I visited the University of Southern California (USC) in January of 2015 (before I started this blog).  I did not tour the campus because my focus was solely on the resources offered to students with learning disabilities.

 

Disabilities and the admissions process

Disability does not trigger any special review at the admissions office.  Disclosing a disability can still be helpful in providing a context for under-performance in high school.  Applicants are allowed to send in documentation, including IEPs and 504s — a useful benefit.

 

Impressions/recommendations

Although I called ahead, no arrangements were made for my visit.  This is a good thing (if somewhat bruising to the ego), as it allows for candid discussions with the actual staff, as opposed to administrators who may stick more closely to a script.  The staff I interviewed were open and friendly.  They appeared to be happy with what they were doing and well-equipped to do it.

The philosophy of “student as self-advocate” rules here.  Even after a student has registered with Disability Services, there is no follow up to determine whether he or she is using accommodations or whether those accommodations are helpful.

When I posed a hypothetical question about a parent calling in to ask Disability Services to do a “wellness check” on a student who appeared to be “lost” (i.e., not calling home, not showing up to class), the counselor took me literally, stating that she would call the campus police.  Maybe it was how I asked the question?  Perhaps, but I would hope that under such circumstances, the Disability Services office would reach out to that student, offer assistance, and encourage him or her to “check in” with the concerned parent.

The Disability Services office is also not well integrated into the rest of the university support system for students.  If a student is doing poorly in class, the tutoring and student advisory system responds but does not notify Disability Services unless the student reports the disability as a cause of the under-performance.  If parent-student ties and communication are frayed, valuable time might be lost while the student is floundering.

This is not unusual for universities across the country, even those with well equipped disability centers like USC.  My recommendation:  know your student well. If he or she is comfortable disclosing a condition and any problem encountered while at the university, the staff appears ready and willing to assist, and more than competent and equipped to do so.  If not, your student could get lost.  A certain amount of “helicopter parenting” may be necessary for students enrolled at USC.

But there is more here than just the Disability Services department.  I also visited the Kortschak Center for Learning and Creativity, down the hall – and independent from – the Office of Disability Services.  It is an ambitious and helpful attempt to assist students with learning disabilities who are having trouble with their studies.

The Center does not address students who are only having trouble in one class; those students are referred to subject-specific tutors in their respective academic disciplines.  Similarly, students who are having life struggles are directed to counseling resources.  The Center is the place for students who have systemic problems with issues such as executive functioning, language processing disorders, and dyslexia.

This last group of students visits Center coaches every week.  These students are exposed to new tablet applications (all Apple, no Android yet).  The staff demonstrated for me a “mind mapping” software package, Inspiration, which allows students to use visual outlines and flow charts in unusual ways.  This software is particularly clever because it also stores the underlying data in a Microsoft Word outline.

All of this activity is separate from Disability Services.  The Kortschak Center is looking to reach all students and identify those who are frustrated by their particular form of cognition — if some of those students have a learning disability (and many will be), so much the better.

So we are left with this:  a Disability Services department which is properly equipped and staffed but does not appear to offer outreach to parents or proactive intervention for students in distress.  This is in line with many other large universities. However, a student who can “self-advocate” is rewarded with access to a state-of-the-art, perhaps even breakthrough, learning lab that teaches them skills they can use for the rest of their lives.

Intriguing, yes?

 

Caveats:

This is only one data point, representing a single visit to a busy campus with many people, including supervisors, with whom I did not meet.  It is just my opinion, which no doubt reflects certain biases and preconceptions.

Further, there is always the possibility that I misheard, or was misinformed, about the information presented here.  I will be happy to correct any errors brought to my attention.

In my previous post, I noted a growing interest in the Internet as a source of information about college. This post seeks to support an even more ambitious statement:  college counselors must regard the Internet as a critical source of information.

