Tag Archives: educationalcounseling

Deciphering Employment Reports of Universities and Business Schools: Understanding the tactics and developing smart strategies

Employment Outcomes of Professional Degrees 📖
Transparency in a business school’s employment report is important (or for any professional school for that matter).
Of course, under pressure, some schools may choose to be less transparent to whitewash trends going badly.
Although in the short-term this may not affect the school much, in the long-term the quality of education and the students, as well as the reputation of the school if it has one, will erode dramatically.
Do you look at a school’s employment report before even applying?
How do you spot discrepancies in a business school’s employment report, though?

On Quality of Education 📖

Do you think that your children or your prospective employees have the same quality education as you had before them?
Is it declining? Or as some claim, is it the quality of the students/prospective employees that is declining?
It is hard to solve this chicken-and-egg problem, which is additionally exacerbated by the inability to achieve much regarding equity and equality in education.

Deciphering College Admissions: The Importance of Standardized Test Scores 🔮

Deciphering College Admissions: The Importance of Standardized Test Scores 🔮

There is this debate of whether the standardized tests for admission into top colleges are really significant and whether they really measure the academic capabilities of the incoming class properly.

Recently, some top colleges have even ditched the standardized tests completely. Nonetheless, some of them reneged on the decision to ditch standardized tests and reinstated these tests as one of the required components of their applications.

Furthermore, the college hopefuls are lulled into thinking that their standardized scores are evaluated in isolation from other academic components of the application. Generally, this will not be the case and the importance of the standardized tests vary among top universities.

For Princeton, the standardized test scores are still very important; for MIT, they are important; but for Cornell and Stanford, they are just considered (but there are other academic indicators that they think are very important, such as rigor of secondary school record and academic GPA).

So, do your research and prepare accordingly!

Are you a STEM major planning to work in a STEM-related field after graduation? 📐Learn the job market you are entering post-graduation💼

Are you a STEM major planning to work in a STEM-related field after graduation? 📐
Learn the job market you are entering post-graduation💼
Start with fundamental data:
-The weight of STEM occupation within all occupation: 6.65% (Based on 2020 estimates)
-The weight is projected to increase to 6.82% in 2030.
-That is approximately a CAGR of 0.25%. So, on average US is projected to add 400K jobs each year, 100K of which are projected to be STEM jobs, between 2020 and 2030.
-In the US, 36.6% of all bachelor degrees are STEM and only 27.6% of all STEM majors work directly in a STEM job.
-For the last couple of years, approximately 2MM bachelor degrees are being granted each year.
-So, what are the odds of you landing on a STEM-related job in the US?
➡️You can do similar back-of-the envelope calculations for other occupations/college majors if you are able to scrap/find relevant data.

Doing the simple math in college admissions 🧮

46,000 applicants apply to a top-tier university in a given year. The university has only 2,000 seats for the incoming freshman class. The university’s statistical model based on historical measures implies that 40 students will enroll in a typical year out of 100 students admitted to the university.

How many students does this university need to accept so that beds and classrooms are filled at full capacity?

What is the admit rate of this university?

The same university wants to move up in the college rankings. One tactic the university could utilize is to increase selectivity and enrollment. So, the university rolled out a binding early decision (ED) round in addition to its regular decision rounds for the next admission cycle. That year, the university received 5000 ED applications and admitted 1000 students. In the regular decision rounds, the university received 41,000 applications. The class size for the incoming freshman did not change, staying constant at 2,000. The yield rate for the regular decision was expected to be 25%.

What was the overall rate of admission and yield for that year?

Did the university improve its yield and admission rates compared to those in the previous year?

Forward-looking or backward-looking 🏫

‘The irony of college admissions is that the decision whether to admit someone is based on the future, not the past. It ultimately hinges on a judgment about the potential of that teenager over the next four years on a college campus, not what they’ve done the previous four years in high school’

Taken from Jeff Selingo’s ‘Who gets in and Why’
—
Does not this apply to all admissions (college, grad, and the professional schools)?

This is a domain in which predicting the future through the reliance on the past data may not work well.