Tag: harvard

Which Universities Won the Yield Game This Year?

By
Rachel Monroe
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It’s easy to get lost among all the different kinds of data surrounding university admissions.  But here’s one number universities pay quite a bit of attention to — and so perhaps you should, too:  admissions yield. A school’s yield percentage is the number of accepted students who end up actually enrolling; think of it as a kind of proxy for a university’s popularity. First-choice schools have high yields; fall-backs do less well. While top universities often have high yield numbers (this year, 82 percent of those accepted by Harvard ended up enrolling), the highest-yielding schools aren’t always the highest-ranked. Case in point:  Utah’s Brigham Young University often beats out Harvard in the yield game.

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Harvard Prof Explores the “Skyboxification of American Life” Tomorrow at Goucher

By
The Eds.
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Michael Sandel

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Harvard Professor Michael Sandel will address one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn’t there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?

Goucher College’s Roxana Cannon Arsht ’35 Center for Ethics and Leadership presents tomorrow a lecture by Professor Sandel whose new book, “What Money Can’t Buy,” explores the ethics of commercialism. The talk takes place in the Hyman Forum of the Athenaeum at Goucher from 8 – 9:30 p.m. and a book sale and signing will follow. The event is open to the public, but reservations must be made in advance online or by calling 410-337-6333.

See the event listing in Baltimore Fishbowl Events

Here is an excerpt from “What Money Can’t Buy” by Michael Sandel that was printed in yesterday’s Huffington Post:

We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets — and market values — have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.

As the cold war ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proven as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet, even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in

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Will the Class of 2034 Have to Pay $400k for College?

By
Rachel Monroe
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Talk about sticker shock:  this year’s babies may end up paying over $110,000 a year for college, if costs keep rising at the same rate. Nope, that’s not a typo.  As of last year, the cost of a year at one of the nation’s ten most-expensive private schools ran to $56,659 (that’s including tuition, fees, room, and board… but not textbooks). Factor in the 3 percent annual increase that’s been the recent norm, and the class of 2034 (or their parents) might be shelling out $422,320 for a four-year degree.

No matter how much financial aid tempers the cost, that’s a prohibitive price tag. (Consider the fact that families with at least one child have seen incomes grow only about 1 percent since 1987.) Some schools are trying to stem the tide themselves.  Harvard pledges that students from families earning between $65,000 and $150,000 annually will pay a maximum of 10 percent of their family’s earnings each year. For the sake of the class of 2034, let’s hope that policy stays in place.

Early Decision More Popular — and More Controversial — Every Year

By
Rachel Monroe
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For most people, November means turkey, raking leaves, and the start of the Christmas song onslaught. For anxious/overachieving high school students, though, November is the season for early decision applications.

For those of us who are lucky enough not to have to worry about these things anymore, or who don’t have any nervous teenagers in the household, a bit of explaining might be in order. When students apply early decision, they are declaring the school they apply to is their first choice, and promising to enroll if accepted. You can only pick one school to apply to early decision… as opposed to more flexible options, such as early action.

There are plenty of arguments against early decision programs — they stress kids out too much, favor the rich, and pressure kids to make decisions before they’re ready to — which is one reason that Harvard suspended its early decision plan since 2007. This year they reinstated it, and got a flood of applications — 4,245 hopeful high schoolers, to be exact… or more than double the anticipated freshman class size of 1,660.

Locally, Johns Hopkins also saw a significant jump in early decision applicants (7.64 percent more than last year). Check out early decision stats for Harvard, Hopkins, and all sorts of other schools here.

What’s your take on early decision — a stress-fest, or a helpful way for serious students to make their preferences known?

The Best College in the WORLD is…

By
Rachel Monroe
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Sometimes being the best in the country just doesn’t feel… impressive enough, which must be why the QS World University Rankings exist. If you’ve ever had the sneaking suspicion that Harvard isn’t quite as #1 as it seems to think it is, well, you were right; the top-ranking school in the world is, once again, Cambridge.  (Rounding out the top 5:  Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Oxford.) Baltimore’s very own Johns Hopkins is the 16th best school in the world, which sounds very nice indeed.

This year, the organization included a new and upsetting feature — well, upsetting if you’re paying for college in the U.S., that is — where you can compare international universities by both rank and tuition costs. #1 (Cambridge) costs around $15,000/year for domestic undergrads, and $5,000 (!) for post-grads. (No, that last figure is not missing a zero.) The #2 school, Harvard, runs around $39,000 for undergrads and $37,000 for post-grads. It’s enough to make you consider moving to England.

More sticker shock from survey organizers:  “In Paris, École normale supérieure ENS, ranked 33rd, and Ecole Politechnique ranked 36th both offer undergraduate courses for less than a $1000 and Postgraduate courses for less than $8,000. In Germany, the highest ranked universities are; University of Heidelberg at 53rd and Technical University of Munich at 54th in the world, each charging less than $2000 for domestic and EU citizens.”

View the complete rankings here, and a discussion of survey methodology here.

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