In - Your Guide to College Admissions from The Princeton Review

Students with Disabilities Live on Their Own (with Help) at Illinois

If you have a physical disability, you don’t have to miss out the college experience of dorming on campus.

A program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides facilities and support to allow students with physical disabilities to attend college away from home.

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a new high-tech dorm building at Urbana-Champaign responds to students’ voice commands and allows them to call for assistance at any hour of the day. Many of the rooms also provide motorized ceiling lifts for students with more severe physical disabilities.

Students without disabilities also live in the building and several of these students work as personal assistants for the students with disabilities, which is another key feature of the program.

Disabled students can have up to five hours a day of one-on-one assistance. They choose which students to hire as their assistants and then juggle their assistants’ schedules to work with their own.

The personal assistants work a minimum of 18 hours a week. In return, they receive free room and board. They also get valuable experience as professional caregivers—many are pursuing degrees in health-related fields.

While the students with disabilities at Illinois are dependent on the student assistants, they are able to live away from home and on campus—something that wouldn’t be possible at most schools.

Stephanie Zaia, a 21-year-old sophomore at Illinois, says that "there's no other campus that has this kind of setup. I visited another campus, and the tour guide didn't even know where the ramps were."

College Speak: Selectivity, Reach, Match, and Safety

You may be surprised by the number of unfamiliar terms associated with college and college life. Undergraduate, TA, accreditation, Greek life, the FAFSA—high school counselors and college admissions officers use these terms every day. Unfortunately, they don’t always stop to explain what each term means.

The “College Speak” series explains the college-oriented vocab that you need to be in the know and focus on the more important questions, such as “which school would be the best fit for me?”

Today’s terms are:

• selectivity,
• reach school,
• match school, and
• safety school.

Selectivity: How difficult it is to gain admission to any particular school.

A school may be very selective, not selective at all, or anywhere in-between. The least selective colleges have open admission policies that, by definition, are un-selective—these schools admit every student who applies.

High selectivity, on the other hand, can be expressed in a couple of different ways. It may be seen in an admission process where only a small percentage of applicants are admitted. It may also be seen in a pool of applicants with very high qualifications. Such applicants have impressive transcripts, extracurricular activities, standardized test, essays, teacher recommendations, etc. Admission to the most selective schools is competitive in terms of both the number and the quality of the applicants.

Most schools are in-between very selective and open admissions—these schools are moderately selective. About 90 percent of the schools in The Princeton Review’s The Best 373 Colleges book fall into this category.

For these schools, you can get a sense of your chances of admission by looking at the average GPA and standardized test scores for the current freshman class. Doing so, you should be able to sort most of these schools into three categories: reach, match, and safety (see below).

Note that these categories don’t work for the most selective schools. Admission to these schools is so competitive that it is difficult to guarantee yourself a spot even if you have perfect grades and test scores. At the most selective schools, admissions officers rely heavily on subjective impressions of an applicant when making their decisions.

Many students add an unhealthy amount of stress to their lives in an effort to gain any perceived edge in applying to the most selective schools. For this reason, it’s not a good idea to make admission to a very selective school the only acceptable outcome of your application process. It might be nice to gain admission to a very selective school, but it certainly isn’t the only ticket to a successful future.

Higher Education Is Healthy for You

Continuing your education may reduce your risk of a heart attack when you get older.

A study of nearly 4,000 individuals over 30 years found a relationship between education and blood pressure. Those who attended at least some graduate school had lower blood pressure, on average, than those with a high school diploma or less. This was still true after the investigators controlled for lifestyle variables such as smoking.

“Blood pressure is a classic predictor of heart disease,” said the study’s lead investigator, Eric B. Loucks, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

While the study found a relationship between higher education and lower blood pressure in both sexes, it found a stronger relationship in females.

What Does the Web Say About You? It May Be Time for a “Digital Makeover”

What can someone find out about you by doing a web search for your name? It’s wise to find out before colleges do.

A few weeks ago, I urged to college applicants to keep things clean on their Facebook profile. Last week, an interviewer for Harvard College became just the latest admissions rep to come forward and admit to using the web to dig up info on applicants. Allison Otis told the Los Angeles Times that, in addition to checking out Facebook profiles, she also looks at Twitter accounts and does Google searches.

So what can you do if you already have personal stuff on the web that’s not suitable for colleges to see? You shouldn’t panic, but you should get busy. The Washington Post’s Campus Overload blog recently provided some tips on how to do a “digital makeover.”

Beware of the False Acceptance Letter (or Email)

It should be a crime.

You spend days or weeks crafting your application. You spend years getting good grades. And you finally get that acceptance letter . . . only to find out that it was just a mistake.

That’s right—colleges and universities have accidentally sent acceptance letters early or to the wrong student entirely. The blame is usually traced back to a tired admissions officer who mixed up a mailing list or prematurely clicked “send.” The school then has to take it all back.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Tweed blog recently posted about this year’s culprit—Christopher Newport University.

