Yugen Shock: Inklings of Uncertainty and Seven Implications for Your Child’s Higher Education

After a glance at yugen in mid-century America, this post explores the profound and often undisclosed consequences of economic decline on American colleges and universities today.  If you are the parent of a college-bound teen, please read carefully.  For more on yugen, scroll to the previous post.

yugen:  profound, mysterious, subtle (Romanized E.J./J.E. Dictionary, Taiseido:  1953).

Yugen entered American popular culture–as distinct from American higher education–through the efforts of the Beat Generation.  Pulitzer prize winning poet Gary Snyder and the late Zen master Philip Whalen have been key figures in popularizing Japanese aesthetics in the West.  In the hands of Whalen, Snyder and other Western pioneers of Zen, yugen lost its Muromachi decadence.  Especially as channeled through Snyder, the concept has been invigorated by a rugged, American individualism.  And, in his “deep ecology” one can hear faint echoes of xuan, the primal Chinese antecedent of yugen.

I first associated yugen with the state of contemporary colleges and universities after reading a series of headlines in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 2, 2010).  Headlines share something of the compact intensity of poetry.  Hence, I have chosen to string these headlines together in free verse and then to take the seven stanzas as topics of discussion–with apologies to Snyder and his art.

the headline poem

Germany pursues

excellence

over

egalitarianism,

field of discord

at public colleges,

farming groups sow

i n f l u e n c e,

black colleges

see a need to improve

their      i m a g e,

we can end

t h r e a t s

to international students,

colleges

a t o p

gas-rich          shale

weigh offers

from

d

r

i

ll

ers,

American

higher education

may need            an u p g r a d e

to go global,

wrestling

with one             G O D

or another.

Looking for Yugen:  A-College Visiting You Go!

Summertime is a fine time to visit college campuses with your teenager.  My website provides metrics to aid in making a good match, along with suggestions for stuff that your son or daughter may want to count.  Any bookstore will carry volumes for planning a campus visit.  If your family vehicle lacks a GPS device, you can find directions on the college website, with links for avoiding congested interstates.  Armed with this abundance of information and encouragement, what could be lacking?

Lacking is the awareness of yugen, in its sense as an undercurrent of dissolution or decline.  Three years ago, parents of prospective students did not need an appreciation of the deep restructuring and retrenchment on most campuses. Today, it’s foolhardy not to watch for fault lines of financial stress behind the smiles of gracious admission officers.

The Great Recession, as some have called it, is not hurting institutions of higher education equally.  Colleges and universities are not marshaling identical strategies to offset shrinking endowments and cutbacks in government funding.  Although trends are beginning to appear, each board of regents (for public institutions) or trustees (for private schools) is making different hard choices.  The soundness of their decisions will influence the quality of your child’s undergraduate education.

We can let the stanzas of the headline poem serve as markers for the changes in American higher education.  I encourage parents to heed these markers.  As always, I encourage parents to take notes and photos during a campus tour and to ask more questions of admission officers than make your teen comfortable. If your teen is like most, s/he will prefer that you ask no questions and take no notes or photos.

The first stanza:  Germany pursues excellence over egalitarianism

As British philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted forty years ago, the Germans gave the world the modern research university.  To believe that German universities have consistently pursued an end other than excellence is to be a child playing in a sunlit garden:  it’s sweet and naive.  Sweetness and naivete are not desirable traits for a parent visiting a college.  Appropriate behavior for a parent during a college visit is congenial and pragmatic, but in this social role, allow pragmatism to trump congeniality.

Our first headline is remarkable only in treating the ordinary as the newsworthy.  For fans of cartoonist Wiley Miller (I am one), the novelty of the German pursuit of academic excellence is a case for the paunchy, bespectacled superhero, Obviousman.  I have seen many cases for Obviousman on campus tours.  The painstaking identification of a dining hall, a science lab, a fitness center and, yes, a bench in a sunny garden all deserve limning in Non Sequitur.  Equally obvious are the needs for a wired campus, for interlibrary loan, for an evening safety patrol and for student health services.

In your role as congenially pragmatic parent, probe the extent of touted campus features and services.  Ask about dead zones in the wi-fi coverage.  Basements in residence halls are often out of range, and they are also recreation spaces and laundry facilities.  Inquire into the screening of students who volunteer for the evening safety patrol.

