About this Guide

The IvyAchievement Counselors’ Guide to Indian College Applicants is meant for college admissions professionals, Indian parents and students, high-school counselors, and anyone curious about how and why Indian students come to the United States and Canada. It contains material already familiar to each audience, but from the perspective of an American counselor who has spent a great deal of time in India. Our founder and CEO Benjamin Stern spent May through July 2016 and November 2016 through February 2017 in India, getting to know Indian college applicants and their families.

Welcome back! In Part I of the IvyAchievement Counselors’ Guide to Indian College Applicants, I discussed why Indian families send their kids abroad. Here, in Part II, I summarize the main considerations and concerns parents and students have when choosing schools in the United States and Canada.

Indian Parents’ and Students’ Concerns

1. Cost

For international students in the United States, the cost of college (tuition, fees, housing and meal plans) runs from about $40,000 to over $75,000 per year without financial aid. State schools are generally in the $50,000-$60,000 range and rarely offer financial aid. Canadian schools can cost a similar amount. Additional costs such as travel, books, and school supplies can bring that total higher.

Because college is so expensive, Indian parents are usually concerned with two things: (1) return on investment (employability and salary after graduation) and (2) the availability of financial aid. Parents don’t often realize that there are over 200 colleges in the United States that give financial aid to international students, some quite generously. Some schools offer “need-based” aid, some offer “merit-based” scholarships, and some offer both. I advise well-off Indian clients who can easily afford to send their kids to college to seek merit scholarships anyway, because that money could be used for other purposes!

2. Quality of Education

Consistent with India’s focus on education, Indian parents are concerned that their children actually learn something in college. Some parents are more focused on their children being qualified for high-paying jobs, while others seek a liberal arts education for their children that is hard to obtain in India. (As I discussed last time, India’s liberal arts schools do not attract the top thinkers and teachers.) Kids tend to value more flexibility, though most are very focused on employability.

I often have to explain that reputation does not equal quality. Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania (a member of the Ivy League) are situated together in a section of Philadelphia known as University City. In the latest US News & World Report ranking, Penn placed in the top 10 while Drexel was 96^th. It baffles Indian parents and students (and many others) that the quality of teaching is as good at Drexel as it is at Penn. I have to explain that the advantages of attending an Ivy League school don’t stem from classroom instruction, the way the advantages of attending an IIT might, but rather from other factors, including campus resources, research opportunities, and a global alumni network.

3. Prestige

Many parents are concerned about prestige and name recognition. There are both good and bad reasons to apply to prestigious institutions. In some parts of the world, a name with cachet can open up doors that a less-recognized name cannot. This may even be the case if traveling to a different part of the United States or Canada from where a particular school is located. If the goal is employment in the United States, I have to explain that a degree from Rutgers or SUNY Binghamton can land a job on Wall Street, and a degree from San Jose State or Santa Clara University can make a Silicon Valley job a reality.

Often, expectations are unrealistic. I once helped a student from India with an SAT score in the low 1200s (out of 1600) and a GPA of under 3.0 (out of 4) including a D on his report card. His high school’s policy was to send out only 10 transcripts, so we had to choose his schools carefully. His parents wanted him to apply to Harvard, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon University, three of the most competitive schools in the United States. His parents were wonderful people, but they simply didn’t understand that even the most talented admissions consultant—or even a professor who might be able to pull strings at a university—would not be able to help such a student gain admission to schools of this selectivity. Other than prestige, their main concerns were that (1) their son be able to get a job after graduation and (2) they were considering a permanent move to California. I convinced this student’s parents to let him apply to the California State University system. They weren’t thrilled with the idea, but now their son has offers from multiple Cal State schools in both northern and southern California.

4. Politics

Parents and students alike are concerned about the political climate in the United States. Last July, in front of an audience of several hundred students at a school in Delhi, a young woman asked me about what I thought would happen if Donald Trump were to win November’s election. “Donald Trump will not be President of the United States,” I declared, to great applause. Of course, like almost everyone else across the American political spectrum, I was wrong. (I did go on to explain that there’s no reason to believe Trump’s policies would not be welcoming of Indian people or businesses.) There are Indians who support President Trump, but among students and parents I’ve interacted with, there’s an almost universal apprehension about certain policies and the cultural atmosphere.

Recent racially motivated violence against Indians has not helped. This type of violence is not new (a few Sikhs were targeted after the September 11, 2001 attacks because some Americans associated turbans with terrorism), but I agree with those who say that xenophobic rhetoric tends to normalize such behavior.

The political climate has also made parents and students apprehensive about employment opportunities in the United States after graduation. I write regularly about the legal issues, so I won’t delve into them here, but I actually think any visa reforms will benefit Indian high schoolers who want to come to the United States to study at reputable colleges and seek high-skilled jobs. Still, the unpredictability of politics in general and the current administration in particular weighs heavily on the college decision, as it should.

5. Social Life

For many kids—not just from India—college is their first time in a culturally heterogeneous environment. Indian families tend to be conservative, so at first I expected parents to be concerned about the liberal social environment most college campuses (especially elite ones) offer. Religious Americans I’ve worked with, including Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews, have voiced these concerns. Surprisingly, I’ve never had a question about this from Indian parents, either in the presence of kids or privately. Even kids don’t ask about it much. I sometimes recommend a few movies for kids to get acquainted with American college culture, and I try to include at least one wholesome selection (such as Rudy or Good Will Hunting) among the raunchier classics. I also try to help my clients transition to college life however I can.

6. Geography

Neither Indian parents nor students seem to care about geography at first; just getting into a prestigious and/or “good” school is enough. I try to educate parents and students about the climatological and cultural differences among regions in the United States. Moreover, popular college guides divide colleges into “urban,” “suburban,” and “rural,” but there are of course many more factors than just that. It’s often difficult to convey that such things matter; a section on North American geography and weather was the least popular part of my summer presentation on college admissions and selection, and I was advised to cut it. I now deal with geography and campus culture when counseling families who have already signed up for my company’s services.

Indians also rarely consider accessibility for travel to and from India as a factor. Between India and North America, there are non-stop flights only to and from New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver. (The San Francisco and Vancouver flights were introduced only recently.) Having taken flights between India and the United States both with stops and without, I can confidently say there is a big difference in terms of both travel time and the ease of time-zone adjustment. Families who want to reunite several times during the school year (which I recommend if possible) should keep this in mind.

Up Next

In Part III, I will discuss the Indian high school experience, including academics, extracurricular activities, and tutoring programs outside of school.

The post The IvyAchievement Counselors’ Guide to Indian College Applicants: Part II appeared first on IvyAchievement.

The IvyAchievement Counselors’ Guide to Indian College Applicants is meant for college admissions professionals, Indian parents and students, high-school counselors, and anyone curious about how and why Indian students come to the United States and Canada. It contains material already familiar to each audience, but from the perspective of an American counselor who has spent a great deal of time in India. Our founder and CEO Benjamin Stern spent May through July 2016 and November 2016 through February 2017 in India, getting to know Indian college applicants and their families.

Welcome to the third and (for now) final installment of our IvyAchievement Counselors’ Guide to Indian College Applicants! In Part I of the Guide, I discussed why Indian families send their kids abroad. In Part II, I summarized the main considerations and concerns parents and students have when choosing schools in the United States and Canada. 

Types of schools

India, like the United States, Canada, and UK, has public (government) and private schools. (Confusingly for Americans, the most prominent chain of private schools in India is called “Delhi Public School,” which is modeled after British “public schools,” elite private schools that admit students of different religions and regional origins.) Government schools are severely underfunded and very rarely do students from government schools apply to college abroad. Private schools in India are relatively inexpensive compared to those in the West, charging a few thousand dollars per year. As in the West, India has all-boys, all-girls, and co-ed schools, and some schools are religiously affiliated (many Muslim or Christian). Many schools and chains are started by enterprising individuals. Examples include the Jayshree Periwal International School in Lucknow—named after the founder and current director—and the Strawberry Fields School in Chandigarh—named after the Beatles song (really).

Indian High School Curricula

In India, high school is four years, as it is in most of the United States. High schools’ curricula are structured around state, national, or international examinations, which are held after 10th grade and 12th grade. National exams include those administered by the quasi-governmental Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in 10th and 12th grades and the private Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, which awards the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) in 10th and the Indian School Certificate (ISC) in 12th. Most states also have their own boards of education; smaller states may be part of a regional board.

International exams include the Cambridge-sanctioned International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) in 10th and International Baccalaureate (IB) in 12th, which are also offered in the United States and Canada. A few schools also offer Cambridge AS and A-levels curriculum for 11^th and 12^th grades.

The prevalence of national or state curricula varies from city to city. For example, in Mumbai, most top private schools follow the Maharashtra state curriculum, whereas in Delhi, most follow the CBSE curriculum.

Students can take any combination of 10th and 12th grade boards, and students often switch schools after two years. The most common among my clients are CBSE for both, ICSE+ISC, and CBSE+IB. Indian students living abroad generally take IGCSE and A/AS-levels or IB. Formerly, an international version of the CBSE curriculum (iCBSE) was offered, but this program has been terminated. Indian students generally do not participate in the IB Middle Years Programme (MYP).

CBSE Streams

The CBSE allows students to select one of several “streams” for a two-year 11^th and 12^th curriculum: Sciences, Commerce, Humanities (sometimes called Liberal Arts), and Agriculture. Few schools that send kids abroad offer the Agriculture stream, and some do not even offer Humanities/Liberal Arts. The availability of these streams to students depends on their performance on their 10^th grade board exams. Each stream has minimum requirements in related subjects (for example, to be able to select the Science stream, students must perform well on their science and math subject board exams). Although there are provisions in the CBSE regulations for students to create their own stream with approval, schools almost never allow this.

Commerce and Humanities students face problems in United States and Canadian college admissions because they don’t take any sciences in 11^th or 12^th grade, which colleges generally prefer. Some Humanities students don’t even take math in 11^th or 12^th, although their 10^th grade math is fairly advanced compared to most Americans’ (but still short of what is required on the SAT Math I Subject Test). Conversely, Science-stream students don’t take any social sciences.