Have you ever gotten a false acceptance letter or email? If so, email INblog@review.com and share your story!

College Speak: Waitlisted and Deferred

You may be surprised by the number of unfamiliar terms associated with college and college life. Undergraduate, TA, accreditation, Greek life, the FAFSA—high school counselors and college admissions officers use these terms every day. Unfortunately, they don’t always stop to explain what each term means.

The “College Speak” series explains the college-oriented vocab that you need to be in the know and focus on the more important questions, such as “which school would be the best fit for me?”

Today’s terms are:

• waitlisted;
• deferred.

Waitlisted: Acceptance letters and rejection letters are equally clear: a school definitely wants you, or it definitely doesn’t want you.

What’s less clear is an offer to be on a college or university’s waitlist.

To be honest, the school is sending you a mixed message. It’s saying that it wouldn’t mind having you in its freshman class, but there are a number of students whom it’d rather have. Unfortunately, you won’t know exactly how many students are ahead of you in line.

On the surface, a waitlist spot doesn’t look too bleak. It may seem as if there’s a decent chance of a spot opening up—some of the admitted students will decide to go elsewhere, right? Unfortunately, the school has already counted on that happening. Schools will send unambiguous acceptance letters to far more students than they have room for—they count on many of those students choosing to attend another school.

Then why do schools bother with wait lists? Well, it’s a kind of insurance. If more than the expected number of admitted students decides to go elsewhere, then a school will start admitting students off of the waitlist if it still has room.

While that’s not a great reason (at least from a student’s perspective), it’s better than the other reason a school might maintain an unrealistically long waitlist—quick cash. All schools require a fee, which is usually several hundred dollars, for the privilege of maintaining a spot on the waitlist.

Getting waitlisted isn’t all bad. I’ve always felt it was a school’s way of letting an applicant know that he or she was close—sort of like the college admissions version of an honorable mention. But I wouldn’t pin my hopes on being admitted off of a waitlist. If you have the money to pay the waitlist fee, you can do so and see what happens. But I would act as if nothing will come of it. If you’ve applied to a good selection of schools, you will have other options.

Paying Kids for Their Homework Instead of Their Grades

You can pay a kid for an “A,” but he still might fail if he doesn’t know how to get that “A.” For this reason, it’s more effective to bribe students for activities—e.g., reading, attending class, doing homework—that directly lead to academic success.

This is the key finding of a series of studies orchestrated by Harvard University. The participants—second graders, middle-school students, and ninth graders—got better grades when paid for specific work rather than the result.

As reported by NPR, the study included 38,000 students at 261 schools and paid a total of $6.3 million—about $166 a student.

Job Prospects for New Grads Are Looking Up

More jobs and higher starting salaries await the class of 2011!

According to two studies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the job market that 2011 grads enter will be better than the market that 2010 grads faced.

StateUniversity.com reports that employers surveyed by NACE expect to hire 13.5 percent more grads with a bachelor's degree this year. Additionally, the average salary for new grads is expected to increase by 3.5 percent, to $50,034.

Reader Response: Making Science Majors More Girl-Friendly

On Monday I wrote a post about a study of girls’ interest in science topics. The study sought to find out whether girls would be more interested in specific topics if these topics were presented in a “female-friendly way.” The original post is here.

During the week, the following response arrived via Facebook from Katie M. in Texas:

Are you seriously trying to say that girls will learn science because it becomes gendered? Even the example used was sexist. A. Why wouldn't a girl want to learn how a CD works? B. Why, when catering it to girls, must it be about weight? If these examples play on stereotypes, how is any of it helpful or healthy?

This is certainly a thought-provoking response. Katie’s right in that the study assumes that there are basic differences between girls’ interests and boys’ interests. Additionally, these assumed differences are based on gender stereotypes. It wouldn’t be helpful to reinforce such differences if our goal is a free and equal society.

The study does, however, go on to say that a student’s interests might not always fall along stereotypical gender lines. As such, it ultimately suggests science classes that would take into account a student’s interests, regardless of his or her gender.

I also like that the researchers want to see more women enter science fields.

If you have any thoughts about this, you should join the discussion! Send your ideas to INblog@review.com.

Campus Legends on College Tours

You want to see the dorms and the dining hall, of course. But the stories you’ll hear are another good reason to take a campus tour.

Campus tours are typically given by a current student and are sprinkled with campus legends. The New York Times blog The Choice just ran a cool piece on a particularly risqué campus legend at my alma mater, Vassar College. It’s a story that has surfaced in campus tours for a number of years.

Even if a campus legend is an exaggeration (or plain false), it shouldn’t be brushed aside. Like any good story, it will tell you something about the people who tell it and the place where it is told.

It’s the kind of thing that can help you to get a feel for a college and help you to decide between two great, but different, schools.

In the coming weeks, check back here for some specific advice on visiting colleges across the country.