When looking for yugen, ask an admission officer about hiring freezes and staff cuts in priority student services. Is there a hiring freeze at the student health center?  Have the hours of physicians or the number of psychologists been cut?  Alternately, has the size of the incoming class been increased, while services remain unchanged?  Don’t forget to explore transport and time to hospital emergency rooms–I’ve known more than one freshman to fall out of a tree and break an arm.

The second stanza:  field of discord:  farming groups sow influence

In a time of budget cuts, expect competing academic interests to vie for diminishing resources.  Most colleges and universities house centers for research (e.g., The Cousteau Center for Marine Sciences) and for interdisciplinary programs (e.g., The Tubman Center for African-American Studies).  Bringing students and faculty from multiple disciplines together with a common purpose, academic centers generate tremendous intellectual activity.  Sadly, across the land, they are becoming an endangered species, as regents and trustees push for retrenchment into traditional areas of inquiry.

Explore the status of a college’s academic centers during the Q/A at the end of the admission information session. Have academic centers recently been consolidated?  Are any academic centers scheduled for closure?  As an analogy that will not appear on the SAT, an academic center is to a college community as the canary is to the coal mine.  When one dies, everybody is in trouble.

You may also want to ask about new academic centers.  As this headline suggests, sustainability is more than a buzz word on many campuses.  However, is the “new” sustainability center really just the old barn down by the duck pond out beyond the tennis courts with a fresh coat of non-VOC paint and a sign of salvaged lumber? What is the center’s mission?  What events has the center sponsored in the past semester as partial fulfillment of its mission to the campus community?

The third stanza:  Black colleges see a need to improve their image

The historically Black colleges and universities facing financial difficulties are not alone in their struggle to attract strong students to their campuses.  Competition for the most qualified students has never been more fierce, and marketing is a hefty tool for student recruitment.  (Of course, if you were the University of Chicago, inundated with applicants after unsolicited publicity by the American President, you could gleefully scratch the marketing budget.)

That said, the calibre of the image management for a college or university need not correlate with the quality of its educational offerings. There are first-rate liberal arts colleges which have chosen not to spend a fortune on marketing (think:  Reed College, undergraduate alma mater of Snyder and Whalen).  Disturbingly, there are also the fourth-rate degree mills that spend the lion’s share of their tuition dollars on marketing.

Do not be won over by glossy viewbooks short on substance.  Viewbooks never contain the content of course catalogs, but inside their slick or thick or nubby covers, you can expect to find the institutional mission and a synopsis of the academic programs.  When in doubt about the general curriculum or the degree requirements of a major, ask for a copy of the catalog. (As once happened to me at Cooper Union, an admission officer may brusquely note that the catalog is available online.  I recommend asserting your interest in a print copy, to facilitate later comparisons across schools.)

Call me finicky, but I prefer that a student tour guide not be paid for trotting me around the campus (think, with kudos:  Dickinson College).  In this economic climate, paying tour guides wastes hours of professional staff time on the mechanics of compensating student employees. (The guides, themselves, earn a pittance.)  Admission officers should recruit and train volunteers to show visitors the highlights and hallmarks of their institution.

Voluntary tour guides usually make their status known, as a point of pride.  If you are fortunate to meet one, I suggest commending the guide’s ethic of service.  The smile on this young person’s face will make your tour memorable.

The fourth stanza:  we can end threats to international students

This could be another case for Obviousman.  Serious threats directed to international students as international students are hate crimes.  These offenses differ from, say, stealing the laptop of someone who happens to be an international student.  Stealing a laptop is a garden variety felony.

The FBI and campus security offices are required by law to collect and publish statistics on misdemeanors and felonies.  The same agencies are further required by law to collect and publish a separate category of hate crimes.  For off-campus crime statistics, contact the local police department or the FBI.  It is your right and responsibility as the parent of a prospective student to request statistics for misdemeanors, felonies and hate crimes on the campus.

Ask any admission officer for the latest campus crime statistics and for a description of crime prevention programs and practices at the college or university.

Among possible prevention responses, expect to find an emergency blue light program, an evening safety patrol, a rape awareness program, an alcohol reduction program, a qualified campus security force, and key cards for entering residence halls.  If the surrounding community has a high crime rate (think MIT, NYU), look for additional measures such as security guards and bag checks at entry points to college buildings.

