How Important Are College Rankings?

By Rajkamal Rao  

Ranking anything in the US is big business.  Cars, hospitals, colleges, phone companies, home builders and consumer products are all ranked by various media outlets and customer satisfaction companies.  

Consumers crave for rankings because it makes it easy for them to sift out good products and services from bad without having to do any product research themselves.  The organizations which are ranked covet these rankings and go to extraordinary lengths to appear high up in those annual lists.

When it comes to college rankings, our position is rather radical.  We strongly believe that for most students applying to U.S. college and graduate schools, rankings don't matter much at all.  There are far better ways to choose colleges than to use school rankings because there are just too many issues with current commercial rankings. We list them after the YouTube clip below.

Our approach is to not use rankings at all and look at what real students do when they receive offers of admission. The College Navigator, a world-class site operated by the U.S. Department of Education, maintains selectivity and yield numbers for all colleges in the admissions tab. Selectivity and Yield are critically important metrics in the higher education sector. Colleges with the lowest selectivity and highest yield are obviously the most sought-after institutions, and therefore, are ranked very high. Watch the clip below.

Why we don't use rankings

We promised ranking enthusiasts that we will explain our skepticism, bordering on cynicism, about college rankings - so here we go:

Problem #1:  Does the methodology make sense?

There are about a half a dozen outfits which publish college rankings.  Every outfit uses its own methodology to arrive at a rank.  U.S. News, the largest and most popular college ranking organization, says that it gathers and weights data from each college on some 15 indicators of academic excellence, such as:

1. Graduation and retention rates (22.5 percent)
2. Faculty resources, such as salary and class size (20 percent)

The weights reflect U.S. News' judgment about how much each measure matters.   Just as anyone who has played around with an Excel sheet knows, if you change the weights, the rankings would change too.  So, the first step in accepting U.S. News rankings as the Holy Gospel is that you agree that its indicators and the weights are just as meaningful to you as they are to U.S. News.

For most people, this is a problem.  Most students go to college or graduate school not only for the experience of learning and exploration, but also, to find better employment after graduation.  But the U.S. News ranking methodology does not consider how employers rank the school!  Nor does it include graduate placement statistics - details about how many (and the kinds of) jobs students got after graduation.  If the most famous ranking outfit does not think graduate outcomes are important, something is wrong!

Here's an excellent article in the NY Times in which a Columbia professor of math challenges Columbia's ranking. Here's his full 22-page post. And another article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that describes how Columbia and other top universities pushed master’s programs that failed to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans. Columbia is one of the highest-ranked schools by U.S. News and such a high ranking probably influenced many students to sign up for programs that clearly did not produce promised outcomes.

Problem #2:  Ranking is not the same as reputation

We do not need any publication to tell us that elite schools such as the Ivy Leagues or Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Duke, Rice and Carnegie Mellon are outstanding institutions of learning.  We already know this fact.  This kind of reputation is earned over decades (and in the case of the Ivy Leagues, centuries) of hard work and accomplishment.  In a sense, reputed schools are famous - for being famous.

Rankings, however, ebb or flow with the tide.  It is nearly impossible to take an institution with millions of complex interactions involving its management, faculty, students, parents, employers and trustees for nearly a year — and reduce them all to a number.

There’s also the question of how valid the underlying data - for all these interactions - is.  Most ranking outfits rely on the schools to provide them with information — such as admissions figures, financial resources, graduation figures and alumni giving — because a transparent, central hub of data does not exist. This creates an inherent conflict of interest.  If a school is truthful in its reporting to an external organization, it could potentially end up being ranked lower.  Should the school be truthful or aim to manipulate data a bit so that it can end up being higher?   When perfect data is not available, every ranking organization makes assumptions to compute scores.  Are these assumptions all valid?

The Obama White House criticized this approach in a September 2015 fact sheet as old and static, not consistent with what families and students need.  “The old way of assessing college choices relied on static ratings lists compiled by someone who was deciding what value to place on different factors”. [Emphasis ours].

Problem #3:  Commercial school rankings are, well, commercial

A key issue about commercial school rankings is exactly that — that is, these rankings are produced by commercial, for-profit companies, which love the status-quo.  The ultimate goal of these outfits is to sell their rankings or build a brand around them.  In 2007, the US News site was regularly getting about half-a-million hits a month.  Within three days of the rankings release, traffic went up to 10 million page views, a twenty-fold increase. In 2010, the company walked away from magazine publishing altogether focusing instead on its rankings business.

Another problem with rankings is that students are placed in the uncomfortable, counter-intuitive position of choosing a ranking system before choosing a school.  Each organization uses its own method to rank, so which ranking system is best for you?  If the school you like is ranked high in a few lists but ranked lower in the others, what should you do?

The Obama administration set out to correct these flaws.  Rather than rely on surveys and snapshots of data as the ranking outfits do, it proposed to use real data to rate the quality of colleges.  Every student who takes a student loan is lodged in the Department of Education database.  If a student transfers to another school, this information is also reported to the government. Every student who graduates and begins a career has to file a W-4 withholding form, so the IRS knows where this student went to work and how much she is making.  If a student failed to make loan payments over a consistent period, this information is also known to the government because the IRS has the power to divert tax refunds to unpaid loan amounts.

Problem #4:  The establishment likes the status-quo

With advances in data sciences and computing power, the government has the ability to come up with a technological solution to tie all of these disparate pieces of real information into a comprehensive ranking system that is based on actual data and not subject to commercial interests.  In 2013, President Obama announced that all 7,000 of the nation’s colleges would be ranked by the government.  As the New York Times reported, the aim was to “publicly shame low-rated schools that saddle students with high debt and poor earning potential.”

