Cardiff University has a contest with the winner receiving free tuition for life–as many courses and degrees the student wants. It is unclear how the contest will work, but there will be challenges:

To earn this once-in-a-lifetime prize you’ll really have to show you’re capable of setting the world alight by thriving in various challenges. Each one, more difficult than the last, will test you for the type of qualities we expect our students to have, such as passion, commitment and intelligence.

Could this have anything to do with the fact that applications are down a whopping 15% over last year?  True, Welsh student applications are down only 10%, but still the university wants to thrive-which happens to be the name of the competition.

Dartmouth gives us a round up of early applications to the Ivies:

Ivy Apps

The decreases are easily understood once you put the 7700 applications Princeton and Harvard received.

Yet another college affirms that admission decisions can be made without test scores like the SAT or ACT as Clark University goes test optional for fall of 2013. Clark joins other national universities such as Wake Forest, NYU and many other top notch liberal art schools.

Clark’s decision to institute a test-optional policy follows an extensive study by the Office of Admissions and the Clark faculty. “By taking a holistic view of a student’s capabilities, character and promise, we can give more weight to his or her four-year academic record — strength of the high school, the rigor of the curriculum, grades, class rank, writing skills and outside-classroom activities,” commented Don Honeman, dean of admissions and financial aid. “This approach will allow us to better identify those students who will thrive at Clark and beyond.”

Although passion owes its origins to suffering, it has come to mean strong feelings, both positive and negative. Any person who will sit down to write a review of a product clearly has feelings for it? Consumers have come to trust reviews on sites like Amazon or Yelp. A growing number of sites are offering up reviews of colleges written by the students themselves. My personal favorite is Unigo. While scoping out some information there, I got curious about which universities actually inspire the most passion. Note, this is not which university is best, or which has the highest ratings, but simply how many students took the time to register a review. Of course, this should favor the colleges with the largest student body. So to control that, let’s just weight them by dividing the number of reviews by the undergraduate student population. So if a university had a student population of 1000 students, but only 500 wrote reviews, we could say they have a passion rating of 50%. I know, not scientific, but we got to start somewhere. So the first ever International Counselor College Passion Ranking:

1. Princeton 665 /5142=.129
2. Brown 526 /6318= .083
3. Columbia 476/7950=.060
4. Cornell 792 /13,510= .059
5. Harvard 596/10,265= .058
6. Dartmouth 230 /4248= .054
7. Yale 246/5311= .046
8. UPENN 195 /10,345= .019

So does this sound like the right order? Does Princeton inspire more passion in its tigers than Brown does in its bears? Is the college that Ben founded really generate so little interest in its Wall Street wannabes? Let compare to some schools famous for spirit:

• Duke = 381/6697=.057
• USC = 399/17,380 = .023
• UMich = 543/27,027 = .020
• Wisconsin =392/30,170 = .013
• Colgate = 569/2800 = .203

So the big football and basketball powerhouses simply fail while duke fits with Cornell and Harvard. Colgate shows exceptional level of passion. Maybe I will play around with some combos and get back to you.

While many universities kindly extended their deadlines in the wake of the snowstorm in the northeast, we are starting to get a picture of application activity for early decision.

With three powerhouses returning to the early game, everyone wondered what impact it would have. Apparently, ots, but not in the way you think. Early apps are up everywhere. First out of the gate:

University of Virginia is reporting 11,417 high school seniors met the deadline for nonbinding early admission to the UVa Class of 2016. That was almost 50% of last years whole applicant pool.

Princeton rolled in with 3547 applications with their return to early cycle. Last year, the tigers totaled 27,189 applications, so this number represents 13% of the pool. For comparison, Stanford’s early applicant pool last year comprised 17% of the overall pool whereas Yale was 19%. Clearly Princeton students may be more tentative but until those schools and Harvard release their results we will not know the full story.

Johns Hopkins reported 1,440 applications for their binding early decision programs.

Northwestern had a 15% increase in early decision applications. Ouch. That represents a 42% increase in the past two years.

Dartmouth College early decision applicants rose by 2.6 percent to 1,800 applications.

Brown is up a modest 4%, but Program in Liberal Medical Education jumped 25 percent.

Brown apps up

Georgetown’s refusal to go to the common app may be helping keep their numbers more modest: Last Tuesday, about 6,750 Georgetown hopefuls submitted early action applications, a 1.4 percent increase from last year’s total of 6,658. But the real story is in internationals: The number of prospective international students rose by about 12 percent, from 417 to 468 applicants.

University of Chicago is up 25% with 8,698 early action applications this fall.

1 California Institute of Technology United States
2 Harvard University United States
2 Stanford University United States
4 University of Oxford United Kingdom
5 Princeton University United States
6 University of Cambridge United Kingdom
7 Massachusetts Institute of Technology United States
8 Imperial College London United Kingdom
9 University of Chicago United States
10 University of California, Berkeley United States

See complete list of rankings here.

Just 2 percent of high school athletes nationally receive one.

That according to an article in Las Vegas Review that profiles the extents to which families go to secure Sports Scholarships, even though there are actually very few full ride scholarships:

Division I-A football gets 85 “full rides” and men’s basketball gets 13; women’s basketball receives 15; women’s volleyball gets 12; and women’s tennis gets 8.

Parents spend thousands of dollars on extra coaching, clinics and travel to try and ensure their children develop their skills to the greatest potential. What is clear from the article is that if money is the goal, students would be better served also focusing on academics as most sports have very limited athletic scholarships, but the university could sweeten the pot for the right athlete they are seeking to land.

Seaton Hall announced today that they are going to offer a substantial discount for kids who commit early:

To qualify for the discount, which would equal about two-thirds of this year’s $31,440 tuition (room, board and other fees add about $13,000 to the total annual bill), students must graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school classes and have a combined score of at least 1,200 on their math and reading SATs — but no less than 550 on either — or an ACT score of 27.

Hollywood Reporter has compiled a ranking of top film schools. What makes this unique is

• it is international
• it includes both BA, BFA and MA/MFA
• it is film

The authors describe their methologoy as follows:

In compiling this list, we consulted industry insiders, execs, filmmakers and film school grads. We asked participants to rate each program based on the following categories: Alumni / Cost / Facilities / Industry Access / Strength of Faculty.

Top five undergrad programs?

1. USC
2. Beijing Flim Academy
3. NYU
4. UCLA
5. Cal Institue of Arts

You can view the whole list here.

Hat tip to Connie. Thanks.

I have posted in the past some great podcasts and open source college level courses. Now Anya Kamenetz has written

The Edupunks’ Guide to a DIY Credential

which is a free 94 page ebook that covers the following topics:

• HowTo 1: Do Research Online
• HowTo 2: Write a Personal Learning Plan
• HowTo 3: Teach Yourself Online
• HowTo 4: Build Your Personal Learning Network
• HowTo 5: Find a Mentor
• HowTo 6: Get a Credential
• HowTo 7: Demonstrate Value to a Network

She has all the topics covered and the book is available in just about every format you can think of. Check it out at Smashwords.