Consider this post to be Exhibit A in my case for using the Internet to assist students and their families:  the plight of the prospective undergraduate engineering student. This post concentrates on how the Internet can be mined for information which will help us avoid a “bad” placement.

At first glance, advising a pre-engineering student would appear to be easy work. There are relatively few engineering schools among the over 2,000 four-year institutions in the United States. The curriculum does not vary among those engineering schools, at least within a particular sub-specialty – such as electrical engineering – because ABET (the accrediting body for engineering education) requires a standard curriculum. Most engineering positions do not require state licensure, allowing students to work anywhere in the United States.

Pick the top-rated engineering schools that are likely to admit your student, in desirable locations, with reasonable tuitions, print out a list of that information, and you’re done. Right?

It’s not that simple.

While the engineering curriculum may not be changing, the rest of the engineering school environment is undergoing a rapid and radical transformation because of the swelling popularity of the major. According to Forbes magazine:

The most popular college major choice for high school seniors surveyed by Career Builder—the majority of whom already have a career in mind—is engineering. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/emsi/2014/09/12/the-most-in-demand-and-oldest-engineering-jobs/).

This is a recent development. As noted in “The Stem Enrollment Boom”:

Using data collected by UCLA, Jacobs and Sax write that from 1997 through 2005, the proportion of freshmen planning to enroll in STEM fields declined, hitting a low in 2005 of 20.7 percent. After modest gains in 2006 and 2007, real increases started to show up in 2008. The percentage of freshmen planning to major in STEM increased from 21.1 percent in 2007 to 28.2 percent in 2011, just as the recession was prompting many students and families to focus on the job potential of various fields of study. That represents a 48 percent increase in just a few years.

(https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/07/study-finds-increased-stem-enrollment-recession).

Engineering is the “hot major” of this decade. More students – and perhaps equally important – parents, are seeing it as the best path to probable employment after graduation.

Unfortunately, many of these students are lambs heading for slaughter unless you do some homework for your client. An examination of that vast library of information – the Internet – reveals why.

Engineering is increasingly regarded as a pre-professional major. By that I mean that unless you begin college as an engineering major (or “pre-major”), you cannot change your mind and enter the program later. Many colleges require that applicants specify their intent to enter an engineering program; these programs typically have tougher admissions standards than other departments. If at first you do not succeed in winning admission as an engineering major, well, thank you for playing – and goodbye. Consider the admissions decision one of my clients received this year from Purdue – admittedly an engineering powerhouse – after applying as a potential engineering major:

Thank you for your interest in Purdue. Unfortunately, because of the demand for the major to which you applied far exceeds its capacity, we cannot accommodate all applicants. However, you’re an excellent student who can succeed at Purdue. Therefore, we’d like to consider you for admission to an alternative major on our West Lafayette campus – and there are a number of outstanding programs.

To request an alternative major . . . submit the online form. 

When completing the form, please select a major in which you are truly interested. If you are admitted, we cannot guarantee you would be able to switch from the alternative major into the major you originally requested on your application. Typically, majors that are in very high demand at the admission stage also have limited capacity for enrolled students seeking to switch. 

Although we are not able to admit you to the major you requested originally, we hope you will request to be admitted to an alternative major. Earning a Purdue degree is a meaningful achievement that can open doors throughout your life. 

My client will not be a Boilermaker (Purdue’s mascot) engineer. For your information, here are just a few other colleges with similar policies:

http://engineering.berkeley.edu/academics/undergraduate-guide/admissions

http://www.seasoasa.ucla.edu/undergraduates/chmaj/com-faq (minimum 3.5 GPA in technical subjects)

https://engineering.cmu.edu/current_students/services/transfer.html (space available and grades)

http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/admissions/undergraduate/apply/transfer/requirements.cfm (grades)

The effect of these policies is to require high school students to commit to engineering well before they understand what that commitment entails. Unfortunately, not every prospective engineering major has the talent or inclination to become an engineer. One estimate pegs the attrition rate at an eye-watering 40% after the freshman year. See http://blogs.ptc.com/2012/08/06/high-dropout-rates-prompt-engineering-schools-to-change-approach/. This information should not be surprising – how many high school students have actual experience with engineering work, and in particular, with the extremely difficult mathematics involved?

