyed say they prefer their admission decisions in their mailboxes, not their inboxes.

Rocket image designed by Cris Dobbins, from The Noun Project. Truck image designed by Michael Pangilinan + Mel Barat, from The Noun Project. (Mashup designed by an admissions dean who shall remain nameless.)

Hurricane Sandy and our Early Decision admission deadline

With Hurricane Sandy working its way up the East Coast of the United States this week, we are extending our Early Decision deadline from November 1 to November 15, thereby allowing students the additional grace period they need to complete their applications.

If you know your geography, you may be scratching your head right now, thinking, “But Lawrence is in Wisconsin; hurricanes don’t go there.” You’re right; they don’t (and we’re thankful for that).

However, plenty of our prospective students are in the way of this storm, and we figured they have more important things to contend with right now. Rather than limit this extension to students in geographic areas in the path of the storm, we determined it would be easier to simply relax the deadline for everybody.

If you have already submitted your Early Decision application—or think you’ll be able to do so by November 1—we will still plan to notify you of our decision by November 15.

If you submit your application after the November 1 deadline, but by November 15, we will plan to notify you of our decision by December 1.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss any of this with our admissions counselors. In the meantime, if you’re in the path of this storm, stay safe. The rest of us are thinking about you.

In the spirit of Halloween, another one of those scary “Is College Worth It?” stories

In this morning’s Today Show, we were presented with yet another variation on what has become an all-too-familiar story running with increasing frequency in the heat of the college application season: “Is college worth it?”

We’ll save you the suspense. The answer—like it usually is for these stories—is “yes”, but first you must pass through a haunted house of drama and factoids.

First act: Usually these stories start with a liberal arts major (in this case, a French major) who graduated into a world reluctant to hire her because of “her limited skill set.”

Second act: The recent graduate, faced with a college debt of $50,000, “settles” for a job that does not employ the skills she learned in her major (in this case, working as a customer service rep for an awning company).

Third act: Cut to the reporter (in this case, financial expert, Jean Chatzky) back in the studio summarizing the state of affairs for the host (in this case, Matt Lauer), who serves as a proxy for the target audience (in this parents of college-bound students). The exchange usually goes like this:

  1. Proof point: Flash a screen with data showing the difference in lifetime earnings between bachelor’s degrees holders and high school diploma holders (about $1 million; so, yes, it’s technically worth it).
  2. Counterpoint: But what about that double-whammy of debt and unemployability?
  3. Solutions offered:
    1. save your money by attending community college then four-year college (a viable option for many)
    2. pick an in-demand major, like medical technology, nursing, education, math & computer science, or engineering
    3. corollary: watch out for those majors that don’t have jobs named after them (e.g., things like “English” or “history” or “philosophy”)

And there, in a three-minute story, you have some one-size-fits-all advice on college and major selection.

We cannot ignore an economy that continues to present significant challenges to all of us. We cannot ignore that there are students out there taking on extraordinary debt to attend college. (In news stories, there is generally a direct relationship between the size of the debt and the level of tension in the story.) We acknowledge that there are a number of in-demand majors, such as those listed above, that have clearer prospects (though certainly no guarantees) for employment than others. There is comfort in certainty.

But what if you’re not interested in those majors? What if you are one of those students for whom a liberal arts major at a liberal arts college is the right fit?

Take heart: the college investment for many people is not simply an investment in job training for your first gig out of college. As we mentioned in an earlier blog, an investment in a place like Lawrence University is an investment for a lifetime, which will comprise, quite likely, more than your first job out of college: perhaps a trip to graduate or professional school; a career change or two; and a host of experiences that will call upon your abilities to find common ground with people who look, think, act, and believe differently than you do. It’s our job to prepare you for all of these by pushing you to become: a nimble, lifelong learner; a strong compelling writer; a creative problem solver; a critical thinker; a competent arguer; and a person equally adept at independence and collaboration. In other words, an eminently employable person.

And one last thing for you budding liberal arts majors out there: Matt Lauer pursued a telecommunications major at Ohio University, a liberal arts college. Jean Chatzky earned a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in—wait for it—English.