C86
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Post by C86 on Jan 15, 2020 17:06:36 GMT -5
I'm going to disagree about the common app. Administratively, the common app makes life easier for students, who can manage their applications from a single dashboard. It is also administratively easier for the high schools, which can use a single platform for submitting supporting materials. (My girls' HS graduating class is 800; the job of managing application materials for all of those kids is mind-boggling). Yes, the common app does facilitate more applications, but it is not likely to lead to a situation where someone will apply to Georgetown, George Washington, George Mason, and Georgia Tech, because the added burden is only $35 per school. The common app allows schools to customize the application by adding unique questions or essays (for example Tufts requires two extra essays, Wake Forest requires 3). I have to believe that Georgetown could devise a robust application through the common app platform. Other schools are able to do it.
I agree that the quality of Georgetown's applicants is exemplary. But, respectfully, it is a matter of quality AND quantity. As I think DFW said in on of these threads, it's not 1968 anymore. The number of college age young people is dropping. Georgetown needs to admit the very best students AND it needs to admit a certain number of them. That is a hard job, and it's going to get harder. That is why I raised the issue about communications. For better or for worse, college admissions has a marketing function. Potential applicants needs to be taught about the school, and also be persuaded that it is the place for them. Georgetown's admissions communications are subpar. My daughter received a brochure when she asked for one, and that was it; no follow up communication. That is roughly the same level of contact that I had with the school when I applied in 1981. But expectations have changed. Schools -- especially good schools -- are aggressively marketing themselves to prospective students. (The University of Chicago, of all places, has a brilliant set of materials it sends to prospective students.) The current admissions system may work for Georgetown now, but this thread is about Georgetown's future. I really think the school needs to recognize that they are targeting an increasingly small and increasingly sophisticated group of applicants, and they need to respond. Their competitors certainly are.
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Jan 15, 2020 17:54:59 GMT -5
The common app makes it easier for everyone involved in the process, but GU. It’s an arrogant position to take. “We only want students to apply, if they really want GU.” One could make a case that this benefits the privileged.
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nbhoya
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Post by nbhoya on Jan 15, 2020 18:56:28 GMT -5
Well, I believe NYT did a study that showed GU has one of the most affluent student bodies in the country, if not the world.
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RusskyHoya
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Post by RusskyHoya on Jan 16, 2020 22:24:55 GMT -5
Come on, are you seriously arguing that a school that's willing to partner with Saudi Arabia wouldn't consider working with Amazon? I don't really want to go down this rabbit hole, but under standard-issue 21st Century U.S. Academia Logic (to include students who care about such things), partnering with a nefarious U.S. corporation is considered much worse than partnering with a foreign state or its rulers/elites. There's various reasons for that, from a sort of 'reverse American exceptionalism' to a strain of moral relativism under which culpability is tied to membership in a community or body politic (only those from within may criticize) to a sense that much of the criticism of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, etc. comes from Islamophobia and racism and should be countered through engagement and building ties. If I were a senior administrator at an elite university who is concerned about optics and what my key stakeholders think, I'd be much warier of getting in bed with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. than with an Arab state or a member of its royal family. Just as I would be much more concerned about an on-campus event that featured Milo or Richard Spencer - who are walking pieces of excrement but have not AFAIK killed anyone - than I would be about one that featured, say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or, I dunno... one with Muammar Gaddafi
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RusskyHoya
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Post by RusskyHoya on Jan 16, 2020 22:57:53 GMT -5
I looked at a couple of others-Stanford obviously had even bigger comp sci and much smaller social science. Columbia is probably most similar to Gtwn but it still has much higher #'s doing "hard degrees". I suspect Penn might also be closer but did not have recent data. On the humanities front several of the other schools had much bigger history enrollments than Gtwn which is interesting because Gtwn has a very well regarded Hist dept. Languauges were generally below Gtwn, some by a lot with closest being Columbia. At most of our peers there has been a very big swing towards mat/science etc. Gtwn has seen the trend a little but not surprising given location/focus and other issues but it is now more of an outlier than 10-20+ years ago. These #'s might even understate the quant trend elsewhere as places like Harvard/Stan/Prin/ even Dart have meaningfully sized quant tracks in Econ/Govt/Psych which Gtwn really does not have. This is the third post in which you've highlighted "hard degrees." Could you please clarify what you understand this term to mean and, if possible, what its opposite would be (i.e., if it's not a 'hard degree,' then it is a ______ degree).
