Application jump by record number @ U of Chicago

The University of Chicago received the largest applicant pool in her history; 12,381 for this year, up from 10,334 applicants last year. Many of you already know that the trend is not confined to the university. Another news from the university--this could be a good news to those who are aspiring to apply to the school next year--is that they will phase out the notorious Uncommon Application in favor of the widely used Common Application. Reason? They simply want to attract more applicants. For the full report, visit here:

http://maroon.uchicago.edu/online_edition/news/2008/01/29/college-apps-jump-by-record-numbers/

Got sleep?

If you suffer from sleep deprivation:

• You cannot think straight.
• You are less able to make sense of problems, make competent moral judgments or retain what you learn.
• You become reckless, emotionally fragile, and more vulnerable to infections and to diabetes, heart disease and obesity, recent research suggests.
  

When you have enough sleep:

• It helps your brain sort, store and consolidate new memories, etching experiences more indelibly into the brain's biochemical archives.
• It can significantly improve your ability to master new motor skills and strengthen your memories of what you learn.
• It boosts your ability to make sense of new knowledge by allowing the brain to detect connections between things you learn.

The average human being who lives for 70 years spends 23 of them sleeping. Pace Productivity, reports that 19 years are spent working, 9 in leisure, 7 in travel, 6 in eating, 3 in illness, 2 in personal grooming and 1 in religious pursuits.

Do the math and get adequate sleep!

Any questions? Visit here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120059164111398073.html?mod=djemWMP

On your financial aid package

1. Submit your financial aid application such as FAFSA or CSS profile as early as possible. Most colleges award financial aid first come first serve basis.

2. Even if your prospective college does not meet your financial needs, don't just give up yet.

3. Visit your college and meet with a financial aid counselor. Express to her/him that this college is your first choice and you definitely want to attend.

4. Explain your family's financial situation (make sure to bring supporting documents for verification) and ask for additional help from the college.

Caution: You are there to inform your financial condition and not to bargain. DO NOT BEG!

5. If you can't visit your college, write a letter to describe your circumstance in detail and send it along with supporting documents.

Employers want more than test scores and grades

Let say you graduate from college and are now looking for a job. What do you think your employer is looking for? Your transcripts, multiple-choice tests or institutional scores? Maybe & maybe not. Recent survey by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, which was released by the Association of American Colleges and Universities yesterday, shows that business leaders want "faculty assessment of internships, senior projects or community-based work."

Here is a list of key findings:

• 63% of graduates are not prepared for the global economy
• 57% said half or fewer of today's college graduates have the full set of skills and knowledge necessary to advance in today's workplace
• 40% said a faculty supervisor's assessment of a student's internship in a real-world setting would be "very useful."
• only 13% said college transcripts are "very useful."
• only 6% said an applicant's score on a multiple-choice test of general content knowledge would be "very useful."

To see the full report, visit USA Today here:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-01-22-graduate-assessment_N.htm

The most expensive colleges

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education (via Forbes), the following colleges topped in the U.S. for their sticker prices.

1. George Washington University in D.C., $39,240
2. Kenyon College in Ohio, $38,140
3. Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, $38,134
4. Vassar College in NY, $38,115
5. Sarah Lawrence College in NY, $38,090

The price tag does not include room, board and books. But, don't get discouraged by looking at these sheer numbers and don't give up on these schools simply because you think you can't afford them. Frequently, these high-priced colleges offer a generous financial aid package. In other words, many colleges today love to play the game of "used car dealership tactics" in which no one expects to pay the full window sticker price.

For the full report, visit here:
http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/01/21/education-university-globalization-biz-cx_bw_lh_0121colleges.html

Colleges want students with character, not just brains

Did you notice something different in this year’s Common Application form? They added these questions for applicants and their school counselors:

For Student:

Have you ever been found responsible for a disciplinary violation at an educational institution you have attended from 9th grade (or the international equivalent) forward, whether related to academic misconduct or behavioral misconduct that resulted in your probation, suspension, removal, dismissal, or expulsion from the institution?

Have you ever been convicted of a misdemeanor, felony, or other crime?

For Secondary School Report:

Has the applicant ever been found responsible for a disciplinary violation at your school from 9th grade (or the international equivalent) forward, whether related to academic misconduct or behavioral misconduct, that resulted in the applicant’s probation, suspension, removal, dismissal, or expulsion from your institution?

To your knowledge, has the applicant ever been convicted of a misdemeanor, felony, or other crime?

Now, read the following excerpts from San Jose Mercury News for their report on how some college would use the collected information. For the entire report, visit here: http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_8032120?nclick_check=1

The questions are designed to help colleges select students with character, not just brains. But high school counselors worry that one adolescent slip-up - sneaking beers into the junior prom or posting a parody of the principal on MySpace - could slam the door to a student's educational future.

“Admission should be based entirely on the applicant's academic achievement and individual talent. ~”Susan Wilbur, UC's admission dean.

"Colleges are building living and learning communities - and they want to admit students who will contribute positively to those communities. While this is a reasonable expectation, this is more complicated than it seems." ~Nicole Burrell of The Harker School in San Jose

"We evaluate and consider a particular infraction in the context of the entire pplication." ~Richard Shaw, Stanford's dean of undergraduate admission and financial aid.

"Sometimes a counselor will tell us about something that didn't show up on the application because it didn't result in expulsion or suspension - but which the counselor feels is relevant and troubling…If there are flashing red signs, the college needs to have the opportunity to know that." ~Sandra Hayes, Santa Clara University’s dean of admissions

Tips for female students

For female students only:

In most college campuses today, male student became an endangered species or a new minority. To balance the undesirable ratio between female and male student, many colleges give a favor to male students in admission process. MSNBC provides an tip on how to spot those colleges: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22687407/

How can you identify the colleges where girls are being admitted at a lower rate than boys?

Each school maintains application and enrollment information in a form called the "common data set." Unfortunately, there's no single Web site that collects the common data sets from all schools. The best way to start is to do an online search using the school name and the term "common data set." If you have no luck, try performing a search with your school's name and the term "institutional research." Every college and
university has an Office of Institutional Research, which produces the common data set.
Once you have the form, you'll have to sort through pages and pages of data. We suggest you check out "SECTION B: ENROLLMENT AND PERSISTENCE" and
"SECTION C: FIRST TIME, FIRST YEAR FRESHMAN ADMISSION." Look at the gender breakdown and you will get a good sense about the percentage of men and women on campus and the percentage of each gender admitted to the school in
question.

Are you information savvy?

A British study conducted by the Joint Information Systems Committee found that the Google Generation (those born after 1993) may be computer literate but not necessarily information savvy. Here are the key highlights of the report:

• Young people don’t develop good search strategies to find quality information.
• They might find information on the Internet quickly, but they don’t know how to evaluate the quality of what they find.
• They don’t understand what the Internet really is: a vast network with many different content providers.

Visit here http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf for the full report.

Dramatic spikes, again.

As expected, three colleges that terminated early admissions program this year received record number of applications.

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Applicants on rise after halt to early admissions
Harvard, Virginia, Princeton results
By Linda K. Wertheimer
Boston Globe Staff January 17, 2008

In their first year without early admissions, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Virginia received a record number of applications, a sign that their push to open up the competition for spots to more students may be working, the schools' admissions officials said.

The three universities hope that eliminating early admissions will create a fairer, less stressful process and a more diverse applicant pool. Early applicants tend to be more affluent than students who apply at the regular deadlines.

Harvard had the most dramatic spike, which it attributed in part to its announcement last month that it was greatly boosting financial aid for students from middle- and higher-income families in the 2008-09 school year. Harvard said yesterday it received 27,278 applications by Jan. 1, a 19 percent increase over last year. Princeton, with 20,118 applicants, had a 6.2 percent increase, and UVA, with 18,900 applicants, reported an increase of 4.5 percent.

William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions and financial aid, said he hoped the numbers reflect that counselors, parents, and students felt less pressure to rush to apply.
"Frankly, I think we emboldened a bunch of people to step back a bit," Fitzsimmons said. "It's pretty clear, no matter how you cut it, that this first year without early admissions has been a resounding success."

In the fall of 2006, with Harvard acting first, the three schools announced they were scrapping decades-old policies of allowing students to apply by November and learn whether they had been accepted by Dec. 15, a few weeks before the January deadline for regular admissions. The switch to a single Jan. 1 deadline for all admissions went into effect with the applicants for the fall of 2008.
In the past, Harvard, Princeton, and Virginia drew between 30 percent and 50 percent of their freshmen classes from the early applicant pool.