CBSE students have the option to take the board exam for a sixth subject without taking a class. The best five board scores count toward their average. It is very rare that students perform better on their sixth subject exam than on any of their other five.

Commerce students take classes such as business studies, economics, and accountancy—courses most American high schoolers do not. However, other than math, the Commerce stream does not cover any SAT Subject Tests syllabi. Because several colleges (including a few Ivy League schools) require two SAT Subject Tests, Commerce students must study an additional subject. English Literature seems to be the most popular, followed by World History. I encourage students to consider the American History SAT Subject Test in order to become acquainted with the American heritage and to demonstrate an interest in the United States and American culture. Foreign language SAT Subject Tests are rare among CBSE students.

Grading and Grade Deflation

Schools give internal grades to track student performance and generate report cards and transcripts, but the only marks that count for Indian university admissions and scholarships are 12^th grade board exams. These board exams are scored on a 0-100% scale that is standardized by geographic area. Science courses include a written component and a practical component. In CBSE, the lowest passing grade is 33%. In ICSE and ISC, the lowest passing grade is 35%. This makes the grading scale quite different from that in American schools, where a 60 or 61 is typically the lowest passing grade.

Because 12^th grade board results are so consequential, many schools have a very strict grading standard for 11^th grade, with even the best students scoring in the 60%-80% range. In fact, one client related to me that an English teacher, by principle, does not award any mark over 70% in 11th grade. Such grade-deflation policies can be damaging to admissions prospects if colleges’ admissions officers are not aware of them. Some high school counselors are willing to acknowledge grade deflation in their school reports. Still, a 70% on a report card has a psychological effect on someone (such as an admissions officer) used to seeing 90s all day. At least two schools have “adjusted” or completely fabricated 11th grade marks for international transcripts. This, of course, gives students from those schools an unfair advantage.

For these reasons, a few schools, for example the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, do not ask for 11th grade marks. This makes it difficult to assess a student’s current performance, so they must be more reliant on standardized test scores.

Click here to see our recommended grade conversions.

12^th Grade Marks

Colleges generally require marks from the first part of 12th grade before an admissions decision is rendered. CBSE, ICSE, and some state board schools start in May (schools start on different dates depending on climate and local holidays). These schools conduct mid-year exams in September and “pre-board” exams in December. Pre-board results are not usually recorded on report cards, but some colleges ask for them. Like 11th grade marks, pre-board exams are graded harshly in order to encourage students to study harder for real board exams.

Many schools provide “predicted” final board scores, which are usually higher than pre-board marks. These are supposedly based on the school’s knowledge of the particular student’s performance compared to those who have previously taken exams, but they may also be arbitrary. Colleges in the UK and Canada tend to care more about predicted scores than colleges in the US do. I have not seen an American school require that final grades fall within a specific range of predicted scores, but I have seen this explicitly from at least one Canadian school.

Private Tuitions

Students throughout India attend “tuitions” outside of school, which are private classes taught in small groups or one-on-one. They are designed to prepare students for national board exams, and the vast majority of private-school students take them. Even many of the brightest and most accomplished students take tuition classes in at least a subject or two. Students spend 4-5 hours per day in these tuition classes, sometimes starting classes at 6 AM to get a class in before school starts. Tutors are graduates of top universities in India and are paid better than schoolteachers; there is essentially a “shadow” schooling system. Usually, these classes are in Hindi or “Hinglish,” primarily Hindi with English sprinkled in.

A few college applications (particularly the University of California application) ask whether applicants have availed themselves of any tutoring or enrichment classes. Indian tuitions are so common that high schoolers don’t even think to mention them. I advise all my clients to mention their tuitions because (1) it is the right thing to do and (2) it accounts for a significant amount of time in addition to class and extracurricular activities, which admissions officers should know.

IIT Entrance Exam Preparation

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are among the premier institutions in the world for engineering and computer science education. Admission to one of 23 IIT campuses requires taking two rounds of the Joint Entrance Examination JEE: Mains and Advanced. Both are very difficult, with the JEE – Advanced being among the toughest national exams in the world. Nearly all students who take the JEE enroll in some preparatory class, and many even enroll in “institutes” that are geared toward preparing students for the test, spending vacations and even school days receiving instruction and studying. (Schools don’t mind if top-performing students miss class to study for JEE.) Overall, it is not abnormal for Indian students taking the JEE to study over 40 hours a week for two years or more.

The competitiveness and pressure of the JEE is a big reason why students apply to schools abroad for engineering and computer science. About a million and a half students take the exam each year, and only a few hundred can study the most coveted major: computer science. I have one client who scored in the 99.9^th percentile on the JEE (a rank of less than 1,500), but his score wasn’t high enough to get a spot in a computer science program. (He is studying materials science and looking to transfer to a place he can study computer science.)

Medical School Exams

Another coveted career is medicine. Most student in India looking to attend medical school in India must take the National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET). Some medical schools conduct their own entrance examinations. Positions at the top schools are as competitive as those for the IITs.

English Language Among Indian High School Students

English is a national language of India and present on all government documents, but the level of English proficiency varies greatly, even among private-school students. Some kids speak primarily English at home, but most speak Hindi and/or a local language, including Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, or Punjabi. English is introduced early enough that nearly all undergraduate applicants are fluent, but English is rarely a “first language.” In most private schools, English is the official language of instruction, but Hindi or a regional language is the primary language of communication among teachers and students before and after class.

The Indian national and state boards barely teach English composition. In fact, it is not unusual for an Indian high school student to graduate without ever having written something longer than two or three pages. Students are also exposed to very little long-form literature. The CBSE curriculum includes a single novel or even just a novella. (H.G. Wells’s 100-page novella The Invisible Man recently replaced Hemingway’s 127-page The Old Man and the Sea as the longest English language item on the CBSE syllabus.) This lack of exposure to literature and composition makes writing college admissions essays very difficult for many Indian students, and even the most brilliant students have trouble. The stronger writers among Indian applicants are generally self-taught.

Not surprisingly, the writing style among Indian high schoolers has a very early-20th century British feel to it, incorporating long sentences filled with florid language and the passive voice. The tone, probably reflecting a holdover from colonial traditions, tends to be submissive and obsequious. Last year, an Indian student submitted an essay to IvyAchievement reading (verbatim), “The elite UK education erudition will guarantee my wholesome development and provide me with an enriching collegiate experience.” I did not make this up.

In addition, the English language syllabi also do not cover certain important topics. When I deliver PowerPoint presentations at schools, I’ll show a picture of an ellipsis and ask what it is and what it does. No one has been able to name it, and usually just a few correctly guess that it indicates trailing off or an incomplete thought. Only one student has identified it as serving to leave out text from a quote. These brilliant kids are never taught how to write a research paper or analytical essay; they just repeat facts they are taught about character, plot, and themes.

But they learn quickly. Usually, I’ll be the primary counselor for our clients, and students will work with a writing specialist to complete their essays. I’ve seen clients develop their writing skills tremendously. One client applied to 27 different colleges.  (I advised him to apply to fewer, but he wanted to anyway.) At first, his writing was comprehensible but stiff and filled with errors. After working with me and one of our writing specialists, his writing is excellent and can no longer be distinguished from an American’s. He even knows American spelling and punctuation conventions now, all ready for college! (He was accepted to three Ivy-league schools, Amherst College, and the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, among others.)

When parents of high school seniors ask me what they can do to help their child do well on standardized tests, I tell them the best thing they can do is speak English at home. When a child speaks English with friends and family, he or she begins to think in English, which saves a cognitive step when taking exams. That saved step can be the difference between getting to a final reading passage and having to skip it. For Indian parents with younger children and those early in high school, I recommend reading beyond the curriculum, writing, and perhaps taking English-language enrichment classes.

Extracurricular Activities

Indian students tend to be very active outside of class. Many schools have a British-style “house” system with house captains and inter-house sports and other competitions and activities.

The most common extracurricular activities, at least among those applying to the United States and Canada, are debate and Model United Nations (MUN). Debate and MUN competitions are held on weekends throughout the school year, and are mostly organized and run by students. MUNs happen at the high school and college levels; sometimes high schoolers are invited to college MUNs. When I was in Hyderabad in June 2016, there happened to be a college MUN at the same hotel. The Secretary General (chief organizer) was a college student; there were no faculty, chaperones, or adults over the age of 22 to be found.

Other popular extracurricular activities include “quizzing” (academic competitions, usually more involved than American quiz-bowl/college-bowl type trivia) and computer programming, often at competitions called “hackathons.”

Popular sports among Indian high schoolers include cricket, football (soccer), tennis, and badminton. Table tennis is also very popular in India. Many Indians play basketball recreationally, but it’s not a highly competitive inter-school sport. American football is basically unrecognized. (I showed one student, otherwise familiar with American culture, pictures of professional athletes playing rugby union and American football. She could not tell which was American football.)

Business ventures are astonishingly common among Indian kids. I’m impressed by what they’ve accomplished. One client, for example, earned thousands of dollars using an online trading platform that automatically bought and sold virtual items. Another client started a venture to deliver excess stationery to needy schools around the world.

Many aspiring Indian students start non-profit organizations, or what they call “NGOs.” In American English, “NGO” (non-governmental organization) means a large, international charity with field operations, like the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, and the Red Cross. Indians refer to any non-profit as an “NGO.” Some of these student-founded organizations are legitimate and do real work; others are merely offshoots of family foundations or entirely made up for college admissions purposes, complete with fake certificates and letters of recommendation. If a client has an NGO on his or her resume, I urge them to support their work with evidence such as social media pages and newspaper coverage. Admissions professionals should be aware of these “NGOs” and investigate if possible.

Counseling

Some Indian high schools send many students abroad and have dedicated counselors familiar with the admissions process. But as in most American high schools, these counselors are usually overworked. I know at least one counselor, at a school that sends a lot of kids to top colleges, who tells his students not to use outside help from professional counselors. A few do anyway, but are afraid to tell him because of his pride.

