The College Whisperer™ | Navigating The Road To College

Plan. Prepare. Prevail!  

Before college applications, the Common App, CSS Profile, FAFSA, financial aid forms, and the whole college application and admissions process get to you, you need to get to us! 

Whether applying to college, paying for college, planning for college, or just thinking about college, contact us at COLLEGE CONNECTION, home of The College Whisperer™ and Official Sponsor of College Admission Success™. No one knows college admissions like COLLEGE CONNECTION. No one! 516-345-8766 

Find out why they say COLLEGE CONNECTION is, "The best darn college planner on Long Island!"

For up-to-the-minute news, apps, info and insights on college applications, admissions, scholarships and just about everything college, follow The College Whisperer™ on Twitter. 

The waitlist, more often than not, is that great void known as the Black Hole of college admissions, where applications go to die.

You, as the applicant, must get your applications in by deadline, or else. You must file for financial aid and scholarships by dates certain, or else. You must notify colleges of your acceptance decisions by May 1, or else.

Colleges, on the other hand, are not so much bound by deadlines. Apply Early Action, expecting a definitive answer sometime between December 15 and January 15? Maybe. Then again, that answer could come in February or March, and rather than "accepted" or "denied," it could be the limbo of "deferred."

When push comes to shove (gee, is it March already?), and colleges have to let students know where they stand (or else?), the ultimate "keep 'em in stitches" -- the waitlist.

Just how long do students remain on the waitlist? Typically, at least until the college knows who's coming, and who is not. Almost always, that will be after the May 1 acceptance deadline set by most colleges. Or, it could be September, the colleges waiting to see who actually enrolls. Then again, it could be never, students who were waitlisted when the Berlin Wall tumbled still waiting to hear.

What to do? What to do?

While the colleges want waitlisted students to inform them of their continuing interest, as well as new developments not previously reported in the admissions process, what they do not want (and most schools state this specifically) are additional essays, follow up letters, or a reincarnation of information already in hand.

And don't send chocolates or gift baskets, either. [Okay. Do send them. After all, the Admissions Committee gets mighty hungry sending out all those letters and emails. That is, when the Dean isn't Tweeting or blogging.] Your unsolicited expressions of love, gratitude, and groveling won't get you in.

Yes, do let the school know that you are still interested. [Typically, there is a short form to complete for that purpose.] Then, assume (and statistically, this is a good bet) that you will remain on that waitlist until well after the May 1 college acceptance deadline -- or forever, whichever comes first -- so make plans to enroll in one of the other schools you've been accepted to.

Then pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and ask yourself, "Do I really want to go to a college that can't make up its mind whether it wants me or not?" The answer should, most often, be, "No. I'm going to a college that has made me an offer and welcomes me with open arms!"
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Plan. Prepare. Prevail!  

When college applications (and financial aid forms) get to you, you need to get to us! 

Contact us at COLLEGE CONNECTION, home of The College Whisperer™ and Official Sponsor of College Admission Success™, for all of your college planning and counseling needs. Nobody knows college admissions like COLLEGE CONNECTION. Nobody! 516-345-8766

Find out why they say COLLEGE CONNECTION is, "The best darn college planner on Long Island!"

For up-to-the-minute news, apps, info and insights on college applications, admissions, scholarships and just about everything college, follow The College Whisperer™ on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/GetCollege 

I came across a website recently, by way of Twitter. Suffice it to say it was one of the many SAT preppies out there – an SAT Dude, in fact -- touting the benefits of preparing for the dreaded standardized test. In this instance, MATH. The tricks of the trade disclosed, so to speak.

The title to the particular post intrigued me, as did the post’s content. It was called, How To Solve “Shaded Region” Questions.

Finally. Someone who could show me just how to find the solution to those confounded shaded region questions (not to be confused with pesky liver spot queries, mind you). Yes, to be able to sleep at night, sans the countless permutations and combinations of tossing and turning, seized with the answer to the question of the ages.

Alas, having been shown the way of the “oddly shaped shaded region” – by a PhD, no less -- I still don’t get it. I think he lost me somewhere between l² – m² + s² = answer, and, whole – gray = white. Could I get that on rye?

