We’ve seen the considerable talents of Georgetown students immortalized in video before: from Ben Shaw and Matt Appenfeller’s powers of satire and pulling off fake mustaches to Arman Ismail’s Joker impression to Jon Deutsch’s Georgetown Forever. But this year at Tufts University, video-literate potential students get to submit their masterpieces as part of their admissions packet.
Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin told the New York Times that he had the idea to let students supplement their admissions essays with videos when he was watching a particularly good YouTube video.
“I thought, ‘If this kid applied to Tufts, I’d admit him in a minute, without anything else,’ ” he said.
Tufts put the word out that applicants could include a one-minute video that “says something about you” (in addition to their answers to some rather outre admissions questions, like, “Are we alone?” and “Create something out of a piece of paper”), and now, over 1,000 out of the 15,000 applicants to Tufts have included videos.
Quinn’s and Klinker’s videos especially are great examples of how video allows applicants to show off talents that they couldn’t, necessarily, in an essay.
Vox thinks this is a delightful idea—and a way better use of YouTube to enhance a university than the horribly hard-to-watch “Why I Chose Yale.”
Heckler Editor Jack Stuef (COL ‘10) speaking at a forum in December
In an e-mail to the Georgetown community that reflected on Martin Luther King Day, University President John DeGioia made his first remarks in response to the December Georgetown Heckler issue, which many students thought inappropriately satirized race. He also said that he and Provost James O’Donnell have also approved the suggestions of the Admissions and Recruitment Working Group, and that they will take the steps necessary to implement the suggestions.
“Mocking the history of oppression of others is not funny, does not build community, and does not reflect well on those who engage in it,” he wrote in response to the one of the Heckler’sarticles. “We often cannot know how our words or deeds can hurt one another – how such an act can bring back into another’s consciousness an experience of a previous injustice or indignity.”
DeGioia also called the response to the Heckler incident ” responsible, respectful, and fitting for an academic community that is committed to the free exchange of ideas.”
The Admissions and Recruitment Working Group presented a draft of their proposals in late November, which it is not necessarily identical to the suggestions that DeGioia and O’Donnell have approved. That draft included suggestions to build a more diverse student body, such as:
Prominently advertising the 1,789 new scholarships that Georgetown will be adding to encourage need-blind admissions over the next five years to potential students.
Looking into strategies that will increase the likelihood that an accepted student from an underrepresented group will attend Georgetown
Increasing the diversity of Blue and Gray tour guides and their knowledge of diversity issues and clubs on campus.
Including imagery on Georgetown’s redesigned website that highlights campus diversity.
Including a required essay prompt that invites students to discuss how their background or life experience would enrich Georgetown on applications.
The full text of DeGioia’s e-mail, after the jump.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is investigating whether colleges are giving men—who are making up a smaller and smaller portion of the higher education population across the nation—a leg up over women in their admissions processes, or giving them more generous aid packages to try to encourage them to attend in higher numbers.
According to the Washington Post, on Wednesday, federal civil rights commissioners voted to subpoena records from 19 Washington-area schools for their investigation—and that includes Georgetown University.
The school is not being fingered as a perpetrator of admissions discrimination. Rather, the commissioners are selecting colleges that will give them a “representative example of higher education nationally.”
Vox has been trying to get numbers on Georgetown’s admissions rates by gender for the last week or so, ever since it saw this opinion piece in USA Today, “Why men warrant a break on college admissions“—take a gander and let us know if you think that failing to give preferential treatment to men “would threaten the diversity that defines our world-class higher education system.”
We’ve been unsuccessful in getting those numbers so far, but we’ll post them when we get a hold of them.
Photo from Flickr user CarbonNYC under a creative commons license
Just ten people attended, most of whom were already involved in the working group’s endeavors, but a few outsiders provided helpful critiques of the working group’s draft of recommendations to the University. (The draft includes suggestions such as adding a diversity-oriented option to the Georgetown application’s essay question and diversifying campus groups like Blue and Gray and GAAP).