Aside from a few of these “feeder” schools (there aren’t many, as there are in China), most Indian high schools are unequipped to handle applications to the United States and Canada. They do not realize that the American admissions process requires a school profile report, and are unfamiliar with Naviance for sending school documents. Furthermore, with the new Coalition Application gaining traction, college guidance counselors will need to familiarize themselves with this new online platform. I’ve worked with counselors directly to help them understand colleges’ requirements, and I urge international admissions officers at North American colleges to reach out to Indian high schools.

In schools that don’t have a dedicated international guidance counselor, sometimes a teacher will serve as the official “counselor,” and will often ask students to write their own letters of recommendation. I’ve even seen a few Indian high school teachers have their students set up the Common Application account and portal for them. As long as I have proof from the teacher that they have authorized this, I will help applicants complete their letters and school profile.

This concludes (for now) the IvyAchievement Counselors’ Guide to Indian College Applicants. Corrections, comments, and recommendations for content can be sent to guide@ivyachievement.com. Please don’t be shy!

The post IvyAchievement Counselors’ Guide to Indian College Applicants Part III: Indian High School appeared first on IvyAchievement.

Click here to view Ben Stern’s newly released IvyAchievement International Financial Aid and Admissions Guide! 

Data includes:

• College city and state
• Number of undergraduates
• Percent of undergraduates who are international students
• Fixed costs (tuition, fees, room & board) without aid
• Financial aid policy (need-blind with full need met, need-based only, merit-based only, both need-based and merit-based, or none)
• Percent of international students who receive aid
• Average international financial aid
• Average financial aid for international students as a percentage of fixed costs (how big of a “discount” is offered)
• Fixed costs after average financial aid award
• Total international financial aid distributed
• Admission rate
• SAT and ACT percentiles
• SAT Subject Test Requirements
• Admissions deadlines (including Early Action and Early Decision)
• The IvyAchievement Computer Science Employment Index (more on that to come!) and median starting salary for computer science majors
• The IvyAchievement Finance Employment Index, which reflects representation of graduates at the top finance employers.
• Additional pages comparing the most generous schools and ranking the top schools for CS, finance.

College profile and admissions data were sourced from U.S. Department of Education Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and Common Data Sets released by schools where possible. (2016-2017 was used in most cases, but 2015-2016 is the most recent available for some school.) Some information comes from U.S. News & World Report Compass™. We used our judgement when there were discrepancies among these sources, giving preference to primary sources unless there was obvious error.

This list is expansive but not exhaustive. There are additional schools that offer financial aid to international students, notably schools closely affiliated with various religious denominations; however, we chose not to include them because of their narrow appeal.

Some of the schools listed may offer aid only to beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and state equivalents; we removed schools where we ascertained this to be the case, but please make sure you are eligible for aid before applying to any given school. Also, deadlines can change, so please make sure you are applying on time!

The IvyAchievement Computer Science Employment Index™ (CSEI) and IvyAchievment Finance Employment Index™ (FEI) are derived from employment data on LinkedIn and PayScale. Data was collected directly from PayScale where possible, but U.S. News & World Report Compass™ was used in a few cases.

Please email any questions, comments, or corrections to international@ivyachievement.com.

What are you waiting for? View now!

The post Introducing Ben Stern’s IvyAchievement International Financial Aid and Admissions Guide appeared first on IvyAchievement.

By Benjamin P. Stern, founder and CEO.

I recently came across the following post by a high school student from India in a Facebook group I’m a member of:

I have SAT coming and pre-boards and of course, boards. …
I sleep for 3 hours per day and because of that my productivity is being hampered to a large extent and in turn, in spite of improving my performance is going down. What to do or how to cope with this?

I was dismayed but not surprised. Indeed, the college application schedule does not fit well with most Indian academic calendars. In a large part of India, the academic year starts in May, followed by a short summer break in late June and early July. This break is often too early to start working on college applications, because essay prompts don’t become available until August or September. While American high-school students are hard at work on their applications (September and October), Indian high school students are working on mid-year examinations. In November and December, schools will conduct “pre-boards,” or tests meant to simulate the actual board exam. There are various national and state boards, and each school tries to emulate the format and content of the real thing as closely as it can.

But do pre-boards matter? Of, if they do matter, how much? I explain here why pre-boards rarely matter at all. There are three reasons:

1. They are inconsequential for admissions abroad

Most American and Canadian colleges ask for the applicant’s most recent grades as of the date of application. Indian high schools conduct mid-yearly exams August-October, and the results of these exams sometimes appear on transcripts they produce. American schools usually want to see these marks, while Canadian schools tend to be more interested in “predicted” grades. Pre-boards are a diagnostic test and do not generally appear on Indian high school transcripts. High schools may send pre-board schools to colleges, but I have not heard of any college in the United States or Canada requiring pre-board scores.

If a student is applying to college in Canada and wishes to refrain from committing fully to pre-boards, I recommend that they discuss alternative ways to generate predicted grades. I urge principals, counselors, and teachers to accommodate students who want to focus on admissions.

Note: this does not apply if your school has a policy of submitting pre-board scores for all students as part of a mid-year report to colleges! 

2. They are inconsequential for admissions in India

Board exams are the key to unlocking higher educational opportunities in India, and people go to great lengths to achieve high scores. Indian families care very much about test scores, and for good reason. This also means they invariably care about pre-boards, because a positive result bodes well for them and their children’s future. But it’s still just a practice test, and nothing more.

3. There will be more opportunities to practice

Many schools conduct more than one round of pre-boards — some, like DPS R.K. Puram in Delhi, conduct three. In these schools, missing one set of pre-boards is not going to make a big difference in final performance. And for those without such rigorous board-exam-prep regimens, not all practice needs to come from school. If parents and students feel it might help, they can hire tutors to administer and grade mock exams. The cost will be small compared to the potential benefit.

Conclusion

I’ve presented three compelling reasons why students shouldn’t worry about pre-board scores.

Indian parents, teachers, and school principals should understand that of all the priorities their children have — SAT/ACT, college applications, taking pre-boards, maintaining their health, and spending time with friends who will soon be distant — pre-boards should have the lowest priority. In fact, it is healthiest and almost always in the student’s interest — that is, it would facilitate higher performance on the actual boards — if they are allowed to focus on other things during this crucial period in the admissions process and their lives. Parents should ask themselves: am I pushing my child to do well on pre-boards because it’s really what’s best for her, or so I can brag to my friends about her anticipated performance? Three hours of sleep per night isn’t healthy for anyone, especially a growing teenager. If just one thing had to disappear to lighten the workload and let kids live healthy, productive lives, it should be pre-board exams. They’re just not worth it.

The post Three Reasons Why Indian High School Students (and Their Parents) Shouldn’t Worry About Pre-Boards appeared first on IvyAchievement.

Introduction

Most students who pursue computer science do so for one simple reason: to prepare for a career in computer science. Deciding where to apply and where to enroll are crucial decisions at the beginning of such a career. But where should you apply? How important is the decision?

Many students and parents rely on computer science rankings to help them decide which schools to apply to. Some influential rankings, such as U.S. News & World Report, enter a sort of “collective consciousness” in admissions. People often assume the “good schools” are at the top, and inversely, that schools ranked low can’t be “good schools.” This assumption is misguided, especially when rankings are based on factors that applicants and parents don’t care about.

Companies that provide computer science rankings are transparent to various degrees with their methodologies, but the major rankings share one thing in common: none are based on real-world industry employment outcomes. U.S. News, for example, uses one single metric: a survey of education professionals working at universities asking them to rate the other universities. Other rankings, such as Times Higher Education computer science rankings and the QS computer science rankings, incorporate “employer reputation” metrics in addition to metrics of academic quality. In doing so, the “common sense” about which institutions are “good schools” for computer science is reinforced. Because none of the other metrics use real-world employment outcomes, misconceptions are amplified year after year. Also, none of the available rankings include liberal arts colleges for computer science.

We thus endeavored to create our IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings. Our goal was to rank schools based on data that is both relevant and reliable. Our rankings are based on two factors: placement in high-paying tech jobs and starting salaries for graduates. All schools awarding computer science degrees were eligible for our rankings, and our rankings include private research universities, public universities, online universities, and liberal arts colleges (including the best women’s colleges for computer science). Our initial ranking includes colleges and universities only in the United States, but we provide basic information on Canadian schools as well. 

Want to skip our analysis and just see our results? Click here to jump down!

Click here to see our Canadian results.

Data sources

IPEDS

The Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is maintained by the United States Department of Education and contains a wealth of information on undergraduate admissions, demographics, course offerings, school resources, degrees awarded, and more. We collected data on over 250 schools, starting with a set of schools that awarded at least five computer science degrees in 2016, the most recent year for which data was available.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional networking site. “Recruiter” is a premium LinkedIn product that allows very specific searches. As its name suggests, its purpose is to allow professional recruiters to find job candidates with specific qualifications and experiences. We were able to use it for a different purpose: figuring out which colleges’ graduates are best represented in the software industry. Search parameters can be found below in “notes.”

PayScale

PayScale is a website that collects and reports salary data for various industries. Last year, PayScale partnered with U.S. News and World Report to provide starting and mid-year salary data for graduates of various majors within colleges. PayScale claims to have surveyed millions of users, we are unsure of the reliability of the data, especially for schools with small sample sizes. Still, we found the PayScale data to be sensible, and even if not a great indicator of absolute salary expectations due to self-selection bias, an excellent gauge of relative performance of graduates in the job market.

Method

The IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings have two components: Relative Employment and Median Starting Salary. In each case, scores were normalized with the highest given a score of 1 and the lowest a score of zero. The final weighted average was then itself normalized to 1 to generate a Computer Science Employment Index™ (CSEI).

Relative Employment (50%) = Number of LinkedIn users graduating 2012-2017 reporting CS-related positions in top companies divided by [the number of computer science degrees school awarded 2013-2016.