Worse, an unsuccessful foray into pre-engineering and engineering course work can damage a student’s GPA and graduate school prospects. Unlike other departments, grade deflation rules the day at engineering schools. Per the New York Times:

After studying nearly a decade of transcripts at one college, Kevin Rask, then a professor at Wake Forest University, concluded last year that the grades in the introductory math and science classes were among the lowest on campus. The chemistry department gave the lowest grades over all, averaging 2.78 out of 4, followed by mathematics at 2.90. Education, language and English courses had the highest averages, ranging from 3.33 to 3.36.  Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?_r=0)

Students who wash out of engineering programs are left at a serious disadvantage when applying to graduate programs, where the overall undergraduate GPA is a critical factor in admission. I will have more to say about this in another post.

But the problem which draws my attention today is that just battling to get into an engineering program is not enough. For many schools, a new competition begins on Day 1 of freshman year, and the stakes are high.

Some colleges do not admit students directly into their engineering major. Rather, they admit them as “pre-majors”. Admission to the major requires an additional application after the student’s sophomore or junior year.

You might think of this as an innocuous feature designed to make sure that students with little talent do not advance – a sort of early warning system that this career may not be for you. And once upon a time, it probably was.

Not anymore, and you will only learn that hard fact from the Internet.

Consider the University of Washington, a top-ranked engineering school. The Engineering Department only admits 10-20% of applicants directly. The rest are required to apply later, as juniors. See http://www.engr.washington.edu/prosp_students/undergrad-adm.html

What happens to the rest?  It isn’t pretty:

See http://www.dailyuw.com/news/article_656b56bb-ba58-5b50-bb3b-122f0681bcf0.html

No, please. Click that link. You will have to read it to believe it. Hit the Back button on your browser when you are done, and we will proceed.

You will not find this article in the information distributed by the University of Washington to visiting students. But Google did. To summarize, the majority of these very bright and talented students fail to get into their engineering sub-specialty. (Thus, the would-be aeronautical engineer may have to settle for industrial engineering – much like a would-be brain surgeon ending up as a general practitioner.)  Some students get into none of the available sub-specialties, and either switch majors or transfer to schools to finish their engineering degree.

Like many universities, the University of Washington has endured massive budget cuts. Unfortunately, its response has been to turn its Engineering Department into a collegiate version of the “Hunger Games”. Maybe Purdue did my client a favor by turning him away at the outset.

Before outraged UW alumni and administrators lunge to their keyboards to leave comments, I concede that many engineering schools use “weed out” courses to thin out their classes. (At Georgia Tech, disappointed students refer to the common practice of transferring out to a Business major as “taking the B train”.)

And the old “Paper Chase” movie line about Harvard Law School (“look to your left, now to your right – because one of you won’t be here by the end of the year”) makes it clear that this sort of winnowing has a long history, even outside engineering. (See Wikipedia for more information about just that winnowing at Harvard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Law_School)

However, I see a difference between requiring students to take extremely difficult introductory courses which award very low grades and UW’s practice of setting a very high bar merely to get into the major. The former practice still allows students to graduate in engineering unless they literally flunk out.

As the old joke goes, “what do they call a medical student at the bottom of his class?  Doctor.”

Students who fail to make UW’s cut have already invested years of tuition, and may incur further costs if they have to transfer to schools which do not accept all of their credits. They may have thought that UW accepted as freshmen only those whom it planned to graduate as engineers. Sadly, no.

The problem with UW’s enrollment control strategy is that students do not learn about it until it is far too late for them to change course (literally). The rules are virtually undisclosed until you begin matriculating at UW; unless you do extensive research on the Internet, you will not discover the problem. As a college counselor, the worst thing you can do is to set a student up for failure without even knowing the risks.