Given the yugen sensibility on many campuses, it is wise to look into prevention program cutbacks and hiring freezes for security officers.  How much better it is to rely on volunteer tour guides than to cut positions in campus safety! (Not that any institution is publicly acknowledging this trade-off.)

The fifth stanza:  colleges atop oil-rich shale weigh offers from drillers

The Chron article bearing this headline focussed on a handful of colleges and one public university (Binghamton, the flagship of the SUNY schools), built above natural gas deposits.  New technologies now make possible the profitable exploitation of these natural resources.  Will geologically favored schools accept the lucre being offered in exchange for drilling leases?

In the narrow sense, it makes no immediate difference to your child’s education if a natural gas rig goes up on a college which s/he is not attending.  In the broader sense, pragmatic parents will recognize that the university is not an isolated ivory tower, as was once believed.  The drilling dilemma is symptomatic of the deeper issue of outside influences upon American higher education.

The ties of higher education to the federal government and to big business have grown strong in the last decade, especially in areas of national defense and intelligence.  These interests shape research and teaching in engineering and computer science, physics and biochemistry, communications and information science, foreign languages, criminology and forensics.  All three branches of the liberal arts–the humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, and the biological and natural sciences–are building active partnerships with national defense organizations.

[A Becker Aside:  To learn which universities received defense contracts in 2009, go to the website, www.governmentcontractswon.com/search.  Select the type of contract and input a name.  The defense contract page helpfully notes, “ TIP: partial names can be entered; for example, searching on the word tech will return a list of all contractor names containing the word tech.”

Following the tip, I typed “university,” clicked the link and generated 147 pages of names.  Among the five pages of universities that begin with the letter “A,” Auburn University in Alabama was the big winner last year.  Auburn netted 111 defense contracts totaling more than $32 million dollars.  Arizona State University in Tempe, where I once took a Chinese language course, garnered 88 contracts for eleven million dollars. I didn’t extend the exercise to colleges, but the comparison could be interesting.]

Defense and intelligence is not the only sector funding academic research.  Agribusiness, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, entertainment and media, and alcohol and tobacco routinely make grant monies available to faculty members.  In turn, faculty grant recipients create opportunities for their top undergraduate students, often in the form of summer research stipends, to collaborate in these studies.

To name an American college or university, public or private, that is more fiscally sound today than it was three years ago would be a Herculean undertaking.  From the cozy college next door to the state university that dwarfs a small town, endowments have shrunk–some by upwards of forty percent.  Pipelines to external funding have also contracted, but expect to see their salience increase relative to other income streams.

For an expose on “the corporate corruption of higher educations,” read Jennifer Washburn’s book, University, Inc, which has the quote as its subtitle (2005).  The abuses documented by Washburn are clear, but equally undeniable are the positive relationships between external funders and academic departments, which generate unbiased, valuable findings.  Collusion between funders and researchers is no different from corporate corruption or government fraud:  it exists; it is never the whole story, and responsible adults recognize the need to watch for it.

As the pragamtic parent of a college-bound child, keep in mind that many departments have money from the government and the private sector.  Be aware also that pipelines sometimes flow two directions:  as research money floods into the campus, well-trained graduates are funneled into jobs with the funding organizations.

Unless aiming for medicine, the law or academe itself, your son or daughter has a good chance of subsequently working for an organization that is on the recruiting list and/or the funding list of the school where s/he matriculates.  Undergraduates employed on externally funded research projects have an increased likelihood of working for the funding organization.  If those employment prospects disturb you, then encourage your son or daughter to continue the college search.  Not all institutions of higher education play the pipeline game in equal measure.  In general, major research universities are more serious pipeline players than the liberal arts colleges.

During a quiet moment, ask an admission officer to provide you with the names of the corporations and the government agencies that have:  1) recruited on campus in the past year, and 2) funded faculty research in the past three years.

Remember to take the business card of this individual and be prepared to leave an email address. The admission officer may need to contact the career center and the development office to obtain this information.  Follow-up with an email after one week of your campus visit, if you haven’t been contacted.

The sixth stanza:  American higher education may need an upgrade to go global

In yet another case for Obviousman, it should go without saying that American education is vastly more international today than at any point in the history of this nation.  More American citizens study abroad.  More foreign students enroll at American institutions–and at every level from the certificate programs of community colleges to the doctoral programs of premier research universities.  More faculty conduct research with colleagues abroad, and most fields of study now have international professional associations.  (For example, I am an occasional member of a rarified group called The International Visual Sociology Association.) With the deep disturbance of yugen, the latest trend in the globalization of American education is the international branch campus.

