Academics Archives - Get Into College

Which Colleges are Greenest?

E Magazine: “It’s no surprise that College of the Atlantic, established in 1969 as the first American college to focus primarily on the relationship between humans and the environment, has topped the Princeton Review’s Guide to 399 Green Colleges for three years running. With only 350 students and 35 faculty members, small classes and focused learning are the norm at COA, which has been churning out environmental leaders for five decades. It became the first carbon-neutral college in 2007 and plans to be completely rid of fossil fuels on campus by 2030.”

“At the #2 school on the ‘green colleges’ list, SUNY Syracuse’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, students and faculty work together on developing innovative solutions to environmental challenges and can focus on applying what they learn in internships reserved for them with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation … Next on the list, UVM has incorporated sustainability into campus policies and curricula for decades, but has recently shown renewed leadership with its Sustainable Entrepreneurship program and campus-wide commitment to waste reduction and energy conservation. UVM has been sourcing all of its energy from renewables since 2015, with solar panels all over campus to make the most of the fleeting Vermont sun.”

“Some other schools with excellent environmental studies and science programs include Antioch, Reed, Middlebury, Colby, Colorado College, Montana State, Evergreen State, Pomona, and the universities of Idaho, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.”

When Colleges Become Universities

Boston Globe: “Boston College and Dartmouth College are well-known for both their undergraduate and graduate degree programs, but neither has expressed interest in a university makeover. But many smaller colleges don’t have that widespread reputation, and this is a way to stand out, college presidents said. ‘We’re laying the foundation for future growth and sustainability in the face of the challenges,’ said Francesco Cesareo, the president of Assumption College … Assumption will be restructuring and expanding its programs into specific schools, adding administrative positions, such as deans, to the campus, and expanding its athletics offerings, as part of the university conversion.”

“Overseas students, who are appealing to institutions since they pay more to attend, are familiar with the university label, while colleges suggest more vocational-type education in many countries, experts said. That can make it more difficult for American colleges to explain their value and offerings when they are trying to recruit internationally.’

“For Simmons University, the transformation of its campus into four distinct colleges has helped recruit a higher caliber of administrators and leaders to the school … Whether it will attract more students, bring in more money, and ultimately help the university withstand the fiscal and demographic pressures is less certain.”

When Minor Interests Are Major Studies

CheatSheet: “Don’t you wish you could have studied in The Beatles in college? Believe it or not, majoring in this English rock band is a real thing at Liverpool University. This isn’t the only unusual college major out there .. With cannabis becoming legal in more states, there’s a real need for people with degrees in medicinal plant chemistry … Roller coaster engineering can fall into several engineering specialties, like design, computer, civil, and industrial/structural … Many people have tried home-brewing beer. So, it makes sense that fermentation sciences is a popular degree nowadays.”

A degree in recreation and leisure “prepares students to find funding for new parks, plan health and fitness events for their community, and help the disabled and elderly … Comic art majors learn both traditional and digital comic-drawing techniques as well as the craft of storytelling … Michigan State University has a school of packaging that takes the subject to a new level. One reason this field is so important is that they innovate sustainable packaging practices … Entertainment Engineering and Design is a major at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.”

“You can major in nannying at Sullivan University in Kentucky and learn things like child development, preparing nutritious meals, and effective communication with both adults and children … If you major in pop culture, you may double major or minor in a study like journalism, public relations, or marketing … At Texas A&M, the anthropology department offers a nautical archeology degree that prepares you for a future in the field. Courses included are Books and Treatises on Shipbuilding and Outfitting and Sailing the Wooden Ship: 1400-1900.”

Syracuse Launches ‘Intelligence Community Center’

The Daily Orange: “Syracuse University will receive a $1.5 million grant from the United States Intelligence Community over a five-year period to educate and recruits students interested in the intelligence field … The Intelligence Community also designated SU as one of eight national Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence. As part of the program, SU will lead a consortium of universities, including Norfolk State University in Virginia and The Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York.”

“The consortium will work to meet the educational needs of the Intelligence Community, a federation of 17 separate federal intelligence agencies … SU plans to build partnerships with the institutions in its consortium to help attract a diverse body of students, such as military veterans, women and others from underrepresented backgrounds … SU’s $62.5 million National Veterans Resource Center, a regional hub for veteran services, is expected to open in January 2020.”

Are HS College Credits a Good Investment?

