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Dickinson College updates value of scholarships and more

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Craig

Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Dickinson College’s merit scholarships are designed to recognize exemplary academic performance without regard to financial need, and the Carlisle, Pennsylvania-based college recently restructured the amount each scholarship is worth. Prospective applicants should sit up and take notice!

Only the presidential scholarship requires a separate application; therefore, all Dickinson applicants are considered for the other merit awards by submitting a compelling Common Application.

  • Presidential Scholarship $35,000/year
  • Provost Scholarship $30,000/year
  • 1783 Scholarship $25,000/year
  • John Dickinson Scholarship $20,000/year
  • Benjamin Rush Scholarship $15,000/year

Those are some major awards that would lead to serious reductions in a student’s cost of attendance.

In other Dickinson College news, the college no longer offers Early Action admission. Dickinson will maintain two rounds of Early Decision (with November 15 and January 15 deadlines) and Regular Decision (a January 15 deadline).

In addition, Dickinson has partnered with MyinTuition, which is a quick college cost estimator. It’s a simple and straightforward way for families to anticipate their out-of-pocket cost and get a sense of their eligibility for need-based aid.

Finally, and in many ways most important, Dickinson’s recent development of a Center for Advising, Internships & Lifelong Career Development has strengthened the college’s emphasis on student success by strategically combining Dickinson’s Career Center, Office of Academic Advising, internship/externship programming and alumni career services. The college is already seeing the fruits of this new organizational structure:

  • 98% of Dickinsonians are employed, completing an internship, attending graduate school or pursuing a fellowship one year after graduation.
  • 94% of the class of 2019 completed an internship, research, externship, service-learning or field experience course.
  • Dickinson’s acceptance rates for the class of 2019 are 94% for law school (compared to the 75% national average, according to the Law School Admissions Council) and 95% for medical school (compared to the 39% national average, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges).
  • 100% of the class of 2023 connected with faculty and Center for Advising, Internships & Lifelong Career Development advisors to select classes.

Those members of the Class of 2020 or 2021 interested in Dickinson should consider attending either Dickinson’s October 14 or November 9, 2019 Fall Open Houses, which offer an wonderful opportunity to get to know Dickinson up close.

How to Solve the College Debt Crisis Overnight

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Craig

It’s really simple: the current system many American students use to fund their journey through American colleges and universities is a scheme to concentrate more and more of the nation’s wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Under this system greater numbers of Americans who were earnestly trying to best position themselves to be contributing members of society are everyday being subjected to a years-long, decades-long, or lifetime sentence of debt slavery.

Yet, none of this has to be happening, and, in fact, it could all change overnight if politicians in Washington, D.C. took the following three steps to free all Americans from the stranglehold that higher education-government complex currently has on our nation.

 

 

Don’t call me a Director of College Counseling ever again

Posted on June 13, 2019 by Craig

There is no doubt that something is very broken in American secondary and tertiary education. Over each of the last fourteen admissions cycles, I have helped students from around the corner and around the world navigate the college admissions process and tackle the full time of job of applying to American colleges and universities.

During this time, I have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of students who are unaware of what makes them unique, what their goals are beyond getting into a ‘good college,’ and what actual options even exist for students graduating high school. What feels like an outbreak of complete lack of self-reflection and time dedicated to research and analysis is occurring at the same time as students are more programmed, stressed, miserable, and incapable of demonstrating what was once considered ‘college level’ verbal and written communication skills than I’ve ever witnessed before.

I can’t be a part of this madness anymore without speaking out. As I see it, three major changes need to be made in the way we educate children in this country, only one of which I have true control over as a person tasked with helping students transition from secondary education to what comes next.