But the plan ran into fierce opposition. “Critics, including many of the presidents at elite private colleges, lobbied furiously against the idea of a government rating system, saying it could force schools to prioritize money making majors like accounting over those like English, history or philosophy.”

This type of thinking is at odds with the outcome based selection approach we have advocated for years.  If students are really passionate about subjects like English, history or philosophy, they may still choose careers in those fields but this should not stop them from knowing how much they may earn after graduation, or that the return on their college investment is likely to be poor.

The Obama White House succumbed to this pressure from the entrenched establishment and when the new College Scorecard was released in September 2015, it did not have a ranking system. The Trump administration did nothing to correct this issue. And it is unlikely that the Biden administration will rank colleges using outcome.   

Problem #5: The conflict of interest is paramount

Ranking outfits must rely on colleges to provide data and self-declare it as authentic. This presents a conflict of interest because some institutions could submit faulty data in the hopes that ranking outfits do not catch it. The result could be better rankings.

According to an indictment of Temple University's Fox School of Business by the U.S. Department of Justice, "relying on the false information it had received from Fox, U.S. News ranked Fox’s OMBA program Number One in the country four years in a row (2015 – 2018). U.S. News also moved Fox’s PMBA program up its rankings from No. 53 in 2014 to No. 20 in 2015, to No. 16 in 2016, and to No. 7 in 2017."

Our takeaway

Students are better off to use rankings sparingly and more as a final filter, if at all, rather than as a crucial pivot throughout the process.  Outcome based ranking lists, such as those from the College Scorecard (although not ranked) or Payscale.com are far better than commercial ranking lists because they keep your focus on the Return on your College Investment.

The best approach is to use selectivity and yield numbers from the College Navigator and base your decision on what other students do.


 

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Exciting summer programs for High School students

By Rajkamal Rao  

Image Courtesy: Rao Advisors

There are outstanding summer programs to keep your teenager engaged and active, while giving them an opportunity to make friends, learn, and have fun. 

 

Summer programs are also about exploration, so it is fine to have your child enroll in a program that you may consider to be outside of her interests or career goals. The best programs offer what a high school generally does not - an opportunity for hands-on, experiential, and collaborative learning in a space that supports scalable, real-world experiences.  

Click here for our expanded list of opportunities broken down into several tabs - Business, Computer Sci/AI, General Science & Engineering, Volunteering, Debates, Government & Leadership, International Relations & Foreign Languages, and Creative Pursuits (Fine Arts).

Notes

 

Colleges look for four components in a student's overall profile. Your chosen summer program must fulfill one or more of these components.

1. Commitment to an activity resulting in improving skills. If you are committed to an activity and keep doing it, you are naturally going to get better at it.
   
   
2. Team dynamics. When you are in an activity that promotes team dynamics, you learn to share, give, and take. 
   
   
3. Leadership. If you are good in #1 and #2 above, you could be promoted to a leadership role within your EC activity.
   
   
4. Service to community. The impact of your EC activity is important. Are you dedicating part of your week to helping others who are less fortunate than you are? Here are guidelines for the Presidential Volunteer Service Awards - this intensity of service is not required always, but, it is good to have on a resume at least for one year.
   

We recommend summer activities that will best help students reflectively describe in their college essays the way they grew, contributed, and learned.

• 11th-12th grade summer: Leadership programs; volunteering in field of major; research; internship, or job.
  
  
• 10th-11th grade summer: Research; volunteering; SAT/ACT/PSAT prep; explore summer learning.
  
  
• 9th-10th grade summer: Volunteering; explore summer learning.
  
  
• 8th-9th grade summer: Volunteering; explore summer learning.

STEM and Liberal Arts

Summer academic programs fall into two basic buckets, STEM and Liberal Arts. Non-academic programs range from providing service at a local nursing home to volunteering for an international organization such as the Red Cross. Work or internship options are also attractive ways to keep children engaged. For a review of why extracurricular activities are important, please read our post here. 

Applying early is critical.

Note: We do the best to maintain this popular page but we do not control the validity of the links. If a link leads to a dead page, please try creative searches on Google or ChatGPT to find the proper link. Please let us know the correct link so that we can keep this page updated. 

Liberal Arts & Humanities

For high school students who are interested in pursuing a political science, government, or international relations career, there are numerous opportunities. Many start off in high school clubs that culminate in inter-school competitions at the regional, state, or even national level. Other opportunities are available through essay competitions or internships.

The best ones are those that are sponsored by the government, or by organizations representing the government. It is never a good idea to pay exorbitantly for such experiences, so be wary of internships or pre-college programs or summer sessions at elite top schools such as Stanford, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Columbia, and Brown.

STEM

There are numerous STEM programs that may interest your child. Many require students to have demonstrated STEM skills in school through coursework and club activities. Some are open to all students.

Volunteering and Community Service

No matter what your passion for community service is, there's always an organization that is eager to have you volunteer.

It helps if you can tailor your interests to the current trend in college admissions. Since the 2020 George Floyd protests, there has been a national awakening, especially on college campuses, about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Some states have banned official consideration of DEI programs for hiring and college recruitment, but volunteering to help uplift disadvantaged communities will always be looked at in good light.

Black, Latino, Native American, Refugees, LGBTQ are good examples of communities that can benefit from your volunteering. Causes could include Rights & Criminal Justice, Education, Health, Immigration, Voting, Youth, Urban Poverty, Enterprise Zones, Financial Literacy, and the Economy.