Median Starting Salary (50%) = Median PayScale reported starting salary for computer science. If computer engineering data was available, we calculated a weighted average of the PayScale figures for computer science and computer engineering based on the respective number of degrees offered. 

American colleges and universities awarding over 1,500 degrees:

These institutions, according to data provided by the U.S. government, awarded more than 1,500 computer science and computer engineering degrees from 2013 to 2016. Not all are equally represented among high-paying tech companies. The poorest showing among these came from Western Governors University, a not-for-profit online university. George Mason University in Virginia, the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, and the University of Central Florida, all non-flagship state schools, also graduate a lot of students who do not end up at top tech companies. Indiana University-Bloomington, a flagship state school, does poorly as well, especially compared to in-state rival Purdue.

UT Austin outperforms UT Dallas, sending around the same number of graduates to high-paying tech jobs, but awarding fewer degrees. Stanford and the University of Washington-Seattle, schools in tech hubs (Stanford is in Silicon Valley and Seattle is home to Microsoft and Amazon), have some of the best employment prospects in terms of placement.

The ratio is for reference to compare institutions; it does not represent the proportion of graduates in high-paying tech jobs, as the data is for different date ranges (degree data from 2013-2016 and employment data for 2012-2017 graduates). The search parameters also do not capture all high-paying tech jobs, but are meant to be a representative sample.

American colleges and universities with the most graduates in high-paying tech jobs:

The 18 schools listed here returned over 1,000 hits using our LinkedIn search parameters. If the LinkedIn results are representative, then graduates of these 18 schools alone account for about 40% of all employees at high-paying tech jobs. (66,628 total search results vs. a cumulative 26,521 search results for these 18). The University of California-Berkeley, located not far from Silicon Valley, has by far the most employees at high-paying tech jobs in proportion to the number of graduates.

Qualifying institutions with the highest reported starting salaries:

Computer science is one of the few majors that make paying full price for college a good fiscal investment. Unsurprisingly, most of the schools that produce graduates with the highest computer science starting salaries are also very expensive, costing well over $60,000 per year. One school whose graduates earn good starting salaries, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is relatively more affordable. (Note that the price is not the full cost of attendance; this includes only tuition, required fees, room, and a meal plan. We recommend adding $5,000-$10,000 to estimate total cost of attendance.) 

[ps2id id=’results’ target=”/]

Results

The IvyAchievement CS Employment Top 40:

Results of the analysis were striking. People tend to think of “rankings” as linear: going from 1 to 10 is the same as going from 20 to 30 or from 40 to 50. Our rankings are anything but:

The top-ranked schools have a huge employment advantage. When we charted the CSEI against the rank, we saw a rapid drop in employment prospects through the top 40, a plateau from 40-60, and then a steady decline. Here are the top 40 schools labeled so you can see how they stack up against one another and to schools ranked below 40.

The IvyAchievement CS Employment Top 40 contain a mix of types of schools. Just over half (21) are private research universities (Caltech, Stanford, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, UPenn, Princeton, MIT, Cornell, USC, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Rice, Santa Clara, Northwestern, Seattle University, Harvard, WPI, RPI, and Tufts); there are also public schools (Berkeley, University of Washington, UCLA, Georgia Tech, UCSD, UT-Austin, UC-Davis, Cal Poly, UIUC, San Jose State, the University of Florida, Penn State, Michigan, UVA, and Texas A&M); co-ed liberal arts colleges (Harvey Mudd and Pomona) and women’s liberal arts colleges (Wellesley and Mount Holyoke).

The top 20 schools issue at most 15% of all computer science degrees in the Untied States, but if our LinkedIn data is representative, their graduates account for around 30% of all high-paying tech jobs. Graduates of these top 20 schools also make a lot more money:

The average reported median starting salary (non-weighted) for schools in the top 10 was $92,748. The top 20 stay above $90,000 on average. The average median starting salary for the IvyAchievement CS Employment Top 40 was $83,802. For schools ranked 41-60, the average median starting salary was $71,721, over $12,000 lower. For schools ranked 81-120, it was even lower at $65,935. (We should note that this is still higher than the median income in the United States.)

Here is a plot of our two factors (Relative Employment and Median Starting Salary) on separate axes. This is where things get really interesting:

We’ve chosen to label several popular schools outside the Top 40. Taking a look at how schools are grouped (especially within the Top 40), we see some interesting features:

• Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, and Harvey Mudd, all located in California (Berkeley and Stanford in the San Francisco Bay Area; Caltech and Harvey Mudd in Los Angeles County), stand far above all others. This was visible in the linear plot above, but this plot makes the advantage even more stark.

• All the Ivy League schools except Harvard are in the same area on the plot. This suggests employers don’t discriminate among the Ivies.

• Of the Ivies, Princeton, Penn, and Dartmouth have a slight edge in salary, while Columbia, Cornell, and Yale have a slight edge in job placement.

• MIT graduates have high starting salaries but are not as represented at top tech companies. This is probably not because they can’t get jobs at the top companies, but because they go to smaller, less established companies.

• Harvard, Tufts, Wellesley, and WPI, which are all in the Boston area, are also in the same general range on both axes. Relative employment is not high, but salaries are comparable to top schools elsewhere in the country. 

• Several California public schools (UCSD, UC-Davis, Cal Poly, and SJSU) fare similarly in our computer science employment rankings. Berkeley and UCLA, usually considered the most prestigious California public schools, have a huge advantage in job placement, but only Berkeley grads enjoy an appreciable advantage in salaries.

• There is similar performance among graduates of Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland-College Park, UVA, and Virginia Tech, all located in the same general geographical area. Only UVA makes our Top 40. 

• UT-Dallas and UT-Arlington fare similarly to each other and very poorly in comparison with flagship campus UT-Austin. As noted earlier, UT-Dallas places many graduates at top tech companies, but a smaller proportion of their computer science graduates gets hired.

• Several public schools (the University of Washington, UCLA, Georgia Tech, the University of Florida, Penn State, Texas A&M, ASU, UCSB, Purdue, and North Carolina State) have relatively weaker starting salaries relative to their job placement compared to their peers. This is likely due to graduates taking lower-paying jobs at top companies and/or geographic areas with lower salaries.

• Graduates among private-public rivals USC/UCLA and Rice/Texas perform nearly identically in the job market. Employment outcome need not be a factor in deciding between these rivals.

• Speaking of rivalries, Duke far outperforms its local rivals UNC and North Carolina State University in high-paying tech job placement. There may be a “research triangle,” but there is no “jobs triangle.” Duke is the indisputable No. 1 in North Carolina for computer science employment.

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) graduates also perform nearly identically to each other. (This does not do much to help students considering RPI vs. WPI, but may assure them that they won’t go wrong.) Coincidentally, they also perform similarly to the California Polytechnic State University.  

Comparison with Other rankings

Below is a table comparing IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings with other computer science rankings, namely:

• U.S. News & World Report Graduate Schools – Computer Science

• Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 – Computer Science

• QS World University Rankings 2018 – Computer Science and and Information Systems

• CSRankings.org – Publications from 2013-2018

Examining the IvyAchievement Top 40, our rankings correlate quite well with Times Higher Education’s, followed by U.S. News:

(This does not include schools outside the IvyAchievement CS Top 40, some of which are ranked highly by others.)

U.S. News

U.S. News & World Report has been ranking colleges for several decades. They provide computer science rankings only for graduate schools. There is only one metric for the U.S. News computer science rankings: a survey of academics asking to rate institutions other than their own. The graduate school exclusivity means that liberal arts colleges are not ranked at all by U.S. News for computer science, and the methodology means that research universities without a national reputation or with a heavier emphasis on undergraduate education are likely to be ranked lower, if at all. This is the correlation between the Computer Science Employment Index for our CS Top 40 and the raw reputation scores for U.S. News for the same schools:

It is notable that despite completely different methodology, all but two of the IvyAchievement CS Top 40 schools are in the U.S. News top 52, if they are ranked. Schools in the IvyAchievement CS Employment Top 40 not ranked by U.S. News include two co-ed liberal arts colleges (Harvey Mudd and Pomona College); women’s liberal arts colleges (Wellesley and Mount Holyoke); two state universities in California (San Jose State and Cal Poly); and two private universities in major tech hubs (Santa Clara University and Seattle University). Because these schools are not ranked by U.S. News, we believe they are overlooked by aspiring computer science applicants, especially international applicants who may be less familiar with non-flagship state schools and liberal arts colleges.

A few notable differentials between the IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings and the U.S. News rankings were Dartmouth (#9 in our ranking vs. #40 for U.S. News); MIT (#12 vs. #1); UIUC (#29 vs. #5); Tufts (#24 vs. #70); Worcester Polytechnic Institute (#33 vs. #90); and the University of Michigan (#36 vs. #13).

MIT’s relatively low ranking was a bit surprising. As seen above, it takes a hit because of its job placement statistics. 

Four schools appearing in the U.S. News top 34 were outside our top 60: Ohio State, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Minnesota Twin-Cities, and Rutgers. All are large state schools whose average salaries are likely lower than those in states with more tech firms. UNC Chapel Hill’s relatively poor showing (#75) is one of the most surprising results, putting it just below rival North Carolina state and well below Duke.

Times Higher Education

Times Higher Education (THE) ranks 300 universities based on “13 performance indicators” including research citations, reputation, and teaching environment. For individual fields such as computer science, the “methodology has been recalibrated to suit the individual fields,” although it is unclear precisely how.

The Times Higher Education rankings correlate well with the IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings Top 40:

Removing four outliers (Harvard, Dartmouth, UIUC, and RPI), we get an excellent correlation:

The “industry Income” metric at first glance would seem to suggest employment outcomes, but it only weakly correlates with the IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings:

There is even less correlation if median starting salary is placed on the x-axis:

THE’s rankings are well researched and impressive in their scope, but there are some very conspicuous omissions: Times Higher Education does not rank Yale, Duke, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, or Johns Hopkins for computer science. These are major institutions to which most top students consider applying. Although we laud THE for not ranking schools where sufficient data was unavailable, this makes their computer science rankings much less helpful to those choosing schools based on employment prospects. THE also does not rank liberal arts colleges, smaller research universities such as Tufts and the University of Rochester, or several public schools in California (including UC-Davis, Cal Poly, and SJSU).

