ON CAMPUS

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HARVARD TURNS DOWN 1,100 APPICANTS WITH PERFECT 800 MATH SAT SCORES

SAM DILLON, NY TIMES - Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with
perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several
applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton
turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point
averages. . . It was the most selective spring in modern memory at
America's elite schools, according to college admissions officers. . .
Stanford received a record 23,956 undergraduate applications for the
fall term, accepting 2,456 students, meaning the school took 10.3
percent of applicants. Harvard College received applications from 22,955
students, another record, and accepted 2,058 of them, for an acceptance
rate of 9 percent. The university called that "the lowest admit rate in
Harvard's history." Applications to Columbia numbered 18,081, and the
college accepted 1,618 of them, for what was certainly one of the lowest
acceptance rates this spring at an American university: 8.9 percent.

"There's a sense of collective shock among parents at seeing
extraordinarily talented kids getting rejected," said Susan Gzesh, whose
son Max Rothstein is a senior with an exemplary record at the Laboratory
School, a private school associated with the University of Chicago. Max
applied to 12 top schools and was accepted outright only by Wesleyan,
New York University and the University of Michigan. "Some of his
classmates, with better test scores than his, were rejected at every Ivy
League school," Ms. Gzesh said.

The brutally low acceptance rates this year were a result of an
avalanche of applications to top schools, which college admissions
officials attributed to three factors. First, a demographic bulge is
working through the nation's population — the children of the baby
boomers are graduating from high school in record numbers. . . Another
factor is that more high school students are enrolling in college
immediately after high school. In the 1970s, less than half of all high
school graduates went directly to college, compared with more than 60
percent today. . . The third trend driving the frantic competition is
that the average college applicant applies to many more colleges than in
past decades. In the 1960s, fewer than 2 percent of college freshmen had
applied to six or more colleges, whereas in 2006 more than 2 percent
reported having applied to 11 or more

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/education/04colleges.
html?em&ex=1175918400&en=6f395ff4c93b2a13&ei=5087%0A


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FINANCIAL AID OFFICIALS AT THREE CAMPUSES UNDER INVESTIGATION

MARK JOHNSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS, NY - State Attorney General Andrew
Cuomo's office is investigating stock grants from student loan companies
to financial aid officers at three major universities as part of a
widening investigation into the $85 billion student loan industry.
Cuomo's office on Wednesday sent a subpoena to Columbia University and
sent letters to the University of Southern California and the University
of Texas seeking information about financial aid officers' ownership of
stock in a loan company that appears on each school's list of preferred
lenders. Securities and Exchange Commission records for Education
Lending Group Inc. show officials at the three schools in September 2003
owned at least 1,500 shares each of the company. Education Lending
Group's subsidiary, Student Loan Xpress, is listed as a preferred lender
at each school.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/local/sfl-
zloanprobe05apr05,0,1905487.story?track=rss


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COLUMBIA U, PENN TOPS IN PIRATING MOVIES

JOE VESTER, DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN - In the latest rankings, the University
of Pennsylvania has finally broken through the traditional
Yale-Harvard-Princeton triumvirate. In illegally downloaded movies, that
is. The Motion Picture Association of America named Penn the
second-worst campus violator for illegally downloaded movies last week.
According to the MPAA, movies have been illegally downloaded on 934 Penn
network IP addresses, second only to Columbia University's 1,198. . .

http://www.uwire.com/content//topnews040507002.html

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