Independent 501(c)(3) organizations

Many students pursue a passion for which no established organization exists. One client enjoyed painting on shoes and reselling them, using the profits from the sale to donate to an established charity. Another used her expertise in quilting to sell products on Etsy and contributing all of her profits to a charitable organization. Another used his passion for tennis to get other friends to join him and conduct tennis coaching camps, donating the proceeds to improve public tennis courts in the community. For such activities to be legal because money is involved, you are better off creating your own tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization named for a section of the I.R.S. code that regulates charities.

There are plenty of destination organizations that would be grateful for charitable contributions. 

If none of the above options appeals to you, look at our link to find causes to help you find an organization in your area. Often, local charities are the best places to find meaningful and fulfilling opportunities.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

It's getting harder to get into colleges using ED/EA

By Rajkamal Rao   
Updated, 12/30/2020

 

What is ED/EA?

An ED student commits to attending their first-choice college giving up many rights. If accepted, they voluntarily agree to withdraw applications to other colleges. The student is unable to compare financial aid offers because there are no competing offers, to begin with.

Early Decision - Image Courtesy: ACT.org

Early Action - Image Courtesy: ACT.org

In return, the college, grateful that students are willing to commit to it and lock in a seat, slightly lowers the standards of admission. For the student, this means an increased chance of winning admission.



At Tulane University, an elite school with an acceptance rate of less than 10%, 46,000 students applied to its class of 2026. Of the 1,800 freshmen seats available, nearly two-thirds who were admitted had applied ED (Tulane has two ED rounds with most admitted from the first round). Only 106 students gained acceptance from the regular decision pool.

This appeal - of landing a coveted slot early in the admissions process - is drawing more and more students to apply early in a game wrought with strategy, anxiety, high-fives, and unfortunately, disappointment. Which school should I apply ED to? Do I apply ED? Or EA, where my action is not binding? Do I apply restrictive EA (like to Yale and Stanford) where my action is not binding but I am still obligated to apply to no other school on an ED/EA basis?

 

 

Class of 2025 Analysis

The results of the Early Decision/Early Action programs at elite schools for the class of 2025 are all in. These numbers are for high school students who will start college in the Fall of 2021.

The table below shows that it is practically impossible to gain admission to the top schools in the regular pool. Top colleges continue to fill more seats during the ED/EA window leaving behind fewer seats for the regular season. This promise has resulted in an explosion in the number of students applying early forcing colleges to become extremely selective even for the early pool. At Harvard, the number of early applicants increased by a whopping 57 percent from last year, while 148 fewer students won admission.

Despite these grim statistics, the only chance of getting in, however slim, is through the ED/EA window. Our analysis proves this for six top schools - Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Rice, and Yale. We don't know the full regular admission numbers yet, so we assumed that the number of overall applicants will remain the same (as for the class of 2023, the latest year for which numbers are available) although many non-elite colleges are reporting lower student interest because of Covid-19.

Rao Advisors analysis based on numbers provided by the institutions

Class of 2024 Analysis (Detailed)

This analysis is for high school students who started college in the Fall of 2020. Here are some anecdotal results from clients we know.

1. Stanford EA. Denied. Someone ranked #11 out of 726 students at LD Bell High School; NMS Finalist; Perfect score on the ACT in Math and Reading. Varsity athlete.


2. Yale EA. Deferred. Someone who is a valedictorian in a TX high school near the DFW Airport.


3. Stanford EA. Denied. Someone who is a valedictorian in a Frisco ISD high school.


4. Cornell ED. Denied. Someone who is a star debater and won numerous UIL competitions, and was ranked close to 11% in a Houston ISD high school.


5. Duke ED. Denied. Someone who started a 503(c) non-profit for the empowerment of women and had outstanding extracurricular activities.

The 2024 ED/EA calculus for Yale (using real numbers)

To understand the power of the prestigious university's EA program, let's look at the class of 2023 - the latest for which public data is available at the time of writing of this post - when 36,844 students applied, all to win admission to the 1,526 freshmen spots that were open. Women won selection at a rate of 6%; men, 7%. These numbers were for the entire freshman class - students applying EA and regular decision.

For the class of 2024, Yale News reported that 796 students received offers of admission from the EA pool (out of 5,777 students who applied EA), so the selectivity of the EA pool was 13.78%, more than double the selectivity for women two years ago in the mixed overall pool (remember that it was 6%) and nearly double for men.

It's this distinguishing feature that attracts more and more students to apply for ED/EA: You substantially increase your chances of winning a seat - but with so many students applying, the ED/EA pool is becoming bigger and bigger each year. Just think of it this way. If everyone in the class of 2024 ED/EA pool had been given admission, that would nearly fill the entire Yale undergrad body, all four years of students!

Worse, ED/EA programs dramatically cut opportunities for students applying for regular admission.

Assume that the strength of the 2024 freshman class is the same as that for 2023 because top universities viscerally hate the idea of increasing class sizes. This means that 796/1526 = 52% of all spots are already awarded to the ED pool. Yale is an EA school - students are allowed to turn Yale down and go somewhere else - but truthfully, who would turn a Yale offer away? Some lucky students who will get into Harvard or Princeton during the regular cycle would, but that's a rare possibility. Suppose that all 796 students gladly accept their Yale offer.

