The latest "blog carnival" and some postings for the college-bound...

The latest edition of the Carnival of College Admission is up and running!

This one is chock full of information for the college-bound kid, parent, family, and all sorts of other people. For instance:

You can hear from Fort Lewis College on their "holistic admissions process"...

Upromise, a site we like (really like...you could use tools like this if you've got little kids and need to keep saving), talks about the college rankings.

FOR STUDENTS -- a scholarship for blogging? $2000? Check it out here.

Great blog -- and a great resource for anyone in the going-to-college process!

Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization -- uSphere speaks at their National Conference

Want to study entrepreneurship in college? Start, maybe, with a few of the schools who sent representatives to CEO -- Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization -- and their annual conference, held this weekend in Chicago. (Which is home of the President-Elect. We need to throw that in.)

Here's a hypothesis: schools that send kids to this conference are likely to have entrepreneurship as part of the mix on campus.

So, a not-so-scientific listing of schools who represented:

Bradley. Great idea for their students to all wear red shirts.
Santa Clara University. In the Valley, so good location for startups.
TCU. Clever purple shirts that said "tcuceo" on them.
IIT. Illinois Institute of Technology. Got to give them props -- they were everywhere and they were the ones who got us on the dias. (Well, them AND GrubHub.)
Northern Kentucky. They actually exhibited, and their (garish) black-and-yellow shirts meant they stood out.

I've left a few more schools out, too, and invite you to comment if you were there...

BTW - Rather than bore you with the details of the uSphere speech at the CEO conference yesterday, here's a link to my notes.

uSphere jumps on the Presidential Bandwagon with (selected) Alma Maters of the Presidents

Riding a wave of 44 poseurism, uSphere is happy to share some random, off-the-cuff, facts about Presidents' alma maters. And other stuff.

Barack Obama - you know by now that he graduated from Columbia. Did you know he started at Occidental? That there's another Columbia, Columbia College Chicago, that is within blocks of Grant Park, where "44" spoke last night? (Yet another Columbia in Missouri, no connection to the President-elect.)

George W. Bush, George Bush - both went to Yale for undergrad.

Bill Clinton - though he's from my Mom's home state of Arkansas, he went to Georgetown.

Ronald Reagan - Eureka College. It's in Eureka, Illinois. Do check them out - Dutch's lasting legacy has really, really had a positive impact on hundreds of students' lives.

Jimmy Carter - US Naval Academy.

What about some of the other folks connected to the President-elect?

Joe Biden - the future VP did his undergrad at the University of Delaware. Nickname? The Blue Hens, a breed of chicken. (This isn't about post-graduate degrees, but did you know that Joe Biden has a Law Degree from Syracuse?! Good to get the Orange connected to the White House.

Michelle Obama - future First Lady went to Princeton.

Craig Robinson - Michelle's brother. Now head basketball coach at Oregon State.

Today Show Forgets to Mention uSphere During Discussion of Credit Crunch and Colleges

We're not mad -- big fans of the Today Show and did enjoy the piece about getting into, going to, and PAYING FOR college in these crazy modern times.

Some things that they mentioned that we liked:

Community Colleges. Matt Lauer: "I think community colleges get a bad rap." (We linked to one in the Chicago burbs above.) Great entry point into four-year schools; one of the interviewees, from Kaplan, said that the Cal-Berkeley system uses Community Colleges as a proving ground.

Look for the lower-cost option. Students shouldn't be price shopping, but they'll have to in a lot of cases in order to get into an affordable school. Here's a thought: instead of those really expensive liberal arts schools in Ohio, like Oberlin or Kenyon, take a look at Mr. Lauer's alma mater, Ohio University. We've linked to it above.

Go before you go. AP credits or other courses can cut your 4-year degree down to 3. University of Nebraska-Lincoln has an Independent Study High School. We like.

Oh, and check out a tool such as uSphere and our college finder. Save time when looking.

uSphere Suggests You Relax Just a Little When Searching for Colleges

Editor's Note: We originally posted this item in September of 2006. When revisiting it, the words still ring true, so here it is in its entirety.

Choosing a College? Relax.
It’s open season on the rankings again. Parents of high school seniors know the ones: the books, put out by large magazines or SAT test-prep companies. The ones that tell you that this college or university is better than that school because of some such reason – like better alumni or a better reputation.

Or more selective enrollment; or higher yield: those are two stats that any high-performing high-schooler knows well.

We’ve got an estimated 1.5 million high school seniors who will apply to a college or university in America this year. And, for a lot of them, the rankings serve their purpose. It’s nice to know that the school you thought you wanted to go to really is highly ranked in business, or engineering, or animal husbandry. It’s great to get into a top program at a top school.

I’m not going to suggest doing away with these rankings, as I am delighted to see people talking about choosing a college or university to spend the next four years. And if these rankings make your kid feel better, or more organized, or whatever, great. (I know, though, that the rankings are all about the Joneses being able to surpass each other with better window stickers.)

From my own experience (running a company that’s shaking up this college admissions process), I would say it’s tough for students to really fumble this selection thing as long as they trust their gut and remember these three words: Just go somewhere.

