Depends on what kind of grades boys get vs girls.
I posted an article a while back saying fewer boys are applying for colleges compared to girls.
No. It doesn’t. With 55000 kids you can get an entire class of 1600 SAT and 4.0 kids. The colleges are f*cking over the boys. If you had boys, you’d care. You have girls. Congrats.
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Yeah. You’d feel lost too if the only US college you got into was CalPoly Pomona with a perfect GPA and 30 semesters of AP and college level classes taken in high school.
The colleges are f*cking the men over. Period.
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This is an interesting take on Indian colleges.
Can we compare the IIT’s from the US universities?
I can give my personal experience. I am a EE major from IIT Madras and later went to Univ of Texas at Austin for my Masters. I was a teaching assistant for two years assisting the undergraduate Digital Logic Design course. UT Austin was ranked #9 in the U.S when I was a teaching assistant. Undergraduate students at UT Austin were good but I was not blown away by their intellect like I was with some (but not all) of my IITM classmates. However at the end of the course I felt that students at UT Austin were better prepared in the subject material than I was when I took the course back in IIT. The reason is UT Austin emphasized weekly assignments that were graded (by me) and students who had trouble with a subject could ask TA (like me) to explain the problem/concept again. They also had to finish most of the problems at the back of the chapter. so it was tough not to master the lesson. Education is one area in which one gets what one puts in terms of effort. Second the exams were not tough and easy to take if one did all the assignments. The grading was also more liberal compared to IITM. This led to lower stress for students and a genuine interest to learn rather than beat the exam. Contrast that to my IIT M experience in which there were no regular graded assignments or TA to ask questions. it was more like the penguin school of education in which they threw you at the deep end and you had to swim or sink. To make up for the lack of regular graded assignments, IIT M professors would make the exams extremely hard and grade on a curve to separate out the students. The extreme example of this exam madness was Principles of Electronics course taught by Mr.Anthony Reddy. This prof would give you either full marks if you got the correct answer or a zero if not. A good number of students went into final with 0/50. If they failed to crack the final, they would get a ‘U” also called a cup in IITM lingo. Of course this kind of binary grading encouraged cheating especially because it was known that the Prof only checked the final answer instead of verifying if you actually solved the problem. Given this traumatic experience is it any wonder that no-one wanted to do anything with analog circuits once we passed the course. The only thing this course accomplished was suck all the joy of learning how analog circuits worked in the real work. My own personal opinion is that education from IITM is comparable to a top 20 US university. Not top 10.
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My mother complained about this back when I went to college - that we were paying full price to subsidize others. I don’t know that it really works that way - if the scholarship bucket only comes from donations, then that’s not the case - but…
Ironically, she was living in New Mexico. Knowing what I know now, I think they should’ve filled out a FAFSA to see if they could qualify for a discount. Even in the 90’s, the cost of living - and income - difference between NM and NY/CA was probably a factor of 2.
Russian School of Math hosted a series of college webminars in the last few months and they were super informative. One of them is on financial aid. It was quite an eye opener for me. One of the tips is to hold assets, be it stocks or RE, in parents’ name instead of the kids, because the multiplier is lower on parents. There was also a lot more that she talked about. The only conclusion I came out with is that I definitely need to hire a professional to help navigate this hot mess.
Same with applying for college in general. The whole process is so convoluted and complex that we need to hire professionals who live and breathe the process for help.
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Agreed. Or be a straight A student and apply to Canadian schools.
And one of their webminars was on Canadian colleges. And the presenter said UBC is changing their admission policy to American style holistic policy.
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Yes. That is what every kid in BC should be doing right now.
My son’s at U Waterloo, and when he tells the other kids what he did to get into college (or not), they’re just shocked. They applied to 2-3 colleges each and knew pretty much which ones they’d get into. Once they find out what holistic admissions are like, I bet they’ll be protesting.
You convinced me I need to have some Canada schools as backup for my kids. It’s getting pretty ridiculous here…
Toronto, McGill, Waterloo, UBC. These are all first rate schools.
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Definitely! And what’s crazy is that the class sizes are something like 60-120.
Waterloo, at least, also has programs with less Gen-ed requirements, but some also have less flexibility - you take all your classes with your cohort, no choice on classes. So when people hire from these colleges, they know what they’re getting.
BTW: My son finally transferred into CS! Again, very grade based. He worked very hard to keep his grades up in the CS classes.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t let non-citizens into the impacted programs (or not as many), so be sure apply for the less impacted ones (like Math), and then work your butt off freshman year and transfer into the more impacted ones if a transfer is even possible. For the four year programs that have all the classes decided, that may not be possible at all.
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Good to know your son was able to transfer to CS. @Terri
@manch Can you explain more about the multiplier? What does that mean?
I know someone who is paying a 5 figure sum to a college counselor to help navigate the maze.
In financial aid applications they need to decide how much resources you have that can apply to a kid’s college education. So if you have asset say RE worth 1M. They have a formula to multiply that 1M by some factor, say 5%. Then for financial aid purpose they assume the kid will have 50k from the family to pay for college.
That factor, 5% in this case, is lower if the asset is in parents’ name. Rationale is probably if it’s in kid’s name of course she can use all of it to pay for her own education. But if instead it’s in parents name they may have it for retirement etc that’s not for the kids’ benefits.
Financial aid = college cost - family resources available for college.
To get more aid you need to lower the second part.
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If family resource is 10M and reduce the RHS, wouldn’t they ask why this family needs financial aid at first place?
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I just pulled up the RSM presentation slides (sorry can’t share):
The multiplication factors:
Parents’ Assets (cash, savings, investments, 529 plans) - 5.64%
Student’s assets - 20%
So the difference is quite steep.
Retirement assets are not included, and there are certain asset protection allowance that are for parents only.
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FAFSA is big online portal. I don’t think any human is going to process your application and judge you. The software will just follow some pre-programmed criteria to give you or not give you aid.
Another cool thing I learned from that webinar is that you can file appeals if you are not satisfied with the outcome. I certainly did not know that. Say you have to support the grandparents but it doesn’t show on the tax returns. It doesn’t hurt to at least try.
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Did the RSM speaker say whether or not cost-of-living is considered? Because I think for FAFSA stuff for K-12, it’s not really.