There are now only 730 seats left to fill during the regular decision cycle, a pathetically low number. But wait, don't forget deferrals. Yale News said that 3,235 students from the EA pool were deferred admission, which means that these students will be competing with those who applied during the regular decision cycle with a slight edge, the edge of having expressed loyalty and interest to Yale ahead of those in the regular cycle who may have expressed such loyalty to some other school (like Chicago or Columbia) during those colleges' ED cycle.

Suppose that 4% of the deferred pool wins admission during the regular cycle. This equates to 130 seats, leaving 590 seats up for grabs for the regulars.

While we don't yet have numbers for the total applicant universe, assume a 5% increase year over year from the class of 2023. The new universe of students for the class of 2024 would be 36,844 x 1.05  = about 38,686 students. Subtracting the 5,777 students who applied ED/EA, we have 32,909 students who apply in the regular pool, all for 590 seats!

This brings Yale's selectivity for the regular decision cycle down to 1.73% for admitted seats, an amazingly low probability. For offered seats, we should divide this by Yale's yield of 69% resulting in a selectivity of 2.50%. 

So what was seemingly a 6% chance for women and a 7% chance for men -  overall - breaks down this way:

1. A 13.78% chance if you're lucky to be in the EA pool.
2. A 2.50% chance if you are in the regular pool.

Summary

It is little wonder that more and more students want to apply ED/EA. But this simply makes the situation more lopsided as it becomes increasingly harder to win ED/EA admission. And the regular decision cycle reduces itself to a joke.

In fact, for those who apply regular decision, merit today matters very little. Only luck does.

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How Important Are Extracurricular Activities For High School Students?

By Rajkamal Rao  

Music class on Mondays and Thursdays.  Dance on Tuesday.  Swimming on Wednesday.  Band practice and debate team on Saturday.  Volunteering at a community organization on Sunday.  Oh, did we forget Fridays?

If you can relate to this schedule for your teenager at home, you're not alone.

Extracurricular activities have come to define what college admissions officials say they look for in a high school student when they conduct a "Holistic Profile" evaluation.  Holistic in this sense refers to both academic performances and to activities that begin when the last class of the school day ends. Here's a laundry list of benefits that accrue to students because of extracurricular activities, according to the College Board.

Encouraging our children to pursue a passion or two is one thing.  But forcing our children to fill out their brag sheets with dozens of activities - simply for the sake of listing them out, is another.  How did we come to this?

Note:  For our companion post about how many extracurricular activities are meaningful for a high school student, please click here.

For one thing, American capitalism doesn't help.   There's an entire cottage industry dedicated to serving the anxieties of parents so that children can be one up on their competition in a diverse set of extracurricular activities.  Typical examples include:  Drawing and Painting; Music – Violin, Piano, Drums, School Band; Dance; Team Sports – Soccer, Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey,  Lacrosse; Individual Sports – Tennis, Golf, Swimming, Track and Field, e-games; Debates; Computer classes; Robotics; Photography; Editing and writing, including school newsletters and yearbooks; Debates.  Non-profit activities such as community service and scouts are additional.

The Basics: How Important?

During the last three decades, extracurricular activities have become an essential component of a child's overall brand especially for admission to the most selective schools in the United States.   These include the Ivy League institutions and such venerable schools as MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley - in general, schools with acceptance rates of 20% or less. Here are great tips about extracurricular activities from admission officers of several selective colleges. 

But in a NACAC survey of 230 selective colleges, those with acceptance rates from 20% to 60% reported that extracurricular activities were not quite as important as academic ability, such as overall grades in high school, SAT/ACT scores, teacher recommendations, college essays, AP scores or class rank.   Student demonstrated interest - how well you rate a college and how likely you are to attend it if offered admission - is a lot more appealing to these colleges than a student's extracurricular activities.  After all, a college is a lot more interested to lock you in and fill a seat than scrutinize how committed you were in high school band.

This said, at least for the top schools, extracurricular activities can make a crucial difference and could well mean the difference between getting in or not. By expanding a child's readiness for college to include actions unrelated to high school academics, the nation's top colleges are indulging in an indirect form of affirmative action. Harvard says it looks "for promise" in all of its applicants rather than academic performance alone - a vague term that gives it full license to grant admission to anyone it wants.

 

Breaking down Extracurricular Activities

Colleges look for four components in a student's EC activity, no matter what it is.

1. Commitment to an activity resulting in improving skills. If you are committed to an activity and keep doing it, you are naturally going to get better at it.
   
   
2. Team dynamics. When you are in an activity that promotes team dynamics, you learn to share, give, and take. You become better at helping your team leader organize. These skills are extremely important not only in college, but in work, and life. A bonus is when your team participates in competitions across schools in the same district, and moves up to regionals, state, national, or even the international level. The University Interscholastic League (UIL), a creation of the University of Texas, Austin (since 1910) is the platinum standard to challenge teams to compete and recognize achievement. UIL hosts contests in just about every EC interest area, so students can always find an activity that they like.
   
   
3. Leadership. If you are good in #1 and #2 above, you could be promoted to a leadership role within your EC activity. Colleges love examples of leadership. Many essay prompts specifically ask you for leadership anecdotes and what better way to demonstrate your skills than in an EC activity?
   
   
4. Service to community. The impact of your EC activity is important. Are you dedicating part of your week to helping others who are less fortunate than you are? If your current EC does not involve a service to community component, you need to invest time in developing a new activity that devotes time to volunteering. Here are guidelines for the Presidential Volunteer Service Awards - this intensity of service is not required always, but, it is good to have on a resume at least for one year.
   