Sorry, Mom and Dad, if you think I’m trivializing what is probably a high-stress time. But I’m actually doing this for your benefit.

I can give you a couple real-world examples, from my own pre-entrepreneurial life as a Fortune 500 PR guy. My last boss had a degree from the University of Southern California. He took over for a guy who went to Virginia Commonwealth. Before that, I reported into a Holy Cross grad (the one in Worcester), and before him a Purdue-Calumet grad (the school’s satellite campus in Northwest Indiana).

They all worked at a company that is now headed up by a guy who did his undergrad in Manhattan. The other Manhattan: Kansas State University.

I’ve got a brother who’s doing fine work in IT, after getting a degree in business from Tri-State University (Angola, Indiana). I married into a family with three graduates of Illinois State University – fine women who got a great education and didn’t break the bank in the process.

I’ve worked for grads of Western Illinois and Mizzou. I’ve been at companies headed by people who went to Arkansas State, where my Mom was once offered a tiny scholarship.

Are you seeing a pattern here? No? Neither am I.

I’m not at all dismissing Ivies. Or selective liberal arts schools. And heck, I went to a school for three reasons – it is the cradle of sportscasters, it had a good basketball team, and I wanted to be Bob Costas. (For the uninitiated, the school is Syracuse, and I highly recommend it for the right kind of kid.)

I’m also not dismissing the rankings: I love the guidebooks, I love the books that dismiss the guidebooks. I love seeing where Montana-Western is (literally, it’s in Dillon, MT; figuratively, it’s a small liberal arts campus that’s a hidden gem and it’s really good in animal husbandry). I love this whole early decision vs. early action vs. open admission vs. wait list vs. double deposit discussion.

I just don’t like where it’s taking our highly stressed-out kids.

Instead, I’d offer a collective chill pill, in the form of this three-step plan:

1. Test-drive, early and often, all types of campuses and a bunch of different experiences. This means that you should (borrowing from my own experience again) attend Shakespeare plays at Notre Dame and spend three weeks out of your summer at Indiana State, even if you’re doing it to prove that you wouldn’t fit in there.

2. Ignore all that advice about having x number of reach schools and making sure that your safeties are still safe. One of the ranking books talks about some girl who filled out 31 applications. She’s my hero, but that’s probably overkill. You should pick whatever number of schools and apply to them for all the reasons that make sense for you. (I applied early, went one-for-one, and called it a day.) Is five or six too many? Too few? Who cares? Do what makes sense.

3. Negotiate. With your parents. For a car, or a trip, or something. Dad offered me a car if I got a full ride somewhere. I didn’t, and it wasn’t until after I got out of school that I realized that HE would have gotten the better end of the deal.

This is a time for Seniors to assert themselves. That could mean getting into a school that only admits 10% of its applicants and has a yield of above 80%, if that’s what’s important. Or it could mean loading up the brand-new Toyota and heading for State U, knowing that, 4 years later, the car will still be running, and there’s more money in the bank.

You’ll of course need that money to buy my book on the Top Graduate Schools for You. (To be published in the fall of 2010.)

uSphere and Twitter and Ning used in the same sentence...

We've had an interesting week here at uSphere headquarters. Some of it is subtle (uSphere vs. U Sphere), and some of it a lot more blatant. All in the name of helping kids and colleges connect.

And, on Saturday, we had a really interesting exchange that can actually justify our using uSphere and Twitter and Ning in the same sentence. Here goes:

Our nascent (SAT word) social network, which you can join by clicking here, is hosted by a company called Ning. Theirs is the DIY social network tool and we're big fans.

Yesterday, though, we ran into a minor blip -- what turns out to have been less than 20 minutes of downtime. And what helped fix it? Twitter.

I sent a note to Ning's customer service team and, while I was getting impatient, posted on Twitter (you can follow me here) that I wasn't happy. Within minutes, MINUTES, I was twittered back and told that all was fixed -- there were a few networks with the same issues, the tech team was on the case, and downtime was minimized.

And I have a new friend, http://twitter.com/lauraoatning.

We've seen schools have similar success with twitter (Butler's admissions team, for instance), and, in this instant gratification society, well, it's another way to connect and get answers, like, now.

Reporting live from the U Sphere social network

It's high time that our own social network gets rolling. If you want to get involved, here's the link to the invite.

Note that we're trying to keep this simple -- students, admissions people, counselors. Parents? NO.

Current college students? Maybe, but the point is sharing info about schools with each other...

Thanks to the folks at Ning for the back office behind this. Great resource.

Meet "The Carnival of College Admissions"

We've bumped into a resource recently that we think will be of big help to the entire U Sphere community. It's called the "Carnival of College Admissions" and there's a TON of information there.

Here's a link to the Carnival.

You can learn a lot here, including:

How to position yourself if you're trying to get into an Art School;

Another take on going SAT/ACT Optional;

And...Are there college experiences that are designed for kids with autism?

Great resource, and our thanks to our buddy Mark Montgomery, an independent educational consultant in Denver, for getting this rolling!