U.S. News has a blog post about paying for college in the current economic climate.  The advice they offer is one we have been giving for years:  Maximize grades and test scores; apply early; do your homework.

With changes come opportunities.  Students who wish to attend top schools can make the dream reality…if they put in the hard work.  Take a rigorous class schedule.  Get high grades.  Ace the SAT and ACT.  Apply for scholarships.  Hitting the magic numbers in grades and test scores opens doors.  Once schools find you an attractive candidate, they will roll out the merit aid — particularly if your application comes in early before the aid runs out!

An investment in the Mackler Advantage carries a lifetime return on investment.  Students who work with us see anywhere from 2 to 10 times the return in scholarship money alone!

U.S. News has a wonderful article about ways high school students can help focus their efforts to get into competitive colleges.  The article features a quote from Dr. Annalee Nissenholtz, head of college counseling at Horton Watkins.  I encourage everyone to read it, as it is one of the few articles I have seen that provides a wealth of accurate information about the college application process.

With regard to essays, a hot topic with seniors right now, the advice provided is quite good — when selling yourself in your essay, remember the key is sincerity and honesty.  An admissions officer can spot a phony person or essay in a heartbeat, and besides, you are trying to present a real person anyway!

Other information discussed with regard to SAT and ACT and AP — all good advice you can find me saying in this blog or on our website.

Bottom line…a thoughtful plan and due diligence can help anyone get to yes for college.  We have the plan, you bring the diligence!

In response to the early criticism or concerns regarding a two-year law program, the Dean of Northwestern’s Law School, David Van Zandt, offered the following information:

In fact, the two-year vs three-year dichotomy sounds a bit more dramatic than the reality, since students enrolled in the two-year program will take the same number of credit hours as those in the traditional three-year program, only over five semesters instead of six. Moreover, from NU’s perspective, the compression aspect, on which many critics have focused, may be less significant than the opportunity to try out a new curriculum that focuses on “foundational competencies”, including communication, teamwork, strategic understanding, basic quantitative skills, cross-cultural work, project management and leadership.

Asked whether an accelerated program might jeopardize the quality of lawyers who graduate and/or result in a draining experience for students, Dean Van Zandt suggested that on both counts it’s really a question of time management. The accelerated program is likely to attract students who have substantial work experience and are already good time managers. Candidates will be required to have had at least two years prior work experience, preferably three, that demonstrate maturity, responsibility and leadership. Without disputing that law school is an “intense experience,” it’s hard to argue that most students don’t still manage to waste a fair amount of time. For those who are more driven, or more efficient, the compression option may be very attractive.

In response to the question of whether law students in the two-year program will be at a disadvantage during the Fall OCI process, in which they will be participating after only one semester—while those in the traditional three-year curriculum will have already had two semesters and a summer of work experience—Dean Van Zandt said that this same question was posed to employers in focus groups and the general consensus was that it wouldn’t be a problem.In fact, some employers might be even more inclined to hire such students because participation in an accelerated program is evidence of focus, drive and real-world experience. As Van Zandt says, these students already “know what work is about.” Moreover, by the time they actually get to summer associate evaluations, both the two-year and the three-year students will have taken a similar number of credit hours and can be judged on their performance at the firm.

If all goes well, Dean Van Zandt says, the program, which will begin with about 40 students, will go up to the normal section size of 60 to 65 students. Meanwhile, for traditionalists (or less gifted time managers), the school still offers four sections in the three-year program.

It would seem from these explanations that Northwestern created this two-year option as a potential niche market for professionals seeking a career change or career boost, similar to the Executive MBA programs around the country — the difference of course is that the law school track requires two full years of full time commitment away from work.  If that is the case, the biggest concern — that the two-year trackers would miss out on recruitment opportunities — goes away because most of those involved carry enough professional experience to get interviews and also may even have job prospects lined up when they start the program.