Global efforts are not fiscally equal.  There are international ventures that cost an institution money, as when a college converts “soft” scholarships into hard currency to support undergraduate study abroad (think, with smiles:  Drew University).  Other global connections are institutionally neutral.   Faculty sabbaticals overseas funded, for example, by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts fall in this group.  Again from an institutional perspective, there are two global money-makers:  international students and international branch campuses.  Neither source of the overseas money now flowing into US institutions of higher education is stable.

First are the wealthy international parents eager at this moment for their children to have an American education.  Two years from now, for still non-existent reasons, those parents may be unwilling to send their children back to America to study.  Domestic pressures may reduce the emigration of students, or another destination may become more attractive.  (Australia is becoming more attractive to East Asian families.)  Meanwhile, international students are a lucrative proposition for American schools.

Non-resident aliens are seldom eligible for financial aid.  A private university like NYU can earn 200 million dollars per annum from the tuition of its non-resident alien undergraduates and graduate students.  In a tough economy, it’s easy for a college or university to become dependent on the money that international students pay in full tuition.

As a pragmatic parent, you can determine the international tuition dollars at any accredited college or university.  (Other income, such as housing for internationals, is trickier to measure.)  The College Board provides the total number of students and the percent of non-resident aliens attending an institution, free of charge.  Multiply the percent non-resident by the total number to determine the number of international students.  Find the cost of tuition–also on the College Board site.  Multiply number of international students by cost of tuition, and, voila, you obtain my estimate for NYU or the school of your choice.

Second, there are the branch campuses sprouting across the globe.  Today, a student in Qatar can enroll at local campuses of Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown or Weill Medical College of Cornell.  (The Cornell connection saddens me, as this is my doctoral alma mater.)  Northwestern University is in Abu Dhabi, and NYU will be there this year.  In Dubai, students can chose between Rochester Institute of Technology and Michigan State, my husband’s undergraduate institution.  Globe-trotting Georgia Tech has outposts in China, France, Italy, Singapore and South Africa, with a campus in India opening soon.  This account is far from exhaustive, and the list of international branch campuses will continue to grow as long as the money continues to flow.

It is a safe bet that international branch campuses are operating in the black.  Material costs are subsidized, and operating costs are low.  Without regional accrediting bodies or guidelines from The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), overseas branches function in an unregulated environment.  Settings like Dubai Knowledge Village are, literally, educational free trade zones.  The preponderance of temporary and part-time appointments suppresses faculty salaries and benefits.  Student services are minimal; professional staff are few.

As long as costs are kept low and while tuition and enrollment at its international branch campus are high, the main US institution of higher education will benefit from the windfalls. Should the international branch fail–for reasons of geopolitics, mismanagement or another normal accident–the institution will stand to lose the unsecured portion of its investment.  Obviously, the inflow of overseas money to the main institution will dry up.

A university will identify international branches, if any, in its publicity.  The viewbook is a good place to begin.  However, you cannot glean sufficient data to calculate the profitability of a branch, and a private institution will not share proprietary information.  My guess is that the margins vary, being higher, for example, in the UAE than France.  Last time I checked, there were no educational free trade zones in Western Europe.

Finally, or rather, initially, there may be substantial inducements for American universities to open outposts in far-flung locations.  In one well-publicized case, the government of Abu Dhabi donated 50 million dollars to NYU before negotiating its branch campus.  In the financial short term, Auburn University, with those 111 defense contracts, could do better approaching Omar Saif Ghobash, the billionaire who brokered the NYU deal and who is the current UAE ambassador to Russia.  In his new post, Ghobash is backing Russian mega-corporation Gazprom in its bid to grab ‘distressed’ oil assets.  Meanwhile, NYU President John Sexton anticipates the flow of students and faculty between New York and Abu Dhabi.

International “earnest money,” especially Arab earnest money, is the latest source of external funding for American colleges and universities. Like tuition from non-resident aliens and windfalls from branches abroad, international donations are inherently unstable.  As more yugen, those one-time inducements entangle top administrators like John Sexton in webs of reciprocity that will be opaque, in the beginning, to almost everyone outside the funding culture.  (When can we expect to see a Ghobash Center for Arabic Studies in Washington Square?)

