South Carolina Private College Tour-- June 2009

Photos of the ten private colleges and universities that I recently visited on the SCICU tour in South Carolina.

Following are brief descriptions for each school:

COLUMBIA COLLEGE located in Columbia is a women's college located in a city-type setting. It is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. They stress women and leadership. The President of this institution is very dynamic. The latest in technology is abundant on this campus. Courage, Commitment, Confidence and Competence is their motto.

BENEDICT COLLEGE located in Columbis is a HBCU (Historically Black College/University). It is affiliated with the Baptist Church. They are nationally accredited in environmental/health sciences, social work, and recreation/leisure services. They have housing for students with children.

CLAFLIN UNIVERSITY located in Orangeburg is a HBCU. They are affiliated with the Methodist Church. This institution was started in 1869 with the help of the Governor of Massachusetts. They have the program Call Me Mr. for black males who are interested in teaching elementary school. They are nationally accredited in Chemistry. Their motto is Claflin Confidence.

CHARLESTON SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY located in the Charleston suburbs is affiliated with the Baptist Church. Religious activities are emphasized with all aspects of campus life. They are offering a new graphic design program.

VOORHEES COLLEGE is located in Denmark. It is a HBCU affiliated with the Episcopal Church. They partner with and have a student exchange with Brazil. Their accredited Business program is their most popular major. Their motto is We Are Voorhees A Community of Scholars. Projects additions for the campus include a new science building, student activity center, and a fine arts center.

PRESBYTERIAN COLLEGE is located in Clinton. This college offers many study-abroad opportunities. Fifty percent of the student body are members of Greek organizations. There is an Historic Honor Code on this campus. They are moving up to Division I in athletics. Most interesting is their Confucius Chinese Scholars Institute.

ERSKINE COLLEGE is located in Due West. This is a lovely, spacious campus set in a very rural setting. They have Literary Societies instead of fraternities and soroities. There are a wide variety of scholarships offered by this college. The most popular majors are biology, education, andd business.

SOUTHERN WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY is located in Central. Students have the flexibility of taking some courses at Clemson University. Fifty percent of the students are commuters. They have a new chapel/arts center. Their motto is Faith, Scholarship, Build Character, Stewardship.

NORTH GREENVILLE UNIVERSITY is located in Tigerville and is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church. They have a strong music and performing arts program. It is an all Steinway institution. They are constructing new buildings to create a village-type setting for the campus.

FURMAN UNIVERSITY is located in Greenville. It is one of the loveliest campuses that I have visited. They are emphsizing a green campus with the renovation and expansion of their science facility. Beautiful lakes, fountains, and gardens abound on this campus. Their Career Center offers lifetime assistance to their graduates.

Busman's Holiday Reading

This entry also appears on the NACAC blog, Admitted.

Heading for the hills at last, speeding to the shore or dashing to your dacha for a few blissful weeks away from the office? Feeling guilty that you havenҀt begun writing recommendations or finished your fall travel planning? Worried about not answering your BlackBerry or iPhone or being away from your laptop? (You are going to be away from your laptop, arenҀt you?) Have no fear׀here are some books about college and the college admission process you can take with you so you wonҀt suffer too much withdrawal. The best thing׀you can read them when you want to.

First off is Jean Hanff KorelitzҀs novel, Admission, which has Portia Nathan, a Princeton admission officer, dealing with the double helix of university admissions and admissions about her own past. ItҀs a well-written and sympathetic book that gets to the heart of the dilemmas admission officers face while also getting to the heart of its main character. And youҀll wonder about her final decision for a long time.

Tom WolfeҀs I Am Charlotte Simmons is breezy and archly critical as he tends to be, but itҀs a sharp, funny novel about a girl from the other side of the tracks and her experiences at a Duke-like university down south. On the pre-college side, try Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. Its premise is similar׀a girl from Indiana receives a scholarship to attend a prestigious East Coast boarding school, with all the transitions and awkward moments that entails. Both have some funny and poignant moments, with great characters all around.

For a nonfiction look at being odd man out, try Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, a memoir by Alfred Lubrano, a kid from Bensonhurst who ends up attending Columbia University, where his bricklayer father had helped build some of its buildings.

Some hefty but eye-opening reading comes with Jerome KarabelҀs The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This exhaustively researched and well-written book weighs in at 711 pages but its revelations about how these universities conducted admission in the late 19th and early 20th centuries will curl your hair if sun and surf havenҀt done that already. ItҀs less an indictment than a reality check: Ӏgolden ageԀ of college admission? Not so fast! Who knew that the Ivies once tried very hard not to have too many smart kids?

