Harvard

College Application Essays Need Stories

College Application Essays Need Stories

If there is something important you wish to get across on your college essay, then it’s best to say it in the form of a story, a narrative essay.

This assertion confuses many for the simple reason narrative essay writing rarely is found in high school curricula: not in honor’s English classes, not in AP English Language, nor in AP English Literature. This is somewhat confounding since the Common Core State Standards, developed in 2010, cites the three essential types of essay writing, in order of importance, as argumentative, expository, and narrative.

The Back Door to Harvard

The Back Door to Harvard

A good way to get into a selective school is by first taking a couple classes at Harvard.

Sound farfetched?  It isn’t. The Harvard University Extension School (HES)   is one of the 12 degree-granting schools of Harvard University, which offers open enrollment into courses across 60 fields and into professional certificate programs in five subjects including nanotechnology. In addition, HES offers associate, bachelor, or graduate degree programs for those more ambitious.

Grade Inflation

Grade Inflation

In the September/October 2013 Yale Alumni Magazine, an article, ‘Grade Expectations,’ notes that in 1963 10% of the grades given by Yale College were As; today’ 62% are.

This phenomenon is not, by any measure, limited to Yale. Across all campuses, 43% of the letter grades awarded were As. Grade inflation is so rampant that a former Duke Professor of geophysics, Stuart Rojstaczer, created a website, www.gradeinflation.com and is now on the frontlines of battling this academic cancer.

Transferring: Opportunities and Challenges

Transferring: Opportunities and Challenges

Transferring from one 4-year university to another requires planning.

It’s important to research transfer requirements and your admissions chances before sending out transfer applications.

A good place to start researching is at a college’s Common Data Set (CDS), which can be found by Googling ‘school name Common Data Set’. Transfer information is in section D. Some schools, however, don’t release their CDSs (University of Chicago and USC immediately come to mind). In such cases you can go to College Board’s Big Future website (http://bigfuture.org). On each school’s profile site you’ll find a ‘for transfer students’ button.

What are the Actual College Retention Rates for our Leading Universities

What are the Actual College Retention Rates for our Leading Universities

According to a news item posted in the October 5th Korea Daily, "almost 1 out of 2 Korean-American students attending America's top universities drop out." This news arose from a doctoral dissertation by Samuel S. Kim, presented at Columbia University in late September. His dissertation was based upon a longitudinal study (a study that tracks a group of individuals over a relatively lengthy period of time) of 1400 Korean students enrolled at 14 universities (all the Ivies, Amherst, Duke, Stanford, Georgetown, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis) between 1985 and 2007.