  1. Starting in elementary school and continuing right through college, most students are not being taught the basics of writing, reading, and speaking English – whether these students attend public, private, or parochial schools. Students are taught to ape the style or priorities of their English teachers in order to earn an A instead of being taught how to think or communicate in an articulate, agile, and dynamic manner. I am not an English educator, but I can say after seeing thousands of essays produced by high school juniors and seniors and speaking to thousands of high school juniors and seniors that writing, reading, and speaking instruction is not being properly carried out in this country if we are to have any hope of sustaining – let alone building upon – the knowledge and attainment of previous generations.
  2. Students have little to no sense of who they are in relation to the generations of people who came before them and thus they have an increasing inability to put themselves in proper context; the result is that their college essays, whether well-written or not, read like narcissistic one-man plays, and from the admissions results I’ve seen up-close, colleges like it this way! We are doing a generation of our fellow citizens a great disservice when they can’t see beyond their own feelings and experiences, when they don’t know anything about their state’s history, and when they know appallingly little about their country’s history or the history of Western Civilization. Again, very few people in either secondary education or tertiary education seem too concerned about this, which brings me to what I can control…
  3. College is not the end all be all. In fact, for many students a four-year college experience can only lead to a lifetime sentence of debt and ignorance. Who appointed four-year colleges and universities to lord over us as non-negotiables of our human experience? All those who benefit from the higher education-government complex, that’s who. I’m done promoting this perverted ideology. Today, one can learn more valuable and applicable information on YouTube than one can learn by completing many four-year curricula on offer at America’s top-ranked colleges. Career, technical, and experiential education in all of their many forms – trade schools, apprenticeships, gap years, a paying job doing just about anything –  are the best fit for many individuals who’ve just graduated high school. We are doing a disserve to students if we provide only college counseling. We are doing a disservice to students if we only provide college and career counseling. We must educate our students to pursue their own individuality and we must expose our students to the diverse options that exist after high school graduation – from the armed forces and community colleges to gap years and apprenticeship programs. I no longer have any desire to work in a school that trumpets its college admissions statistics, name drops the elite colleges and universities its students have matriculated into, or even slaps the name “College and Career” before the words “Counseling Office” or “Guidance Office.” In all of these scenarios, schools are giving colleges, universities, and employers far too much control of our youth. Students need to be empowered to think big and dream big. That requires not anchoring high school counseling, guidance, or advising to college or career at all.

At a time when long-standing traditions and institutions are actively attacked in our country on a daily basis – mainly from those who’ve been indoctrinated by or are employed by higher education institutions – I’m going to join all those in favor of tearing asunder the part of the past that I don’t like; don’t call me a “Director of College Counseling” or “College Counselor” anymore. It’s giving four-year colleges and universities, corporations, and governments – all of which are in business and are big business – way too much power over all of us. For as long as I continue to help students and families transition from high school to what comes next, from this point forward, if you are going to refer to me as a “Director” of anything, please refer to me as “Director of What Comes Next.” “What Comes Next Counselor” also has a nice ring to it. In return, I promise to provide you a “What Comes Next” guidance experience that exposes you to the full diversity of post-secondary options. Even if 100% of my students continue to enroll in four-year colleges and universities, if my recalibrated approach to post-secondary guidance gives even one student or family pause to consider the benefits of attending a community college while working a full-time job, or pursuing an apprenticeship, or taking a gap-year, or joining the military, or getting a job as a waiter, or earning a degree abroad, or starting a business I will have earned my title as “Director of What Comes Next” and I will feel so much better about myself knowing that I am no longer a cog in the wheel of the American higher education-government complex that has for far too long entranced far too many Americans.

Yet, most of all, I will feel great for the young men and women I work with every day because once they see a four-year college or university is not the be all end all, maybe some of them will calm down, drop out of a few of their extracurricular activities, and use their spare time to pick up and read a book like Great Expectations or Candide or go on YouTube and watch for free the full thirteen installments of Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark. There is no doubt that after doing so students will be closer to gaining a healthy perspective on life than they ever could playing America’s obscene college admissions game.

I may still be the CollegeMeister, but I will remind all with whom I work that where one goes to college (if they do at all) or where one works 40+ hours each week (if they do at all) does not define a person. If anything, the sobriquet CollegeMeister is more apt than ever because I have not just mastered the Byzantine art of getting into the world’s “top colleges;” I have freed my clients, my colleagues, and myself from colleges’ former power over all of us, and I look forward to helping others see the light. No longer will colleges be the masters and the rest of us their slaves.

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