Twenty-four of our IvyAchievement Top 40 were ranked by Times Higher Education. Of all the rankings we examined, THE’s rankings correlated with ours the most closely. Similarly to the U.S. News results, none of our Top 40 were ranked lower than #56 in the United States by THE. Notable discrepancies with THE include Dartmouth (IvyAcheivement #9 vs. THE #29); the University of Wisconsin-Madison (#47 vs. #15); the University of Chicago (#49 vs. #18); the University of Maryland (#56 vs. #15); Purdue (#65 vs. #20); and UNC-Chapel Hill (#72 vs. #25). Thus, as with the U.S. News results, a few large state schools underperform in our rankings.

QS World University Rankings

Quacquarelli Symonds, a higher-education marketing company, publishes “Computer Science and Information Systems” specific rankings. Metrics they use include “Academic Reputation,” “Employer Reputation,” “Citations Per Paper,” and “H-Index” (which tries to measure academic citation impact). For “Employer Reputation,” employers are asked to identify up to 10 domestic institutions and 30 international institutions they consider best for recruiting graduates, and QS gives more weight to regions with which the respondents are familiar. The QS World University Rankings survey is based entirely on opinion and not real-world employment outcomes. When plotted against the IvyAchievement Computer Science Employment Index, there is only a weak correlation:

Particularly notable is that Harvard earns the highest score in the QS computer science reputation survey where it clearly falls short of its peers in computer science job placement, and Carnegie Mellon graduates far outperform their college’s reputation. This is likely due to the international nature of the QS survey, as people assume “Harvard” must mean “good.”

Of our top 50, QS omits the same schools as U.S. News does, including liberal arts colleges and regional colleges/universities. Thus, the QS rankings are of limited value to those interested in computer science education and employment outcomes.

CSRankings.org

CSRankings.org is maintained by UMass-Amherst computer scientist Emery Berger. The site draws on DBLP, “on-line reference for bibliographic information on major computer science publications.” The scores and rankings generated by CSRankings.org reflect publications per institution by “faculty that have appeared at the most selective conferences.” Thus, the ranking reflects those who are employed by universities, not by tech companies. We include this ranking for comparison because students may wish to apply to and enroll in a university with strong research for intellectual curiosity or in contemplation of pursuing academia.

Ideally, CSRankings.org could be used to calculate the number of publications per faculty member, but this is more difficult than it seems. CSRankings.org reports number of faculty, but determining the relevant number is difficult, as faculty are distributed across departments, and departments are organized differently from university to university. (For example, MIT and Berkeley have departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, whereas many other schools have separate departments.) Our attempts to include a computer science faculty-to-student ratio ran into these difficulties. We would have liked to include this figure in our rankings, but we were unable to come up with statistics and were consistent and fair from school to school.

Given the IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings and the CSRankings.org figures, there is clearly a group of all-around leaders in computer science that excel in both academic output and job placement:

The schools highlighted above are the best all-around choices for computer science in the United States and will provide the best opportunities for a career in computer science, whether professionally or doing research. They are the only schools in the top 25 of both IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings and the CSRankings.org. They are also in the top 25 of U.S. News, Times Higher Education, and QS rankings for American schools.

Why not UIUC? UIUC clearly has an excellent computer science department with world-leading research and recruitment by the hottest tech companies. It is without doubt an academic powerhouse. However, its graduates’ employment outcomes aren’t as good as some private colleges’ and several of of its state-school peers’. This may be affected by its Midwestern U.S. location, away from big tech hubs.

[ps2id id=’canada’ target=”/]The Best Canadian Schools for Computer Science Employment

The IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings include only schools in the United States. We would like to rank Canadian schools as well, but we don’t have access to all the same data points and salary data would not be directly comparable. Here are the LinkedIn search results and some basic analysis:

The University of Waterloo reports just over 3,000 enrolled students. Assuming the University has graduated 3,000 students 2013-2016, this yields a Relative Employment score of .41, around the same as Washington State University and Rutgers University (and slightly higher than MIT!). Please contact us below if you can provide statistics on the number of computer science degrees awarded by Canadian schools.

Our search parameters are for mostly American companies, so it makes sense that a large proportion of the overall results indicate employment in the United States. Waterloo, UBC, McGill, and Queen’s University all had the majority of their search in the United States.

Conclusion

We hope you have found our computer science rankings and analysis informative and helpful. To our knowledge, this is the most in-depth look at computer science outcomes and rankings available to the public. We welcome questions, comments, input, and feedback. We feel our rankings are well researched, but they are not set in stone, and we are eager to correct any errors. We would especially like to hear from you if you are:

• A prospective applicant deciding where to apply

• A current applicant or parent doing research on schools

• An admitted applicant choosing where to enroll

• A high school counselor who would like more information and guidance

• A university admissions officer or other official who wants to correct or clarify any information

• A higher-education business professional who is interested in partnering with IvyAchievement

Notes

IPEDS

Schools report various degrees awarded, including several in the “Computer and Information Sciences” category, including computer science, data science, and computer programming. For our rankings, we used the most widely reported category, “Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services” as well as “Computer Engineering.” For schools that reported degrees in categories other than “Computer Science” and “Computer Programming” (e.g. “Information Science, Computer Networking”), we subtracted the non-coding degrees. In our initial analysis, we included schools that awarded at least five “Computer and Information Sciences and Related” degrees in 2017. We used data from 2013-2016 inclusive. Our final ranking includes schools that awarded at least 40 computer science or computer engineering degrees in that time period (an average of 10 per year).

LinkedIn

Location: United States

Graduation year: We limited search results to include candidates who finished school between 2012 and 2017 inclusive. This was to minimize the effects of industry experience on job placement and bias results toward early career placement. One limitation is that LinkedIn does not allow for differentiation between college and graduate school. However, we believe that the quality of program will be largely consistent between graduate and undergraduate.

Position: Software Engineer; Software Developer; Senior Developer; Senior Software Developer; Senior Software Engineer; Associate Software Engineer; Programmer; Software Programmer; Application Developer; Developer; Java Engineer; Software Development Engineer; Full Stack Developer; Engineer; and Senior Engineer Web Developer. Although this list may not be exhaustive, it most likely would not include those in sales, marketing, human resources, and non-software management positions.

Companies: Adobe; Airbnb; Amazon; Apple; Arista; Bloomberg; Brocade; Cisco; Citrix; Dropbox; eBay; Expedia; Facebook; Google; HP; IBM; Intel; Intuit; Juniper Networks; KLA-Tencor; LinkedIn; Microsoft: NVIDIA; Oracle; PayPal; Qualcomm; Salesforce; Symantec; Texas Instruments. These were derived from various “best companies to work for” and “software companies with highest starting salary” lists. We purposely did not include consulting companies such as Accenture and large outsourcing companies such as InfoSys.

PayScale

We used data scraped from PayScale’s website and directly from U.S. News Compass™. Where there were differences between the figures, we used the higher of the two. 

Several schools offer computer engineering degrees separate from computer science. Computer engineering is a separate category in PayScale as well. All of the schools we analyzed for which PayScale reports computer engineering salaries happened to report their computer engineering degrees in IPEDS, except for MIT. (MIT offers degrees in “computer science and engineering” as well as other computer-related fields.) 

For all schools reporting computer engineering degrees, we used reported data to calculate a weighted average of the median starting computer science and computer engineering salaries. 

PayScale reports a median starting salary for “computer and information sciences” at MIT of $95,700 and a median starting salary for “computer engineering” of $102,300. Because the primary computer science degree at MIT is “computer science and engineering,” we used the higher figure unweighted. Using the lower figure, MIT’s rank would be #17 (just behind Columbia) rather than #12.

Dartmouth does not offer computer engineering as a major, but PayScale reports a median starting salary of $81,800 nonetheless. For our computer science rankings, we used the “computer science” figure unweighted. Using the lower figure, Dartmouth would be #21 (just behind Brown) rather than #9.

The post The 2018 IvyAchievement Computer Science Rankings appeared first on IvyAchievement.

Because you’re entering a war zone, we have prepared a commencement speech for you and the rest of Class of 2021. Don’t stop reading – this is important.

Firstly, congratulations to our clients who got into their dream school this week! Needless to say, our clients are amongst the top of their class and have worked hard to get into their school of choice. Here’s a list of the schools our clients were admitted to: Yale University, Columbia University in the City of New York, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Williams College, Duke University, University of Notre Dame, and NYU Stern Undergraduate College!

As a reminder, there’s a major difference between early decision and early action. The primary difference is that early decision acceptances are binding while early action acceptances are non-binding. This means that if you were admitted to the University of Pennsylvania through early decision, you must attend the University of Pennsylvania (this is nothing to be upset about, after all). Otherwise, you have a couple of months to make a decision. Spend it wisely.

To the incoming Class of 2021, we have prepared a speech to help you prepare for the journey that’s ahead. Now, without further ado:

…

Class of 2021,

So you spent immense hours on your early decision or early action applications. Too many nights did you stay up to revise your personal statements to meet the maximum word count; you even have a file saved for each of the 43 respective drafts of your essay. The countless hours you put into your club positions or volunteering are starting to weigh in. And alas, you were finally accepted into your dream school last week. Great! So your work here is done now, right? Time to sit back and relax?

Nope. It’s not that simple.

If you were accepted through either your early action or early decision application, you’re likely feeling joyous, and you should be! For many others, though, they might be under a lot of pressure – and with good reason.