Early admission is still used by more than 300 schools, and is popular among students who had a top pick and wanted an answer as early as possible. But it has been unsettling to others who preferred more time to consider multiple schools.

The three schools' policies varied, with Princeton and Virginia requiring students to commit to them as soon as they were accepted, and Harvard giving students the option to say no.
The numbers of students who applied early varied at the three schools, with Harvard regularly getting 4,000 early applicants - about a fifth of its overall applicant pool.

In November, the three schools went on joint recruiting trips to educate students and parents about the elimination of early decision, a venture that probably helped boost application numbers, Fitzsimmons said.

"The message was that we're out here in November when we normally would be doing early admission to tell you we have terrific institutions, and we haven't given away a huge chunk of our freshman class," he said.

Still, Fitzsimmons and admissions officers at Princeton and Virginia cautioned that they could not reach final conclusions about the effect of eliminating early admissions. The universities cannot analyze the economic diversity of their applicants until after February when students apply for financial aid, said Janet Lavin Rappelye, Princeton's dean of admission. In addition, she said, schools will need more than one year of data to draw meaningful conclusions.

"In three to five years, we'll be able to look back to see whether this works for us," Rappelye said. "The question will be, 'Are we admitting a more diverse pool of applicants, and are they coming?' "
Also, it is difficult to know all the factors that influenced the increase in applications, particularly at Harvard, which has been phasing in changes to financial aid since 2004, Fitzsimmons said. Harvard's latest announcement came in mid-December, when most students already had sent in their applications.

Nationally, college applications have been on the rise because of a bulge in the population of high school graduates. The number of graduates climbed from a low of 2.5 million in 1995-96 to an estimated 3.2 million by 2006-07, and is expected to peak at 3.3 million by the end of next school year, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Students also have been applying to a greater number of schools at once, said David Hawkins, the association's director of public policy and research.
"It's very difficult to pinpoint any single interpretation of these numbers," Hawkins said. "Follow the money is always the rule that I go by. Early decision, I would guess, would take a backseat to the [Harvard] financial aid announcement."

But Hawkins said Harvard's 19 percent increase in applications defies predictions from many college officials that Harvard, Princeton, and Virginia would see drops in total application numbers because savvy applicants saw early decision as the best strategy to get into a school.

Yale and MIT, which have early admissions, had higher numbers of early applicants this year. Officials at the schools said it could be because of the changes at the other schools. Yet, Yale expects its overall applicant pool to remain about the same size, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a 4 percent increase in overall applicants.

Yale has no plans to dump early admissions partly because it saw an increase in the early applicants' diversity about five years ago when it made changes, said Jeffrey Brenzel, the school's dean of undergraduate admissions. Yale used to require early applicants to commit to the university early if they were accepted; now, Yale lets the applicants wait until the regular spring acceptance deadline.

With its rise in applications, Harvard will become more competitive this year, Fitzsimmons said. It will still accept 2,100 freshmen - 7.7 percent of this year's applicants, compared with 9.1 percent last year.

Fitzsimmons said he believes Harvard is reducing stress for some students, based on letters from high school counselors and others saying they appreciate having more time to apply.
But others say it remains to be seen whether eliminating early admissions at some schools will reduce the stress on students.

At Milton Academy, the usual 60 percent to 65 percent of the roughly 190 seniors applied early, and they just chose different schools than in the past, said Rod Skinner, director of college counseling.

"It might have been for some kids that there was less pressure. They could wait till the regular round," said Skinner, "But for other kids, they wanted to get it in early anyway so they could have something by December."

Laughter is the best medicine

Laughter might be the best medicine. According to Laughter Therapy researchers, it stretches muscles throughout our face and body; it makes us breathe faster, supplying more oxygen to our tissues; and it boosts our heart rate. In addition, it burns about 50 calories if you laugh about 10 minutes. Even some researchers argue that laughter may raise the level of infection-fighting antibodies in the body and boost the levels of immune cells. Here is something that help you exercise your facial muscles now:

Things Learned From Admission Applications & Interviews

• Answer to the question for “Type of U.S. visa” – Citibank.
• In answer to the application question on sex - - "Once; in Orlando."
• A student whose father is a construction worker listed his father's occupation as "Erection Specialist."
• One student wrote a short response to “why Flagler”: "I don't want to go to a large university, and I'm not all that interested in a really small college. I'd like to attend a mediocre college like Flagler.
• A student listed her activities as President of her Sophomore, Junior and Senior class. She was home schooled with her brother. In a telephone conversation, I asked her mom about it and she said that they indeed did hold elections and her daughter did win.
• During interviews, I like to ask about a favorite book. I had one young man answer, "Oh, I don't read books."

Early acceptance rates declined

42%, 36%, 31%...You wish they were the numbers for acceptance rates at your prospective colleges. Nope. They are the numbers for "increased early admission applications" this year at Chicago, Yale, and Georgetown.

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Early acceptance rates decline across Ivies
By Tasnim Shamma
Princetonian Staff Writer

In the first admissions cycle without early admissions at Princeton and Harvard, application numbers soared and acceptance rates dropped across the rest of the Ivy League and at other selective institutions that continue to offer early admissions.

Seeking early acceptance at a top school, some applicants who might have applied early to Princeton or Harvard in past years seem to have applied early elsewhere, especially to Yale, which saw a record 4,888 applicants for the class of 2012, a 36 percent jump from the class of 2011.

Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye said in October 2007 that she thought some students had applied early to Princeton for strategic reasons. "My concern about Early Decision over the past few years has been that students were not using it for their first choice," she said. "They were using it as a strategy."

With a record number of applicants, Yale accepted 885 students — or 18.1 percent — compared to last year, when it admitted 709 students, or 19.7 percent of its 3,594 early applicants.

Other peer institutions also saw dramatic increases in the number of early applications received. Columbia and Brown reported a 6 percent increase, Dartmouth an 8.7 percent increase, Duke a 5 percent increase, MIT a 13 percent increase, Georgetown a 31 percent increase and the University of Chicago a 42 percent increase.

Penn and Stanford were the only peer institutions that bucked the trend, as both reported a 1.8 percent decrease in early applications received.

Early admissions data for Penn was unavailable, though Penn's Interim Dean of Admissions Eric Kaplan predicted a 30 percent early acceptance rate, about the same as last year.

Before dropping its early admissions program, the University had drawn heavily on applicants from the Early Decision round in crafting each class of students. It received 2,275 early applications for the current freshman class, 2,236 early applications for the sophomore class, 2,039 for the junior class and 1,815 for the senior class.

Since Princeton and Harvard are the only Ivy League schools to have dropped their early admissions programs, it's possible that these most recent statistics indicate that high school seniors are focusing on other schools now, angling for the security of early acceptance. But Rapelye said she is willing to accept this risk.

"We literally had 10,000 students in our pool last year of almost 19,000 students who were qualified to be here, at the highest level," she said. "So what if some of them decide to go early somewhere else? We will still have thousands more from which to choose."

Financial aid scam!

One of the colleagues at National Association for College Admission Counseling warned a recent financial aid scam using a false FAFSA application website. The real site is not fafsa.com but fafsa.ed.gov. When you receive anything from other than http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/, watch out!

I received an email today from FAFSA.com stating that they had successfully filed my FAFSA for me and needed for me to fill out a signature page. I was instructed to follow a link and then fill out a form revealing my personal information. It all seemed very convincing. Years ago I did have a student go to FAFSA.com instead of FAFSA.ed.gov and they tried to bill her a substantial fee. I aggressively reminded them that she was a minor and couldn't sign a contract and they backed off. So, you might want to remind your students and their families that filing the FAFSA is always free and that the web site if FAFSA.ed.gov!

Check out your school

Do you want to know how your school is doing in reading and math achievement, graduation rates and participation in challenging Advanced Placement exams? Check out the “Dashboards” provided by the Department of Education. The U.S. Education secretary Margaret Spelling wants to promote school improvement by publishing the data.

The dashboards can be found at http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress.

For the full report, visit here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/13/AR2008011303480.html?wpisrc=rss_education

Be an angular student

Time has changed. In 1990's, colleges were looking for "well-rounded or multi-talented" applications; in 2000's they shifted gears to search for "angular" students, those with special, highly developed interests and talents. For example, the dean of admissions at Duke said, "What we were talking about was making room for students who were perhaps less well-rounded and more angular, but no less talented, whose talents were evident in a more focused way...it [Duke] is also a great place for someone whose focus is on research, on the arts, on creativity." He also added, "Looking for bright, well-rounded kids is a safe strategy, but it's not necessarily the best strategy." The following article will confirm what Duke's admission officer said.