How bad is the situation at UW?

As the title of this post states, “The Data Is Out There – But You Need To Look For It.”

If you look (hard) for it, you will find a UW Engineering database where you can look up acceptance rates by sub-specialty (such as biomedical engineering or aeronautical engineering), by academic year, and even rates for under-represented and minority students. See

http://data.engr.washington.edu/pls/portal30/STUDENT_APPL.RPT_APPLICANT_STATISTICS_YEAR.SHOW_PARMS

Variables include the department (sub-specialty), the quarter (first-time applicants apply in the Fall), and whether the student is already at UW or is a transfer candidate. There are also variables for gender and minority status.

Acceptance rates range from 30% to 45%. Fewer than half are accepted into the major. Further, this helpful table shows that UW’s winnowing has become much more severe since the recession. See http://data.engr.washington.edu/pls/portal30/STUDENT_APPL.RPT_APPLICANT_STATISTICS_YEAR.show.

This information is not mentioned in college guidebooks or the university’s glossy brochure. Once I pointed it out, my client did not apply to UW.

But UW may not be an outlier for much longer. Other schools are looking to control enrollment in this suddenly “hot” major.

Did you know that the Ohio State University keeps records – online – of its committee meetings?  Consider this nugget from the minutes of a College of Engineering Committee on Academic Affairs meeting in 2013.

10.1.1 We have 1750 new first semester freshmen this year and have 2300 students taking one of our Introduction to Engineering courses this semester.

10.1.2. We have a massive enrollment bubble going through the college, but our new enrollment management plans should help keep our enrollment under control.

https://engineering.osu.edu/sites/eng.web.engadmin.ohio-state.edu/files/uploads/ccaa_minutes/130829_ccaa_min.pdf

And what might those enrollment management plans entail?

The plan was approved by the university and programs were required to create their own enrollment management plan that needed to be approved by ASAP. These policies are important to Engineering as it appears that we will have about 1,800 new freshmen this coming autumn. Part of the college’s enrollment management plan is increasing the requirements for admission of transfer students.

https://engineering.osu.edu/sites/eng.web.engadmin.ohio-state.edu/files/uploads/ccaa_minutes/130521_ccaa_min.pdf

And that is exactly what Ohio State has done. Students applying to their sub-specialty majors in 2015-16 will find that the GPA requirements are significantly tougher than in previous years. Again, you can find this information on OSU’s website, but only if you know where to look:  (compare https://advising.engineering.osu.edu/sites/advising.engineering.osu.edu/files/uploads/Admission_To_Major/engineering_major_application_information_su2015-sp2016.pdf with https://advising.engineering.osu.edu/sites/advising.engineering.osu.edu/files/uploads/Admission_To_Major/engineering_major_application_guidelines_su2014-sp2015.pdf

In sum, the world is changing for engineering students. But unless you turn to the Internet, you will not detect and appreciate the magnitude of that change.

College counselors have one mantra:  we find the best “college fit” for your student.  But what does fit mean, and how do we go about it?

“Fit” is a vague term which means different things to counselors, parents, and students.  Consider some of the commonly used criteria for evaluating a potential match between a college and a student:

• Opportunity to learn (not just the acquisition of knowledge, but “learning how to learn”)
• Availability of certain fields of study, and the strength of same compared to other colleges
• Quality of professors, both in terms of knowledge and general likeability
• Average time to graduation
• Job prospects upon graduation
• Best choice of graduate schools upon graduation (which is not quite the same thing as job prospects)
• Availability of internships and co-ops (a longer form of internship which offers a better chance of winning a job offer from the company)
• Likelihood of graduating (because if you do not graduate, the rest does not matter much)
• Socialization (opportunity to acquire social skills, and even marital prospects)
• Availability of on-campus housing for some, or all, years of attendance, and the condition of same.
• Cost of attendance and availability of financial aid
• Availability and affordability of study abroad
• Quality of surroundings (e.g., most students will prefer California to North Dakota)
• Likelihood of gaining admission

