LinkUp College Consulting - College Admissions Assistance & Application Strategy

This truism of the college application process cannot be repeated often enough to those high school seniors struggling to find a sufficiently weighty personal topic on which to expound for admissions committees.  According to Nancy McDuff, associate VP of Admissions at UGA, "If I want to read a great literary work, I'm going to read Faulkner.  What I want to do is read the students' words.  I want to get to know the students."

The New College of Florida—a public honors university in Sarasota, FL—has been producing more Fulbright Scholars per capita in the past few years than Ivy League heavy-hitters like Harvard and Yale.  The school of 800 students had six of them just this year.

The California budget crisis has resulted in some changes to the University of California system's admissions processes, with important implications for in-state, out-of-state, international, and transfer students.  If you plan on applying to any UC campus, make sure you know how these changes could affect your application.

You may be unaware that Kaplan Inc., the ubiquitous test-prep company owned by the Washington Post Company, owns and operates a for-profit, mostly-online university with some 66,000 students.  This NPR bit is an interesting take on KU and the for-profit university phenomenon, including advertising dollars in education and the value of regional accreditation.

Since almost all colleges and universities accept both SAT and ACT scores, many students choose to take just one or the other, instead of spending valuable time preparing for both.  This article addresses what differentiates the two standardized tests and suggests ways to determine which test might be a better fit.

About three weeks ago we posted a link to a New York Times article that discusses new data showing parents are spending more time with their kids in order to make them more competitive college applicants.  Now Lisa Belkin explores the most extreme case: mothers who QUIT THEIR JOBS to help their kids get into college.  (N.B.: The consultants at LinkUp all agree that this is crazy and may, in fact, be counter-productive.)

So how can you make your application stand out from the thousands of other applications a college or university may receive?  "When I hear about a kid who’s doing something unusual I want to know more," says one college admissions officer.  The key factor may be "leadership" experience.