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Countdown to college: Schools seek 'angular' students

Source: The Charlotte Observer
By Lee Bierer
Nov. 5, 2007 (McClatchy-Tribune News Service delivered by Newstex)

One of the buzzwords of today's college admissions process is "angular."

Angular? What does that mean? Until the nineties, colleges' most successful candidates were well-rounded high-achievers, while today's most sought-after students are referred to as "angular" or "focused." One of the biggest mistakes students make today is not taking this new emphasis seriously.

When most parents applied to college decades ago, high school students were encouraged to dabble in a variety of clubs--be the candy striper, join the French Club, sell ads for the yearbook and be a member of the debate team, etc. Today, those "well-rounded" students would be considered "serial joiners" and would not be evaluated as enthusiastically.

Colleges are looking to build a well-rounded class with dedicated hospital interns, students that tutored younger students in French, yearbook editors and national debate winners. Colleges are less interested in jack-of-all-trades students. It's the passion, the continued interest, and the leadership growth that intrigue and engage admissions committees. "Passion"--it's undoubtedly the most overused word on the college admissions circuit, but that is what colleges say they are looking for. Helping students find their "passion" means guiding them to identify one, two or three interests or talents that they enjoy and will continue to pursue throughout their high school career, and hopefully into their college years.

Nurture the passion, not because you think it will make the difference in being accepted to the college of their choice, but because it will help develop them into a more interesting and fulfilled person.

The reason for the change in priorities from well-rounded to angular is a growing belief among college admissions officials that commitment to an activity and the ability to do it well serve as strong predictors of success in all college endeavors. The serial joiner student typically makes less of a contribution and has less of an impact than the one who is captivated and consumed by a few choice activities.

Many parents falsely believe that the only talents that interest colleges are athletics. In your effort to identify the right college "fit" for your student, explore college Web sites and identify if they offer courses, sponsor a club or compete in the "passion of choice." All tiers of colleges are looking for achievers that can make a contribution to the college community. When considering a variety of extracurricular activities, after you've determined a real and sustained interest, ask yourselves if and how your student's participation can possibly benefit a future college.

Applications from students with "spike talents"--i.e., top-tier ability or a highly original talent--tend to jump off the page. Spike talents can range from winning the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search to playing first oboe in the state orchestra. It is important to note, however, that spike talents will never make up for less-than-stellar grades for admission to the most selective colleges.

What then should you read?

Do you want to know who you are? Trace and study your past. There is no better way than studying history to understand what/why/how/who/where we are now. Here is a suggested list of books for you to start.

http://ednews.org/articles/21699/1/An-Interview-with-Professor-Don-Elder-On-Reading-History/Page1.html

An Interview with Professor Don Elder: On Reading History
Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

At the beginning of every year, one contemplates the books that one has read in the past year and realizes the need to delve more deeply into various books, and issues. Over the past year, I have received many comments about the need to encourage students to read more- and the need to have them read more primary sources as well as fiction, non-fiction, biographies and autobiographies.

In this interview, Professor of History, Donald Elder responds to some questions about important books that need to be read, and the issues regarding these books. As we enter this election year, it seems imperative to reflect back on our country's history, as we are surely making history now, and the current election will contribute to our nation's history.

The issue of what students in social studies, history, and Western Civilization should be reading has been continually debated and discussed over the past year. We thank Professor Elder for sharing his views, beliefs and opinions about the crucial issue of reading, and the specific issue of reading historical materials.

1) As we enter the New Year, one often thinks about the books that one "should" have read last year. As we enter this New Year, what is on your list of important books in the realm of history that SHOULD be read by adults and citizens of this country?

I would hope that all American citizens read The Battle Cry of Freedom. James McPherson tells the story of the most cataclysmic event in our nation's history in a balanced and very readable fashion.

All Americans should read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, to see how humans have the capacity, for better or worse, to fundamentally alter their environment.

I also think that they should read 1776 by David McCullough. We should never lose sight of how desperate the American cause was in that year, and how great a debt we owe to the individuals (of both sexes and all ethnicities) that kept the idea of liberty alive.

2) Progressing along, what are some books that should be MANDATORY reading for high school students- and tell us why?

I would say that for high school students, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is the most important book about US History. Because Douglass saw slavery from every vantage point, the book presents the institution as it truly was. You can't understand our country without understanding slavery's effect on us, and this is the best avenue for gaining comprehension.

I would also recommend The Scarlet Letter, as it puts the mindset of Puritan New England into a setting that young people could relate to even today.

Finally, I would recommend The Grapes of Wrath. It captures perfectly the essence of how The Great Depression forced hardships on the American people, but also shows their amazing resilience.

3) And what are some books that should be MANDATORY reading for college students who are history majors?

For History majors, they should Thomas Paine's Common Sense and The Federalist Papers to see how logical argumentation has been able to influence the course of our nation.

They should also read Women at Work by Thomas Dublin to see how women made their first large-scale foray into the developing manufacturing sector.

Paul Johnson's A Shopkeeper's Millennium shows how religion and American society have intersected. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is great at describing the costs that immigration, industrialization, and urbanization carried with them.

Douglas Kennedy's Freedom from Fear does a great job of demonstrating the complexities of The Great Depression and how it affected the political balance in America.

Finally, The American Age by Walter LaFeber does a masterful job of describing the Cold War.

4) Do you think it more important for students in high school history classes and college American history classes to read biographies or autobiographies and why?

I like certain autobiographies (Douglass and Franklin come immediately to mind), because you hear from the protagonists in their own words. But autobiographies are usually to a certain extent self serving, and thus have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Biographies (like those written by David McCullough or Doris Kearns Goodwin) are good because they can put the lives of their subjects into context. But the authors of biographies may interpret their subjects through their own belief system, so they too must be approached with caution.

5) Do you think it more important for high school students to read fiction as opposed to non fiction?
I have always felt that fiction is quite valid in high school. Indeed, two of the three books that I recommended for high school students were fiction. I think because of all the TV and movies they watch it is easier to approach them through fiction, as long as teachers place the books into the proper context.

6) I believe it was Descartes who said "The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries". If this is true, who would you recommend for high school students and then college students to read?

I totally agree with the quote. Reading The Gettysburg Address by Lincoln, a speech of Malcolm X, or the Declaration of Rights that came out of the women's convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 definitely allows me to connect with the people whose ideas and actions helped shape our nation.

7) Given the upcoming election, are there books that you think the average citizen should read?

I'm afraid I would reflect my political bias if I did! Seriously, I would recommend The Making of the President, 1968 by Theodore White. As divided as we may think we are today, it pales in comparison to the horrendous situations that divided us that year.

8) If the "unexamined life is not worth living", surely, a school's reading list of history should be examined by parents and taxpayers. If you were on a school board, reviewing the required reading list for high school history students, what criteria would you use for the required reading over the course of four years?

I would want them to have a good balance of male and female writers from various ethnic groups spanning chronology both in terms of when the books are set and when they were actually written.

9) If there were one book you would recommend for the understanding of America, what would it be and why?

I would recommend 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, by Mark Kurlansky. It offers the best look at how events all over the globe in that one year had the most profound effect on the way that the last forty years would play themselves out.

Video game and its emotional impact

Many parents worry about the sheer intensity of violence in computer games. But today's article urges parents to look beyond the gushing blood, ruthless depredations, and mindless killing on the video screen: search your child's soul and ask, "Is this morally right?"

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The moral cost of video games
Violence is bad enough. But here's the worst part.
By Matthew Devereux
PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND

In the controversial new video game "Manhunt 2," you're required to sneak up behind innocent victims, hit them over the head with a garden spade and then use that same weapon to decapitate, them. The whole thing is pretty graphic, because the game has, well, pretty graphics. As blood gushes, you're supposed to feel satisfied that you're ready for the next challenge.

To some, this scenario captures everything wrong about video games. "They're too violent," detractors say. "And they glamorize violence. Children might be tempted to copy them." While this is an understandable concern, it misses more obvious problems with many video games today: primarily, an utter lack of moral consequence.

Countless studies have tested the alleged links between virtual violence and its real counterpart. Conclusions vary, but I certainly don't need a panel of academics to explain to me that the teen across the street isn't going to attack me with a garden spade.