   Remember that reporting volunteering hours on a college application works on the honor system. That is, you report your effort honestly. Unfortunately, many applicants exaggerate their hours of service which is why colleges, not having a mechanism to validate, let the reporting stay as it is. Unless you are pursuing a Presidential Volunteer Service Award medal, you should not be concerned about obtaining evidence for your volunteering hours.

   The gold standard in community service is recognized by the White House and Americorps. The President's Volunteer Service Award (PVSA) Program recognizes selfless service by students as young as 5 years old. High school students can earn the prestigious Gold award by committing 250+ hours of service during the year. Lower service levels are also available.
   
   Students whose native language is not Spanish but who are taking advanced Spanish classes in school have additional opportunities to demonstrate your interest in serving underprivileged communities and simultaneously improve your Spanish. You can engage in areas as varied as Rights & Criminal Justice, Education, Health, Immigration, Voting, Youth, and the Economy by working with Hispanic organizations such as Unidosus or the AAMA.
   
   Would the volunteer hours during the summer after the 8th grade and before the start of the 9th grade count towards a student's high school volunteering hours? Yes, they would. Volunteering falls in a grey area and the accounting is not as rigorous as academics because the activity is  more age-based. See PVSA requirements above for guidance. Because there's overlap in the 11-15 years bracket from middle to high school, a rising 9th-grader's summer volunteer hours would count. 
   
   
   
   

One of the best EC activities: Become an Eagle Scout (Boys) or win the Gold Award (Girls)

Is there one activity that combines all four of the above components? Yes! Boy or Girl Scouts!! Eagle Scouts (fewer than 5% of all scouts earn this distinction) are highly valued by college admission teams.

A typical Eagle Scout needs to prove competencies to win at least 21 merit badges, many representing life skills such as CPR, search and rescue, or swimming, and the entire journey commits the scout to 4-5 years of regular participation. All Eagle Scouts must design, engineer, and implement some community service project - leading other scouts. Similar requirements are in place for Girl Scouts Gold Awards.

Before enrolling into a Boy Scouts troupe, we advise families to verify that their children would be safe. The Boy Scouts organization in July 2021 agreed to an $850 Million settlement over abuse claims dating back decades.

We conducted a webinar on Dec 17, 2020 - attended by over 500 parents and students - at which five outstanding high school students shared their extracurricular journeys. Featured are Rohan (Golf), Sarika (Debate), Ankitha (Band Director), Sahaj (Eagle Scouts) and Anish (Computer Science/Robotics Club). This program is one hour long.

 

Our takeaway

Regardless of the relative value in college admissions, there is little doubt that extracurricular activities help grow a high school student than just core academics. They provide opportunities for students to pursue a passion and demonstrate commitment. Most students begin experiencing what true leadership is all about. High school students also end up making friendships that help them socialize better in college. 

 

The landscape is changing rapidly.  If your child is considering a highly selective school, extracurricular activities are critical to your child's chances of getting in.  Otherwise, if applying to schools ranked between 50 and 100, extracurricular pursuits are not quite so important. Regardless of college admissions, extracurricular activities help shape a student's profile like nothing else, so one or two strong activities should form a student's profile.

As to how many extracurricular activities are important, we will address this question in a separate post.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

Does a "good" school district mean your high school student will be successful?

By Rajkamal Rao  

Image Courtesy: Zillow

When families hunt for homes, an important consideration for at least four decades has been the reputation of the school district. In North Texas, Frisco, Plano, Coppell and Carroll ISD rank relatively high in the minds of home shoppers; Ft. Worth, HEB-ISD and Lewisville, not so high.

While there are many reasons to buy a home in a particular area (such as proximity to one's work place, shopping, ethnic neighborhoods, highways, friends, extracurricular activities for children and asset appreciation), doing so only because of the reputation of the school district may be suboptimal given the changing K-12 environment in today's public schools. That is, a good school district does not automatically translate into student success in learning, academics, and extracurricular activities.

 

But the reputation of the school does matter when it comes to college admissions, especially at the elite institutions. In a provocative article in the Atlantic, "Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene," writer Caitlin Flanagan describes all that is bad with private high schools (hyper-aggressive parents arguing about students' grades, uber-school buildings that cater to students' every need, and outrageous annual fees including some schools that charge more than $50,000/year). But she concedes that the one advantage that sets private high schools apart is that they send huge numbers of students to the most elite colleges.

Flanagan sources her information from the "Best High Schools In America" website which ranks all high schools (public and private) on a single objective measure: the number of students a high school sends to top colleges. With over 12,600 records, PolarisList says it is the largest aggregator of Harvard, Princeton, and MIT matriculation data for US high schools.

In North Texas, the following schools send the most high school students to Harvard, Princeton, and MIT (data based on graduating years 2015-18).

1. Plano ISD (all three high schools):  27 out of 4,065 students
   
2. St. Marks Academy (Private): 21 out of 86 students
3. Hockaday (Private): 16 out of 120 students
   
4. Greenhill (Private): 5 out of 120 students
5. Coppell HS: 5 out of 725
   
6. Flower Mound HS: 3 out of 856
   
7. Centennial HS (Frisco): 2 out of 548
   
8. Frisco HS: 1 out of 449
   

Flanagan's point is well made. Your odds of getting into elite institutions are much higher if students attend private schools. But not everyone can afford their high costs. For the rest of us who depend upon a public school education, Plano appears to be the best pick.
 

Attempting to frame the entire discussion on one objective measure (the number of students a high school sends to top colleges) is impractical and meaningless for most families. We want to assure them that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is one of the the best state education departments in the country and provides hard-working students an excellent choice of colleges and careers. We hope that this post will help lower the financial stress on families trying to save or borrow extra money - simply to be able to afford a "good" school district.