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Post by reformation on Jan 17, 2020 16:20:29 GMT -5
I used the "Hard Degree" moniker as a STEM proxy. I think I used it to give context to the discussion re discussion of relative academic rigor between Gtwn and some other schools. Some on the board were maintaining that Gtwn is more rigorous than...because Gtwn kids have to write a lot of long papers et al and have more formal req's etc. I think this type of comparison does not make sense anymore because the distribution of majors at Gtwn vs most of its peers is now very different than it used to be say 30 years ago. The quality of the actual social science and humanities degrees at both Gtwn and its Ivy peers typically varies by a lot more than the STEM degrees so I thought the "Hard Degree" shorthand was useful to make the point. I've seen kids from both, pick you favorite school and Gtwn, with great well thought out programs in philosophy, Govt etc and also quite poor ones from both. Its much rarer to see someone take a mediocre computer science degree at Cornell,stats degree at Harvard etc, or applied math at Brown.
I was not trying to make the point, that I think you are implying that I was, that non STEM degrees are by their nature not rigorous. Take Arabic, for example--its a very hard degree taught at an elite level at Gtwn. However; if say less than 1% of the student body now take degrees in Arabic, Russian, Asian languages etc + with non major language enrollments way down I think one has to look at this strength of Gtwn in a different context than one might have done 20 years ago. Harvard's History and Lit, Gtwn's AM Stud etc are great degrees but again I think when looking at the big picture one has to consider both enrollment numbers and outcomes.
As far as the social science offerings go at the different schools political science, sociology, econ, psychology et al are generally much more quantitative than they used to be. This trend has filtered into the undergrad at a lot of the top places though much less so at Gtwn. I suspect a much bigger % at places elsewhere do these more quant oriented soc science degrees but I haven't really looked into it and I think it probably varies a lot by specific school. In contrast, Gtwn is obviously ideally situated for the kids to get invaluable practical experience though internships etc in govt et al. However; the gap between what people would do in this regard versus other places in big cities Har, MIT, Col may be smaller than what is commonly perceived--hard to say because I don't really see any data on what the students at Gtwn actually do in this regard and only have anecdotal evidence from one Ivy for another look --some internships are certainly great and unique, others are certainly less productive. The kids that I've seen from my faculty advising role have internships in tech(a lot, finance(a lot)govt(a few),media & Arts(moderate #)
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Feb 15, 2020 7:37:20 GMT -5
Perhaps, this topic needs its own thread, but what’s up with the removal of “offensive” books from the GU libraries? Including Blatty’s Legion, I might add. This is a dangerous move by the university, where will it end?
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Post by TrueHoyaBlue on Feb 18, 2020 6:33:15 GMT -5
Perhaps, this topic needs its own thread, but what’s up with the removal of “offensive” books from the GU libraries? Including Blatty’s Legion, I might add. This is a dangerous move by the university, where will it end? A little context on this one—these are not libraries in the sense that anyone would normally think of them. When the Southwest quad was built 17 years ago, it included two study rooms (one in McCarthy and one in Reynolds) each of which has a table and about 10 chairs, and one wall full of bookshelves. My understanding is that at some point, Student Affairs or somebody else determined that the easiest way to fill the shelves was to buy (or receive a donation of) a bulk lot of old pulp paperbacks. These included a bunch of mystery and thrillers series from the 50s, 60s, 70s, almost none of which included a title or author that I’d heard of (these were neither critically acclaimed or best sellers, for the most part). The part about the covers being racy—in the way that pulp paperbacks were, makes sense to me, though I never paid much attention. They sat on the shelves for years, almost never picked up. From time to time, students or others would donate their own books at the end of a semester, but there wasn’t much room given the space being taken up. I don’t know any details about how the decision was made to remove those book series, or if whether Blatty’s book was in the pulp group or otherwise singled out, but my overall sense of the action is as in the spring cleaning direction, rather than an active censoring, and certainly not a “library” related action.
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Feb 18, 2020 22:09:25 GMT -5
I see the GU endowment came in at #61 in NACUBO’s 2019 ranking. Embarrassingly low versus our peer group. Need some fat checks.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Feb 18, 2020 23:42:00 GMT -5
I see the GU endowment came in at #61 in NACUBO’s 2019 ranking. Embarrassingly low versus our peer group. Need some fat checks. It's not embarrassing, it's a reflection of the time value of money. Georgetown started 30 years late on this and is not going to climb the charts by sheer will. A $100 million endowment gift would be transformative but would only move GU to #56. Of small note: Georgetown overtook GW in endowment after that school had a net loss of 1.13% on its assets.