Getting into your dream school is only the tip of the iceberg; the real battle begins in the fall when your first set of classes begins. What students don’t realize is that they had just signed up for war. The academic rigor of a top university challenges students to step out of their boundaries not only on a mental capacity but on an emotional capacity as well. Therefore, the time between receiving your admissions letter and attending your school of choice should be spent in what we call “preparation mode.”

During preparation mode, you will probably be asking yourself a series of tough questions. “What’s more important to me: the engineering program at MIT, or the financial aid package Cornell is offering me?” “Will I like the ‘vibe’ of the Yale campus and neighborhood in downtown New Haven?” “What will living on the east coast be like? (It’s so cold out there…)” These types of questions will be some of the most important determinants when choosing your school. Here’s some wisdom we thought we’d share with you:

Be Smart Financially

Money is a huge factor when it comes to picking your school. Students are often presented with the dilemma of sacrificing going to their dream school to attend a school that’s offering a better financial aid package. For example, one of our clients received a much more preferable offer from Yale University than Princeton University, which ultimately led to her decision in attending Yale.

Sure enough, reducing your student loan debt now can provide a lot of financial relief a couple years down the line. Because each school offers different financial aid packages, the amount of financial aid that you receive is important to consider when weighing your options.

“The School Is Nice, But I Hate Living Here!”

Committing to a school means committing to your home for the next two to four years. Not only is this the place you will be attending classes and participating in different clubs and organizations, but you will be living there as well. Students often forget that the school they choose to attend will also be the same place where they carry out their daily lives: eat, shower, study, sleep – you name it.

Having early exposure to your prospective school of choice can help give you a better idea of whether the campus is a right fit. If you have attended the Yale Young Global Scholars (YYGS) academic summer program in the past and think you would be happy attending Yale, then your decision is already made. You could probably withdraw from all other schools and be satisfied with your decision. If you haven’t had a chance to step onto campus, then go visit! If you are unable to physically visit, many top universities have virtual tours that you could navigate online. Take advantage of technology!

Stay Diligent

Last but not least, don’t fall victim to senioritis! It’s very tempting to take it easy in school now that you have been admitted into your dream school, but it’s extremely important to stay on top of your game.

Colleges and universities will still require you to do well in your classes and continue to excel. For that reason and while it’s rare, schools reserve the right to rescind their acceptance offer to you if they spot any red flags, such as getting a D in AP Chemistry during your last semester. With that being said, stay diligent for the remainder of the school year! It’s the final stretch!

Over the next couple of years, you will begin facing novel challenges, like living on your own, figuring out how to choose a major, and adapting to an irregular schedule. You will also likely find yourself working much harder than you did in high school and wanting to become involved on campus. You may even find an internship that will lead to your next job! These are only a couple of the challenges that will come your way, but when the time comes, you’ll be prepared because, well… you prepared!

As the winter holidays have finally come to an end and the year of 2017 commences, students should also begin thinking about the next steps, such as applying to FAFSA (if you haven’t already) and taking their last SAT or ACT tests. Of course, you should take the time after graduation to let loose a bit and relax, but remember not to let your guard down.

As previously mentioned, it’s extremely important to stay on top of your classes to make sure you protect your early action or early decision acceptance offer. Too often do students begin to slack off before even graduating, forgetting that their admission to their dream school is provisional. In other words, schools can rescind their offers to its provisional students. Keep on studying!

And lastly, if you weren’t accepted through early action or early decision, it’s not the end of the world! The school year is not over, and you will still likely get into one of your top schools of choice. College may bring you some of your most memorable experiences in your life, and taking the time to pick the school that’s right for you is essential. You don’t want to just settle for a school because you had trouble deciding. Picking your college of attendance will take some brainwork, but we believe that you have it in you. Stay diligent and stay warm.

Class of 2017, “May the Force be with you.” (Star Wars)

The post Letter to Class of 2021: Prepare for War appeared first on IvyAchievement.

This Wednesday, May 28, 2018 is “Ivy Day,” when all eight members of the Ivy League release their undergraduate admissions decisions. In honor of Ivy Day, our founder and CEO Ben Stern will become the first person to visit all eight schools in a single day. (We don’t think this has ever been done; if you have and can prove it, please let us know.) He will be accompanied for at least part of the trip by Columbia University student Mohak Sharma.

Geographically, Cornell University (located in Ithaca, New York) is separated from the other schools by a considerable distance: around four hours from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and over five hours from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Ben and Mohak’s itinerary will start out in Ithaca, NY with a quick stop at Cornell and end in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania:

Accounting for traffic and gas stops, total driving time will be about 15-16 hours. With half an hour for each stop, total time should be around 19 hours. Departing at 5AM should allow Ben and Mohak to arrive in Philadelphia by midnight.

This is not the shortest possible route, which would be Cornell->Penn->Princeton->Columbia->Yale->Brown->Harvard->Dartmouth (or the reverse), but Ben has chosen to start at Cornell and end at Dartmouth because:

1. He lives in New Jersey and would like to minimize his overall driving time. Following the shortest route, ending at Dartmouth or starting at Penn would require significant additional driving back to central New Jersey, whereas Penn is about an hour away.
2. Ben wants to avoid driving in rural areas at nighttime. Starting at Cornell and ending at Dartmouth or vice versa would mean doing significant rural driving both early in the morning and late in the evening. Sunrise on Wednesday is just before 7AM EDT, so most of the trip from Cornell to Dartmouth will be after dawn.
3. Ben enjoys driving in beautiful Upstate New York! New York driving would be limited on the shortest route.

This is the tentative itinerary:

• 5am depart Ithaca

• 10:30am arrive Hanover (visit Dartmouth)

• 11:00am depart Hanover

• 1:30pm arrive Cambridge (visit Harvard and MIT)

• 2pm depart Cambridge

• 3:30 pm arrive Providence (visit Brown)

• 4pm depart Providence

• 6pm arrive New Haven (visit Yale)

• 7pm depart New Haven (allotting an hour in New Haven for pizza!)

• 8:30pm arrive New York (visit Columbia)

• 9pm depart New York

• 10:30pm arrive Princeton (visit Princeton University)

• 11pm depart Princeton

• 12am arrive Philadelphia (visit University of Pennsylvania)

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The post Ivy Day Grand Tour – Visiting all 8 Ivy League Schools appeared first on IvyAchievement.

IvyAchievement founder and CEO Ben Stern sought to commemorate “Ivy Day” (the day all eight Ivy League colleges release their admissions decisions) by visiting all eight schools. Ben recruited Columbia student Mohak Sharma (who transferred from Drexel University) to come along for the ride.

Ben formulated an ambitious plan:

• 5am depart Ithaca, New York (quick stop on Cornell’s campus)
• 10:30am arrive Hanover, New Hampshire (visit Dartmouth)
• 11:00am depart Hanover
• 1:30pm arrive Cambridge, Massachusetts (visit Harvard)
• 2pm depart Cambridge
• 3:30 pm arrive Providence, Rhode Island (visit Brown)
• 4pm depart Providence
• 6pm arrive New Haven, Connecticut (visit Yale)
• 7pm depart New Haven (allotting an hour in New Haven for pizza!)
• 8:30pm arrive New York City, New York (visit Columbia)
• 9pm depart New York
• 10:30pm arrive Princeton, New Jersey (visit Princeton University)
• 11pm depart Princeton
• 12am arrive Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (visit University of Pennsylvania)

Could it be done? Read on to find out!

The post Visiting all eight Ivy League campuses in one day appeared first on IvyAchievement.

The long-awaited 2019 IvyAchievement International College Admissions and Financial Aid Guide is finally here. Download it now!

Our International College Admissions and Financial Aid Guide includes the following data for over 300 schools:

• Institution name and nickname(s)
• City and state
• University/college type and religious affiliation
• US News National University, Liberal Arts College, Engineering, and Business rankings
• International enrollment
• International financial aid information
• Cost of attendance with and without financial aid
• Largest merit scholarship available at each college, including which colleges offer full tuition and full rides to international students
• Athletic scholarships for international students
• On-campus employment
• Cooperative employment programs (co-ops)
• SAT and ACT percentiles
• SAT/ACT and SAT Subject Test requirements
• Overall and international acceptance rate
• International student yield
• TOEFL and IELTS requirements
• Conditional admission and remedial English programs
• Deadlines for ED, ED2, EA, RD, and scholarships
• International and overall retention rates and graduation rates

We have assembled all this data in one PDF and are making it available absolutely free of cost.

The IvyAchievement staff drew from multiple sources, including:

• University-published Common Data Sets for 2017-2018 (nearly 200)
• Peterson’s CollegeData
• IPEDS (United States Department of Education Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System)
• U.S. News & World Report
• College websites and press releases

We painstakingly checked, validated, and corrected the data we collected. Each source had various issues, and we did the work to bring you the most reliable, accurate data on international admissions and financial aid available anywhere.

We also have an interactive, sortable Google Docs version available. Please click here to request access. There is no cost for access, but you may be asked to verify your identity and/or affiliation.

The post IvyAchievement 2019 International College Admissions and Financial Aid Guide appeared first on IvyAchievement.

by Benjamin P. Stern, Founder & CEO of IvyAchievement

Taking time off from studies between high school and college (a “gap year”) is becoming increasingly common. Nearly 20 years ago, education professionals at Harvard University (including long-time Dean of Admissions & Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons) wrote a comprehensive argument for why a gap year is beneficial. I encourage everyone to read their piece, entitled Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation, which was originally published in The New York Times. Since the article was written, many colleges have followed Harvard’s lead—as they often do in admissions—and routinely encourage students to take time off. In 2019, the arguments for taking a gap year are even stronger.

I would like to use this article not to re-hash or summarize the Harvard article, but to highlight and elaborate upon considerations specific to international students and their families. First, Part A discusses why international students would benefit from a gap year. Next, Part B addresses common objections families have to taking a gap year. Finally, Part C addresses the few situations in which a gap year might not be advisable. (Click on any of the links to skip directly to that part!)