Still, if you're a parent, the sheer intensity of violence in many games today ought to be a valid concern. You wouldn't let your children view online pornography, so why let them decapitate people in a video game?

Yet many parents buy their children games rated inappropriate for anyone under 17. Why? Perhaps it's a hangover attitude from the "Pac-Man" past, when all video games were presumed to be harmless fun. Or maybe they just want their kids to think they're cool. Whatever the reason, there's clearly a disconnect between the level of parental angst and parental tolerance.

One of many dubious arguments against violence in video games is that children find it hard to distinguish between "real" and "virtual" situations.

If that's true, is CNN not a more pernicious peddler of unsavory material for kids? When kids turn on the TV and see footage of soldiers shooting each other for real, is there any substantial difference between that and playing a first-person shooter game?

Years ago, after the tragic shootings in Columbine, the news media were quick to lay blame at the game industry's door. Could they not as easily have turned that criticism on themselves?
What's surprising about the media's obsession with violence in games is that it overlooks more serious lapses in values. By concentrating on the bloodthirsty and dramatic, they're ignoring influences that are much more harmful to children long term.

Take, for instance, the idea of ruthless competition, that for every winner there are necessarily losers. Regardless of what game you're playing, the message is almost always the same: Do whatever it takes to win, even at the expense of everyone else.

Imagine if that were the moral of every movie and TV show you ever watched. Would the world be a better or worse place? Would you let your children play a game that promoted such a dog-eat-dog mentality?

Fundamentally, most games operate within a moral framework: good versus evil (or vice versa). But what games conspicuously lack is moral consequence. Once you've killed someone, stolen something, or blown up a building, that's usually the end of it – you'll rarely get to see the emotional impact of your actions on the characters around you.

Every bit of mayhem becomes just another item on a video-game to-do list. Games ignore moral consequence and emotional nuance to focus on the purely visceral. There are only two types of decisions you can really make: the strategically correct one or the strategically incorrect one. There is no "right" or "wrong" – only success or failure.

Unbridled competition combined with no moral consequence eventually leads to a lack of compassion. And without compassion, humanity is lost.

What games risk instilling, not just in kids, but in anyone who plays them, is a kind of sociopathy: a dearth of conscience. Whether this might be imitated outside of gaming is beside the point. What we should be asking ourselves is if we really want to spend ever more time playing things that encourage these values. That's a moral question, one that's easily sidelined in favor of simply having fun, but it's something we all must consider as the pastime grows more popular.

I'm not calling for stricter regulation of the video-game industry. Rather, I hope to widen the debate to include issues that might not be considered if we believe the sensational, trivial hysteria of the media. By concentrating so heavily on the immediate (and short-term) effects of video-game violence, we're distracted from discussing more important moral dimensions. It's time for parents to stop asking what is appropriate for their children and to start asking what is morally right.

• Matthew Devereux writes about the video-game industry and is a former staff writer of Edge magazine.

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On Reading

I wholeheartedly agree with Shaughnessy's assertion that parents and school should provide a conducive environment for students to read more. However, reading itself can be nothing but a complete waste of your time unless it prompts you to reflect carefully and systematically, and nudges you to articulate what you have learned in writing. Think about the last time you watched a movie. Do you even recall what the movie was about? Had you discussed--better yet, wrote an essay--about it, you would have still remembered it. So, don't just read a book: think, reflect, and write something about the book in your journal. The same principle applies to the article below.

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Commentary: On Reading
Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

Every once in a while, an exemplary article is brought to my attention. Recently, Caleb Crain published an article in The New Yorker on " The Twilight of the Books". In this article, published on Dec 24, 2007, he discussed the decline of books and reading.

Crain first reviewed some of the salient past literature conducted by various polls and organizations over the past 50 or so years, which seems to indicate, probably quite correctly, that there has been a decline in reading. This decline is pervasive, and includes newspapers, magazines, books, and the like.

Certainly, with the advent of television, and now the explosion of movies and CD's people are turning more and more to the screen rather than to the hard cover or paper back book. Children growing up in the current zeitgeist are exposed more to the Internet than to H.G. Wells' book "The War of the Worlds". Adolescents are turning more to text messaging and e-mailing than to actually writing essays or book reports. And adults, in their stress filled lives, have little time to turn to Will and Ariel Durant, or Cervantes or Dumas.

Crain, who studied at Columbia, reviews some of the past work of Maryanne Wolf of Tufts. Wolf has hypothesized about how the computer screen and technology has affected our brains and the wiring and circuitry in it. Today, we have MRI's and other magnetic resonance imaging devices that provide a visual picture as to what is occurring in the brain as we process prose materials and text.
Certainly, those who read, succeed, and those who read well, comprehend extensively and remember and integrate what they have read are more apt to succeed and achieve in school and in life. Yet, the problem remains that we are increasingly a television society and even the Internet with the "You Tube" phenomenon in increasingly providing "sound bites" and "talking heads" to provide us with the latest political skullduggery.

The decline in literary reading is cause for concern.This writer is not saying that students should be forced to read Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn but that perhaps there should be a good deal of American literature that students should be exposed to- be it Catcher in the Rye or Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Faulkner.

There should be a consistent exposure to books of various genres and perhaps indeed, even some sort of" forced processing". Jeanne Chall of Harvard once mentioned that she had to write book reports on books that she had written and it did not kill her.

I think that there needs to be much more responsive writing done regarding what students are reading-even if it is their thoughts and ideas and feelings about good old Harry Potter.
J.K. Rowling's boy wonder has been the one bring shining star perhaps over the last twenty or so years in terms of getting children, adolescents, and yes, even adults reading again. Stephen King has carried that challenge for far too long.

Yet one wonders if there is some sort of pattern here- that only a select few writers can speak to the masses, or if there are only a few elite writers who speak to the intellectual needs of the few.
Yet, what are the needs of the many? What are the intellectual materials that students should be exposed to as they traverse their academic gauntlet from kindergarten to twelfth grade and then on to college? And what should the average college student be doing in terms of reading materials other than assigned texts in certain classes? (Some of these texts have been purchased "used" and sadly have been underlined and highlighted by some previous student who may have had a distinctly different processing style.)

Crain does optimistically state that perhaps we are in some sort of pendulum swing, and that the next few years will see a return to reading for pleasure, for enjoyment, for learning and for procuring a fund of information and knowledge- perhaps along the lines of E.D. Hirsch and his "Core Knowledge" program. And certainly any racial, ethnic or cultural group should feel free to construct their own lists of"required reading" to represent their specific group. I think of Alfred Tatum in this regard, and there are certainly others. In an educated civilized society students should be exposed to poems, plays, short stories, novels, novellas as well as biographies, autobiographies and historical novels as well as fiction and non-fiction. The "feel" of a text in one's hands is irreplaceable- young children seem to love those large picture books that transport them to a world of friendly frogs, and red Clifford dogs. The issue is how to make the transformation from friendly frogs to Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". Some publishers have exploited the issue of "feel ". The latest Clive Barker book, "Mister B. Gone" sports ancient parchment type of paper, which provides an antique feel for the book.

Educational theorists need to address the issue of the importance of reading, and the need for individuals to read not just inside school, but out of school also. My good friend and colleague from Denmark, Mogens Jansen is one of the few scholars who has devoted his time to this concept- the importance of outside reading and the need to have some type of on-going reading program. I have to apologize that with the various end of the year festivities my own independent reading program has crashed, but will be resurrected with Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. And I have at least exposed some students to Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales" instead of the usual " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clark Moore.

Educational theorists, as well as pragmatists need to help teachers cope with a culture that fosters "Cliff's Notes" as well as Monarch Notes and "Literature for Dummies".
Are there books that every American student should read? Is there any one book that every American that goes through the public school system should read? While children and college students are forced or mandated to read certain texts, there should be some books that should form a nucleus of American education. Who is to determine this core set of books? Or should this be a question posed to parents about to have a child? What are the top ten books that you believe that your child should read? Some individuals for whatever reason have a penchant for science fiction and the work of H.G. Wells.

Others feel the American western is the thing and others along with Shakespeare acknowledge that "the play's the thing". Yet what books have made the most impact on the greatest number of people and should these books be the required reading buffet for our students?

Crain notes that "No effort of will is likely to make reading popular again". It is incumbent upon educational theorists to propose ideas that will make reading popular again, and to test those ideas so that we have empirical evidence.

We need to have newer enthusiastic teachers who are able to say " this is how you motivate students to read Melville" and "this is how you get pupils to understand H.L. Mencken". We have to have principals who encourage Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as well as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And we need librarians who promote not just the castle of Hogwarts, but the castle of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy.