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Feb 19, 2020 3:56:15 GMT -5
Nine figure checks go a long way in moving GU up the ladder. The schools ahead of us in the next 10-20 spots are all within reach. I see firsthand what our competitors are doing on the admissions side to court children of billionaires and it’s both strategic and utterly disappointing.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Feb 19, 2020 8:35:26 GMT -5
Nine figure checks go a long way in moving GU up the ladder. The schools ahead of us in the next 10-20 spots are all within reach. I see firsthand what our competitors are doing on the admissions side to court children of billionaires and it’s both strategic and utterly disappointing. Billionaires aren't always as their bank accounts may seem. (Hey, whatever happened to that New York real estate billionaire who sent a son and two daughters to Georgetown?)
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Bigs"R"Us
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Post by Bigs"R"Us on Feb 19, 2020 11:29:04 GMT -5
Competitors are combing the applicant pool for children of parents known to have a net worth exceeding $250 million. Then, the pool is vetted as to past charitable giving. The kids are advocated for if their applications are remotely acceptable. No bribes necessary, if you have a fat wallet.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Feb 22, 2020 13:26:55 GMT -5
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Post by reformation on Feb 22, 2020 21:50:41 GMT -5
Gtwn seems to pay a lot of attention to applicants wealth--purely anecdotal but I would say the random sample of Gtwn kids I know are materially wealthier than s similarly random sample of the kids I know at the Ivy I'm affiliated with. I;d be very surprised if Gtwn did not comb the applicant pool for high end wealthy people as well.
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Post by reformation on Feb 22, 2020 22:23:39 GMT -5
When looking at fundraising comparisons of gtwn vs whoever, one thing that I think is often overlooked is that other univ's that raise big gifts typically have more ambitious projects to fund vs what gtwn does. There is going to be a lot more financial support to support a world class effort in neuroscience or AI etc, than there is to fund a jesuit or religious oriented project. There are probably a number of interesting projects Gtwn could fundraise for besides the usual financial aid stuff or some athletic facility.
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nbhoya
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Post by nbhoya on Feb 23, 2020 12:46:21 GMT -5
Facilities, facilities, facilities. Gtown needs to start a capital campaign to get their buildings to world-class stature. They’re falling behind and you can’t tell me we haven’t lost some good kids because of it.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Mar 6, 2020 22:25:48 GMT -5
Meanwhile, this recruiting post gives us a view of what McDonough Gymnasium could be like with a mark of creative thinking at Georgetown, through not always encouraged:
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Post by reformation on Mar 7, 2020 7:46:50 GMT -5
Which post?
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RusskyHoya
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Post by RusskyHoya on Mar 7, 2020 9:27:06 GMT -5
Meanwhile, this recruiting post gives us a view of what McDonough Gymnasium could be like with a mark of creative thinking at Georgetown, through not always encouraged: One must take care to differentiate creative thinking from magical thinking. While it certainly was/is within Georgetown's power to turn McDonough into a 'real' on-campus arena if that were a top priority worth hundreds of millions of dollars, no amount of outside-the-box thinking or willpower can make the University an easily accessible place to get to for those coming from off-campus. Nor could the brightest minds from the Big 3 Consulting Firms, a not insignificant share of them Georgetown alums, devise a plan that would convince the neighbors that adding thousands of extra cars to already-choked Georgetown streets (and permitting the university to raise its number of parking spaces to house those cars) is something they should allow. Now, if someone wants to give me $500 million or so, I bet I could pitch the University on building the DeGioiaDome on the site of the Key Bridge Marriott, complete with gondola to campus. See, there's no shortage of creative thinking out there! But let's just say that allocating vast gobs of money toward NCAA athletics is a fraught proposition, now as much if not more than ever. There are a lot of other demands competing for every dollar, some of which are more... vocal in their communication. The last month's events are a good case in point: thehoya.com/black-survivors-coalition-launches-georgetowndoesntcare-campaign/thehoya.com/editorial-stop-failing-black-survivors/georgetownvoice.com/2020/02/28/panel-of-administrators-meets-with-students-sit-in-enters-fifth-day/
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