If the program stays limited in this fashion, I could see it gaining more acceptance within the legal community.  However, if the program strays from the niche and starts to recruit right out of undergraduate school or reduces curriculum requirements, I would foresee a big protest from the legal world.

In a monumental development in the world of legal education, Northwestern University Law School will offer, starting in 2009, an accelerated two-year JD program.  The press release states that graduates of this program would have to take the same credit hours as the three year JD program, but would spend one summer taking courses and also mini-courses that shorten holiday breaks.  Notably, the accelerated students would still have the same internship opportunities (not sure how this actually works yet).

Not surprisingly, initial reaction from legal academia has been negative.  Law schools take three years for a reason — students need three years to adequately develop the skills necessary to be an able lawyer upon graduation.  Recently, law schools have been criticized for a third-year that seems pointless to some students given the cost of tuition and the inability to go immediately into the job market.  But the third year finds students studying serious core courses found on the bar exam, and allows for concentration in specialty areas that would be difficult to learn once in practice.

If a law degree takes as long as an MBA, how will the profession compare to other professions?  Can a two-year terminal degree really carry the name “doctorate”?  Interestingly, in medicine the trend to a shortened degree program never found a lot of steam.  Six year programs are few, and they do not skimp on any of the medical requirements, just eliminate the liberal art component of the four-year undergraduate education.  And of course once one passes the boards and graduates, the same rules apply for residencies.  But a shortened law program does not seem to have the same built-in protections.  Also, if law school takes only two years and costs less than it does currently, more people will want to become lawyers at a time when the profession regularly hears that it has too many lawyers (even though the needs of underserved populations continue to be unmet).

Will this be a good or bad development for the legal profession?  Only time will tell.  As a law school graduate, I think the three years has intrinsic value.  I would like to see changes to the curriculum that benefit the industry in terms of training skills, but that to me seems like another reason for keeping the third year rather than eliminating it.  It takes time to absorb the methodology and substantive components of law; shortening the time to complete that absorption must result in a loss somewhere comparatively, whether in knowledge, depth or opportunities.  But perhaps Northwestern has found a way to meet all these current needs in a shorter but more intense two-year period.  I certainly will withold judgment until I see the full details of the proposed plan (not to be released until Friday).

What do you think — is six-year law a good idea, given that we already have six-year med?  Or is a two-year law degree insufficient for a variety of reasons?  Share your thoughts!

The College Board announced a new SAT score reporting policy.  Currently, when a student sends her scores to a college or university, the SAT sends every test score relating to that student.  Starting in March, 2009, students will now be able to select which scores they want a college or university to receive.

The impact of this change is monumental.  Up to now, a college would know if a student had taken the SAT more than two or three times and could discount later scores.  Also, a college would know if a student had several previous bad outings and one good score, or several good scores but one recent lousy score.  The selectively hiding of scores now strongly favors the student in putting her best score forward to colleges, while also making it harder for colleges to weigh the value of a particular score. 

The major corollary to this policy change is this:  take prep courses to improve your score and do not be afraid to retake the test!

Why the change?  I imagine that colleges are driven by reporting the best scores of applicants because it affects selectivity — if a college can report only the highest scores of every applicant, it makes their median SAT score balloon up, which makes it look like their entering class is super smart.  It seems that colleges want students to play the high score game so that everybody wins — the student picks the best scores and the school report the best scores.  Seems like win-win!  Whether that will be true remains to be seen — we will have to see how this plays out through the application process.

But the message is clear students — test often but prepare, because just retaking the test without actual preparation will not increase your score!

I know many parents who ask me what they can do to get their child to read more.  I have a fun suggestion for the summer.  Every week, you and your child should pick a magazine or two out — something other than People — but one still very interesting to both of you.  Make a list of three articles to read for the week, and set three times for when you will have a discussion about each article.  Nothing like formal debate — but a dinnertime conversation would be great!  I find that students respond better to nudging about reading if they see Mom or Dad or both joining in the process.  Also, I know from years of experience that students retain information better if they engage interactively with the material, and having an active discussion where one is challenged on one’s interpretation creates precisely the kind of stimulation needed to encourage better critical thinking skills.