Perhaps (and this is just a passing, rhetorical thought here), if Vladimir Putin had to solve a “shaded region” problem before he invaded and annexed the Crimea, that region might still be a part of the Ukraine today.

I often wonder whether we should be teaching kids -- and testing them -- on matters somewhat more mundane, such as balancing a check book, creating a budget, giving correct change back from a ten dollar bill, unit pricing, saving for retirement, and investing for the future?

Nah! Solving "Shaded Region" questions is so much more useful...

Folks, I think it’s great to delve into the mysterious and the unknown, whether exploring the outer regions of the universe, or the inner sanctum of the mind. But before we set out to solve those tricky shaded region questions, I believe we need to master the true common core that is the foundation of all knowledge  -- Reading. Writing. Arithmetic. 

It is critical, if we are to advance as a society and a civilization, that we must learn to think, to reason, to question. From the sublime to the absurd.  Shaded regions (all fifty of them), to that which is only exposed by the glaring light of day. Without the basics, however, we are inevitably doomed to the darkness.

Teach more. Test less.
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Plan. Prepare. Prevail!  

When college applications (and the Common App) get to you, you need to get to us! 

Contact us at COLLEGE CONNECTION, home of The College Whisperer™ and Official Sponsor of College Admission Success™, for all of your college planning and counseling needs. Nobody knows college admissions like COLLEGE CONNECTION. Nobody! 516-345-8766 

Find out why they say COLLEGE CONNECTION is, "The best darn college planner on Long Island!"

For up-to-the-minute news, apps, info and insights on college applications, admissions, scholarships and just about everything college, follow The College Whisperer™ on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/GetCollege 
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Forlorn? Depressed? Inconsolable?

Read this article by journalist and author Joan Didion on being denied admission to Stanford in 1952. As timely today as it was when first published in 1968 in the Saturday Evening Post!

On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice

“Dear Joan,” the letter begins, although the writer did not know me at all. The letter is dated April 25, 1952, and for a long time now it has been in a drawer in my mother’s house, the kind of back-bedroom drawer given over to class prophecies and dried butterfly orchids and newspaper photographs that show eight bridesmaids and two flower girls inspecting a sixpence in a bride’s shoe. What slight emotional investment I ever had in dried butterfly orchids and pictures of myself as a bridesmaid has proved evanescent, but I still have an investment in the letter, which, except for the “Dear Joan,” is mimeographed. I got the letter out as an object lesson for a17-year-old cousin who is unable to eat or sleep as she waits to hear from what she keeps calling the colleges of her choice. Here is what the letter says: “The Committee on Admissions asks me to inform you that it is unable to take favorable action upon your application for admission to Stanford University. While you have met the minimum requirements, we regret that because of the severity of the competition, the committee cannot include you in the group to be admitted. The Committee joins me in extending you every good wish for the successful continuation of your education. Sincerely yours, Rixford K. Snyder, Director of Admissions.”

I remember quite clearly the afternoon I opened that letter. I stood reading and re-reading it, my sweater and my books fallen on the hall floor, trying to interpret the words in some less final way, the phrases “unable to take” and “favorable action” fading in and out of focus until the sentence made no sense at all. We lived then in a big dark Victorian house, and I had a sharp and dolorous image of myself growing old in it, never going to school anywhere, the spinster in Washington Square. I went upstairs to my room and locked the door and for a couple of hours I cried. For a while I sat on the floor of my closet and buried my face in an old quilted robe and later, after the situation’s real humiliations (all my friends who applied to Stanford had been admitted) had faded into safe theatrics, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought about swallowing the contents of an old bottle of codeine-and-Empirin. I saw myself in an oxygen tent, with Rixford K. Snyder hovering outside, although how the news was to reach Rixford K. Snyder was a plot point that troubled me even as I counted out the tablets.

Of course I did not take the tablets. I spent the rest of the spring in sullen but mild rebellion, sitting around drive-ins, listening to Tulsa evangelists on the car radio, and in the summer I fell in love with someone who wanted to be a golf pro, and I spent a lot of time watching him practice putting, and in the fall I went to a junior college a couple of hours a day and made up the credits I needed to go to the University of California at Berkeley. The next year a friend at Stanford asked me to write him a paper on Conrad’s Nostromo, and I did, and he got an A on it. I got a B- on the same paper at Berkeley, and the specter of Rixford K. Snyder was exorcised.

