College Essay Writing Tips

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College Essay Writing Tips
Article written

efficient implementation

Article Request Live view is great, compelling you to participate in personal recording team. It complements the rest of your applications and help you from other candidates. This article is only one part of the application that you need to take full control, so the time to do a good job. Check out these tips before you begin. Dos

will continue to limit the direction and demonstrate personal
your article must be a single point or thesis. The reader must be able to find your main idea and follow from start to finish. Try to read, just someone intro to see what he thinks of your article.
articles, also try to complete, eventually sounded diluted. Remember, this is not about telling the committee what you did, they can choose from a list of tasks, instead, to show them who you are. Prove it

develop your main idea with facts, and very specific events, quotations, examples of reasons.
There’s a big difference between expected and only one can be an idea to develop the details:
Okay, “I love being around people with a wide range of backgrounds and interests”,
good “. Think that night, I sing the theme song from Casablanca with a baseball coach, he Bogie, discussed Marxism with a little old lady, I heard more than I ever wanted to know about some woman gallbladder surgery “Be specific

avoid cliche writing, generic , and expected with specific vital information.
okay. “I want to help people have so much to get a life of love and guidance of my family, I feel that many people are not so lucky, so I want to extend the lives of others”
good. “My mother and father stood by many ’til their shoes with water or with the fingers turned white or somebody signed a golden retriever with his name on their coats in the mud, I think this kind of commitment. I want to work with fourth graders.” Do

tell them not what you think they want to hear
licensing authorities most read articles on the charms of their university, the evils of terrorism, and the personal commitment involved a doctor. Bring something new to the table, not just think about what you want to hear it.
not write a resume
Enter any information that is found elsewhere in the application. At the end of your article sounds like an autobiography, travelogue, or laundry list. Yawn.
“During my first year I played first singles tennis team, served on student council, received a B + average, traveled to France and worked at the cheese.”
Do not use 50 words when five
you want to eliminate unnecessary words.
good. “Over the years I was out of my parents, friends and teachers pointed out, I have also noticed this about myself and that I was not the cleanest person in the world,”
Better: “I’m a slob.”
Do not forget to proofread
Tip misspellings or grammatical errors can be seen carelessness or just bad writing can be interpreted. Do not rely on computer spell checker. It can miss spelling errors like the one below.
“After I graduate I plan to form working for a nonprofit organization, in the summer.”
“From that day, Daniel was my best fried.”
This article is based on information found in the college application essay, by Sarah Myers McGinty, which is available through our online store.

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Back to College

UW-Madison students are happy students, as we recently learned from the Huffington Post. This high ranking of our institution is a coup when it comes to attracting more applications, and since we rise in rankings by rejecting more applicants (and rightly care about happiness), this will likely be seen as a good thing.

Of course I'm delighted that our students are happy. Pleased as punch that they rate our sports culture and political activity highly (a 9 and an 8 out of 10 respectively), and the opportunities for things to do "endless."  It's wonderful-- they are spirited, free-thinking, and enthusiastic, and as all of my students well know, I love to teach them.

But with love (yes, really) I need to offer a little constructive critique. We have some things to work on and they directly pertain to the educational mission (and indirectly the affordability mission) of our school.   In that same set of rankings we scored just a 6 on "professors accessible" and a 7 on "intellectual life."  Maybe I'm hopelessly old-fashioned, but those are the things that students and families are purportedly paying tuition for-- courses and learning.

Or not.  I suppose, really not.  If you take a look at the latest video produced by the UW-Madison Administration, apparently my framing is not theirs, and a high-quality education offered by professors is not the message Madison seeks to attract and retain students with.

Here is WELCOME BACK to UW-MADISON.  It's definitely maximizing the sports culture rating. But I'll buy you a scoop of Babcock ice cream if you can glean any sense of an academic message about school from it.

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Vouchers and College Attendance: Puzzling Findings Deserve Much Caution

Several months ago I described the problems in a study that seemed to have great policy relevance, but little empirical support for its contentions.  Sadly, examples of studies like these abound in education, and another is currently making headlines.  "Vouchers Boost Blacks' College Enrollment Rates," claim the stories-- and boy do the effects seem large! A "24 percent increase" in college attendance among black recipients of those vouchers-- what a dream. And it must be an accurate statement, right, since this was an experiment?