Some of these criteria involve several variables.  For example, the cost of attendance may depend upon the match between the academic performance of the student and the college’s targeted demographic.  Simply put, a student who is more “attractive” to a particular college may receive a significant amount of “merit aid” not offered to students with weaker academic credentials.  Thus, a student with an A average and a 1300 SAT (reading and math) score might receive no aid from Johns Hopkins, a full tuition waiver from a local public college, or a reduction in tuition from out-of-state to in-state rates at a school like the Ohio State University.

College counselors use interviews and questionnaires to obtain information about the student which helps tease out which colleges might provide the best match.  Then the hard work begins of deciding which of the factors listed above should weigh most heavily for the particular student, and selecting colleges accordingly.

Some of that work is based on the counselor’s prior experience with potential “match” colleges.  Many consultants visit over 20 colleges a year, and more than a few have visited hundreds in their lifetimes.  These counselors can develop a “mental database” of information which helps them sort quickly through the over 2,000 four-year colleges nationwide.

But therein lies a problem.  Nobody can visit over 2,000 colleges.  Further, the information gleaned from such visits can become dated.  Like any institution, colleges change with the times.  Key people leave; policies change.  Recently, facing tight budgets, colleges are limiting enrollment in certain “impacted” majors, or even cutting departments wholesale.  Even if colleges highlighted such information during counselor visits (they don’t), counselors would not have timely information unless they visited each school every year – which is impossible.

This is why there is growing interest among counselors in using the Internet to tap information about colleges.  This is my specialty, and I discuss it in more detail in my next post (“The Data Is Out There – But You Need To Look For It”).

Welcome to the Rosenblatt College Counseling blog. My name is Ken Rosenblatt, your host, and you can find my biography here:  About Me.

This blog focuses on issues confronting parents and college counselors in navigating college selection and admissions.

Some of my posts are aimed primarily at parents. College admissions is an amazingly complex “game”, and parents and consultants alike have an interest in sorting out the players and keeping track of rule changes.

Some parents are interested in news and information about college for students with special needs / disabilities. As you can see from Students With Special Needs / Disabilities, the college selection and admission process is more difficult for these students. I work with these students, and will share and solicit approaches and strategies which increase their access to, and success at, colleges.

Other posts will be aimed squarely at my colleagues, college counselors. I decided to become a college counselor because my experience with the admissions and selection process as a parent convinced me that the Internet has changed the essence of how we accomplish our mission:  to find the college which best fits a student.  I believe that the Internet is a huge, and – when used correctly – largely reliable resource for college selection and admission. You can, and should, mine it regularly to uncover data and insights available nowhere else.

I will use this blog in part to demonstrate how a data-driven approach can augment results obtained by the “tried and true” methods of relying on guidebooks, campus visits, and the like. My post: The Data Is Out There – But You Need To Look For It , is an example.

Although a blog is by definition a work in progress, my current plan is to offer the reader three different types of “posts”.

First, I will monitor the Internet and report (to be accurate, mostly re-report) news about college selection and admission, usually with commentary.

Second, I will provide that staple of many college consultants, the trip report. This is where your intrepid correspondent visits a college, and in few hundred words conveys something about the atmosphere of the college and its student body. In addition to the standard topics, I will often focus on services provided for special needs students.

Third, I will publish longer form pieces.

Finally, a blog without comments is a lonely place.  I welcome different perspectives, and encourage readers, particularly college counselors, to have their say in the Comments section for each post.  I particularly welcome disagreement because that is how we all become better at what we do.

For now, this blog is moderated, meaning that I have to approve each comment before it is posted.  This is about spam prevention, not censorship, but you may notice a brief delay in the posting of your comments.

Thank you for visiting.  Please return often.