So it worked out all right, my single experience in that most conventional middle-class confrontation, the child vs. the Admissions Committee. But that was in the benign world of country California in 1952, and I think it must be more difficult for children I know now, children whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed steps, each of which must be successfully negotiated in order to avoid just such a letter as mine from one or another of the Rixford K. Snyders of the world. An acquaintance told me recently that there were ninety applicants for the seven openings in the kindergarten of an expensive school in which she hoped to enroll her four-year-old, and that she was frantic because none of the four-year-old’s letters of recommendation had mentioned the child’s “interest in art.” Had I been raised under that pressure, I suspect, I would have taken the codeine-and-Empirin on that April afternoon in 1952. My rejection was different, my humiliation private: No parental hopes rode on whether I was admitted to Stanford, or anywhere. Of course my mother and father wanted me to be happy, and of course they expected that happiness would necessarily entail accomplishment, but the terms of that accomplishment were my affair. Their idea of their own and of my worth remained independent of where, or even if, I went to college. Our social situation was static, and the question of “right” schools, so traditionally urgent to the upwardly mobile, did not arise. When my father was told that I had been rejected by Stanford, he shrugged and offered me a drink.

I think about that shrug with a great deal of appreciation whenever I hear parents talking about their children’s “chances.” What makes me uneasy is the sense that they are merging their children’s chances with their own, demanding of a child that he make good not only for himself but for the greater glory of his father and mother. Of course there are more children than “desirable” openings. But we are deluding ourselves if we pretend that desirable schools benefit the child alone. (“I wouldn’t care at all about his getting into Yale if it weren’t for Vietnam,” a father told me not long ago, quite unconscious of his own speciousness; it would have been malicious of me to suggest that one could also get a deferment at Long Beach State.) Getting into college has become an ugly business, malignant in its consumption and diversion of time and energy and true interests, and not its least deleterious aspect is how the children themselves accept it. They talk casually and unattractively of their “first, second and third choices,” of how their “first-choice” application (to Stephens, say) does not actually reflect their first choice (their first choice was Smith, but their adviser said their chances were low, so why “waste” the application?); they are calculating about the expectation of rejections, about their “backup” possibilities, about getting the right sport and the right extracurricular activities to “balance” the application, about juggling confirmations when their third choice accepts before their first choices answers. They are wise in the white lie here, the small self-aggrandizement there, in the importance of letters from “names” their parents scarcely know. I have heard conversations among 16-year-olds who were exceeded in their skill at manipulative self-promotion only by applicants for large literary grants.

And of course none of it matters very much at all, none of these early successes, early failures. I wonder if we had better not find some way to let our children know this, some way to extricate our expectations from theirs, some way to let them work through their own rejections and sullen rebellions and interludes with golf pros, unassisted by anxious prompting from the wings. Finding one’s role at 17 is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.

Cheer up. Your very best days are yet to come! :-)
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Plan. Prepare. Prevail!  

When college applications get to you, you need to get to us! 

Contact us at COLLEGE CONNECTION, home of The College Whisperer™ and Official Sponsor of College Admission Success™, for all of your college planning needs. No one knows college admissions like COLLEGE CONNECTION. No one! 516-345-8766. 

Find out why they say COLLEGE CONNECTION is, "The best darn college planner on Long Island!".

For up-to-the-minute news, apps, info and insights on college applications, admissions, scholarships and just about everything college, follow The College Whisperer™ on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/GetCollege.

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Recently, I spent the better part of a day assembling furniture that was “Made in China.” Leaving aside the fact that the instructions were clearly lost in translation, and the pictures of the nuts, bolts and assorted parts looked nothing like the content of the carton (not even the ones that were left over after final assembly), I got to thinking about why we can’t – or simply won’t – make things like tables, chairs, and dressers here in this country.

Could it be, as we are told, time and time again (mostly by advocates of standardized testing under the guise of raising standards and achieving goals), that we are falling behind the rest of the world –- China, for one – in such areas as math and the sciences?