Pragmatic parents can review donations to the prospective colleges and universities of their children.  In a quiet moment or by phone, ask either an admission officer or a development officer for a copy of this year’s list of donors. The list usually appears in small print, organized by dollar amount, at the back of an annual alumni publication.  If you approach the admission officer, expect to wait a few days for the information to filter down.  Follow up with a phone call, if needed.

Once you have the list, check for contributions from foreign governments and overseas foundations–or, for that matter, any donor of concern to you.  Monies passed through US foundations and anonymous donations cannot be tracked.  The good news is that deep sleuthing should not be necessary.  The UAE donation to NYU was a transparent transaction, covered in The New York Times.

The seventh stanza:  wrestling with one God or another

Stephen Prothero, the author of the article bearing this title and of the book God is Not One (2010), is an interesting person.  This is not to say that I like or agree with him.  Not knowing the man personally, I don’t like or dislike him.  Not being a scholar of religion, I won’t take a public stand for or against his arguments.  However, as a woman concerned with excellence in higher education, I find Prothero interesting, and, as any faculty member will tell you, interesting is an educational asset.

In a time of budget cuts, program closings, hiring freezes, hate crimes, influence peddling and dubious overseas ventures, Americans need to return to what is urgent and profound in higher education:  to the yugen of learning. And, used here,  I mean yugen in its early Chinese and later American connotations, as that which is profound.  Prothero challenges us and our undergraduates to ponder the big mysteries:  the scope of the universe, the origins of life, the nature of justice, the reality of God.  For Prothero, as for Snyder and Whalen, it is only in wrestling with the big mysteries that we grow into our full humanity.

He observes, “Of course we are born human beings, but only in the most trivial sense.  Often our humanity lies ahead of us–an achievement rather than an inheritance, and a far-from-trivial achievement at that.”

Could there be a more sublime purpose for higher education than the achievement of full humanity?  On your next campus visit–between watching out for symptoms of economic decline–look also for signs of intellectual vitality.  Only a vital academic community will encourage your son or daughter to emerge into mindful adulthood.  Even in this time of retrenchment, havens of profound learning await the parent and the child who make the effort to reach them.

cheers to good college visiting,

dkb

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College Deadlines: Two Days and Counting

Today is the 28th day of April.  Your daughter or son must select one, and only one college in two days.  If s/he hasn’t yet made a choice, then this may be a sickeningly tense time in your home.  Here are five tips from Becker Academic, LLC, to help your child make a sensible decision in the next forty-eight hours.

Step One/Right Now:  Narrow the Field

Teens, parents:  Take a moment to breathe and focus your attention.  Inhale, exhale.  This is an important decision, but it is not a multiple choice test.  There may be–and very likely is–more than one right answer.

Look over the candidate colleges that are still in the running.  Should your child find more than three, encourage her/him to toss out the forth-, fifth-, sixth-place possibilities. There are not six number-one favorite colleges.  Three is a manageable number from which to make a choice.  Encourage selection of those three options.  Now.

Step Two/Five minutes from now:  Predict Student Indebtedness

Review the financial aid packages for the top three options.  Which ones include student loans?  What are the different dollar amounts of the loans?  If you multiply by four and add ten percent for escalating costs, what debt load will your child be carrying at the end of four years?  Discuss the implications of graduating with a debt, for which payments will begin nine months after your child is no longer a full-time student.

We at Becker Academic, LLC, recommend that an undergraduate not acquire more debt than the price that s/he would reasonably pay for a car in the first year after graduation.  The key word is ‘reasonably.’  For a teen who plans to major in electrical engineering, that debt could match the sticker price for a Lexus ISC-10 3.5-Liter V-6 convertible.  If your child wants to become a freelance journalist based in Paris, s/he should keep the student loan debt in the range of the Smart Fortwo Pure coupe.  (There are plenty of Smart cars in the alleys of the Marais.)  Should your child have no career plans at this stage, keep the level of indebtedness on the lower end of the automotive scale.

Step Three/Tonight or Tomorrow Night:  Assess Departmental Balance

To do this exercise, you will need access to the Internet.  Most public libraries have personal computers (PCs) for use at no charge, along with staff to assist you in the basics of PC operation.