Market Watch: “With college costs and student debt rising, policy makers and education leaders have touted the potential of giving high-school students the opportunity to take college courses to curb the amount of time and money they spend on their journey to a degree. But even as the programs have exploded — in some cases explicitly advertised as an antidote to our nation’s college-affordability problem — there’s limited evidence on how the college credits students earn in high school are applied toward their college degrees and whether they wind up saving the students money.”

“The bulk of colleges — 92% of public and 80% of private schools — say they have a policy of accepting college credits that students earn in high school, according to a 2016 survey from the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. But in practice, whether an individual course is accepted depends on a number of factors, the survey found. Those include the type of institution where the credits were earned, whether the receiving college offered an equivalent course and the location where the student took the course (in a high school or college classroom).”

“In other words, even in states where public colleges are required to accept the college credits students earn in high school, those credits don’t necessarily save a student from taking the required courses to complete their college degree. In order for a student to maximize college credits earned in high school, the credits need to apply to their specific degree program, but it’s often the case that these credits transfer, but don’t actually apply towards a student’s degree. The variation in credit-transfer policies often means that the onus is on families to figure out how to best maximize the college-credit students earn in high school.”

Goucher Redefines Liberal Arts

Washington Post: “At Goucher College, students no longer need to take a broad range of introductory classes outside their major to graduate. For non-science majors, Introduction to Biology has been replaced by Disease and Discrimination, a course that crosses disciplines to explore the inequalities in access to health care. Introduction to Philosophy was dropped for Society in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Math has become Integrative Data Analytics. Responding to a growing national debate over the relevance of a traditional liberal arts education, Goucher and other small, private liberal arts colleges … have adjusted course offerings, lowered tuition, added graduate classes that lead to employment and developed other strategies to attract students.”

“The long-held academic requirements to take a broad range of courses in a variety of disciplines have been replaced with multidisciplinary courses called ‘complex problem explorations.’ Instead of introductory classes, students take courses that might be taught by a biology professor but use a variety of disciplines to look at a contemporary issue …Because employers seek workers who can operate in teams, the college requires students to work collaboratively at times.”

“St. John’s College in Annapolis, a tiny institution with two campuses, wasn’t going to change its curriculum, which is dedicated to teaching the classics. So it took another bold approach, dropping its tuition from $52,000 a year to $35,000 … St. John’s leadership believes that small colleges can no longer rely on tuition dollars to keep them afloat. Instead, colleges will have to rely on philanthropy … St. John’s has used its tuition drop to launch a capital campaign that has so far raised $200 million toward its goal of $300 million. A year after cutting tuition costs, applications are up 13 percent and the percentage of admitted students who are committed to attending has risen as well.”

DePaul Tour: A Distinctly Vincentian Education

Never afraid of getting too much of a good thing, we squeezed in one last college tour during our Chicago whirlwind. With just hours to spare before our return flight, we grabbed a slow Lyft to DePaul University’s Lincoln Park campus — the residential, horizontal one, as compared to its more compact high-rise Loop campus located about five miles, or 20 minutes, south.

DePaul is a big, private, university of about 16,000 undergraduates and 8,000 graduate students, making it America’s largest Catholic university. What comes clear, pretty quickly, is that DePaul’s Catholic identity is of a distinctly inclusive variety, welcoming a robust mix of Jewish and Muslim students as well as Latinx, Asian and LGBTQ.

Vincentians, followers of the 17th-century French priest Saint Vincent de Paul, founded the school as St. Vincent’s College in 1898. The name changed to DePaul in 1907, but its operative philosophy remains grounded in “teaching and service,” and it still lives and proudly articulates its founding principles more than 100 years later. Our info session leader, herself an impressive recent graduate, summed it up in three succinct bullet points: education, environment and ethos. It’s not often that a school’s defining characteristics are spelled out so quickly, clearly and with feeling.

Education at DePaul finds expression across a total of ten schools and 300 programs. The Lincoln Park campus is home to the colleges of education, arts & sciences, science & health, music and theater. The Loop is where you’ll find schools for business, law, communication, digital media and new learning (for adult students). Both campuses follow the Chicago-style quarterly system, which here includes a 10-day, freshman-year study-abroad opportunity during the six-week winter break.

DePaul considers the Chicago environment to be its classroom, providing opportunities for internships, co-op employment and research. Lincoln Park is where the vast majority of the students who live on campus reside, complete with a lake, a quad, shops, restaurants and nightlife. The Loop more of a downtown, big-city experience. Transit fare is included in tuition.