The majority of applicants to American and Canadian colleges apply when they are still in high school. Traditionally, students who take time off before college first gain admission and then defer matriculation for a year so that they can take a gap year. (I did exactly that, deferring my Early Decision acceptance to Columbia University.) However, nearly all colleges allow students to apply after senior year. For reasons I will discuss below, applying during a gap year rather than the final year of high school makes more sense for international students. It is no wonder this option is becoming more popular!

[ps2id id=’parta’ target=”/]A. Why take a gap year?

The main reasons to take a gap year are: (1) it’s healthier both mentally and physically; (2) it makes for a stronger candidate; and (3) it makes students more prepared for college. These factors are especially applicable to international students. Let’s explore each of these independent and individually compelling reasons:

1. Taking a gap year is healthier.

The pressure of high school and the college admissions process is well documented and familiar to all aspiring college students. The Harvard article discusses this at length, including how pressure to get into the “right” school starts in infancy. But international students have it particularly tough.

It’s better for mental health.

In many countries, pressure to perform well academically is overwhelming. The United States has no standard curriculum and most top colleges use holistic admissions processes, so there is no single factor that determines admission. (Some states have a Board of Regents that conducts examinations, but these exams are used only for admission to state schools.) In contrast, many countries have national curricula and/or college entrance examinations. For example, India has two national curricular options, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination (ISC), as well as state-administered boards that mirror the national curricula. The highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) determines admission to the top engineering schools, and the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) conducts a competitive exam for entrance to their professional-track MBBS program. Colleges other than IIT and AIIMS often use the top schools’ exams for their own admissions purposes. All students in Vietnam take the National High School Graduation Examination, which is now also used for college admissions purposes (the Vietnamese Department of Education used to conduct a separate entrance examination). China, Korea, and many other countries have national exams as well. These national exams, unlike the SAT and ACT, are given once a year, meaning a minor illness or even just nerves can have a huge impact on a child’s future.

Culture plays an important role too. In countries like India, China, and Vietnam, there is immense cultural pressure to perform well, and kids often feel their value lies in their performance on these board and entrance exams. Each May, I see parents in India posting on Facebook and sharing WhatsApp messages bragging that their child scored well on board exams. Exam coaching centers take out full-page advertisements in newspapers and fill up billboards with names and pictures of their state and national “toppers.” I’ve worked with students who have been beaten with belts, shoes, and even cricket bats for attaining low marks, and parents seem to have no regrets about meting out such punishments. Exam results can directly affect marriage prospects: Indian matrimonial ads will prominently feature “IITan.” There is even an Indian matrimonial site specifically for graduates of IIT and IIM (Indian Institute of Management), featured in The Wall Street Journal. Students from countries with this type of achievement-centered culture face a level of pressure beyond what most American kids face. (First and second-generation immigrant families may relate more.) This means that literature regarding the pressure of dealing with college admissions should be taken even more seriously.

A gap year does not resolve the societal and cultural factors that pressure children and drive stress levels to unhealthy extremes, but delaying the college admissions process until after graduation can help alleviate the pressure. The college admissions process for American colleges involves standardized testing, listing extracurricular activities, writing essays (often 50 or more), and soliciting letters of recommendation. It is very difficult to juggle all these activities while living up to parents’ expectations for academic performance. By allowing their kids to take a gap year, parents can make things a little easier for their children while not compromising on their expectations. In turn, kids will be able to focus on doing the best they can. Taking a gap year simply makes sense for both parents and kids.

It’s better for physical health.

Taking a gap year can also improve physical health. Kids all over the world are exercising less and spending less time outdoors. A gap year can give kids an opportunity to be more physically active. Also important is sleep: a well-planned gap year can be challenging and rewarding, yet allow for a healthy amount of sleep for a teenager. Students struggling with their weight can use a gap year to establish good habits, and weight loss is much easier when stress levels are low (and ages 18-19, when metabolism is high). College (especially in rigorous programs like engineering, computer science, and business) is challenging, and kids should enter as healthy as possible. A gap year is a great opportunity to get healthy.

2. Taking a gap year makes for a stronger candidate.

With very few exceptions, a student will be a stronger candidate with a gap year than without one. This is because a gap year leads to better academic outcomes, a more comprehensive extracurricular profile, and more time to work on applications.

It leads to better academic outcomes.

The academic benefits to taking a gap year are obvious. American college preparatory schools design curricula and schedules around college admissions. Teachers are aware of the college admissions process, high schools hold college fairs and host college representatives for information sessions and interviews, and exams are scheduled so as to not interfere with admissions. Because American high-school seniors spend a lot of time on college applications and then tend to “slack off” toward the end of senior year, many high schools have introduced alternative senior-year programs, in which students take few or even no classes at all in their senior year. The American holidays of Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday in November plus the following Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) and the ubiquitous Christmas break (from December 24 until January 1) are conducive to allowing kids to work on their college applications before November 30 and January 1 deadlines (or, perhaps more accurately, deadlines are scheduled to allow kids to work over these breaks from school).

International curricula and academic schedules are geared toward national exams and have breaks according to national holidays. For example, Indian schools begin the school year in April.  Midterm examinations are held in September or October, then schools break for Diwali, and then have preboard exams beginning in November or December. This makes it extremely difficult for students to adequately prepare for the September, October, November, and December SAT and ACT administrations, which are the last opportunities to achieve target scores for the application cycle. Vietnamese schools, on the other hand, begin in September but have no holidays more than a day long until Tet, the lunar new year, which can fall out anywhere from mid-January to late February. September testing dates are feasible, but there is little opportunity to work on college applications in the fall. But even if testing is out of the way (I find it rarely is), students still have to contend with juggling college applications and schoolwork.

Not having to worry about international college admissions means students can focus on performing well, which is important for both domestic and international admissions.

A gap year makes a huge difference academically for Indian high-schoolers in particular. Indian high schools tend to evaluate their 11^th grade exams as well as their 12^th-grade midterm and pre-board examinations harshly in order to encourage students to study harder an improve. It is not uncommon for a student with an 11^th-grade final average of 70% and a 12^th-grade midterm average of 75% to score in the mid-to-high 90s on 12^th-grade final exams. Some teachers go so far as to award no grade above 80% in some subjects! These grades have no consequence whatsoever for college admissions in India, but they are quite consequential for American and Canadian college admissions. Many Indian high schools—even ones where a large proportion of kids go abroad—pay little regard to this fact.

I am often asked by Indian students and parents how to explain or compensate for lower 11^th final and 12^th midterm and preboard marks. There are various ways to mitigate the impact of these lower scores (such as having a counselor indicate the student’s performance relative to others in the class), but there is only one answer that is 100% reliable: get high marks on final exams and apply next year. There is no substitute for the psychological reassurance an admissions officer gets when seeing scores above 90%. It also happens to be the case that some Indian students do achieve marks in the high 80s and low-90s in 11^th finals and 12^th midterms, and these students have an advantage in the admissions process. For kids without these scores, taking a gap year can help reduce this advantage. (Note that Indian students with high 11^th marks still have an advantage and should still take a gap year.) Although this situation may not hold true in all countries, 12^th-grade final results are generally more important than 11^th-grade results for gap year applicants.

Taking a gap year also gives students more time to take standardized tests (SAT, ACT, and/or TOEFL). All but a few colleges accept standardized testing in the year after high school. It is much easier to study for the SAT or ACT without balancing test preparation with school, and even knowing that one will have a gap year available to re-take an exam may reduce pressure during exams taken in 12^th grade. Additionally, students who take a gap year have the advantage of being able to include the results of AP exams taken after 12^th grade. This is a natural time to take them in countries like India, where subject curricula span two years and 11^th grade is usually too early to take APs.

It makes for a more comprehensive extracurricular profile.

Perhaps the most important part of taking a gap year is the opportunity to develop extracurricular activities. To revisit our comparisons with American prep schools, those schools offer copious opportunities for extracurricular activities. Outside of school, organizations offer opportunities for personal development, community service, and general resume-building.

A gap year provides a chance for international students to do something significant that does more than just “pad” their resume. As the Harvard authors explain:

Occasionally students are admitted to Harvard or other colleges in part because they accomplished something unusual during a year off. While no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college, time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college.

Harvard officials state unequivocally that taking a gap year can increase your chances of getting into top colleges. When they state that “no one should take a year off simply to gain admission to a particular college,” the authors are saying here that you shouldn’t take a year off just to get into Harvard, MIT, or any particular college of your choice. They go on to say that overall, a gap year is likely to make you a stronger candidate, and what you accomplish on your gap year can even be the distinguishing factor that makes a difference between admission and rejection.

For students at international schools with more extracurricular opportunities, a gap year can provide a chance to truly “stand out from the pack.”

3. After a gap year, students are more prepared for college.

Besides making students stronger “on paper,” a gap year allows kids and families to be more prepared for college. Going off to college is an important and major transition for kids and their families. It is a psychologically complex process for kids and parents alike. For most kids, it will be their first time living away from home, except perhaps for a summer camp. It can be difficult to move a few hundred kilometers across a state, let alone thousands of kilometers across an ocean—as most international students do. Students who have taken a gap year will be older and likely more mature and now better able to handle the separation. The gap year itself can (and often should) include time away from home in order to ease the transition. American college kids almost universally spend the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks at home with their families, and many American college students can hop on a plane or even head home for a comfort weekend any other time of the year (and parents can do the same to visit their children). Due to travel times and visa restrictions, international students and parents—even ones who are well-off—usually do not have this luxury. Thus, by easing the transition to university life, entering college after a gap year can foster long-term success.

