Early College Portal Opens April 7
If you are planning to take an Early College course in the fall, the portal opens tomorrow (April 7). Sign up as soon as you can! You can take just one course or work toward completing a Pathway. See your School Counselor if you have questions.
The Midcoast Career and Education Fair on 4/27/23 is coming together nicely. We are adding new employers daily. One-stop-shopping! Get a job and get into Community College!
CHILLS Campus Visits
If you will be taking to the friendly skies or hitting the road to do some college visits during April Break, please keep CHILLS Campus Visits (on Instagram) in mind. We are trying to locally crowdsource information about colleges that our kids can actually get in to. If we broaden the collective knowledge of the institutions our kids attend, perhaps we can break the siren song of the Ivy League. There’s a certain degree of Khardashianism going on with schools that are popular because they are popular. We’re hoping to expose our kids to more alternatives.
So if you find a good one, send 10 photos and any description(s) that you wish to accompany them to piet.lammert@fivetowns.net
And if you haven’t already seen them, here are some tips and tricks to curate a successful college visit.
And if you want to make your tour guide’s day, a $10 coffee shop gift card never fails
The College Board Pivots
I identify as a nerd. I own it. Which is why I’m chuckling to myself replaying the FRIENDS “Pivot” episode in my mind (I cannot utter the word without thinking of this scene). Which also works out great for you. While you are rushing to the Sports section to check the plight of the Sox or tuning in to Todd Gutner and his cat with the AM weather, I’m reading The Chronicle of Higher Education
So this article definitely caught my eye. As I’m sure you don’t want to drop a couple of Benjamins for an annual subscription, I’ll summarize.
“Last week, the College Board shared its plans to provide a way for admissions offices to connect with high-school students via mobile app. Starting this fall, the new service, called Connections, will supplement the organization’s existing Student Search Service, which colleges have long used to obtain information about teenagers they wish to recruit. College Board officials say that the new service will give students more control over their personal information.”
Here’s how things have worked for a long time: High-school students can opt into the Student Search Service when they register for or take the PSAT/NMSQT, SAT, or Advanced Placement exams. Each year, nearly 2,000 colleges buy access to, or “license,” troves of student data stored in the College Board’s vast database…And then institutions can bombard those students with brochures, letters, and electronic come-ons. Though inefficient for colleges and often annoying for students, it’s a time-tested way to expand an applicant pool.”
What’s changing: Before, there was just one bucket for colleges to draw from (Search). Now, there will be a second (Connections). The difference between them has to do with where students take exams. Starting this fall, the College Board’s in-school assessments — the PSAT/NMSQT, SAT, and PSAT 10 — will be administered online. Students who take one of those exams will be asked to share their cell number with the College Board, which will then text them a link to download an app called BigFuture School, through which they can get their scores and see some general advice about applying to college. Students will then be able to opt into Connections, which will be loaded with profiles of colleges that are — you know it — interested in them.
By opting into Connections, students will not be transmitting any personally identifiable information (PII) to colleges. All that an institution will know about them at that point is which “audiences” they fall into: when they will graduate from high school, which of 29 geographies they live in, and the range in which their test score falls.
Students can then choose when, or if, to share their personal information with a particular college. Doing so will turn on the ol’ recruitment fountain.
Whether teenagers will really want another way to receive plaintive pitches from colleges remains to be seen. The College Board says that more than three-quarters of students it surveyed recently said hearing from colleges via mobile app would be “very helpful.” If you know any teenagers, though, it’s easy to imagine that many of them will delete it or ignore it after getting their test scores.
“One thing is for sure: The next recruitment cycle won’t be for the faint of heart.”
Honored
Unless you’re a UMaine devotee, you likely don’t know that UMaine has one of the most highly regarded and longest continuous running Honors Colleges in the US.
The Honors College provides students with the benefits of a SLAC (small liberal arts college) within the opportunities made possible by a major R1 research university.
It endows participants with an opportunity to conduct original research with a culminating thesis.
It features small (12-15 students) seminar style classrooms in which students analyze, discuss, and otherwise pick apart thousands of years of literature that help to answer the big question “What does it mean to be human?”
It provides a housing option exclusively for Honors students, in the good dorms.
Here’s more information…UMaine Honors and a podcast of some present UMaine Honors College students.
UMaine is not alone in providing an honors option. Several other UMaine System schools do as well:
So if you applied all Selective colleges and got clobbered, or got terrible financial aid, or are just checking out other possibilities, spend some time trying on the Honors College for size.
#knowthestatewhereyoumatriculate
There is a bill in the Colorado legislature to increase the cap on OOS (out of state) students; good news for the kids who are considering CU Boulder.
While some states are scuttling DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusions) efforts, others are seeking to strengthen them.