So there you have it…a simple summer recipe for better reading.  Enjoy!

Some wonderful words of wisdom from Chaim Potok, in his novel, The Chosen, following on the theme of some recent posts:

Human beings do not live forever…We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity.  So it may be asked what value is there to a human life.  There is so much pain in the world.  What does itmean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?  I learned a long time ago…that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing.  But the eye that blinks, that is something.  A span of life is nothing.  But the man who lives thhat span, he is something.  He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.  Do you understand what I am saying?  A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.  It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning.  That I do not think you understand yet.  A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest.  I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.  Do you understand what I am saying?

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We see many students every week and we work with them closely.  We know more than how they “do” tests or schoolwork, we know them as individuals.  And we know many of them wonder about direction in life — they seem unsure or even rudderless about career paths or personal paths outside of career.  Indeed, that is why we offer our mentoring services.  We see that many students lack a sense of urgency about finding a path of personal meaning and discovery, which involves answering the questions Who am I as a person?  What do I want to get from life?  What legacy do I want to leave behind attached to my name?  How will I live this life of mine?  What standards will guide the choices I make?

We knew we were not seeing an accidental occurrence but rather a trend.  Whereas a generation or two past the immediacy of taking life by the reins, whether for personal gain/ambition or making a difference in the world (or both), today’s generation simply does not move the same.  And now a study by Stanford psychologist William Damon confirms this trend and gives it quantitative and qualitative substance. 

“There have always been kids that drift,” Mr. Damon, a noted scholar on children’s moral development and contemporary child-rearing practices, said in an interview. “But I do think we have a special problem today in the numbers of kids and the kind of trouble they’re having in finding a sense of direction.”

For the study, Mr. Damon’s team has conducted in-depth interviews with a quarter of the youths surveyed, and compared the responses with those from other surveys taken of earlier generations of young people.

One-fifth of the survey participants said they had found something meaningful to which they wanted to dedicate their lives—whether that meant raising a family, pursuing a career that mattered to them, starting a business, or choosing a religion, according to Mr. Damon.

At the other extreme, the researchers identified a quarter of the young people as “disengaged,” meaning that they expressed no particular wider purpose for their lives and were not involved in activities that might help them find one.

“Apart from the kids on either end of the spectrum,” Mr. Damon said, “there’s a majority of kids who are looking for something but haven’t found it. They’ve either tried something that doesn’t work, or they have some big dream but they haven’t pursued it in a practical sort of way.” Mr. Damon classified those young people as either “dabblers” or “dreamers.”

Mr. Damon’s findings speak to a wider body of evidence showing that young people around the world are putting off marriage and parenthood until well into their 20s, longer than their parents and grandparents did. The trend has spurred some psychologists to coin the term “emerging adulthood” to describe the period from 18 to 25 as a new transitional phase between adolescence and adulthood.

Damon and others in this field have found a pervasive lack of passion for charting a life path, and a strong trend in favor of “drift” so that essentially the pull of circumstance or social communities determines how these young lives move forward, rather than the values and dreams of the individuals themselves.

We deal with a wide variety of personalities and backgrounds every day, and we have some amazingly self-motivated and ambitious students and some at the other end of the spectrum.  But we have seen the trend of fewer students thinking about — not knowing, just thinking about — a life path and purpose as important goals.  If college is the time for self-discovery, why are so many students not engaging themselves and getting ready for the process?  This is the question Damon and others hope to answer in the near future.  Damon stresses the idea of general disillusionment with role models who would otherwise serve as motivators, but that seems only to beg the question.  Why would a large group of kids choose a path of disengagement — just because the environment is one of general disengagement?  If we are wired as people to find meaning and purpose for our lives, why this counterrevolution for inertia?