For all students, the notion of “teaching and service” is the classroom ethos, with studies framed by the questions: What must be done? Whom are you helping? What difference are you making? This holistic view of academics and action perhaps further informs DePaul’s five-year law school program, which students can begin as freshmen, and helps explain why undergraduates can apply to the university’s medical school while pursuing a bachelor’s degree.

One curiosity is the school’s logo. It’s just a little puzzling why a college named after a saint would have a sports team called the Blue Demons and a red-eyed, blue-hued mascot that appears quite the opposite of saintly. The story goes that the team originally was nicknamed the D-men, which morphed into demon and then a blue one because it was a school color, along with scarlet red, accounting for those eyes.

Our tour lasted only a few minutes because we had to return to our hotel to get our bags and then head to the airport. This made us sad, because our guides were a hoot. The one with purple hair said he told his mom he would apply to DePaul and DePaul alone the minute he set foot on campus. “It was just something about the vibe,” he said. The other, a former film production major who switched to economics confided: “I realized I was more interested in watching movies than making them.” With a wry smile and sideways glance, she quipped, ”So, if you know anyone who needs any film production credits …” Clearly, a budding capitalist.

With that, she pointed us to the nearby L station, a mercifully fast train ride downtown, and then yet another bumper-to-bumper car ride back to O’Hare.

UVA Tour: It Takes an Academical Village

His name was invoked no less than four times during the first five minutes of our UVA tour. Thomas Jefferson is known for many things, and his legacy endures in manifold ways, yet it is astonishing that his vision of higher education is still standing so tall in Charlottesville after 200 years. Disenchanted by the limitations of his own alma mater, William & Mary, which had fallen into decline at the time, Jefferson sought both to expand the scope of study beyond ministry, law and medicine and tighten the relationship between student and teacher.

Ever the architect, Jefferson drew what he saw. It was a place where students lived downstairs from their teachers in a long quadrangle, set on a great lawn. At the head was not the steepled church common to most colleges at the time, but rather a great, domed library. At the foot, off in the distance, farmlands and a mountain range, suggesting an agrarian ideal as much as wide open, future possibilities. Jefferson termed his concept the “Academical Village” (apparently, he also liked to invent words). A few chosen students, as well as professors and even the university’s president, occupy it to this day. That the structure lacks indoor plumbing makes living there no less an honor.

It’s impossible not to feel Jefferson’s centuries-old influence while walking its “grounds,” which other schools would call a campus, but not UVA. It’s all about the grounds. Students enthusiastically buy into other curiosities of the founder’s chosen vocabulary, referring to themselves not as freshmen, sophomores, juniors or seniors, but as first-years, second-years, third-years and fourth-years. Jefferson thought this reinforced a commitment to lifelong learning.

Even more noteworthy is a tight embrace of Jefferson’s notion of self-governance. This was self-evident during our 90-minute tour of the grounds. Our guide declared at the outset that tours are conducted independent of the admissions office and that he was not paid or compensated in any way. The school had little to worry about, as his presentation was a nearly relentless rave review, which is in itself testament to the return on self-governance. The only lapse concerned the cafeteria food, which our guide compared to a warm glass of water on a hot day. “You’re going to drink it,” he said, “but you’re never going to crave it.” Clearly, our guide writes his own material.

He also confessed some sense of isolation during his first year or so, in part because the sheer size of the school made it challenging to find his peeps, but also that the academic rigor consumed his waking hours. Ironically, it seems axiomatic that the larger the school, the more alone you are, at least at first. Our outwardly extroverted guide said he made a conscious effort to remedy this simply by reaching out to others, and also joining clubs, of which there are some 600 at UVA.

The most profound evidence of Jefferson’s lasting legacy is in the academics itself. Jefferson wasn’t kidding about expanding the horizons of academic pursuit, originally offering an unprecedented total of eight schools: law, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, ancient languages, modern languages, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy — yet notably no divinity school. Today, it’s a total of eleven schools: arts & sciences, leadership/public policy, education, business, commerce, architecture, law, medicine, and nursing. UVA also runs the Wise College, a four-year liberal-arts school serving Appalachia.

If a single idea might pull these disparate disciplines into a coherent focus or philosophy, it would be Jefferson’s penchant for design, and the very modern idea of “design thinking,” or seeking solutions based on human need and behavior. It’s an approach that informed Jefferson’s design for the school itself, and is perhaps the best explanation for why it is one of America’s most renowned universities today.