Well, not necessarily.

Too many practitioners, policymakers, and even researchers are far too inclined when they hear the words "randomized trial" to ignore the usual concerns about the reliability and validity of estimated program effects.  After all, it's "gold standard," and touted by the Institute of Education Sciences as being the most valid to get a sense of how well programs work. Unfortunately, its usefulness is a bit more limited than that-- first, experiments don't always work as planned in creating equivalent initial groups for later comparison, and second, they often tell us only how well the intervention worked under a set of very specific conditions and circumstances, that are often crucial but rarely described in detail.  Moreover, unless they are really carefully planned in advance, their post-hoc analyses can get particularly squirrelly when it comes to estimating different effects for different people.

For these reasons, I'm not sharing in the wild enthusiasm over the new Brookings study by Paul Peterson and Matt Chingos that purports to show that vouchers provide a big boost to college attendance to a very at-risk group: African-Americans.

I started laying out these concerns a few days ago via Twitter, but am restating and summarizing them here, in case it's useful to those who don't spend all of their time obsessing about methodology and need to know what really works in education.

Here are three reasons why the findings don't pass my sniff test:

(1) The estimated average treatment effect of offering the voucher is null.  Since the effects of receiving the voucher is positive and large for one group- African-Americans-- this implies that the effects must be negative for another group, and yet this is never mentioned.  Why? It's rather unusual to show effects for only selected groups, and not for all of them. Most importantly, it goes against best practices.

(2) The only subgroup with effects, African-Americans, is a group that doesn't seem to have equivalent treatment and control groups before the offer of the voucher.  If anything, the treatment group students seem more inclined to college attendance independent of the voucher, given that more of their parents have bachelor's degrees (while other factors are also imbalanced, this one is a known drive of college attendance, among the most important).  While the authors attend to this issue a bit, and try one kind of sensitivity analysis to adjust for it, in their text they fail the potential flaws all of the cautions they deserves-- even going so far as to making this finding the main highlight of the paper.

(3) In the paper and the press the authors stress the effects of receiving a voucher but voucher receipt is not randomly assigned.  So if you are excited about the experimental component-- in a study that claims to be "The first to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment" -- you need to know that the main result (for example, see paragraph 1 here) isn't experimental. This is a quasi-experimental approach and is subject to the usual kinds of errors.

Are these flaw par for the course, and thus no big deal? I don't think so.  There was an evident PR effort behind this report, and it's led to widespread reporting of a study that really needs more vetting.  Words like "the Brookings Institution at Harvard" (sidenote: huh?) give it more credibility than it deserves at this stage, and the term "experiment" makes folks feel overly confident in the results.

Now, all that said, I do understand how these things can happen.  Since they suggest differential responsiveness to programs (and thus the potential for cutting costs while increasing program effectiveness), subgroup analyses are quite seductive and compelling, as are randomized trials themselves. Last year, my colleagues and I wrote about some tentative findings from our study of financial aid that suggested effect heterogeneity. Prior to the release, we extensively vetted those findings with colleagues, and ran at least five different sensitivity analyses.  After publication of the working paper, which we were careful to describe as "in progress," we sought even more feedback and advice-- and got a crash course in the enormous difficulty in disentangling effect heterogeneity from heterogeneous treatments. Truth is, the work is still ongoing.  And that's an incredibly important and valuable part of the research process, and one we all should wish and allow for-- it makes the work better.

So, here's to hoping that this is what will happen next for this voucher study.  Instead of rolling full steam ahead thinking vouchers will magically boost college attendance for black students everywhere, let's support the authors working through all potential alternative explanations for these odd results, and then replicating their experiment.  Again, my own experience suggests replication is critical, revealing the processes and contexts under which effects occur and are more reliable.  We should all demand it, especially from high-profile studies like these.

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More Flexibility to Raise Tuition?

Central to debates over the New Badger Partnership is the question of whether additional flexibilities that make it possible to raise tuition are desirable.

Evidence can and must be used to make these decisions. A robust, evidence-based debate on our campus is obviously needed but to date has not occurred. Instead, to many of us outside Bascom it seems as though administrators have mostly relied on the input of a few economists and some other folks who work in higher education but are not scholars of higher education. It also seems like seeking advice from those mostly likely to agree with you. (Please--correct me if I'm wrong--very happy to be corrected with evidence on this point.)