For teens who have a prospective major, do the exercise for the respective academic departments of the two or three schools.  Otherwise, have your child select her/his preferred division within the liberal arts:

the Humanities (e.g., English, history, modern languages and literatures, mathematics, philosophy)

the Social Sciences (e.g., anthropology, criminology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology)

the Life and Natural Sciences (e.g., astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics)

For those students without a prospective major, use the department of English for Humanities preferences, economics for social science preferences, and biology for life and natural science preferences.  English, economics, and biology tend to be the largest departments within their divisions, and if these departments are lacking in faculty balance, then the smaller departments are unlikely to be better.

Divide a spreadsheet or a sheet of paper into five columns, with the headings:  College Name, Full Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor and Other.  “Other” includes adjunct faculty, visiting faculty, instructors and faculty emeritii (retired).  These are the four categories of faculty rank that you will be considering.

Create a table with as many rows as there are colleges to consider, either two or three.

For each college, locate the official institutional website. (Hint:  the last four characters will be “.edu”.)  From the college homepage, click “academics” (usually in small print on the tool bar), then click “departments.”  Once you have found the list of departments, select the one that you will use for the exercise.  Within the department link, select “faculty.”

At this point, you should see a list of the current faculty in the department.  Sometimes there will be thumbnail photographs.  There may also be links to the webpages of the individual faculty members.

You want to identify the rank of each member of the department.  If you are fortunate, the ranks will be listed under or beside the names of the faculty.  If the college is less obliging, you may have to click on the individual webpages.  A rare few institutions do not rank faculty, in which case, you are welcome to call us and we’ll talk you through another option.

Place a “tick” mark in the cell of the table that corresponds to the rank of each member of the faculty for the first college.  Tally the marks:  e.g., 3 full professors, 4 associate professors, 2 assistant professors, 1 other.

Repeat the exercise for the other candidate colleges.

Compare your results.  You are looking for balance, rather than size.  A balanced department will have similar numbers of faculty in the three main categories and fewer numbers in the “other” category.  Ideally, the numbers will peak in the middle, at the associate level, because this is often the most productive stage of a faculty member’s career.

Departmental balance contributes to the mentoring of undergraduate students.  Mentoring includes providing opportunities to participate in research, to pursue internships, and to conduct independent study.  It extends to assisting the undergraduate with presentations at professional conferences and with courses approved for the major in study abroad programs.

Step Four/Tomorrow:  Consider Current Student Satisfaction

For the fourth step, your child needs to take the leading role.  S/he should telephone the admission offices of each candidate institution, identify herself/himself and ask to be put in contact with several current students.  If s/he has a proposed major, then students in that major are optimal contacts.

By cell phone, text, tweet or archaic email, your child can reach out to current students to explore key academic  issues, along with the social, athletic and extracurricular concerns that s/he may have.

Discuss the results of these exchanges with your child.

Here are a few sample questions, which are, alas, too long to tweet:

How often in a typical semester do you meet with your faculty advisor?

What topics do you discuss with your advisor in these meetings?

Are you or any of your friends doing research with faculty? What’s it like?

Can you describe the research project done by you or a friend who has received a summer stipend?

How have you handled difficulties enrolling in courses of your choice?

Step Five/For the Duration:  Resist Institutional Outreach

Every year, selective colleges and universities make stronger efforts to attract the high school students whom they have admitted.  The headline on the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 30) reads, “The Sweet and Subtle Science of Wooing the Admitted.”  Among your remaining parental responsibilities before your child’s high school graduation is encouraging a realistic appraisal of these institutional efforts at outreach.

If not exactly science, enrollment management is certainly big business.  In tough economic times, all colleges and universities–and their nicely compensated enrollment managers–are striving to increase their yields.  The “yield” is the proportion of admitted students who elect to attend the institution.

There is an arsenal of tactics to increase yield.  They range from receiving a friendly phone call from your child’s regional admission counselor to having your daughter discover the red rose left by local alumnae on the hood of her car. (I did not make up that example, and the recipient of the rose was a young woman.)

Encourage your child not to be swayed by these tactics–although s/he is certainly welcome to keep the rose. Focus decision-making on the cost and the value of the options for higher education.  Help your child grasp that her/his undergraduate years will center upon strong, positive relationships with the women and men of the faculty, not with the smiling faces in The Office of Admission.

. . . . .