Curriculum standards

In 2015, the TEA dramatically changed the curriculum standards for every public school in the state. It introduced four tracks to get students to be college-ready, and each track requires 26 credits to graduate. It introduced the idea of endorsements using which high school students could "specialize" in defined streams, such as STEM or Business & Industry.

In most cases, TEA curriculum standards exceed the requirements of even the most elite colleges. Stanford requires three years of foreign language (Language other than English) study in high school. With the DAP track, the TEA requires three years of LOTE study. With the Foundation track plus an endorsement in Arts and Humanities (available in every school district in the state), a student must take four foreign language credits, one higher than what Stanford needs. So, whether a student is in Frisco or Lewisville or East El Paso, she can easily meet the foreign language requirement if that is what she wants.

Then, there are curricula set by national and international organizations. While high school performance continues to be crucial, it is now even more important to differentiate a student's profile by taking Advanced Placement (AP) or IB courses. These are taught in school but culminate in external evaluation by the College Board or the IB Organization. Practically every school district offers AP courses, so, here too, a single school district is not decidedly superior.




Learning opportunities

One area where "good" schools historically differentiated themselves was in the learning opportunities offered to children, by offering a wide variety of electives, honors and CTE courses in school. But today, the trailing schools are not far behind, thanks to an important development: online learning.

In Texas, students from any public school district (frankly, even those who are home-schooled) can take a variety of online courses from TXVSN or UT High School. Both are fully accredited by the TEA and school districts are required to honor courses completed online. Some schools impose limits on how many online courses one can take in what year and nearly all schools do not provide weighted GPA grades for courses completed online, but prior complaints from even a few years ago that a student is completely shut out of taking a desired course because it is not offered by the school are no longer relevant.

While learning online is not for everyone, this is increasingly the path chosen at work and higher education institutions worldwide. The state of Arkansas requires high school students to complete at least one online course for credit, in recognition of this trend.

If a student is firmly opposed to taking online courses, he can always register for dual credit courses at brick and mortar institutions, like community colleges and even local universities.

What about teacher quality? This is a subjective measure and we all have our favorite and not-so-favorite teachers. But one thing that has changed the K-12 landscape is the popularity of Khan Academy, a resource available 24x7, on demand, for free. Khan Academy has largely neutralized the teaching advantage of "good" school districts.


Funding
A common argument for buying property in "good" school districts is that because of their ability to receive more funding based on higher property tax assessments, they are able to invest more for school infrastructure and operations, like paying teacher salaries.

But to a large extent, municipal bond markets have neutralized this advantage. In fewer than 6 years, HEB ISD has raised more than $500 million for school investments, all through bonds. Also, the state of Texas sends billions of dollars to disadvantaged school districts.

Competition
On the flip side, with so many high-earner and motivated families moving to wealthy school districts, competition among learners is fierce. Such a breakneck contest for that extra point on a test has resulted in high levels of stress both among students and parents. Many families engage in additional tutoring and academic practice, simply to keep up with the competition.

In some cases, competiton has veered into becoming unhealthy. Some students try to cheat or otherwise game the grading system simply to get a high enough GPA to improve class rank.

To limit unhealthy competition, starting the 2018-19 school year, Plano ISD started to not publish the weighted average GPA and class rank on report cards, until the second term of the 11th grade. This is the equivalent of a tennis chair umpire only announcing your points in a match but not disclosing the points of the player across the net. This is a terrible decision because students do like to know how they are doing when compared to their peers.

Many families have asked me this question: Is it time to get out of a "good" school district and move to one which is less competitive in which a student's class rank can potentially improve?  This is a serious question because an improved class rank at the margins could potentially earn a student automatic admission to the University of Texas. The Texas Top 10 rule does not differentiate good high schools from bad. Further, graduating from an under-represented school district could make a student's profile more appealing to top colleges.

Just think about the logic here. Families which have paid a premium to buy a home in a "good" school district years ago are now considering leaving it to go to a "bad" school district. If this logic makes sense, why buy in the wealthy district in the first place?

Class rank considerations

You need a minimum of 26 credits to graduate from a TX high school. Most students begin earning high school credits in the 8th grade.

Class rank is an important metric in TX and is computed for ALL high school classes. If you're moving to TX for the 10th grade, make sure that your destination school honors your student's earned GPA with weights. Unfortunately, most school districts will not commit to evaluating your transcript until after you move, so you must be ready to fall behind in class rank.

By state law, the class rank computation has to be finalized by the end of the 11th grade, with an update permitted after the first 9 weeks of the 12th grade. So, college admissions in the state largely rely on the 11th-grade class rank and the 12th-grade performance is practically irrelevant for most students. So, if you're moving to TX for the 10th grade, your student can only earn a fair class rank for the 10th and 11th grades, because credits earned until the beginning of 10th grade are subject to school district interpretation.

At UT Austin, 75% of the 10,000 incoming freshman seats are automatically granted to those in the top 6% percent of each high school class. No other factor is considered. If your student is not in the top 6%, he or she has to compete for the 2,500 seats in the holistic pool. Last year, there were 47,500 applications for those 2,500 seats from all over the world - resulting in a selectivity of 5.5%, no different from Harvard or Yale.


Residency considerations for in-state tuition

The 3-year rule to claim TX residency applies to those seeking an independent domicile provided the student graduates from a TX high school. Once the student establishes this domicile, he or she can continue to claim TX residency for the purpose of in-state tuition regardless of the residency or work status of their parents.