But most probably, we need parents who fill their living rooms with books instead of DVD's and Christmas presents under the tree that require book marks and not triple A batteries.
Perhaps we need more DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) programs in the schools or more SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) time. And perhaps School Boards should look more carefully at the text of Alfie Kohn " What Does it Mean to be Well Educated?"

Perhaps Kohn should re-write his text and subtitle it " What Does it Mean to be Well Educated in an age of No Child Left Behind? Or"What Does it Mean to be Well Educated in an Age of Inclusion and Mainstreaming?"

John Glover and Roger Bruning in their classic educational psychology text indicated quite simply that students who see parents read, and are read to, are more likely to read, enjoy reading and procure the habit. I am not sure if Steven Covey has reading as one of his habits of successful people, but I believe that independent is critical for the development of thought, critical thinking and higher order thinking- and the more of it, the better.

One does not learn to think critically by watching the pratfalling John Ritter in "Three's Company" or Erik Estrada in California Highway Patrol or "Chips". Indeed some readers may not even recognize these various ancient television programs because they have grown up on a different generation of programming. Certain college students came of age reading Hermann Hesse's "Demian"and "Steppenwolf" and the latest cadre of college freshmen are exposed to Jonathan Safran Foer's book " Everything is Illuminated".

The knowledge of different generations DOES differ- and rightfully so. We should not expect college students born in the 1990's to know about Fernandel or even Jack Benny. Nor would they be able to name the Beatles or know who Elvis was (Presley not Costello).
But we should hope that they would know a bit about Plato, Socrates, Chaucer and hopefully Shakespeare.

Exactly how much they should "know" or remember or understand is also up for debate.
As always there are political/social and other issues. Fifty years ago, the classrooms of America, and other nations around the world did not have students with a variety of exceptionalities. Currently, in our classrooms across the nation, we have students who are mainstreamed with various exceptionalities and other health impairments. There are students with learning disabilities, mental retardation, visual impairments, hearing impairments, benign congenital hypotonia, pervasive developmental delay and disorder as well as children with expressive and receptive language disorders and delays and asthma, epilepsy and diabetes. To paraphrase Winston Churchill " never in the course of human events have so many teachers been faced with so many challenges, with so little support and training".

It is obviously quite difficult to force a student who is blind to read- we can expose him or her to books or tape or on Braille, but one cannot coerce children with autism or mental retardation to read. For children with dyslexia, or to be perhaps more politically correct, children with a learning disability in reading, abridged novels may be more appropriate and appealing or again, books on tape, or even as a last resort, movies ( although watching Robert Redford in " The Great Gatsby" just doesn't seem to translate into what F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to say). And although Henry Morton Robinson's book "The Cardinal" was made into a movie, the movie simply doesn't capture the rich, robust language and the poignancy of the book.

I am not sure "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us", but I am fairly sure that he would think that we should read more, encourage more reading, and perhaps even have some discussion about what we have read and (gasp!) perhaps even write about what we have read in the form of book reviews- pro and con.

I do concur with Crain that we may be seeing a "twilight of the books" – we may be seeing a differential appreciation of reading- one in which very few people actually read a book, but analyze it in depth and savor the implications of what they have read.

We may be seeing a " twilight of the books" in terms of books that required extensive thought may become fewer in number and read only by those who have the time and the background knowledge and information to digest the message and implications of the book.

We may be approaching a "twilight of the books" that require thought and in depth analysis, and literary criticism and we may be seeing what is tantamount to the cheap dime store novellas or paperback books with poverty of content.

But if things are darkest before the dawn, we may also be seeing a resurgence of quality literature, books and reading and a return to the classics of the past, present and the future. It was Thomas Paine who wrote a small pamphlet called " Common Sense" that brought about the American Revolution.Hopefully, Crain's small piece in the New Yorker will strike a similar chord in readers and there will be a wide reverberation of it's message to at least delay the setting of the sun. And it was Hemingway who wrote " The Sun Also Rises ".

Hopefully, the New Year will bring about a resurgence in quality,in depth reading.

Soure Link:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge-crain

Tour your prospective colleges, virtually.

Finding a right college is like searching for your future spouse. Just as you don't want to select your mate upon reviewing photos displayed online, you may not want to choose your college based on what you see online. You must visit them "in person" to experience their spirit, culture, and atmosphere after investigating initially through the following virtual college tour engines.

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The college tour goes online
New websites paint a portrait of college and university life, providing one-stop shopping for prospective students.
By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

For those parents and students whose New Year's resolution is to start the search for the right college, some new – and free – tools are coming online to make that task a little bit easier.

The websites – College Portrait (www.voluntarysystem.org) and U-CAN (www.ucan-network.org) – offer essential information to make it easy to compare participating schools. Interested in the professor-student ratio? The racial breakdown on campus? A detailed picture of costs and financial aid? Here's where you can get a glimpse or follow the links to dig deeper.

These sites are one answer to the mounting pressure to make the often-frustrating system of admissions and financial aid easier for families to navigate. Some education advocates hope they will prove to be the first step toward building an even more comprehensive website that would include guidance-counseling components. Students should be empowered to choose for themselves what matters most, they say. And they hope these nonprofit alternatives will help reverse the brand-name frenzy fed by popular rankings such as the annual guide by U.S. News & World Report.

Just over a year ago, the report of the Education Secretary's Commission on the Future of Higher Education sounded the call for more accountability and transparency. College and university groups moved quickly to make the information they already gather more available to the public, aiming to head off potential federal mandates.

"Parents and students ... are trying to make some big, difficult decisions, so the more transparent we are about our business and the outcome of our business, the better it is for everyone," says Charles Reed, chancellor of the California State University system.

All 23 Cal State campuses will be represented on College Portrait, the joint venture of two public university associations, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). "It's important for all of higher education to participate so that we can continue to gain the public's confidence about how we use the public's resources to educate America's future workforce," Mr. Reed says.

College Portrait will offer some innovative features – such as an interactive cost calculator. People have a hard time figuring out the true cost of college, and low-income families often believe college is out of reach, says David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at NASULGC. "We put the calculator in so that by entering a dozen pieces of data, you can [get] a reasonable estimate of what the net cost will be of attending a specific university."

Visitors to the site, which is still in its pilot stages, can see a breakdown of academic progress and graduation rates at each school – not only the percentage that graduate in four years and six years, but also the percentage that are still enrolled in higher education or have graduated from another institution.

Debate over access
Schools that want to be listed on College Portrait also have to agree to post "learning outcomes" data. Various assessments already exist to measure how much students gain in broad areas such as problem-solving and writing skills. But whether those results should be reported publicly is a matter of heated debate in higher education.

Because of the learning-outcomes requirement, the University of California, another public system in the state, has declined to participate.

Only about 300 out of more than 3,000 colleges and universities in the United States use such assessments so far, Mr. Shulenburger says. Schools that sign on to College Portrait will have the next four years to begin tracking the learning-outcomes results before being required to post them.
U-CAN – a site put together by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) – offers similar information in a template. It includes links to a school's own website for details on areas such as internships and study abroad. U-CAN does not require schools to post learning-outcomes data, but allows them to link to such information if they choose.

"Given the extraordinary diversity of our institutions ... what you need is a whole range of ways to assess quality," says NAICU president David Warren. A school whose curriculum is focused on the "Great Books" is going to measure success very differently from a school with strengths in engineering, for instance.

Launched in late September, U-CAN has nearly 600 colleges participating, and many others in the planning stage. College Portrait expects to have many schools represented by the spring.
For members of Congress who have been advocating for more accessible information, both sites are encouraging. A version of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act moving through the House would set up a voluntary system similar to U-CAN.

Focus on retention rates
Judy Bracken, a college and career specialist at George Mason High School in Falls Church, Va., says U-CAN is "really user-friendly; it's a fun, bright site." And she expects the cost calculator on College Portrait to be a popular feature. But she doesn't see the sites as unique.

"The College Board has [information] on almost every single college," she says. While she relies on a search tool that her school district pays for, she says various free resources are already available.

Wherever people do their searches, one piece of data she advises them to scrutinize is the retention rate – the number of first-year students who return the next year. "That really does tell you, Did they market themselves in a true fashion?"

Ms. Bracken encourages students to shake off the pressure to chase the Ivy League or other name-brand schools. "If I can just get kids to look really carefully at what is the best fit for them, then I feel like I've done my job."