As a last bit of advice for a stressful week, remember to breathe deeply.  And, don’t forget to celebrate together this weekend as a family!

cheering good choices,

dkb

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Money Matters: Tax Returns, College Costs, and the EFC

Okay.  Exhale.  April 15th was last week.  This Monday marks a new beginning, with 361 rich days to enjoy before the next hazing ritual of tax returns. There are few experiences that I detest more, despite the ease of online filing and electronic transfers.  Couldn’t I replace the tax nightmare for just one year with a nice trip to the endodontist?

If you are a parent with a child entering college next fall, the month of April can be worse than a double root canal.  Along with the tax mess, there comes the final selection of a college.  By May first, your teen needs to make a decision that will shape her life choices and life chances.  Before that date, you must decide if you can support her choice by fulfilling your Expected Family Contribution (EFC) to her dream school.  The two decisions are linked, and now that the offers of admission have been made, financial aid often become paramount.

At Becker Academic, LLC, we are not financial advisors.  However, our eight years of experience as educational sociologists have given us solid insights into the realm of EFCs and their appropriate role in college selection.  Here’s our quick take on seven aspects of the subject.  If you have other questions, send us an email and we’ll do our best to provide an answer or a suitable referral.

1.  What is the EFC?

The Expected Family Contribution is the dollar amount that parents/guardians are asked to make toward the annual cost of the child attending an institution of higher education.  The EFC will vary from year to year, depending:  1) on fluctuations in household income, 2) on the number of children currently attending college–but not including graduate school, and 3) on changes in the mathematical formula that the college or university uses to calculate the EFC.

2.  How is the EFC calculated?

Colleges and universities may use one of two options for assessing the EFC.  The first relies on a federal methodology and uses information that you provided on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).  The second inputs data provided by you to CSS Profile into parameters established by the individual institutions of higher education.  This second approach is sometimes called ‘the institutional methodology.”  Because the parameters for institutional methodologies differ, the dollar amounts of the EFCs for a student to attend different colleges seldom match.

3.  Why is there a huge range in the EFCs?

The EFCs of different schools can vary dramatically for a single family.  We often see variations that exceed ten thousand dollars.  When the difference in the EFC of two schools is relatively large, factors other than the institutional parameters are probably coming into play.  In these cases, check the college websites to determine whether the institutions are “need blind” and then see if their financial packages include merit aid.

4. What’s the significance of “need blind” admissions?

“Need blind” colleges and universities purport to make their admission decisions fully independent of the financial need of applicants.  Most schools making this claim abide by it.  However, if admission decisions and financial aid decisions are made in a single office at the college, full independence cannot be guaranteed, regardless of the claim.

Institutions that are not need blind may offer the disclaimer that they “do not meet full demonstrated need.”  A college or university that does not meet the full demonstrated need of all applicants, as determined by its institutional parameters, is free to entice select students with greater financial incentives.

5.  Should I be concerned if a non-need blind college offers my child a great package?

Yes.  You should be concerned that this marvelous offer may be a one-time deal.  When the college is meeting full demonstrated need for all, its EFC will not change much from one year to the next, so long as your family situation remains the same.  Any institution that does not guarantee to meet the full demonstrated need of all students can use financial aid as an inducement to attract newcomers and then lower the aid substantially once the students have acculturated to the institution.

6.  What about merit aid?

Merit aid is awarded for accomplishments or contributions that your child has made and/or can reasonably be expected to make to the college community.  Scholarships are the common form of merit aid, and they may be awarded by the institution or another organization.  Most scholarships are institutional, and the great majority are for academic merit.  You can also find scholarships for leadership, service and artistic pursuits.  (Athletic scholarships are a special category of merit aid, which relies upon direct student recruitment.)

Be sure to determine whether the merit aid will continue throughout the undergraduate career, assuming the student meets stated conditions (e.g., maintaining a specified grade point average).

6.  The EFC at my child’s dream school is totally unreasonable. What can I do?

First, determine whether the institution meets full demonstrated need for all students.  If it does, then you have the sole option of trying to negotiate an increase in merit aid.  Some admission officers have a small discretionary fund in the less familiar merit categories of leadership and service.  Review your child’s resume for possibly overlooked accomplishments in these areas.  Explore these possibilities in a conversation with the director of admissions–not with the admissions counselor for your region.