ItҀs been out for a while but itҀs worth reading Jacques SteinbergҀs The Gatekeepers, if you havenҀt already. Reportorial but empathetic (Steinberg writes about college admission topics for the New York Times), it provides a behind-the-scenes look at the admission process by focusing on one admission dean, Ralph Figueroa, at Wesleyan as he goes through an admission year.

Thomas HineҀs The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience helps answer the question, Where the heck did all these kids we work with come from? Hine provides a fascinating contextual narrative that illustrates the evolution of the creature we now call a Ӏteenager.Ԁ While teens once were expected to take on adult roles very quickly, they are today both courted and feared as a group, and, as Hine puts it, ӀSchool and university are simply a convenient place [sic] to store them until their talents are required.Ԁ Discuss! His final chapters ask us to perhaps redefine what being a teen means in our changing culture, and you may wonder a bit less about why they behave the way they do now. Or not׀the book was written before the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

So have fun wherever you go (or stay) and leave the guilt behind. Reading at least one of these books should inoculate you against out-of-office queasiness. See you in the fall!

Today's Video: Study Abroad as Career Prep

Annie Everett of the University of WashingtonҀs Foster School of Business explains in todayҀs video how spending a year abroad in Grenada, Spain, was a superb preparation for her career.

Flexibility Spurs Short-Term Travel Demand

More students are pursuing short-term study abroad programs at Penn State, but officials there think that the economy has less to do with that trend than does the flexibility that short-term offerings provide students.

Regimented majors donҀt provide many Penn State students with many options for long-term study abroad, reports the Daily Collegian student newspaper. Paul Shaffner, the assistant to the director of study abroad there, says that's the biggest reason for increasing student interest in brief international courses.

Shaffner also thinks lower costs may be a draw for some students but that, overall, the poor economy hasnҀt seemed to deter Penn Staters from studying outside the United States.

ӀSomehow people are considering this important,Ԁ he said. ӀImportant enough to spend money during tough times to do it.Ԁ

Requirements for UK student visa

Every student must give full consideration to the Requirements for UK student visa before making an application for visa because this is the most important step and this is the point where a student gets puzzled. Believe me that this is not a problem at all if a student is familiar with all the documents needed for student visa.

As you know that the UK Border Agency (according the new TIER-4 POINTS BASED SYSTEM) has started new form for the UK student visa and there are some new requirements as well.

In the new points based system, a student has to earn the required points (40 points) before making an application for student visa. To earn the 40 points and to be able to apply for visa, a student needs the following documents.

? A visa letter or the letter of admission from a licensed sponsor. This letter makes 30 points for a student.

? Proof that the student can fund his/her studies in the UK (in the form of bank statement, scholarship or student loan etc). This proof makes 10 points for a student.

? Passport or other travel document.

? Four resent passport size photographs (45mm x 35mm and

o taken against a white background;

o clear, of good quality, neither framed nor backed;

o on standard photographic paper;

o full face and with no sunglasses, head covering (unless for cultural or religious reasons but the face must not be clearly visible).

? Proof that the student has paid the visa fee.

? Health certificate from IOM confirming that the student is not suffering from infectious tuberculosis (TB).

? A filled application form. Forms are available on the UKBA website or you can visit the website of the British High Commission in your country for application form.

? IELTS test certificate (minimum 5.5), although not compulsory but it has a very good impact upon the visa.

? Biometric data.

? All of the above mentioned documents with NIC and all educational documents shall be produce in original and attested photocopies. This depends upon the High Commission whether a student is asked to submit the original documents or some of them.

Please make sure that these are the general requirements for UK student visa. For specific requirements you should visit the British High Commission in your country or you can also visit the British Council if you need any sort of help.

The UKBA http://www.ukba.gov.uk/

NOTE PLEASE; According to the New Rules it is compulsory to have advanced English language skill. Read more
Wishing you good luck!

Tuberculosis test for UK visa

Nationals of some countries are required to produce a Tuberculosis (TB) health certificate before they apply for visa. For this certificate the applicant must be tested for Tuberculosis (TB) at certified health centre or hospital run by the International Organisation for Migration. This test includes a chest X-ray.

If you want to apply for visa with your wife/husband and children then you need to produce the TB clearance certificates of all those members of your family.

Remember that only certificates issued by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) will be acceptable for your visa and if you fail to produce the TB test, your visa will be refused and you will be given no right to get your application fee refunded.

Pregnant women are exempted from chest X-ray - they will be given an optional sputum smear test.