Virtual counselors
There is an effort under way to incorporate some of the tried and true advice of guidance counselors into a free comprehensive website. The nonprofit group Education Conservancy (www.educationconservancy.org) is leading the charge to develop a prototype and raise the estimated $400,000 it would need to start up such a site.

With so many students not having enough access to college counselors, there's a "dire" need for a site that will offer much more than just information templates, says executive director Lloyd Thacker, a former admissions officer and high school counselor. Thacker is also in the forefront of the movement to have colleges boycott the U.S. News rankings. "We're serving the needs of kids in a process that's become increasingly commercialized," he says.

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How to raise C's to A's

Are you struggling with low grades in your school? Take a look at your room, homework binders, and notes. Clean up the clutter and organize as the following article suggests; then it will dramatically improve your academic performance.

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Source Link:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2008/01/06/better_organization_better_grades/

Better organization, better grades
Neat binder helps students in class
By Victoria Cheng, Globe Correspondent January 6, 2008

For every young student who has gotten in trouble for forgetting to complete a homework assignment, David Schwartz has a solution.

In 1996, in response to his 8-year-old son's request for help in organizing school papers, Schwartz invented a binder system with color-coded folders matched to different school subjects and tabbed pockets that separate homework from reference sheets and tests or quizzes.

The system had an immediate impact on his son's grades, which jumped from C's to A's and attracted the attention of the school principal, who commissioned binders for the entire class at the Fay School in Southborough.

The David (short for "documents for advancement via individual determination") Organizing Assistant is now taking off in public schools in Cambridge. Last fall, Fletcher-Maynard Academy implemented the binder system for fifth through eighth grades, and Cambridgeport School provided binders for students in grades 3 and 4. Pilot implementation is scheduled at the Maria L. Baldwin School and the Kennedy-Longfellow School this spring.

Schwarz, chief executive officer of Framingham-based Productive Education LLC, is working out contracts to provide the binders for the schools.


Annlee Foster, who teaches language arts at Fletcher-Maynard and oversees the David program at the school, said the system is an improvement over Fletcher-Maynard's previously ad hoc binder policy in a variety of ways. Each fifth- through eighth-grade student purchased a David binder with a complete set of folders and a pencil case for $19.95 at the beginning of this school year, sparing their parents from the mad dash for school supplies in the fall, she said.

"The three-ring binders the kids used to use were heavy and overloaded," she added, noting that the David system, held together by three book rings threaded through a series of hole-punched folders, is not only much lighter but also standardized in appearance, eliminating disparities among students using deluxe canvas binders and those using the less expensive plastic variety.

The system has also changed the learning dynamic in the classroom, with teachers "paying more attention to how kids organize," Foster said. "The whole color-coding has had a huge impact. If the yellow folder is for science, teachers can tell immediately if a student is not working on science during class."

Seventh-grade Fletcher-Maynard student Ashley Correia, who had decorated her folders with red and blue stars, said she likes the new system for the way it simplifies her search for papers.
"I always use it at the beginning and end of class and I can find a lot of my papers easier," she said, demonstrating a search for her social studies homework by flipping to her green folder and to the cover sheet on top, which listed her homework assignments in a neatly lettered chart.


Besides providing students at Fletcher-Maynard with a simple system for arranging their schoolwork, the David system is also used as a hands-on demonstration of the eighth-grade MCAS design and engineering curriculum.

Ellen McLaughlin, who brought the David binder system to Fletcher-Maynard through the school's Tutoring Plus program last February, was introduced to the binder when she was running a robotics class affiliated with MIT. The binders, originally intended only to help organize students, became a robotics project when Schwartz, whose background is in computer science and business, presented it to students as a machine they could build.


"We presented the organizing binder as a toy," said McLaughin. "How do you design a toy? You need to experience it, tear it apart, and put it back together."

The five Tutoring Plus students who initially tested the organizing binder's folders and filing system immediately wanted to implement it in their regular school routine, McLaughlin said. In so doing, they aroused the interest of their peers and of Fletcher-Maynard principal Robin Harris.

"We really had a need for our students being organized," said Harris, who first noticed the program when she dropped in on a Tutoring Plus session and witnessed her students' animated discussions about which filing system worked best for them.

"Over and over and over again, our teachers have said the major reason preventing our kids from being a little more successful was that they were unorganized," she said, adding that she sees the binder as one method for improving student performance.

"A large number of our kids have special needs, or are kids of color or qualify for the reduced [price] lunch program . . . a lot of choices in life will be made for them," Harris said.

"Our goal is to close the achievement gap and produce kids who are academically sound - kids who have the ability to make choices, who know what it means to be a student, be organized, be focused, and be a citizen in the community."

"Organizing skills are probably the most important skills we can give to a young child," Schwartz added.

To Schwartz, the binder system's main purpose is to help students with their homework; its usefulness in teaching to state-aligned MCAS standards has been a serendipitous bonus.

"We've positioned this as a thinking machine: You assemble the machine and when you walk away, you actually have something you can use in daily life."

Positive Prejudice?

The following report about a Harvard professor's research on positive prejudice reminds me of the prime minister's monologue in Love Actually:

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspicion love actually is all around.

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Source Link:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/01/06/those_people/

Those people
What if our prejudices could be transformed into a force for good? A Harvard scholar suggests a new way to think about social relations.
By Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow January 6, 2008

IN A WORLD FRAUGHT with ethnic, religious, and sectarian tensions, "tolerance" is a familiar mantra. Diversity training sessions in schools and workplaces try to instill it. Mitt Romney, in his recent speech on faith, praised our nation's embrace of it. The UN has even designated an International Day for it. (The date - mark your calendars - is Nov. 16.) Across the political spectrum, extolling tolerance is as obligatory as condemning terrorism.

Of course, no one could deny the misery caused by social divisions, from Iraq to the Balkans to Jena, La. The consequences can be as personal as hurt feelings or as sweeping as warfare, and show little sign of abating.

But Harvard social psychologist Todd Pittinsky believes that our reverence for tolerance may be misplaced. The tolerance agenda aims to improve society by eliminating negative attitudes, but has nothing to say about generating positive ones.

Pittinsky's work focuses on what he has dubbed "allophilia," borrowed from the Greek for "love of the other." In survey studies that began in 2005, Pittinsky has found that high levels of allophilia for a particular group predict positive behaviors - such as donating to relevant charities and supporting sympathetic policies - significantly better than low levels of prejudice against the same group.

Pittinsky's research suggests that negative and positive attitudes are not opposite ends of a spectrum, but at least partially independent - that all the tolerance training in the world would not instill affection for a group. Pittinsky's investigations - conducted among diverse populations in the Middle East, New England, and elsewhere - suggest a novel approach to transforming relations among social groups.

Instead of merely training people to hate each other less, Pittinsky says, it may be time to teach them to like each other more.

"Would you want to be tolerated?" Pittinsky says. "The synonyms are even worse - to endure, to put up with. . . .We can and must do better than tolerance."

Pittinsky, an associate professor of public policy at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School, stresses that he is at the beginning of a life's work. (He has not yet published this work in a peer-reviewed journal; two papers are under review.) His research has largely focused on verifying the existence of allophilia and developing the scale to measure it. He has begun to look into what causes allophilia and how to promote it - several studies are underway - but has yet to establish conclusive answers. And not everyone is convinced that positive attitudes are a revolutionary remedy; some scholars caution that positivity can in fact be linked with prejudice.

"Prejudice doesn't necessarily require negative feelings," says Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. For example, he says, it is possible to have positive attitudes toward women, but based on stereotypes of them as cooperative and nurturing, a kind of "benevolent sexism."

Pittinsky believes we are capable of positive feelings that do not rely on harmful stereotypes. Yet Nosek's point raises one of the central questions of the allophilia research. The theory implies that we should not abolish prejudice per se, but inculcate new, albeit positive, prejudices. We may bristle at this prospect: America is founded on the ideal of individuality, the notion that all citizens have the right to be judged by their own unique characteristics and accomplishments. But a large body of research - to say nothing of history - suggests that the human mind inevitably categorizes people into groups. Should we aim for color-blindness? Or should we, as Pittinsky suggests, accept the futility of that goal and instead cultivate affection for others because of, not despite, these differences?

Combining fatalism and idealism, allophilia offers a rosy philosophy for an irredeemably tribal world.