It would be wonderful to see a more thorough review of existing evidence and the development of an evaluation plan that will assess positive and negative impacts of any new policy in ways that allow for the identification of policy effects-- not correlations. (Let's be clear: comparing enrollment of Pell recipients before and after the implementation of a policy like the MIU does not count.)

A few years ago I blogged about studies on the effects of tuition and financial aid on individual decision-making. To summarize-- effects of each are relatively small (especially when compared to effects of academic under-preparation, for example) but usually statistically significant. Also, what we call "small" reflects our value judgments, and we must recognize that.

Effects of "sticker shock" are thought to accrue early, such that the "shocked" students end up academically unprepared for college (for example don't even graduate high school) and thus are omitted from the eligible population of students on whom effects of aid and tuition are usually estimated. So hypotheses about sticker shock are very hard to test, partly because a good test requires measuring both the initial "shock" and the resulting behavior many years later (when college enrollment decisions are made).

There are other ways to think about these questions, beyond individual-level analyses. For example, we could contemplate possible effects of tuition hikes and aid increases on overall enrollment (which results from the aggregation of behaviors of many individuals). We could also look at evidence on how common it is for institutions like ours that hike tuition and raise aid to sustain the commitment to that aid over time.

Let's start down that path by examining one study that sheds light on the first of those questions. I will review more such studies in the coming days. My goal is to help facts and figures replace fear as the driving force behind our campus decisions.

*************

In "Rising Tuition and Enrollment in Public Higher Education" Hemelt and Marcotte examine the relationships between tuition and aid on the one hand, and enrollment on the other. Essential to this discussion, for most of their analyses they disaggregate by type of institution, making it possible to isolate effects on universities comparable to UW-Madison.

Using national IPEDS data on public 4-year colleges and universities from 1991 to 2007, the authors find that on average a $100 increase in tuition and fees (in 2006 dollars) would lead to a decline in enrollment of a little more than 0.25 percent. Since we rarely raise tuition by $100, let's instead consider that a $1,000 increase in tuition would result in an enrollment decline of 2.5 percent.

But most relevant to this discussion, these economists find that the tuition elasticity of enrollment is largest at Research I universities-- and they specifically give the example of UW-Madison. According to these scholars, freshmen at universities like Madison's are "much more" affected by tuition increases than students at other kinds of institutions (for example, freshmen at UW-Stout). (The tuition elasticity is -0.24 at Research I's compared to -.107 on average). And, the average amount of aid received has the smallest effects for students at Research I universities, compared to other colleges (.06 on average, compared to .01 at Research 1's).

In plain English, what does this mean? The consequences of raising tuition are greatest for students at places like Madison, and the benefits of increasing aid are smallest.

Why is this? The authors consider the possibility that students at Madison are not weighing the price of Madison relative to the price of Stout or Eau Claire, nor the price of other Big 10 schools writ large, but rather the price of comparably elite Research I institutions. Restricting their analysis to the top 120 public universities in the country, then, they again find that these students are particularly price sensitive, and particularly aid insensitive.

A few words from the authors: "These patterns in price and aid sensitivity are consistent with students opting out of “top 120” schools for competitors as price rises, while finding a way to pay tuition bills at other state schools where students may have fewer options....The evidence...of higher price sensitivity but lower aid sensitivity at “top 120” and Research I institutions raises general questions about enrollment patterns at public four-year colleges and universities, beyond the implications of tuition on enrollment at single institutions. One implication may be a shift of students from higher income families to private institutions or public universities in other states, along with a shift of students from lower income families to less expensive public universities within the state. This would suggest a redistribution of students across public colleges and universities within a state, with those most financially able leaving the system, and others scaling back to enroll at more affordable
institutions. Obviously, student-level data are needed to test this."

Distributional consequences of tuition policies are too rarely considered, and are not addressed in the NBP.

Sure, consequences and benefits should be put into context-- for example considered against the consequences of not raising tuition. But this paper by respected economists clearly indicates that it is not appropriate to assert that increasing financial aid at institutions like UW-Madison will effectively hold students harmless from the negative effects of tuition increases. Enrollment will be affected, and distribution of enrollment across institutions may be particularly affected. Who will measure those effects? And who will care?

