10 Major Changes to College Admissions in 30 Years

The Evolution of College Admissions 

Choosing the right school and applying to college may seem like a complicated process, but it's easier today than it was before U.S. News & World Report released the first Best Colleges rankings in 1983. Today, students can use the college rankings and Google to research schools, tweet questions and comments directly at universities, submit applications and apply for financial aid online.

Read about some of the major trends that have changed the college admissions process over the last three decades.

The Common Application

When The Common Application started in the 1970s, there were only 15 member colleges. Now, with more than 500 universities using the application, it is a prominent part of the college admissions process.

The Common App streamlines the application process by allowing students to apply to multiple schools using one form. It also makes it easier for institutions to connect with students who they likely wouldn't reach otherwise, says Aba Blankson, director of communications for the nonprofit.

The World Wide Web 

The Internet, which became widely available in the '90s, changed the way students researched colleges and the way colleges advertised to students, says Jonathan Henry, vice president of enrollment management at Husson University in Maine.

College admissions officers used to have more contact with students before they submitted applications, but the Internet has made it easy for students to research on their own. As a result, the first contact that schools have with many students is when they submit applications.

Enrollment Management 

Colleges have created entire departments to find new ways to advertise and recruit students since fewer students are signing up for mailing lists, Henry says.

To promote school principles and initiatives, admissions departments are finding ways to capitalize on the platforms that families are using to research colleges. That can include providing accurate data to the government and rankings products like U.S. News' Best Colleges and talking with the media to create a positive public perception.

read the rest of the article covering: 

• Social Media
• Video Platforms
• Online Degrees
• The Role of Parents 
• Standardized Tests
• Financial Aid
• Nontraditional Students 

Changes in Higher Education 

Read more about how the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings and higher education have evolved over the last 30 years. 

Trying to choose a major? See how some of the 10 hottest college majors have changed since the 1980s. 

Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good Thing

Imagine that on Day 1 of a difficult course, before you studied a single thing, you got hold of the final exam. The motherlode itself, full text, right there in your email inbox — attached mistakenly by the teacher, perhaps, or poached by a campus hacker. No answer key, no notes or guidelines. Just the questions.
Would that help you study more effectively? Of course it would. You would read the questions carefully. You would know exactly what to focus on in your notes. Your ears would perk up anytime the teacher mentioned something relevant to a specific question. You would search the textbook for its discussion of each question. If you were thorough, you would have memorized the answer to every item before the course ended. On the day of that final, you would be the first to finish, sauntering out with an A+ in your pocket. And you would be cheating.
New York Times, by Benedict Carey, Sept 4th, 2014.
But what if, instead, you took a test on Day 1 that was just as comprehensive as the final but not a replica? You would bomb the thing, for sure. You might not understand a single question. And yet as disorienting as that experience might feel, it would alter how you subsequently tuned into the course itself — and could sharply improve your overall performance.
This is the idea behind pretesting, one of the most exciting developments in learning-­science. Across a variety of experiments, psychologists have found that, in some circumstances, wrong answers on a pretest aren’t merely useless guesses. Rather, the attempts themselves change how we think about and store the information contained in the questions. On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we benefit from answering incorrectly by, in effect, priming our brain for what’s coming later.
That is: The (bombed) pretest drives home the information in a way that studying as usual does not. We fail, but we fail forward.
The excitement around prefinals is rooted in the fact that the tests appear to improve subsequent performance in topics that are not already familiar, whether geography, sociology or psychology. At least they do so in experiments in controlled laboratory conditions. A just-completed study — the first of its kind, carried out by the U.C.L.A. psychologist Elizabeth Ligon Bjork — found that in a live classroom of Bjork’s own students, pretesting raised performance on final-exam questions by an average of 10 percent compared with a control group.
The basic insight is as powerful as it is surprising: Testing might be the key to studying, rather than the other way around. As it turns out, a test is not only a measurement tool. It’s a way of enriching and altering memory.

Read the complete article: www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-exams-is-actually-a-good-thing.html 

What You Need to Know About the Ebola Outbreak

Where is the Outbreak? 

What are the chances of getting Ebola in the United States?

Two American aid workers infected with the Ebola virus while working in West Africa are being treated at a hospital in Atlanta, in a containment unit for patients with dangerous infectious diseases. But the risk that anyone will contract Ebola in the United States is extremely small, experts say. 

 Doctors across the country are being reminded to ask for the travel history of anybody who comes in with a fever. Patients who have been to West Africa are being screened and tested if there seems to be a chance they have been exposed. Heightened concern about the virus led to alarms being raised at three hospitals in  New York City. But no Ebola cases have turned up. If someone were to bring the virus to the United States, standard procedures for infection control are likely to contain it. 

 It helps that Ebola does not spread nearly as easily as Hollywood movies about contagious diseases might suggest. In 2008, a patient who had contracted Marburg – a virus much like Ebola – in Uganda was treated at a hospital in the United States and could have exposed more than 200 people to the disease before anyone would have known what she had. Yet no one became sick.

Rest of the article: New York Times

Signs and Symptoms

Symptoms may appear anywhere from 2 to 21 days after exposure to ebolavirus, although 8-10 days is most common.

Some who become sick with Ebola are able to recover. We do not yet fully understand why. However, patients who die usually have not developed a significant immune response to the virus at the time of death.

(CNN) -- Here's some background information about Ebola, a virus with a high fatality rate that was first identified in Africa in 1976.

Facts:
Ebola hemorrhagic fever is a disease caused by one of five different Ebola viruses. Four of the strains can cause severe illness in humans and animals. The fifth, Reston virus, has caused illness in some animals, but not in humans.

The first human outbreaks occurred in 1976, one in northern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) in Central Africa: and the other, in southern Sudan (now South Sudan). The virus is named after the Ebola River, where the virus was first recognized in 1976, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ebola is extremely infectious but not extremely contagious. It is infectious, because an infinitesimally small amount can cause illness. Laboratory experiments on nonhuman primates suggest that even a single virus may be enough to trigger a fatal infection.

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