Since the publication, in 1954, of psychologist Gordon Allport's landmark book, "The Nature of Prejudice," a mountain of psychological research on group relations has accumulated. The vast majority has focused on conflict and tension. Over the last decade or so, some scholars have begun to inch toward a more positive orientation. But even much of this research has been loath to leave the negative altogether behind. Some of it has examined sympathetic attitudes rooted in pity, while other work has looked at ambivalence - "envious prejudice" and "paternalistic prejudice," each of which integrates positive and negative attitudes.

Other work has sought ways to mend divisions by encouraging people to see themselves as part of a bigger, "superordinate" group. If Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq could identify primarily as Iraqis, for example, they might be less inclined to dehumanize one another. An oft-quoted maxim in the field alludes to the ultimate superordinate group: "The best way to achieve peace on earth is an invasion from Mars."

Yet a small, emerging body of research has focused on purely positive feelings across group lines. In 1997, research by C. Daniel Batson, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas, showed that urging people to "take the perspective" of members of another group can enhance empathy and generate more positive attitudes. At around the same time, scholars such as Thomas Pettigrew, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, began investigating how friendship with a member of another group can promote an affinity for that group as a whole.

Pittinsky is part of this vanguard studying what he calls "unmixed positive regard." With his colleague Seth Rosenthal, a research fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, he is the first to codify these feelings into a numeric scale. Even more than his peers in this contingent, Pittinsky's work emphasizes the discrete spheres of positive and negative feelings; most researchers do not distinguish between increasing the positive and reducing the negative. And in this regard, Pittinsky is applying findings from other areas of psychology to the study of group relations.

"In a larger context, there are theories about affect that suggest that positivity and negativity are separate dimensions," says Marilynn Brewer, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University. For example, over the past decade, several researchers have argued that trust and distrust are two distinct constructs, rather than opposite ends of a continuum. Attraction and repulsion form another pair like this. Classic psychological research in the 1950s showed that perceiving another person as beneficial to oneself leads to attraction, while perceiving someone as harmful leads to repulsion. Studies over the years (not to mention a wealth of collective dating experience) have confirmed that less repulsion does not necessarily translate into more attraction, and vice versa.

Pittinsky's work extrapolates from these insights to understand group relations. His first effort, in 2005, was to develop an allophilia scale by surveying lay participants as well as "allophilia experts," such as academics specializing in foreign cultures. They were asked to list thoughts, feelings, and behaviors they would exhibit toward a target group. Based on these responses, Pittinsky and Rosenthal identified five components of allophilia - kinship, comfort, affection, engagement, and enthusiasm - and formulated items for the surveys.

A study in 2006, for example, measured allophilia toward African-Americans. Subjects (who belonged to a variety of other races) were asked to rate their degree of agreement with statements such as: "I feel like I can be myself around African-Americans"; "I would like to be more like African-Americans"; "I am truly interested in understanding the points of view of African-Americans." The study also used several preexisting scales - each based on survey questions - to gauge racism against black people.

Then the surveys asked subjects about their willingness to proactively intervene on behalf of African-Americans, e.g. "I would speak in defense of African-Americans if I heard someone demeaning them." Subjects also rated their support for affirmative action policies. In both cases, high scores on the allophilia scale were a better predictor of these supportive responses than were low levels of racism. As one would expect, allophilia tends to correlate negatively with prejudice. But, counterintuitively, some subjects exhibit high levels of both, bolstering the claim that the two dimensions are independent.

Studies conducted last year measured feelings between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, and the attitudes of native Maine residents toward the growing influx of Muslim immigrants from Africa. Pittinsky and his colleagues have also done studies unrelated to race: one involved rival colleges, and another assessed attitudes toward gay men. In all of these studies, allophilia for a group predicted positive behaviors better than lack of prejudice. Moreover, the studies have taken care to distinguish between allophilia and indiscriminately bleeding hearts. They measured other factors, such as altruism and liberal political outlooks, and found that allophilia beat them in predicting positive behaviors.

Pittinsky's newest research is examining how feelings affect positive and negative attitudes differently. Feeling accepted by a group is more likely to increase allophilia toward that group than to reduce prejudice. Conversely, feeling sympathy for a group might make us hate them less, but does not necessarily make us like them more. These findings are consistent with the classic research about our attraction to people: feeling accepted by someone forms a bond that feeling sorry for someone does not.

Pittinsky has chiefly focused, so far, on measuring allophilia and understanding its effects, but work from other researchers hints at what may be done to foster it.

Linda Tropp, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has found that a single friendship can have a ripple effect on attitudes. In the laboratory, she paired up people of different races to engage in friendship-building activities, such as sharing embarrassing moments and cooperating on Jenga, a game involving building blocks. Afterward, participants reported initiating more interracial contact.

"When you forge close relationships across group boundaries," Tropp says, "you become invested in the friend and their group."

On a larger scale, the idea of "positive role models" may seem quaint, but it does appear to have a real effect. In psychology studies, Americans of all races have more negative subconscious associations with black people than with white people, according to Nosek, the University of Virginia psychology professor. But when they are exposed to black role models, such as Oprah Winfrey or Martin Luther King, Jr., immediately before tests, this negativity is mitigated.

"The associations we absorb from our cultural context can change," says Nosek.
But, as Nosek points out, it's entirely possible to experience warmth for a group without wanting to change its position in society. One example is the "benevolent sexism" that keeps women cherished but marginalized, as vividly manifest in 1950s sitcoms. There are other examples: "White masters were said to very much like their slaves," Nosek remarks. But this affection was dependent on "a very particular context - as long as they were well-behaved and maintained the role structure."

Yet in other cases, as Nosek agrees, positive feelings can nurture a drive to improve a group's situation. As Pittinsky has found, allophilia is linked with enthusiasm for supportive policies and even social activism on a group's behalf. Pittinsky hopes that as the research progresses, government programs and school curricula will use it to teach allophilia promotion in addition to prejudice reduction.

More broadly, though, he hopes that simply introducing the concept of allophilia into the popular imagination could disrupt ossified assumptions about social relations. Group differences are powerfully associated in the public mind with conflict and discrimination. Despite good intentions, many of us have anxieties about interacting with other groups because we expect them to be prejudiced against us, or because we fear we are prejudiced against them. But, Pittinsky and others insist, that's not the whole story. Many of us have positive feelings, too, but they may be overlooked, misunderstood, or unexpressed because we lack a vocabulary to articulate them. By demonstrating the existence of these feelings - and by giving them a name - Pittinsky says he is aiming to "interrupt vicious circles and launch virtuous ones."

College admission frenzy continues

Getting into selective colleges (about 50 schools out of 3000 colleges) became like a battle ground in which you need to exercise the rules from the ancient Chinese war game book, the Art of War by Sun Tzu. Though it may not be the war that leads to "a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin" as Sun Tzu said, frequently, the thin and white envelope from your prospective college can make you devastated as the following article shows. The real problem, however, is not about the rejection letter but about the opaque nature of the process of college admission. For example, I know one student accepted by Stanford and rejected by UCLA, still another student got YES from Yale but NO from William & Mary. Why? No one knows and that frustrates us of all.

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Getting In Gets Harder
The children of the baby boomers are flooding colleges with applications, making the process more competitive than ever.
By Peg Tyre
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 11:53 AM ET Jan 3, 2008

When high-school senior Maxine Wally got rejected from Northwestern University last month, she lay down on her mother's bed and cried. She thought she had a good shot. Wally consistently took the toughest classes she could fit into her schedule, and her grade point average puts her near the top of the class at her well-regarded public high school in Berkeley, Calif. After months of researching Northwestern on the Web and grilling friends, teachers and advisers who had gone there, Maxine pinned her hopes on getting accepted. "I've been trying to tell her—gently—that getting into college can be very competitive," said Maxine's mom Wendy. But young people, sighed Wendy, "want to follow their dreams."

For students like Maxine who are applying to college for next fall, that dream is turning out to be frustratingly unobtainable. It turns out the odds of getting into a selective college have never been worse. Why? It's simple demographics. A little less than two decades ago the biggest population bulge in the history of America, the baby boomers, were busy having kids. Now those kids are in junior high school and high school and creating a demographic boomlet all their own. This spring the largest number of high-school graduates in the history of the country—some 3.32 million—will don a cap and gown, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Next year, at the peak of the peak, the number of high-school graduates is expected to top 3.33 million. "For many middle- and upper-middle-class kids, the transition from high school to college was never without some obvious stress," says Barmak Nassirian, spokesman for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "But now it has become a multiyear nightmare."