After you get the test result that you are free from infectious TB, you will be given a TB health certificate, by the IOM clinic, and this certificate is valid for full six months. You should submit this certificate with your application for visa in the normal way and bring it with you to the UK, as you will be asked for this certificate at the air port.

If unfortunately, your test shows that you are suffering from infectious TB then you will not be allowed to apply for visa. Then you should seek treatment and after a successful treatment, when you get a certificate that you are free from infectious TB, you can apply for visa.

Presently, nationals of Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, Sudan, Tanzania and Thailand are required to produce TB clearance certificate before they apply for visa.

To check whether you need this certificate and for further information, please visit the UK Visas website

More Follies of the Striving Class

Jacques Steinberg's New York Times article and blog entry about overpriced "independent college counselors" hit the paper/blogosphere recently. Although he's a day late and a dollar short, (they've been in business for quite a while) it's good to have his voice out there again about the absurdities of paying tens of thousands of dollars for college counseling.

While it's fine, I guess, for rich people to spend their money any way they see fit, it does seem to belong in a category all by itself, especially when it gets to the point of putting on a fashion show to demonstrate what one counselor (who clearly believes Princeton is still living in Fitzgerald's Jazz Age) thinks students should wear to college interviews. It has an almost Borat-ish feel to it: Are these ambitious students being set up by an artful impostor?

Not just cluelessness but arrogance are on display in the articles:

ӀItҀs annoying when people complain about the money,Ԁ the Vermont-based counselor, Michele Hernandez says. ӀIҀm at the top of my field. Do people economize when they have a brain tumor and are looking for a neurosurgeon? If you want to go with someone cheaper, or chance it, donҀt hire me.Ԁ

I'm not sure what she means by being "at the top of her field" because as far as I know we don't have any ranking system that would quantify that, nor is there anything like the rigorous testing and qualifying hurdles that neurosurgeons go through. Kind of an insult to neurosurgeons, really. If she means she charges the most, well, that seems like a given. If she means because she gets her counselees into "top" schools, that's relatively easy when you can pick your clients, they can afford your fee (and presumably full tuition afterwards), and your definition of "top" covers a rather wide range of institutions.

Some claims put forward by these independents are tenuous at best. One who says she worked in the Cornell admission office, had in fact been simply an alumni interviewer; another was an outside reader for Yale, which means that she helped with the overflow of applications but probably had little or no decision-making power. But these slight qualifications, exaggerated claims, and sometimes wildly inaccurate information don't seem to put people off.

When I lived in Baton Rouge in 1989 there was a woman who called herself an independent counselor by virtue of having sent her own daughter to college. She told one of my students that the SAT was easier in Texas than Louisiana, and the student, despite evidence to the contrary (including a letter from the president of the College Board), rose at 4AM to drive to Houston and took the test there because the woman "cost $800.00" so she must be right. Perhaps we're dealing with that kind of psychology here. More recently, I knew whenever my students in Chicago were using one particular woman when their college lists were geared more to their egos than reality.

Hopefully, the vast majority of independent counselors are decent people who provide a decent service at a decent cost. They take up the slack when students have no good school counselor or can't see one easily. I think things have improved since my days in Cajun country, but still, some people don't seem to mind that they're spending a fortune to get something they could get just as well if not better for far less.

My question is, Why not? I could vent all day about independents, but what really interests me now is, Who the hell are the people paying the price? Can I assume that they're the same ones who pay $6,000. 00 for a handbag or $5,000.00 for a shower curtain? I'd really like to know who they are and what they hope to gain. I assume we're dealing with parents, of course; my guess is that their kids suffer through all the poking and prodding and planning and preening and strategizing, looking forward to the day they can get out of the house and be themselves, if they know who that is by then. The parents, meanwhile, get to brag about their new servant, uh, counselor, and how precious Gwen will get to Exlibris University as a result.

I'd love to study this group and find out what motivates them, how they treat their children, how they themselves got to college, and why they'd try to buy something so dubious as an easy path to the Ivy League or similar. Have they read the dreadful guidebooks of Elizabeth Wissner-Gross? Do they contact all their Ivy friends to make contacts for Junior? Do they try to call the Dean of Admission themselves or do they just let the servant do that? Just wondering. As a former anthropologist I'd give a lot to study this culture and try to figure out how it all intersects with American education and class anxiety.

In the long run, it doesn't really matter because we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of applicants each year, a number so negligible that when you step back it seems a waste to even bother writing about it. The huge majority of students are doing quite well without gilding their applications for the effect. But, like $64,000.00 commodes, $40,000.00 advice fascinates us. While 99.44% of the US gets along fine without the unnecessaries, the freakish .56% still exerts its power over those of us in the cheap seats.