Hey Frosh, Show Your Room To Pre-frosh!

Are you a frosh who lives in Fauver or Clark? Do you love your room? Do you get along with your roommate? If you've answered yes to any of the above, then sign up to show off your rooms to pre-frosh and their parents on their tour of campus! If you've got it, flaunt it.

Just click on the Link and then hit the **Frosh Click Here** button.

Why? It's a great way to meet pre-frosh and their parents and convince them to come to Wesleyan. Also, you will get bonus points if you ever apply for a job at admissions!

Wesleyan Early-Decision Applications Up 40%

A New York Times article reported today that Wesleyan Early-Decision Round I applications increased by forty percent. While this year was initially speculated to show a dip in applications, due to the nation’s financial crisis, Wesleyan’s rate is currently unprecedented.

Wesleyan’s competition has also seen significant increases in early-decision applications: Dartmouth, Middlebury at 10 %, Haverford at 14 %, Pomona at 20 %. Wesleyan’s rivals, Williams and Amherst, rates have remained stagnant.

Greg Pyke, Senior Associate Dean of Admissions at Wesleyan remarked on the outstanding increase:
“It’s hard to believe that one group of 17-year-olds has become more decisive than the group you saw the previous year. So maybe it’s that in a time of economic uncertainty, people want something settled.”

To what should we attribute this increase in applications? Could it be due to all of the press Obama conjured for the University this past summer? Or the success of Wesleyan alumni in mainstream music (MGMT, Santogold)? Why are we out-competing our competition?

Read the full article

College Admissions Low As Ever

Many elite college admission notifications went out this week, and apparently this year they've got the lowest admission rates yet - even steeper than last year's record low percentage of admissions.

Fortunately for your younger siblings, they might not have to put away those Ivy League (or uh, Wesleyan) sweatshirts prematurely - demographic math suggests that next year or the year after, the number of high school graduates in the country will peak at around 2.9 million after 15 years of steadily climbing, which means a downturn in college applicants in the years to come and less competition with super-applicants of the above left type:

"The demographic changes include sharp geographic, social and economic variations. Experts anticipate, for example, a decline in affluent high school graduates, and an increase in poor and working-class ones. In response, colleges and universities are already increasing their recruitment of students in high-growth states and expanding their financial-aid offerings to low-income students with academic potential.

While many admissions deans expect to look nostalgically on what has become, for them at least, a golden era in college admissions, some say that a letup in the admissions craze might not be so bad."

No shit! Huge congratulations to those of you in the Class of 2012 who've made it so far, clearly you faced odds worse than those of us already here did.

How did we miss this gem!?

I don't know if you've gathered from what I post lately, but I'm doing a ton of research on college admissions for my thesis. Running through some newspaper articles tonight on Factiva, I came across this gem of a piece describing one family's perception of Wesleyan that, while printed over a month ago, is just too hilarious not to post:

By the time we get to Wesleyan, it's so hot that we may as well be in Louisiana, and we're happy to discover that the admissions office offers bottles of chilled water, with its own Wesleyan label.

Not surprisingly, the admissions office, like those of other colleges we've visited, is filled with people who seem, more or less, just like us, trailing kids who seem, more or less, like Sam. There are slightly rumpled couples wearing sandals -- with very little in the way of makeup on the women, lots of Eddie Bauer for the men -- and boys and girls in various stages of nerves and excitement. Everyone radiates a kind of hopeful, earnest sameness.

But we're early -- by almost two hours -- so rather than sit and study the other families, we scoop up our bottles of Wesleyan water and head out for a self-guided tour. This, of course, is different from a guided tour, because on it, you get no facts and figures about small classes, flexible programs of study, cooperative dorm living, sports, modern dance concerts, vegetarian and/or kosher cafeteria alternatives, or chemistry labs. Sam is particularly interested in seeing the library.

"How big is this place, anyway?" he says. "How hard could it be just to find one stupid building?"

"I don't think I even considered applying here," Stuart says.

"My friend Amy went here and loved it," I say. "I remember visiting her once . . ."

"You've told me this story, like, a thousand times before," Sam says.

" . . . and the food was so amazingly good. I'll never forget that."

"Who cares about the food?"

"You will," I tell him. "You'll care about the food."

And so it goes, until we decide, grumpily, if unanimously, to walk down the hill in the direction of Middletown proper for lunch. Where, once again, there are all these people who look like they might live in Berkeley, or the Upper West Side of Manhattan: people in Birkenstocks, the New York Times tucked under their arms; women with big silver jewelry, carrying notebooks and pens; teenagers so tall and good-looking that you wonder if maybe you've seen them before, perhaps in a movie . . .

Sam, picking up on social nuances, is glancing around nervously, and biting his lower lip. Perhaps he's thinking, as I am, that the other kids here, in addition to having a certain quality of East Coast suave that Sam, with his Deep South upbringing, clearly lacks, also have SAT math scores superior to his. Especially the kid whose family, sitting just behind us, is vigorously debating the relative merits of MIT versus Caltech.

--by Jennifer Moses, Washington Post, June 3, 2007

Gay Affirmative Action?

Middlebury College is considering sexual orientation in its admissions decisions:

Middlebury College is this year for the first time giving students who identify themselves as gay in the admissions process an “attribute” — the same flagging of an application that members of ethnic minority groups, athletes, alumni children and others receive, according to Shawn Rae Passalacqua, assistant director of admissions at Middlebury. His announcement surprised many of those who attended the session, and who said that they had never heard of a college having such a policy.