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The single best guide to all things that ‘matter’ in admissions

Posted on May 13, 2017 by Nancy Griesemer Leave a Comment

In the months immediately following publication of the third edition of Admission Matters, Sally Springer, lead author, was quite certain there would be no fourth edition. As Springer freely admits, “Updating a book like Admission Matters takes a great deal of time and effort and it essentially takes over your life for many months.”

Springer is right of course. But lucky for us, she and her co-authors, Jon Reider and Joyce Vining Morgan, had a change of heart and recently got back together to produce the fourth edition of Admission Matters—the single, most useful college guide currently on the market.

“Admission Matters is not just comprehensive, it’s a paper version of a great college counselor,” commented Maria Furtado, executive director of Colleges That Change Lives.

Jennifer Delahunty, former dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, agrees, “Filled with both common sense and sage advice, the fourth edition of Admission Matters is the only guide any high school student—and his or her parent—will ever need.”

Since publication of the last edition in 2013, there have been remarkable changes in financial aid, standardized testing and application platforms. Application numbers have exploded, pushing selectivity to the limits of comprehension at a number of elite colleges. And the skyrocketing costs associated with a college education continue to far outpace annual increases in the cost of living.

From the outside looking in, the entire process of selecting and applying to colleges appears totally out of control—characterized by neither predictability nor humanity.  And instead of looking forward to their next chapter, high school students and their families have come to dread even starting the conversation.

But along comes Admission Matters with a reassuring message—“College admissions does not have to be, and should not be, an ordeal.”

To back this up, the Admission Matters team worked hard to update information and incorporate changes in an easy-to-understand narrative designed to give readers confidence in themselves and their ability to master the process and not have the process master them.

While the fourth edition of Admission Matters will look familiar to those who have read and relied on the third edition, there is a good deal of new material “sprinkled throughout” in addition to thorough updates—some even made at the page proof stage, when they were important enough.

 

As someone who annually reads and reviews a considerable number of college guidebooks, I’m very choosy about which ones I recommend.  In fact, the list is very short.

Since I discovered Sally Springer and her book at a NACAC conference several years ago, Admission Matters has been and remains at the top of that list. This is because I want to recommend a guide that is up-to-date, accurate and offers the kind of advice I offer to families, in user-friendly terms.

Following its predecessors, the fourth edition of Admission Matters is thorough, crystal clear, and very direct about what college applicants need to do and how to do it.

The authors are seasoned professionals with more than 100 years of experience in secondary and higher education in the roles of high school teacher and college counselor, college admissions officer, college professor and administrator, and independent educational consultant. They are parents themselves who have undertaken the college admissions journey with their own kids.

Admission Matters covers all the nuts and bolts of college admission—from developing a balanced college list to applying for financial aid. Tucked into appendices, there are worksheets, an application timeline and an annotated list of additional resources.  And to keep Admission Matters as current as possible, the authors are maintaining a website with free updates and additional materials.

I highly recommend Admission Matters to anyone with a college-bound student going through the process this fall or anyone wanting to be a little bit better prepared for the future.

And this recommendation goes for admissions professionals in colleges, schools, or working independently.

You won’t find a better, more comprehensive admissions guide on the market today.

Admission Matters is available online (on Amazon via the image below) and in bookstores everywhere.

A ‘must-have’ guide to public university honors programs

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Nancy Griesemer

After five years of writing about public university honors colleges and programs, John Willingham has learned that excellence in honors education is far from limited to the nation’s most prominent flagship universities.

“Many well-known state universities do have outstanding honors programs, Willingham explains, “but increasingly one can find equal value in the growing number of honors colleges in non-flagship institutions.”

To prove the point, Willingham recently published the third in a series of guides titled, INSIDE HONORS: Ratings and Reviews of Sixty Public Honors Programs. And if you’re considering honors programs housed within top public universities, this 400-page guide (also available in digital format) is an invaluable resource for evaluating different aspects of the “honors” experience.

The original idea for the honors project grew out of a series of articles Willingham authored that compared various public university honors programs.  In fact, the first edition of his guide attempted to “rank” programs.

The ranking was dropped in the second edition in favor of a “mortarboard” rating (similar to five-star rating systems) and is based on data obtained on honors graduation rates, class sizes, course range and type, honors dorms, and other honors benefits, including merit scholarships.

For the new third edition, Willingham was able to upgrade his data by obtaining detailed spreadsheets of course sections by academic subject, honors enrollment in each section, and critical data about the types of honors classes.

“I had to know how many honors classes were only for honors students and how many were mixed—honors and non-honors students,” said Willingham. “Finally, I needed information about honors ‘contract’ sections, regular classes where honors students have agreements with instructors to do extra work for honors credit.”

The resulting guide, together with an extremely useful website, provides a very comprehensive picture of what resources and benefits may be available through various honors programs. For the newest edition, a total of 50 programs were rated, while ten received unrated summary reviews.

Beyond the ratings, INSIDE HONORS offers lengthy narrative profiles of all sixty honors programs.  And each profile contains data on the average and minimum admission requirements, including old and new SAT scores, ACT scores, high school GPA and class ranks as well as honors application deadlines and a list of other programs with similar admission requirements.

In other words, INSIDE HONORS is a must-have guide for anyone interested in exploring public university honors programs.

Here’s a sneak preview—the following 11 honors colleges and programs received an overall rating of 5.0 mortarboards (listed in alphabetical order):

  • Arizona State, Barrett Honors College
  • Clemson, Calhoun Honors College
  • CUNY, Macaulay Honors College
  • Georgia Honors Program
  • Houston Honors College
  • Kansas Honors Program
  • New Jersey Inst of Technology (NJIT), Albert Dorman Honors College
  • Oregon, Clark Honors College
  • Penn State, Schreyer Honors College
  • South Carolina Honors College
  • UT Austin Plan II Honors Program

Honors colleges and programs that received 4.5 mortarboards include the University of Central Florida Burnett Honors College, New Mexico Honors College, the Oklahoma State Honors College, Temple Honors Program, Ole Miss SMB Honors College, Arkansas Honors College, Delaware Honors Program, UC Irvine Campuswide Honors Program, and Honors Carolina at UNC Chapel Hill.

Note that CUNY Macaulay, Houston, and NJIT were not rated previously. And Oregon’s Clark Honors College and Clemson’s Calhoun Honors College have moved up to a 5 mortarboard rating.

Two honors programs with high ratings in past editions are included but not rated in the 2016 edition. The Michigan LSA Honors Program and the Echols Scholars Program at the University of Virginia are undoubtedly great choices for those who earn acceptance, but the (mostly) public data used in the past two editions to rate these programs is no longer sufficient now that much more information has been provided by other programs. Along the same lines, INSIDE HONORS does not rate UCLA and Wisconsin because internal data were not available from UCLA and the information provided by Wisconsin did not match the revised format.

For admissions professionals
Admissions professionals—members of NACAC, IECA or HECA—are invited to purchase the print edition of  INSIDE HONORS at a discounted price of $14.41 (includes shipping). To order a copy, email Wendy at [email protected] and provide an address and organizational affiliation. She will then send an electronic invoice, payable by PayPal or credit card for fastest shipment.

In addition to both the electronic and print editions of the guide, individual rated programs profiles are now available for $2.99. They may be delivered the same day, usually within a few hours, for quick answers to questions or to do a comparison almost on the spot.

For more information on the publications or the honors project, visit the Public University Honors website.

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