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Politics As Usual?

There is much buzz here at UW-Madison about the proposed New Badger Partnership. You can read all the details about what the Chancellor has proposed here, and you can read about some of the concerns expressed here.

In the interest of a rich discussion of this important policy proposal, I want to draw your attention to some relevant research on the topic. I'll start off with a recent paper by Michael McLendon, professor at Vanderbilt University, and his colleagues Russ Deaton and Jim Hearn.

In a 2007 article McLendon discusses trends in higher education governance reforms over the last several decades, and in particular the rationales posed for these reforms. The piece is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some highlights relevant to the campus debate:

Between 1985-2002 states considered more than 100 different ways to modify governance of higher education systems. "Policy rationales asserted in justification of these changes often pointed to the desire for improved accountability, operating efficiency, cost savings, competitiveness, coordination, and innovativeness....Paralleling roughly the emergence globally of a public sector reform movement christened the “new public management” (Brudney & Wright, 2002, p. 354), some American states experimented with changes to their governance systems for higher education that focused on efficiency rather than equity, choice rather than standardization, decentralized rather than centralized decision-making, performance rather than process, and outcome rather than input measures."

Sound familiar?

Why so much reform? As McLendon and his colleagues note, it is most common to depict "reforms as a rational response by state leaders to policy problems for which the redesign of higher education systems might serve as a suitable solution." But, McLendon posits, building on an argument advanced earlier by Aims McGuiness, an entirely different explanation is possible: political instability. Turnover in who's in charge- and the threat of turnover-- may in and of itself lead to these reforms-- even though they are posed as rational and necessary, in fact the reforms themselves may be political animals.

And this is, in fact, what McLendon finds. "Fluctuations on the political landscape of states [are] the primary drivers of legislation to reform governance arrangements for higher education."

In particular:

(1) "States are more likely to enact governance legislation in years in which the legislature became captured by one of the two major political parties, following a period of divided party control of the institution."

(2) "As the percentage of a state’s legislature that is Republican increases, so too does the probability of a state changing its higher education governance system."

(3)"The longer governors occupy office, the lower the probability of their states enacting structural changes. Conversely, states whose governors are newer to office appear more likely to undertake such reforms...A turnover in administration could present the most opportune time for a governor to seek to maximize control over executive branch agencies, leading to the changes in higher education governance we have documented."

(4) "Our analysis yielded no evidence linking passage of governance legislation with the economic conditions of states, the characteristics of their college and university systems, or regional diffusion."

In other words, historically states have not made decisions about the governance of state higher education institutions based on stated rationales but rather based on politics.

Is the situation here in Wisconsin at this moment in time really any different?

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Overachievers

You don't get to be a professor at a top university by settling or compromising. You get there by striving, competing, and working against all odds to cram extra hours into already-long days. You expect the best, of everyone.

So it's hard to be a professor at a public university right now. Almost by definition, public universities aren't the top of the heap in spending on the things that professors are trained to care most about-- research, salaries, resources. This leads to frustration, anger, and indignation when our talents go unrecognized, our fields disrespected, and our friends leave for private universities.

It's hard to be a professor at a public university, for sure.

Of course, it's also hard to be a kid whose entire future depends on achieving economic stability and that seems to depend on college-- but college is increasingly out of reach. You're told that the flagship college in your state is really the only one that's worth going to and despite your desire to ignore those elitist comments, they nag at you. You want to go there, but annual costs of attendance are more than your family makes in a year. Your parents didn't go to college, and none of your friends managed to get to that place. So really, why bother? Why work your tail off in high school to get the best grades, work after school jobs to save money, and why knock yourself out to take that ACT? You're never going to be able to get in, and if you do, it's gonna financially cripple your family to afford it. The government has never come through with real financial help before, why expect it to now?

Somehow, my heart tells me it's harder to be that kid than it is to be me.

It's time for UW-Madison to be with the children of Wisconsin's working poor families. Offering financial aid -- accompanied as it is by a byzantine system of paperwork, rules, and caveats-- is clearly insufficient to overcome the fear instilled by widespread talk that tuition is high and getting higher. (I am a researcher of financial aid-- it "works" but it by no means demonstrates sufficiently large effects to hold students harmless from high tuition.) Financial aid won't help combat word on the street that the place is so elite it won't even hang with the other UW universities or colleges anymore. It's out for itself--its alumni, current students, and professors-- not for you.