Katerina Kulagina (GRD ‘09), for example, the Associate Director of Admissions for the MSB’s Executive Degree Programs, asked about diversity of Georgetown’s own undergraduate admissions staff. Senior Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions Jaime Briseno replied that of the 15 or so people working in admissions, he and Assistant Director Kamilah Holder (SFS ‘02) were the only two non-white staff members.
The working group hopes to include diversity discussion in NSO
In a campuswide e-mail yesterday evening, the Office of the Provost announced that the Admissions and Recruitment Working Group has put together a draft proposal for changes to Georgetown’s recruitment process.
The changes, which are meant to encourage a more diverse student body, are not official, and the “plan for implementation” of any changes will not arrive until January 2010, after community comment. However, the e-mail, signed by Provost James O’Donnell and Vice President for Institutional Diversity and Equity Rosemary Kilkenny, did indicate that the suggestions would be “immensely helpful” to the University’s ongoing recruitment of the Class of 2014.
Suggestions for altering the admissions and recruitment process, according to the nineteen-page working group report (PDF) provided by link in the e-mail, include, among other things:
Prominently advertising the 1,789 new scholarships that Georgetown will be adding to encourage need-blind admissions over the next five years to potential students.
Looking into strategies that will increase the likelihood that an accepted student from an underrepresented group will attend Georgetown
Increasing the diversity of Blue and Gray tour guides and their knowledge of diversity issues and clubs on campus.
Including imagery on Georgetown’s redesigned website that highlights campus diversity.
Including a required essay prompt that invites students to discuss how their background or life experience would enrich Georgetown on applications.
These proposed changes are aimed at increasing campus diversity and cross-cultural engagement. The report notes that relative to peer universities, Georgetown has a very low attendance yield among its accepted minority applicants.
Turns out last year’s economic nosedive caused more than just the stock market to decline—Georgetown’s yield rate also took a hit.
The yield rate, the percentage of students accepted to Georgetown who chose to enroll, dropped to 43 percent this year, down from last year’s 45 percent. That makes 2009 the second consecutive year Georgetown’s yield rate has slumped. From 2005 to 2007 the yield rate remained at 47%.
Charles Deacon, the Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, pointed to the economic downturn as an explanation for the drop in yield rate.
“The yield fell about three percent this year as the financial crisis affected virtually every college and family whether they were financial aid applicants or not,” Dean Deacon wrote in an email.
The yield rate for students who applied for financial aid was roughly 39 percent, significantly lower than the 49 percent yield for students who did not apply for financial aid. This disparity helps explain the markedly lower yield for minority students, roughly 80 percent of whom have applied for financial aid in recent years, according to Deacon.
In addition to a drop in yield rate, the number of applications Georgetown received also declined this year. A total of 18,617 students applied to Georgetown this year, a slight drop from 2008’s 18,700 applications. The 2008 applicant pool was the largest in the University’s history, though, so while this year’s numbers aren’t record-breaking, they’re still higher than any year besides 2008.
To combat the flagging yield rate, and the disparity between financial aid seeking applicants and non-financial aid seeking applicants, the University has increased its fundraising efforts and plans unveil additional steps later this week.
In the wake of the Hoya’s April Fools’ Issue last spring, President DeGioia held a town hall meeting and announced the creation of three working groups to address diversity issues in terms of admissions, academics and student life at Georgetown. DeGioia promised that these groups—comprised of administrators, faculty and students—would be doing work over the summer and issuing a report this semester.
So what were they up to exactly this summer? We checked in with Rosemary Kilkenny, Georgetown’s Vice President of Institutional Diversity and Equity to see how their summer assignments went.
The academics working group outlined a document that compares Georgetown’s curriculum to that of “similar” schools. The purpose of this document was to examine whether or not Georgetown’s curriculum placed enough importance on cultural diversity. Factors mentioned in the outline include whether the curriculum requires the study of various cultures, what percent of students are ethnic studies majors, and an analysis of minority enrollment in relation to these factors.
