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, The Independent Teenager's Guide to College Admissions will be available for purchase by the end of this week.
To college-bound students, COLLEGEdata offers a cornucopia of free resources:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