Last year about three-quarters of four-year colleges and universities reported an increase in the number of applications from the previous year. This year applications are pouring in again. The deadline for most colleges is between Dec. 1 and Jan. 15, and although administrators don't tally the numbers of applications they receive until later in the year, many admissions officers—even some at schools not normally considered highly selective—are already calling it a banner year.

Last year Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., got 4,000 applications for 455 seats. By the first week in December the school had already topped that number—and the deadline was still six weeks away. Colorado College, which received 3,410 applications for 500 seats in 2002, expects to break 5,000 this year. Last year Ball State in Muncie, Ind., saw applications jump 22 percent when it got 13,000 applications for 3,100 spaces. So far this year applications are up an additional 15 percent.

Flagship state schools, like the University of Texas at Austin, where the number of students applying has jumped from 14,982 to 27,237 in the last 10 years, are turning away more kids than they want to. "The positive side is that we get to be more selective," says Gary Lavergne, UT's director of admission research. "But when you see a kid collapse with grief because they didn't get in, well, that's not fun."

College counselors say that as schools get choosier, parents have grown more resigned to the realities of kids' prospects. "It used to be that parents would go crazy if their kid couldn't get into a status school," says Harvard admissions officer turned private college counselor Chuck Hughes, who runs a company called Road to College. "Now parents are starting to realize how crazy competitive it is." To hedge their bets, kids are applying to more schools than ever, too. In 1991, 59 percent of prospective college students applied to three or more colleges. In 2006, 71 percent applied to three or more and 18 percent applied to seven or more.

College admissions officers are split. On the one hand, they say they don't like being forced to reject so many worthy kids. On the other hand, they're enjoying—and profiting from—the attention. As the number of applicants rises, admission becomes increasingly selective. Most parents and students equate selectivity with a quality education, which in turn encourages even more applications and allows colleges to become even more selective.

So, despite the fact that some schools are turning away larger and larger numbers of hopeful applicants, colleges are spending big bucks on marketing, about $2,000 per student, to keep applications rolling in. And it's not just glossy brochures and interactive Web sites. Ball State, for instance, recently hired a public relations firm to create a brand image for the school and come up with a tag line ("Education, redefined"). These days the university advertises itself on billboards and through a series of slick television ads. When it comes to marketing, "sometimes it feels like we're all locked in an arms race," admits Bryn Mawr admissions chief Jenny Rickard. "But no college wants to back away," even though they are getting more than enough applicants to keep their institutions healthy.

At some colleges the bumper crop of applications is causing crowd-control problems. For years Rutgers University has run a private bus to ferry prospective students and their parents around its sprawling New Brunswick, N.J., campus. But in the last five years, as the number of applicants has jumped from 26,000 to 43,000, there's no more room on the bus. By the first week in September parents had already reserved most of the spots through December. The university is looking at building a massive new visitors center to handle the overflow.

By 2015 the number of high-school graduates will begin to drop back out of the stratosphere. But admissions directors are already worrying about the shrinking pool of future applicants, especially the sliver of those who can afford to foot the $40,000 annual tab. The most selective institutions have begun to aggressively recruit applicants from China, Korea, India and South America. Publicly, college admissions officers say they're encouraging international students to enroll in order to improve diversity on campus. At most colleges, though, the active outreach is directed at wealthy international students who can afford to pay the full sticker price of a private four-year education.

For her part, Maxine Wally is sad but resigned. The sheer numbers of applicants this year, she says, makes the process "feel almost random." But a few days after her rejection from Northwestern she'd dried her tears and was putting the finishing touches on her applications to Barnard, New York University and Boston University. "I know I'm one of many, but that doesn't mean I'm not smart and driven and ready to be a committed student."


URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/83159

How to get in

When you listen to either Hernández or Wissner-Gross, the message is the same; dig up your passion and bring it out to the public square. In today's college admission frenzy, it is what comes out of you that counts, not what goes into your brain. By all means, isn't it what education is all about? Education (e+ducere) means "bring out or lead out something that is hidden."

Source Link:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110011074

A Desperate Need for Acceptance How to get into college despite the disadvantage of privilege.
BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY

Given that, with the arrival of the new year, college applications are now flooding into admissions offices all over the country, it might be a good time to reflect on the absurdity of the whole college-admissions process. Take this passage from Michele Hernández's "Acing the College Application," where she assesses the chances of a high-school student getting into a college of his choice. "Best case: Neither of your parents attended college at all, your father is a factory worker, and your mom is on disability. . . . Worst case: Your father went to Yale as an undergraduate and then Harvard Business School and is now an investment banker and your mom went to Brown, holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and works as a research chemist."

We all understand that being a rich white kid puts one at a disadvantage in the college-admissions process. But it is worth pausing to savor the irony of an institution that charges as much as $45,000 a year asking its applicants to demonstrate their proletarian credentials.

What's a privileged kid to do? Ms. Hernández, a former admissions officer at Dartmouth, offers a couple of options. "Be vague" about your parents' occupations: "If your mom is the chief neurosurgeon for a New York hospital, try 'medical.' " Or you could get yourself a job, "the less exalted the better," Ms. Hernández advises, citing one boarding-school student who improved his admissions chances by baling hay every summer (on his family's farm).

But making your collar seem blue may not be enough. What colleges are looking for these days, according to Ms. Hernández, is passion. "Since the late 1990s," she writes, "the focus has shifted away from well-rounded students to the idea of a well-rounded freshman class."

A high-school student who gets good grades, serves as student body president and plays varsity football may be a remarkable person, but to an admissions officer his excellence may look rather conventional and diffuse. Better to cultivate a particular skill or enthusiasm. The ideal admissions-candidate is thus a prize-winning gymnast, a fluent reader of both Greek and Latin, a math champion, a successful entrepreneur or a violin virtuoso (all, ideally, with working-class parents, of course). And remember, Ms. Hernández warns, "passion cannot be faked."

But so much else can. Elizabeth Wissner-Gross's "What High Schools Don't Tell You" provides, as its subtitle has it, "300+ Secrets to Make Your Kid Irresistible to Colleges by Senior Year." Ms. Wissner-Gross is an "educational strategist" and proud of it. "When people ask me what I do exactly," she explains, "I'm sometimes tempted to tell them that I make kids' dreams come true."

So what happens when you rub her magic lamp? She'll offer a five-year plan for the future college student--aimed at piling up credentials, polishing the youthful résumé and shaping a suitable self-image so that, when it comes time to fill out college applications, nothing has been left to chance.

Starting no later than middle school, a kid should have "dazzling" and "very ambitious" long-term goals. Ms. Wissner-Gross offers a list of possibilities: "I would like to conduct research for NASA"; "I would like to speak at an important political rally"; "I would like to become known as the nation's top math student"; "I would like to host a fund-raiser ball for cancer research." Students should then structure their time accordingly--with the emphasis on "structure."

Ms. Wissner-Gross wants students to adopt a four-summer plan "crammed with multiple enrichment activities" but all focused on that key long-term goal. Each summer--working in a local research lab, attending a math camp or trying to write the great American novel--should take a would-be college applicant one step closer to his dream.

But aren't summers supposed to be, well, fun? Ms. Wissner-Gross has two bits of advice: "Contrary to pop psychology, down time need not be unstructured to be relaxing and to help a student decompress." And "children who insist on hanging out with already known friends during the summer often miss out on wonderful opportunities." Yes, buddies can be an obstacle if you care about getting into college.

During the academic year, Ms. Wissner-Gross says, young actors and musicians should take private lessons and be sure to perform both inside and outside of school. Her secret #205 reads: "When it comes to college applications, starring in school shows is better than being a good soldier and playing small parts." (Is that really a secret?) To the aspiring journalist, she recommends starting a blog (ugh) and submitting articles to local weeklies, although nothing too contentious. Such articles "should not be investigative journalism." When writing about school activities, students should "focus only on the positive." Young documentary filmmakers might want to make a "thirty-second informational spot announcement about some aspect of school procedures." Future public servants should "avoid heavily political or religious causes that tend to be controversial."

Will all this careful calculation get a child into the college of his dreams? Who knows? It will certainly produce some really annoying teenagers, not to mention what it will do to their parents. If your child has to miss class for one of his extra-special résumé-building activities, Ms. Wissner-Gross advises, mom should write a mollifying note to each teacher along these lines: "I'm sorry Matt will be missing your English lesson on 'Our Town' today. The play is a family favorite, and I cried my way through our at-home reading last night." For producing real tears, though, even Thornton Wilder can't compete with "What High Schools Don't Tell You."

Ms. Riley is The Wall Street Journal's deputy Taste editor.