The 12-month rule applies to students who wish to claim a "dependent" domicile. To earn this, the student's parents must establish a home or work presence for at least 12 months. Once this condition is met, the student can claim in-state tuition.

There are several ways to prove residency in these situations. The rules are easiest for US Citizen and PR families but a little more complicated for those on H-1B or L-1 visas.

Takeaways

Buying a home is an extremely private decision and should remain so. But the reputation of the school district alone should not drive the home buying decision because changing K-12 trends no longer make a "good" school district essential to student success.

In fact, there's increasing evidence to the contrary.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions. We are indebted and privileged to have earned their trust in matters which are so important to them. Please check out our public Google reviews to see what they say about us.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

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How we help high school seniors get into choice colleges

By Rajkamal Rao  

We will be glad to help your 12th grader (or rising 12th grader) through every step of the college admissions process.

We are honored to have helped hundreds of student clients in the United States and from around the world win admission to top colleges and universities in the U.S. For the Class of 2024, several clients reported getting interview calls from the very best schools, including MIT, Caltech, Yale, Columbia, CMU, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Cornell, CMU, and Johns Hopkins. Several students got confirmed admissions to Columbia, Cornell, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Rice, NYU, Vanderbilt, Wash U and CMU. A few got admissions to direct MD programs.

Many clients reported getting into some of the best public Ivys. UT Austin, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, UCLA, the University of Michigan, Purdue, the University of Virginia, and the College of William and Mary repeatedly made the list. Clients also got into Texas A&M, Arizona State, the University of Washington, the University of Pittsburgh, and Virginia Tech.

We place all of our expertise online. There's a good chance that our answers to many of your questions are already available for free. We also conduct numerous low-cost webinars to educate parents and children about all things college. We publish event details on our Facebook page so, please follow us on Facebook.

We recognize that the college admissions process is complex and parents need professional advice tailored to the needs of their 12th grader. Here are the various value chain elements of our service including the various proprietary tools and decks.

1. College selection and finalization, including evaluation of ED/EA strategies. [Included: Long-form resume template, BS/MD deck for interested students].
   
   
2. Advice for H-1B families with children on H-4 visas.
   
   
3. Describing the step-by-step task plan to successfully complete a college application. [Included: College selection master tool, Campus visit questionnaire]. Our tool prompts clients to plan regular checkpoint/status calls to review progress.
   
   
4. Essay reviews for platforms such as the Common App, the Coalition App, ApplyTex, MIT Admissions, and UC Apply. We follow the same process as the top schools with two professionals reviewing your essays independently. 
   
   
5. Supplemental essay reviews.
   
   
6. Financial Aid and scholarship planning. [Included: Our comprehensive guide to college financial planning].
   
   
7. Assistance in successfully completing college applications, such as for ApplyTex and the Common App. We provide detailed pointers about how to obtain and send transcripts, recommendation letters, and SAT/ACT scores.  
   
   
8. Assistance in petitioning high school or college administrations to handle extraordinary situations, such as requesting in-state classification for tuition, credit transfer, visa issues, or other exceptions.
   
   
9. Mock interview practice. [Included: Interview questions after the practice session].
   
   
10. Deciding on which offer of admission is the best, using our structured, analytical approach.
    
    
11. Any additional support.
    

Bonus: At the end of every one-on-one counseling session, we will provide you with a summary of discussion points and a clear set of action items for future conversations. Such a summary may include links to our proprietary tools, templates or posts. This is a free service.

When it comes to pricing, we do not want to constrain parents with burdensome fixed-price all-in-one contracts because not all students need help in all the above areas. Some may need assistance only for essays, or others a combination of elements in the value-chain list.

Our fees structure follows a hybrid model - significant free advice via our popular posts on this website, Facebook page, and public seminars; a variable pay-by-the-hour counseling component, and a fixed-price offering for essay and resume reviews.

All of our counseling session pricing is by the hour. Please review our fees section. In our simple pay-by-the-drink model, you're always in control of what specific area of college admissions you want help with, how much engagement you wish to have, and how much you wish to spend.

All of our essay reviews can now be ordered from a simple menu-driven product list resembling an online store. You prepay for our service using a fixed-price model and get full buyer protection from PayPal.

 

Please check out client reviews on Google.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions. We are indebted and privileged to have earned their trust in matters which are so important to them. Please check out our public Google reviews to see what they say about us.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

How H-1B parents with children on H-4 visas should plan for college admissions

By Rajkamal Rao  

There are many H-1B parents whose rising senior children on H-4B visas face a dilemma about how to protect their immigration status and still attend college.

There are two main questions:  What should the immigration status of the children be when they enter college? H-4B or F-1? And, what kinds of scholarships and financial aid can these children find applicable?

Immigration stages and the priority date

Which immigration status the child decides to be in largely depends upon the green card priority date of the H-1B parent.

There are three major steps to obtaining a green card.

1. The Labor Certification or PERM stage (Application for Permanent Employment Certification).
2. The Immigrant Petition (I-140) stage.
3. The Adjustment of Status (I-485) stage.

The priority date is the date on which the Labor Certification was filed with the Department of Labor, or, if no Labor Certification is required, as in the case of applicants with exceptional ability, the date on which USCIS received the I-140 petition.

The priority date is simply the reserved position in the queue to obtain a green card.