The admissions working group addressed the huge discrepancy between the percent of admitted black students and admitted white students who end up attending Georgetown. According to Kilkenny, approximately 25 percent of admitted African American students attend Georgetown, as opposed to between 70 and 80 percent og admitted white students. This finding led the admissions group to think about how Georgetown packages itself as a community in terms of cultural diversity.
In terms of student life, Kilkenny brought up the apparent social segregation that takes place on campus, citing Leo’s specifically as a particularly flagrant example. The participants of the student life working group have been studying and analyzing integration within several student groups and activities on campus this summer.
Sound like exciting stuff to you? If you’re interested in joining one of the working groups you should contact Rosemary Kilkenny at kilkennr@georgetown.edu.
Imagine a brave new world where tour guides no longer continuously face their groups
Earlier this week, the New York Times ran an article about the evolving world of college campus tours. If you thought they were still all rote repetition of historical trivia and guides walking backwards, you’re in for quite a shock.
Apparently there’s a grassroots movement to turn the tour guides around so they’re walking the same direction as their groups and to make the tours more conversational and less statistics- and dates-based. The campaign seems to be spearheaded by TargetX, a consulting firm that audits colleges’ tours and makes recommendations, and has adherents at the likes of the University of Texas at Austin and nearby American University.
The Times article highlighted one institution in particular, Hendrix College, a liberal arts school in Arkansas. Hendrix revamped their campus-visit programs three years ago and has since seen increases in the number of high schoolers visiting and applying to the school (granted, the number of students applying to college in general has also risen).
But what say you, should Blue & Gray explore some forward-facing pacing and ditch the dates?
Although yield statistics won’t be finalized until August when the new freshmen actually show up on campus and the Office of Admissions was unwilling to give us preliminary numbers about what percentage of applicants sent their commitment checks in, we were able to get some data about the number of students admitted from the waitlist.
According to Valerie Youmans, Assistant to the Dean of Undergraduate Admisions, 181 students were admitted from the waitlist this year. She also said that there are currently 15 more students committed than we have space for (this should level off over the summer as students withdraw their commitments and there will inevitably be some no-shows when school starts she explained).
How does this year’s waitlist admit rate compare to past years? Here are some stats from the last four years:
Adcom, would you accept this man? Or at least spare him a sloppy joe?
Editor’s Note: A couple weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal put a challenge to some university presidents: write a response to your school’s admissions essay prompt. Heartbreakingly, our own John DeGioia was not one of the respondents. Inspired by WSJ, though, Vox asked Georgetown Heckler Editor and noted DeGioia impressionist Jack Stuef to imagine what his response would have been like.
Georgetown’s Prompt: The Admissions Committee would like to know more about you in your own words. Please submit a brief essay, either personal or creative, which you feel best describes you.
I was sitting on a veranda sipping wine with Chinese Minister of Education Zhou Ji when he asked me a question similar to this prompt. He’d just told me a little bit of his own background.
“I would like to know more about you in words that are your own,” Ji said, finally out of earshot of his wife and concubine. “Submit, please, some words that best describe you.”
“Well, I don’t know, Ji,” I replied, staring off into the Beijing fog. “Does it have to be personal?”
He consulted with his advisors and phoned the Party official who governed the region and open-ended questions asked within it. “It can be personal or creative,” he said.
“Well then, Ji, I’m not much different from you,” I chuckled. “I sit in my office and hope nobody notices me until I have to make a call or go to an event, smile a lot, and babble some vaguely agreeable nothings to the crowd.”
“Yes, but who are you, Dr. DeGioia?” he asked. “It’s obvious from you being here in China that you are a very worldly and important person that any university, such as, say, Georgetown University, would be lucky to have as a student, but I want to know about the man inside your rodent-like exterior.”
I’ll tell you what I told Ji. It’s impossible to describe myself in things so rigid as words! To illustrate the nuanced nature of my personality, I’ll have to use numbers.
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, a weekly newsmagazine at Georgetown University. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
Men, the world is your oyster
The working group hopes to include diversity discussion in NSO
Adcom, would you accept this man? Or at least spare him a sloppy joe?
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