I am not naive-- we are going to take a bone-crushing hit this year. Our belts are going to tighten so much that we can hardly breathe-- at least we will think that's true. But the fact is, UW-Madison doesn't know poverty. Not even close. It's been blessed to have what it needs to be nearly everything it's wanted to be. That's getting harder to do, and now in these times choices will have to be made. Programs will have to be cut. Faculty will have to teach. Class sizes might have to be a bit larger. The truth is, we will survive this-- and we will be more respectable for it. UW-Madison is nothing without the respect of Wisconsin. Leaving the state behind is not an acceptable approach to accommodating our desires to be the "best."

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A Little Information Could Go A Long Way

THIS GUEST POST COMES FROM ROBERT KELCHEN, DOCTORAL CANDIDATE IN EDUCATIONAL POLICY STUDIES AT UW-MADISON.

In a new report, Filling in the Blanks: How Information Can Affect Choice in Higher Education, Andrew Kelly and Mark Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute examine the role that information can play in the college choice process. One thousand parents in five states were asked which of two similar colleges they would recommend to their high school-age child. Half of the parents were given information about the colleges’ six-year graduation rates, while half were not. The researchers found that parents who were provided information about graduation rates were fifteen percentage points more likely to recommend the college with the higher graduation rate to their child, with larger differentials for parents who reported having less information about colleges and who had lower levels of education.

The intervention shows the importance of providing salient information to the parents of high school students. However, because parents in the study were making a theoretical decision instead of an actual decision that would affect their child, they had less of an incentive to think as carefully about their choice. This might result in effects that are larger than in real life, especially where parents have evenmore information about the two colleges being compared. A logical next step would be to repeat this experiment with high school students to see if the results significantly differ. Encouraging or requiring colleges to publicize their graduation rates may lead parents and students to choose colleges at which the student is more likely to graduate, as they take this information into account. In any case, even a small effect of additional information can make this low-cost intervention sound public policy.

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Keep An Open Mind

As discussions about the future of for-profit colleges intensify, my email inbox has begun to fill with inquiries. Why haven’t I weighed in? What do I think—is Congress on the right track? What does my recent conspicuous silence portend?

While I’m flattered (and a little confused) by a seeming desire to hear my opinion, the truth is I haven’t been ready to provide one. Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about the for-profits and the tough questions their growing presence in higher education raise. I’ve struggled with an intellectual exercise of sorts, attempting to set aside the financial interests associated with the sector and simply consider whether common objections to the industry would exist even if its colleges were not-for-profit. It’s not easy to sleep at night when wrestling with complex demons like that.

I’ve come to the conclusion that yes, objections would continue. We’d be worried about the quality of what’s being proffered, what students are actually learning, how hard the colleges are working to recruit students not really ready for college work, how much debt folks are graduating with relative to their new income, etc.

Here’s the rub: We should have the same concerns about our current public and private non-profit institutions of higher education. Many of us do have these concerns. We are just less vocal about them, perhaps because it is so much easier to object to treating people badly while making a buck, compared to treating people badly while not making a buck.

Our concerns are well placed, but they are also too narrow. We are looking for trouble only under a single lamplight, simply because that’s the spot illuminated. We need to look more broadly. There is a reason enrollment in the for-profit sector is growing, and it has at least partly to do with student demand. Our public colleges and universities aren’t sufficiently equipped to do the job—and blame for that is shared by states and localities, institutions, researchers, and taxpayers. It’s a little hard to know where the buck stops in that situation. It’s not so hard in the case of for-profits—so we disparage them more easily.

I’m not saying I’ve become a fan of the for-profits, or that my worries about how they are serving students have been allayed. Admittedly, the more I learn, the more I become somewhat more impressed--for example, by the innovative efforts of some to help transfer students and older students find a more fluid and efficient way to a credential. There are some examples of that kind of work at public institutions, but it feels a bit less "outside the box."

The current discussion in D.C. is worth having. It needs to be broadened and deepened. More voices need to enter the conversation. It’s in the interest of students all over the country for it to continue.

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