A new college ranking, strictly speaking

I have a new college ranking system. It rates schools based on their students' speaking skills!

So far, two colleges top the list, each earning Five Cicero’s, the maximum score. The institutions are the University of the South in Tennessee and Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Last year I visited both schools for two days and spoke with many students, none of whom said “um,” misused “like,” or concluded any sentences with “and stuff.”

How can this happen?

Both schools are academically intensive liberal arts colleges with small classes in which you are expected to participate and in which peers and professors listen to what you say and respond and put you on the spot. In this environment, it’s best to express yourself clearly and intelligently.

My goodness! Is it possible that liberal arts colleges can teach a marketable skill, like speaking smoothly and smartly? I suppose so.

My new ebook

My new ebook, The Independent Teenager's Guide to College Admissions will be available for purchase by the end of this week. 

Website Review: COLLEGEdata delivers!

To college-bound students, COLLEGEdata offers a cornucopia of free resources:

1. A tool for predicting your chances of admission at over 1,900 colleges. To use this instrument, you have to create an account with the web site. For its calculations, the web site appears to rely on admissions data from the colleges and from a huge and growing volume of application results shared by students. The tool is easy and fun to use, though for safety's sake, I would discount its estimations of your chances by about 10%, especially at highly selective colleges. Employ this gizmo, but always check with your college counselor to make sure you are applying to enough "backup" schools.
2. Another tool, for college matching, that helps you track down prospective colleges by your preferences for location, size, institutional type, difficulty of admission, cost, availability of aid, sports, student background, and majors offered.
3. A vast trove of articles on paying for college. This section also links to a scholarship finder, a calculator to help estimate need-based financial aid and the family's expected contribution, and a device for comparing financial aid awards. For interactive features, this web site is hard to beat. Just remember that financial aid calculators provide estimates only.
4. An online magazine awash with articles from students about their own college application experiences, with postings about managing time and money in college, and with tips from college admissions officers about navigating the application process successfully.

And much more, which you can discover by visiting the site. No single resource can give you all the accurate answers you need to navigate your college search, but COLLEGEdata is well-organized, informative, concise, lucid, and, as I have already mentioned, fun to use.

Realism about athletic scholarships

Families who groom their children to compete for a collegiate athletic scholarship should be aware of the risks, which this article and this article explain:

1. Expecting that participation in high-level youth sports is the path to a lucrative athletic scholarship, parents can spend $5,000 to $10,000 a year taking their child to compete in elite, year-round tournaments, money that could have been saved for college tuition.
2. Only about 2% of high school athletes receive NCAA athletic scholarships annually. In other words, a student has a statistically better chance of getting admitted to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford than of getting a sports scholarship.
3. Most athletic scholarships cover less than what it costs to attend the school, often much less.
4. To maintain a scholarship, the typical NCAA athlete spends over thirty hours a week in season training for his or her sport. That means less time to study, rest, make friends outside the team, join non-athletic organizations on campus, and even pursue summer internships, as most sports require year-round training.
5. All this training invites serious athletic-related injuries. Another article explains how the athlete's family, not the college or the NCAA, pays the medical expenses resulting from the injuries. If they permanently sideline the athlete, the school can revoke the scholarship. 

Here is a less stressful way get a scholarship and still play sports in college. Don’t take the child to tournaments every weekend. Take the kid to the library. Many colleges offer merit scholarships, essentially tuition discounts, for students with high grades and standardized test scores. Many of these schools have fine NCAA Division III teams, which typically demand significantly fewer hours per week for practices and competitions than scholarship-granting programs require.

This article explores the advantages of playing sports at an NCAA Division III school.