If you visit, try to allow extra time for a self-tour.At the very least, do take the time to explore Jefferson’s famous serpentine walled gardens and step inside his breathtaking rotunda. While the guided tour was outstanding, it took us inside just one building: a quick lap around a very quiet library. Consistent with our guide’s one-star review of the food, we didn’t get to see a cafeteria, and if you’ve seen one dorm room you’ve pretty much seen them all. No great loss there. But to get a true sense of the school, it’s essential to see students in their natural habitat, at least at a student center or something like that. UVA really should open its doors a bit wider.

Consequently, our main impression is that most students walk the grounds alone, by themselves; we didn’t see many pairs, much less groups of students as is common on many other campuses.

While the University has grown considerably over the past two centuries, it is comforting that it has held fast, and proudly, to the principles on which it was founded, not unlike certain other products of Jefferson’s imagination. Yet, it must be noted that Jefferson was not the only U.S. president with a central role in realizing the UVA vision. James Madison, who was in office at the time, was on the school’s organizing board, along with former president James Monroe, who sold the land on which UVA was built. Chief Justice John Marshall was yet another distinguished UVA founding father. They all would certainly be amazed to see their university today, but just as surely would easily recognize the vibrant community of citizen-scholars they envisioned back in 1819.

Traditional Studies are in ‘Major’ Trouble

Axios: “In 1869, at Harvard, Charles Eliot invented the college major as we know it — each student would be channeled into a specialized area of study, and move on to a stable, lifelong job.” However: “The seismic shifts created by frontier technologies are challenging a centuries-old model of higher education — one that is already under siege as the cost of college skyrockets, student debt balloons, and automation eliminates entire careers. Some university majors are aimed at jobs that might not exist any longer in the years and decades ahead. For those jobs that will exist, experts say, the uniquely human skill of problem-solving is essential, rather than a specific major. ‘The old model of studying one thing is giving way to a need for broadly trained workers,’ says Darrell West of the Brookings Institution.”

“Cal State Long Beach has partnered with the Institute for the Future to roll out ‘Beach 2030’ — a plan to ramp up interdisciplinary courses that reflect the fast-changing global landscape, and thus to ‘build future-ready students.’ Arizona State University has opened a College of Integrative Arts and Sciences that eliminates academic departments entirely and instead gives out degrees melding disciplines. Concordia University in Montreal has teamed up with five other Canadian universities focused on ‘skills training’ in addition to traditional degrees.”

The movement has its skeptics: Certain majors might need to be spruced up, but the idea of upending the model entirely is dangerous, says Matthew Mayhew, a professor at Ohio State. ‘There are still tons of people in college who are pre-med or accounting or chemistry majors that are getting jobs and directly applying what they learned in college,’ Mayhew says.” However, Mark Somerville of Olin College comments: “A smaller set of majors that are much more broadly defined is the direction we ought to be moving in. When it’s hard to predict what the jobs of the next 10 years will be — much less the next 50 years — acquiring the skills necessary to acquire skills is more important than the specifics of any given discipline.”

What Does The Ivy League Really Want?

The Washington Post: “Because of the impressive SAT scores and high grades of students admitted to Ivy League institutions, many people incorrectly infer that superhuman academic performance is the key ingredient for admission. ‘Grades are still the most important factor in admissions,’ the founder of one consulting firm told USA Today. ‘Course rigor is also extremely important’ … In reality, academic strength is just one of several dimensions by which candidates are ranked, including extracurriculars, athletics and the enigmatic ‘personal’ ranking.”

“Savvy parents and applicants are well aware that the Ivy League values athletic talent. But it is often listed as just one ‘hook’ among many others, including legacy status, membership in a historically underrepresented minority group and socioeconomic disadvantage. Asked in 2012 about the magnitude of athletics, a former dean of admissions at Princeton said that ‘we do not emphasize one activity over the other; athletes as well as artistic endeavors are equally valued.’ She went on to specifically mention ‘musicians, dancers or actors’ as groups receiving recognition. But athletes are a special case and are given vastly more preference than other recognized categories.”

“A number of studies have shown that Ivy League graduates are vastly overrepresented in positions of corporate and political leadership: Almost a third of officers and directors in the corporate elite earned undergraduate degrees from elite schools. But overrepresentation is far from dominance. In a comprehensive 2017 study of ‘3,990 senior executives drawn from 15 sectors, including government,’ researchers at the University of California at Riverside found that barely 10 percent attended Ivy League colleges. Ivy League graduates were most represented in industries involving media, including publishing, journalism and the arts — but even there, they were a decided minority.”