If the institution is not need-blind, then you have additional options when opening a dialogue with the director of admissions.  You can, for example, point to the more attractive offers that your child has received from competing colleges and ask whether the target school will meet the best offer.  Several outstanding institutions state plainly that they will match any offer from a college or university of comparable calibre.  Many schools are willing to consider the matter, although they do not make a public pronouncement to this effect.  In short, try bargaining! (But, remember the warning about continued funding.)

7.  The EFC at my child’s dream school is still totally unreasonable.  Now what do I do?

You have several options remaining.  You can ask the director of financial aid at the target institution to review your EFC.  (Processing errors do occur.)  You can meet with your financial advisor for suggestions about bridging the gap between the EFC and reality.  You can conduct a family discussion to explain the financial shortfall and to explore making good choices under constrained circumstances.  If you and your child have conducted a comprehensive college search, then other schools on her list will have made acceptable offers.  If there are no acceptable offers, consider the colleges with rolling admission deadlines, because these schools may still have openings and funds for the fall of 2010.

Read my next post for hints to help your child understand that our dreams come true in different ways and in different places.

Cheers to solvency,

dkb

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Recipes & Resolutions: When to Take Standardized Tests

It’s a dark afternoon in Cockeysville this New Year’s Eve, and I’ve been thinking about resolutions as I consider recipes to serve for Sunday brunch.  The couple coming to brunch, weather permitting, are dear friends.  Our friendship reaches back through the decades, to my senior year at University of the Pacific, when they–older and better established–rented a flat on Octavia Street in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco.  These days, we manage to get together only a couple times a year, although our Maryland homes are no more than half an hour apart.  That’s life in middle age.

I’ve settled on the recipe for Soupe a l’Oignon Gratinee that Craig Claiborne published in The New York Times in 1974, short months before I met my Sunday brunch friends.  Like our friendship, the recipe’s tried and true, simple and good through and through. Interestingly, Claiborne didn’t concoct this onion gratin.  He lifted it from Gastronomie Practique, a 1907 cookbook by Ali-Bab, which is the weirdly “Oriental” nom de plume of Henri Babinski.  (I don’t recall Ed Said commenting on the adoption of pseudo-Arabic names, but perhaps someone should investigate the practice.)

The trick to Babinski’s onion gratin is timing.  Let it go too long, and it turns as stiff and dry as cardboard.  Undercooked, the dish lacks its signature crusty brown top.  I’ll let you know how mine turns out.  Meanwhile, there’s still the subject of resolutions to ponder.

For the year of 2010 C.E., I resolve to work on timing.  In my middle age, it seems that many problems, big and small, could be eased by judicious timing.  When to provide disaster relief, when to withdraw American troops, when to remove the gratin from the oven, and when to take standardized tests can be critical considerations.

I’ve slipped standardized tests into my list of time sensitive activities because the topic has been on my mind for most of December.  It’s a topic that comes up frequently in my work with client families of Becker Academic.  I’ve developed a response that is unorthodox among college counselors and planners.  But, I’m an educational sociologist, and I see higher education through different lenses.  Here are my recommendations:

High school students are wise to take the first round of SATs and ACTs shortly after winter break of their junior year.

The winter break allows for concentrated test prep.  The January test date comes before due dates for major spring semester assignments.  It also allows time to prepare for a second round of testing, optimally scheduled after the end of spring semester.  With rare exceptions, mid-year juniors have completed the coursework measured by both standardized tests:  e.g., neither the SAT or the ACT covers calculus.  Subject tests may be scheduled as late as fall of senior year if there is a compelling reason.

Persons intending to proceed to graduate or professional school are wise to take GREs, LSATs, MCATs, GMATs, or another required test BEFORE submitting applications for admission.

Like standardized tests for undergraduate admission, tests for advanced study may be retaken until a desired score is achieved.  However, if schools have been selected and applications already tendered, there is no window for a second round of testing, should the first score fall below the acceptable level of the chosen institutions.

I wish that I had composed the core message of this post earlier.  By “earlier” I mean any date before the son of my Sunday brunch friends applied to ten law schools without having learned his score on the LSAT.  I hope my oversight doesn’t sour a valued friendship. This year I resolve to work on timing.  The people in my personal and professional circles may be better for my efforts.

If God (or the devil) is in the details, then fate is in the timing.  So, too, the Sunday brunch.

dkb

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