Well, let’s see. The Chinese stole the plans and designs for that chair I was attempting to put together. They clandestinely copied it, without regard to specifications, thereafter mass-producing same in a factory staffed by what is essentially slave labor working in inhumane conditions. And then, as if to rub salt in the wound, they sold the stuff back to us via Lowes and Home Depot, profiting handsomely from what, in reality, was good, old American ingenuity.

But I digress. For the real question remains, if America’s education system is failing us so badly, our students lagging behind the rest of the world, why is half of the free world – and almost all of the world that lives under the yoke of Totalitarian regimes -- clamoring to get in to America’s colleges and universities?

And get in, they do!

Why, in any given year, upwards of 10% of the incoming freshmen class at most American colleges and universities is comprised of international students. [At some colleges, that number is closer to 20%]. In fact, there are more international students on American campuses today than ever before in our history. In 2012/13, according to the Institute of International Education, there were some 819,644 international students at colleges and universities in the United States.

While American students drown under the tide of more than a trillion dollars in student loan debt, our own government, through grants and entitlements, pours millions of dollars into the coffers of these colleges, funding the ever-increasing influx of foreign students. Recruiters receive generous compensation – officially sanctioned, no less, by organizations such as the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) – for bringing foreign nationals to our shores to live and study on our college campuses. [It is a violation of federal law, by the way, to be compensated to recruit American students. Go figure!] 

Folks, educating the world has become a big business. And the world is buying in, in droves. In the process, American students, already facing fierce competition at home for fewer seats and scarce resources, are increasingly short-changed.

Don’t get me wrong. Before you berate me as Rush Limbaugh on steroids, hankering to close our borders, build electrified fences, deport anyone who cannot demonstrate a bloodline to a native American, let me be perfectly clear: I am all for diversity and globalization. I believe that, as a free, democratic, progressive society – one that has thrived because we are a nation of immigrants, and not despite our E Pluribus Unum – we should take a lead in educating the world.

Indeed, the world looks to us, not only as that beacon of freedom and torch of liberty, but for our innovation, our know how, our “can do” attitude.

That said, when we must deny enrollment at our colleges and universities to 10% or more of American students, whose seats in the lecture halls and research labs would be filled by international students, we do a disservice not only to those students left behind here at home, but to the very future of America.

Yes, educate the world. After all, those who are educated, informed, and enlightened are more inclined to build bridges than bombs, and, in dispelling ignorance and displacing dogma, both at home and abroad, those who are educated would more likely become teachers rather than terrorists. 

And educate the world right here in America, where we have the very best schools (public and private), the very best teachers, and the very best tools (Common Core and College Board notwithstanding) to lead the way.

Keep in mind, though, that if we do not educate America first, not only raising the bar, but giving every student in this country (and I necessarily include those who would be covered by the Dream Act) the opportunity and the wherewithal to reach that bar, we haven’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell of educating the world, let alone making it a better, safer, more beautiful place for everyone.

- - -   
Plan. Prepare. Prevail!  

          FREE College Planning Workshop, March 26th

 When college applications get to you, you need to get to us! 

Contact us at COLLEGE CONNECTION, home of The College Whisperer™ and Official Sponsor of College Admission Success™, for all of your college planning needs. No one knows college admissions like COLLEGE CONNECTION. No one! 516-345-8766. 

Find out why they say COLLEGE CONNECTION is, "The best darn college planner on Long Island!".

For up-to-the-minute news, apps, info and insights on college applications, admissions, scholarships and just about everything college, follow The College Whisperer™ on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/GetCollege.  

- - -   
Plan. Prepare. Prevail!  

          FREE College Planning Workshop, March 26th

 When college applications get to you, you need to get to us! 

Contact us at COLLEGE CONNECTION, home of The College Whisperer™ and Official Sponsor of College Admission Success™, for all of your college planning needs. No one knows college admissions like COLLEGE CONNECTION. No one! 516-345-8766. 

Find out why they say COLLEGE CONNECTION is, "The best darn college planner on Long Island!".

For up-to-the-minute news, apps, info and insights on college applications, admissions, scholarships and just about everything college, follow The College Whisperer™ on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/GetCollege.