With so many H-1B employees applying for I-140s, and only about 7,900 green cards issued each year, the wait is long. Estimates are that anyone with a priority date after 2009 is in this line, those closer to 2009 at the head of the line, and those with a priority date of today at the very end of the line. Everyone in the line is considered to be in the green card backlog.

When the priority date becomes current - that is, there is a green card available for the employee and their family - H-1B families enter the I-485 stage.

When the I-485 is properly filed, USCIS will initially respond by mailing a letter that confirms receipt of the application, via Form I-797C, approximately 2-3 weeks after the I-485 filing. This is the H-1B employee's confirmation that they are officially an “adjustment of status” applicant. It takes 8-14 months after receiving the I-797 to obtain the physical green card.

What should the immigration status of the children be when they enter college?

Children of H-1B families are by default on H-4 dependent visas. These are restrictive and do not permit any meaningful activity other than going to school. Working for gain is forbidden, although, the experience of work in college (on-campus employment, teaching assistant roles, internships) is integral to the college experience. The H-4 EAD visas that permit H-1B spouses to work are not granted to children.

For students whose families are in the I-485 stage, it may be appropriate to stay on the H-4 visa and wait out the 8-14 month processing time to get the green card.

If the family is not yet at the I-485 stage, students should consider converting to an F-1 visa so that they can pursue on-campus employment and internship opportunities. However, such a move could force them to pay out-of-state tuition fees [see next section]. The decision to convert to F-1 has to balance these two conflicting priorities. In some cases (see points 2 and 3 below), converting to F-1 may be the only way that a student can legally remain in the United States.

The process to convert to F-1 is fairly straightforward. In general, you need three documents to file your I-539 - (see item #6 in the document) - the official form that USCIS requires to grant you the change of status: your I-94, the I-20 from your target institution and a financial statement to demonstrate that the cost of a year's attendance in college (tuition, fees, books, room and board) is covered. Some institutions process the so-called Change of Status for you but you still have to do the federal paperwork. 

1. Once the student sends in a deposit to a college and locks in a seat, the student should request the college to process a conversion to an F-1 visa. The University of Missouri has published an excellent checklist of the process. Rochester also has a detailed guide.
   
   
2. This conversion may be especially necessary if the H-1B parent becomes unemployed and is forced to leave the U.S when the student is in college on a H-4 visa. Job loss may even occur when the student is a rising high school senior. Luckily, U.S. law allows for high school students at public high schools to study for an entire academic year on an F-1 visa, although, the student must technically reimburse the high school for tuition expenses.
   
   
3. If a student is younger and the parent has to return to their home country, the student can still convert to an F-1 visa but switch to a private high school. Students on an F-1 visa can pursue a full secondary education – and even earn a diploma – but only at U.S. private high schools.

As long as a student is younger than 21, they can continue to appear on their parents' I-485 application and still get their green cards. As a student turns to being within 9 months of their 21st birthday and the parents haven't still obtained their green cards, the student has to find other ways to remain in the United States - convert to F-1, obtain an H-1B sponsorship - or even consider marriage to a citizen or permanent resident!

Scholarships and financial aid for H-1B children

The majority of public scholarships - such as FAFSA grants, work study, and subsidized loans - are unfortunately not available to H-1B families. Many states operate financial aid programs specifically for such families - like the State of Texas TASFA program.

But the best news for H-1B families is that children can attend public colleges and universities as in-state residents. Domicile is a technical term that colleges use to determine whether someone is resident in a state or not. The legal definition of domicile is that it is a place that a person treats as their permanent home, or lives in and has a substantial connection with. States permit H-1B families to claim domicile on the theory that these families want to immigrate to the United States and make the state their future home.

Many children of H-1B families know of no homes other than those in America. State law is fairly uniform and we will use Texas as an example. If a child is a dependent of an H-1 or L-1 parent, and if the child graduates from a Texas public high school and has attended that school for three years leading to obtaining a high school diploma, the student is automatically deemed to have earned independent domicile in the state of Texas and is eligible to be treated as in-state for the purpose of tuition. This classification remains even if the parents leave the state of Texas but still hold on to their H-1 or L-1 status.

Even if the student did not spend three years in Texas leading to a high school diploma, the student can qualify for in-state tuition - as a dependent of their parents. This assumes that the parents continue to live in Texas as their domicile - they live in a home in Texas, work in Texas, drive in Texas, and have a substantial connection to the state. The only time such dependent domicile becomes an issue is when the parents have to leave the state, say to go to California. Then, the student attending a Texas college is no longer an in-state resident for the purposes of tuition.

Students who covert to an F-1 visa will lose their in-state tuition privileges. The F-1 is a non-immigrant student visa and by definition, F-1 students are expected to return to their home countries after their studies even if the F-1 student in this case has no connections to the home country. The F-1 is NOT a dual intent visa - that is, unlike those on an H-1B visa, students on an F-1 visa are not permitted to apply for a green card directly, and therefore, cannot reasonably claim domicile in a state. USCIS rules prohibit F-1 students from attempting to gain domicile in a state for the purposes of enjoying in-state tuition benefits.

We recommend that students of H-1B families limit their school choices to state public universities and colleges.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions. We are indebted and privileged to have earned their trust in matters which are so important to them. Please check out our public Google reviews to see what they say about us.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

Preparing for Fall 2020 Online

By Rajkamal Rao  

The Drag at the University of Texas, Austin. Photo Credit: Rao Advisors LLC

Incoming college freshmen are having to contend with one of the most consequential decisions of their college careers as they consider the Fall 2020 term. To attend a university campus? Take hybrid classes? Or go online?