[ps2id id=’partb’ target=”/]B. Common objections

Because taking a gap year is not the norm for international students, and because parents have a conception of what is “supposed to” happen with college admissions, I often encounter resistance when suggesting a gap year. I will address the most common objections here:

1. I don’t want (my child) to waste a year.

As the Harvard authors noted, “time away almost never makes one a less desirable candidate or less well prepared for college.” The authors have to hedge and say “almost” because it is possible for a gap year to be used ineffectively—for example mostly playing video games and/or engaging in leisure travel without cultural exposure and education. However, this can easily be avoided with proper planning and supervision. There are plenty of great activities to do during a gap year. Here are just a few examples, out of many possibilities:

• Community service
• Tutoring
• Religious studies/spiritual development
• Working for a local or international humanitarian organization
• Academic research in physical or social sciences
• Mastering a musical instrument
• Touring with a band
• Starting/running a business
• Shadowing a doctor or therapist
• Learning an unusual skill, like riding a unicycle or freediving
• Visiting cultural sites and live among people in another region or country
• Writing a book
• Joining a theater troupe
• Painting/drawing/sculpting and exhibiting artwork

Given the mental and physical health benefits of taking a gap year, it is very, very unlikely the extra year will be a “waste.” If you have at least a rough plan in place, then you and your family will benefit from a gap year.

2. All my friends/my friends’ children are going straight to college.

We understand that there is societal pressure to advance to the next stage in life. Kids want to feel like they’re growing up and parents want their kids to be “normal.”

High-school friendships, as cherished as they are, usually fade in college as new ones are formed. Even close romantic relationships usually fall by the wayside, as occurs with the so-called “turkey drop” before Thanksgiving weekend, as high-school sweethearts realize the challenges of a long-distance relationship and the opportunities to meet other suitable romantic interests. I can offer some advice for those worried about social life during a gap year:

To kids: It can be difficult to fathom an entirely different set of people in your life, but that is exactly what will happen when you go to college, whether it’s immediately after high school or not. During your gap year, stay in touch with your friends no matter where they are. If you’re home, you’ll get to see them when they come back for breaks; if you’re traveling, perhaps you can visit them. And if you end up attending the same college as one or more friends, your transition will be even easier, as you’ll have someone to turn to for advice and support.

You may also be able to do activities with other gap year students! As taking a gap year becomes more common, it is getting easier and easier to find other kids in a similar situation. Without the pressure of school, you may find yourself forming deep, meaningful relationships that will last a lifetime!

To parents: Your child may take some time to adjust to not having his or her friends around, but you can rest assured that he or she will make new friends in college. Colleges provide orientation programs where they integrate students and provide social activities. Being more mature will make it easier for your child to form meaningful friendships as well.

Finally, if parents and students take the advice of education professionals, taking a gap year will become the new “normal.” By allowing your child to take a gap year, you can be influential in making the whole process easier for your friends and family with younger kids who will be applying in the future.

3. It’s expensive.

With proper planning, a gap year will have minimal impact on your finances. If money is a concern, your child can get a job to help with their support. Letting your child take a gap year may even save you money, as several colleges have started to reduce tuition in a reversal of a long-running trend of tuition increases.

Additionally, the academic and extracurricular advantages your child will have make it much more likely he or she will qualify for a scholarship or get into a school that provides need-based financial aid. A $15,000 or $20,000 scholarship will more than make up for most gap-year expenses!

4. My child will forget what he/she learned and lose his/her edge academically.

As discussed in the Harvard article, research suggests this is highly unlikely.

Parents worry that their sons and daughters will be sidetracked from college, and may never enroll. Both fear that taking time off can cause students to “fall behind” or lose their study skills irrevocably. That fear is rarely justified. High school counselors, college administrators, and others who work with students taking time off can help with reassurance that the benefits far outweigh the risks.

After four rigorous years of high school and stress, a child is more likely to be “burnt out” and less likely to excel academically. But that doesn’t mean the brain needs to take a break! Gap year activities can and should include intellectual pursuits. The college application process itself will be an intellectual exercise, as your child will be required to write many essays requiring self-reflection, creative thinking, and expository skills. Students who took a gap year almost always are glad they did, and “not being used to school” is a very rare complaint.

5. I/my child will be viewed less favorably by admissions officers because colleges will think I/my child couldn’t handle everything in senior year.

This is simply not true. The admissions process is not a contest to see who can handle to most stress; it is a quest to find the most qualified students who will contribute to the campus community. Extracurricular activities are not “hoops” to jump through. Colleges seek out students with unique skills and extracurricular activities because they want kids to participate in extracurricular activities on campus. Trying to “impress” colleges by getting high grades and test scores while engaging in extensive extracurricular activities and working on college applications is the wrong approach. College admissions officers want to see the ability to balance various commitments, but they would much rather see another year of skill development and intellectual exploration. Attempting to do everything simultaneously is a high-risk, low-reward proposition: if you are weak in any area, you will be at a disadvantage in the admissions process. If you are capable of balancing academics, standardized tests, college applications, and extracurricular activities (which is impressive but not particularly rare), then what you are capable of in a gap year could make you truly singular and an even stronger candidate.

[ps2id id=’partc’ target=”/]C. When shouldn’t I take a gap year?

This article was almost entitled “Why Every International Student Should Take a Gap Year.”  Although a gap year is almost always beneficial, there are a few situations in which taking a gap year may not be advisable:

1. You are an athlete who has already been recruited by an NCAA Division-I school.

Recruiting for top athletic programs can start even before junior year of high school (11^th grade). Coaches may already have recruited students and secured commitment letters by December nearly two years before college entry (for example, a commitment in December 2018 for September 2020 admission). If you have been recruited and have already committed to a particular program, it may make sense not to take a gap year and instead begin your four years of NCAA eligibility per your agreement with the athletic program. Just make sure to meet their minimum academic requirements.

2. The political situation in your country makes it dangerous to stay.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people emigrate to escape violence, crime, and persecution. For many, college in the United States, Canada, or elsewhere is a ticket to freedom. If you can afford college (or are a strong enough candidate to qualify for the financial aid you need), then it may make sense to get a student visa and leave as soon as possible. But even if you are in such a situation, a gap year may be possible with tourist visas to other countries. The situation will differ from person to person and family to family, but a gap year may be less advised in some situations.

3. You have already taken more than one year off.

Occasionally, students take a year off during high school. Even in such a case, an additional year off after high school can be beneficial. However, if you’ve taken more than a year off, it may be advisable to begin your college career, perhaps at a community college or in your own country, and then apply for a transfer. Students who are conscripted into military service (for example in Israel, Singapore, and Germany) should also not take additional time off if they want to enroll in a four-year undergraduate program in the United States or Canada. Preferably, discharge from service should take place at least a few months before August.

4. You absolutely require a backup plan in your own country, and admission to a desirable university after a year off is not possible.

For personal or political reasons, families sometimes want a domestic option for their children in case study abroad does not work out. Usually, taking a gap year is no impediment to enrolling in a domestic college. However, if for some reason no adequate backup school allows admission after a gap year, then taking time off after high school is not a viable option. Instead, a transfer application would be advised. Keep in mind that just because deferral of admission or applying during a gap year is not common in your country, that doesn’t mean it is impossible. If you are in such a situation, it would benefit you to research the policies of the public and private institutions in your country. We find this reason to rarely be an impediment.

That’s it. These are the only situations I can think of in which taking a gap year might do more harm than good. To sum up: if you’re not a recruited athlete, it is not dangerous for you to stay in your home country, you haven’t taken more than one year off from school already, and you have or don’t need a domestic backup school, you should take a gap year!

Thinking about applying to college and need help deciding if a gap year is for you? Schedule a consultation with IvyAchievement!

The post Why (Almost) Every International Student Should Take a Gap Year appeared first on IvyAchievement.

High school summer programs on a college campus can be a great way for students to become familiar with what it’s like to be in a campus academic and social environment. Summer programs are especially helpful for international students who may not be familiar with American campus culture. These high school summer programs are held throughout the summer (in the northern hemisphere) and range in cost from free to many thousands of dollars.

Simply attending a college summer program will not likely boost admissions prospects unless the program is particularly selective, such as MIT Launch and PROMYS. However, the experiences students (especially international students) have encountering other kids from different backgrounds and being exposed to top-tier, world-renowned lecturers often lead to interesting ideas for admissions essays. Further, students can write confidently about what it’s like on a college campus, rather than simply imagining it. This is a particular advantage that international students can get in the admissions process over their peers, as many international applicants simply have never been on a college campus, even for a brief visit. Admissions officers will be more inclined to admit students who “know what they’re getting into.”

This list contains almost every summer program offered by colleges listed in the top 35 of the 2019 U.S. News & World Report National Universities rankings, plus dozens of other STEM, business, and arts programs. It does not include programs targeted at a particular geographic region or specific ethnic groups.

If you would like more data, including overall cost, cost per day, and financial aid availability to international students, please sign up for the Google Sheets version.

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Legendary college counselor and IvyAchievement CEO Ben Stern is currently in Delhi and is available for consultations. Whether you’re in high school, in college, or already graduated, you can get personalized guidance for admissions abroad.

Location:
Prius Platinum Building, DLF Saket 110017

Cost: INR 3000 for a 45-minute consultation (pay on site). First 15 to sign up get an INR 1000 discount!

The post Meet Ben Stern in Delhi July 2019 appeared first on IvyAchievement.

Wednesday, June 3 & Thursday, June 4, 2020 (choose one)

9:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
4:00 PM Arabian Standard Time
5:00 PM Gulf Standard Time
6:30 PM India Standard Time
8:00 PM Indochina Time
9:00 PM China/Singapore/Philippine Standard Time

For over a century, selective American colleges have expected students to engage in extracurricular activities throughout all four years of high school. Even in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, this expectation has not changed. In the coming year and beyond, colleges will judge applicants based on the creative ways they adapted to quarantines, lockdowns, and stay-at-home orders.

Your options may seem more limited in the current circumstances, but they are also limitless.

Through this webinar presented by IvyAchievement founder Ben Stern, learn how to make the most of the rest of the year and build an awesome college profile!

We will be joined by University of Toronto Lester B. Pearson Scholar Atharv Agrawal, an IvyAchievement student who earned a full-ride scholarship to study at one of the world’s top universities, as well as Asav Kumar, an incoming Caltech student. Both will share what extracurricular activities they’ve been doing for the past three months!

Zoom link will be provided to registered participants.

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