Damon suggests his findings have big implications for education as well as parenting.  He feels schools do not do enough to talk about “meaning” in life and developing a life path because they have to teach so much else in terms of basics.  I think schools have a difficult task in creating a strong foundation of solid academics; taking time away from serious learning is not helpful to their mission.  However, adding to the curriculum material that focuses on school as part of a meaningful path in life and having some seminars on that topic would be beneficial.  But ultimately, it seems unfair to impose on our school system the duty of helping students find meaning in that manner; it makes more sense to help create meaning through learning and example (which in fairness Damon discusses).

So…in the end we want to help students take their lives seriously, their life paths seriously.  This is not an easy task, but a required one, one that needs a team effort of parent-student-educator/life coach.  When all three work together, we work magic.  We know…we feel it and see it happen every day.

The GRE has been evolving over the last few years — the most significant change would be the move to computer-adaptive test taking — in order to make the test more relevant, i.e. more predictive of future success.  Not so long ago, the GRE contained vocabulary, critical reading, grammar, mathematics (all very similar to the SAT) and analytical and logical reasoning (very similar to the LSAT).  Critics argued the GRE needed a writing component, so they switched out the multiple choice of logical and analytical reasoning and replaced them with two essays involving analysis of, and making, an argument.  More recently, the GRE added new question types for passage completions (same model as sentence completions except spread over a paragraph) and student-produced response in math.

The latest change, however, represents a real shift in structure.  The GRE wants to gauge more intangible qualities like communication skills and ethics, so it has created the “Personal Potential Index” — a numerical index that supervisors and educators complete about the test taker.  On paper, this seems like a good idea.  But this mechanism suffers from two flaws.  First, the index is not from the student taking the test but others who watch his or her behavior.  We already have letters of recommendation that do this very task.  A standardized test should test the student, not his or her associates.  Second, by relying on educators and supervisors, the GRE introduces a form of index inflation — how many educators or supervisors will tank their own?  How likely is it they will be extra glowing in their reports?

A few years ago, I wrote a law review article analyzing the LSAT.  I proposed expanding its scope to include traits like communication skills, negotiation strategies, problem solving abilities and ethical dilemmas.  But the type of addition I proposed involved an additional test completed by the applicant, not a reporting index.  I applaud the GRE for focusing on intangibles, but suggest they move more toward a student-produced measure of these skills.

The larger question becomes one of fit — does the GRE serve the right goals in helping graduate schools make good admission choices?  Certainly, the GRE contains a broad measure of basic skills.  But the degree of difficulty between the GRE and SAT is not that different, and four years of college should create a larger divide.  The writing component has helped significantly add an analytical argument dimension.  But we are talking about future professors, psychologists — future PhD holders.  Should we not expect more at the entry point?  At least as much as we demand of future lawyers and doctors?  Or is there some qualitative difference between doctoral degrees?  I think graduate excellence is graduate excellence, and the GRE could do more to measure those skills and make a statement that we expect more of any future PhD candidate.

Thoughts?

Some of you will be taking the ACT next month, so we thought we would offer some pre-test tips. 

We find in working with students in the English that many of them lose focus on the question.  For instance, a student may be reading through the passage and run across a question and not really know what the test wants him to do.  When you work the English, try focusing on the answer choices to each question.  With a little practice, you will find that by focusing only on the answers to the questions you can tell what type of question you have in front of you (you will still need to read the passage to figure it out!).  If you see the answer choices all list pronoun options, you know you have a pronoun referent question and should look in the sentence for the matching noun.  If you see the answer choices all list verb forms, you know you have either a subject-verb agreement question or a verb tense question.  If you see the answer choices contain comma variations, you have a comma question.  By focusing on the problem in this way, you will zoom right in on the item tested in the question and what you need to zoom in on in the sentence or passage.  And you will keep yourself from straying into something the question is not asking about!

Give it a try!  We bet it helps!