School Technical Ideas

Wait lists will once again haunt University of California applicants.  The confusing system that UC used last year will expand to all campuses except for Merced. 

Today, in a letter to school counselors, UC reported how the wait list system will be implemented for Fall 2012 freshman. 

Applicants may be admitted to one or more campuses where they have made applications.  If a campus is full, a student may be offered a wait list spot. 

Meanwhile, UC urges students to register at a campus where they have gained admission and make a deposit. until another offer comes through, by submitting a “Statement of Intent to Register.”

Students may be offered a wait list position at more than one campus, and they can accept one or more wait list offers.  The opt-in deadline for freshman will be April 15.

If a student gets off of a wait list, the original Intent to Register can be withdrawn, but the original campus deposit will be forfeited.  Students will have to pay another deposit on the newly accepted offer and submit another Statement of Intent to Register. UC requires a non-refundable $100 deposit when a student accepts an offer.  Under the wait list system, students could be spending hundreds of dollars moving themselves on and off wait lists.

Freshman applicants who have accepted wait list spots will be notified of their status on, or before, June 1.  If a California applicant was eligible for UC admission through Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) or by Statewide Admission Index, and was denied admission at the campuses he or she applied to, the application will be sent to a referral pool, regardless of whether the student has accepted wait list status on any campus.

With a staggering 93,000 freshman applications, students will be scrambling for spots.  Appeals are accepted under certain conditions only, and are meant to correct errors or other hardships that might impact an admissions decision.  Students cannot appeal to be placed on a wait list. 

University is asking for $500 to confirm admission. Reader is still waiting for admission results from other universities.

Question

My GRE score is 156 (Quant) and 149 (Verbal), my TOEFL score is 84.

I have applied to:

1) New York Institute of Technology 2) Michigan State University 3) University of Texas at Arlington 4) University of Texas at Dallas 5) Wayne State University 6) University of San Francisco

I got an accept from New York Institute of Technology yesterday. However, they say I have to pay $500 within two weeks to confirm my seat there.

Now what should I do?

Do I wait for the other universities to give their decisions? Or should I pay the fees and confirm my seat?

Also will I lose my accept from NYIT if I dont pay the fees within the two weeks?

Im not sure if they have already sent I-20.

I have seen few other universities ask for non-refundable deposit to send I-20 (or confirm the admission).

NYIT is not the best among the list of universities.

Its a fundamental starting point for much of education reform. This countrys schools are bad, and education is in trouble, it part because theyre not producing enough students prepared for careers in sciences, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

But America might very well have plenty of STEM specialists already. So many, in fact, that the job prospects for STEM graduates are actually pretty dismal. Perhaps thats the point.

In 2007 Barack Obama said:

In this kind of economy, countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow. Already, China is graduating eight times as many engineers as we are. By twelfth grade, our children score lower on math and science tests than most other kids in the world.

Theres a crisis, right? We need colleges to produce 10,000 more engineers a year. As Richard Stephens of Boeing said to the House Science and Technology Committee in February, 2010:

Our industry needs more innovative young scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians to replace our disproportionately large (compared to the total U.S. workforce) population of Baby Boomers as they retire. At the same time that retirements are increasing, the number of American workers with STEM degrees is declining, as the National Science Board pointed out in 2008. This skills shortage is a global concern across the board in all high-tech sectorspublic as well as private.

Maybe not. According to a piece by Beryl Lieff Benderly in the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, critics may have vastly overstated the real need for STEM experts. As Benderly writes:

Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Boards authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.

Of course, theres nothing wrong with having too many scientists, right? Scientific minds can invent wonderful things and fuel economic progress. Why would some experts, like the gentleman from Boeing, overstate the need for scientists? Well the more STEM professionals are out there, the cheaper they get. More STEM people means companies dont have to pay them much.

So whats really going on here might not be that we have too few scientists and engineers but that we have too many. According to Benderly, however, this isnt an accident; its policy.

Simply put, a desire for cheap, skilled labor, within the business world and academia, has fueled assertionsbased on flimsy and distorted evidencethat American students lack the interest and ability to pursue careers in science and engineering, and has spurred policies that have flooded the market with foreign STEM workers. This has created a grim reality for the scientific and technical labor force: glutted job markets; few career jobs; low pay, long hours, and dismal job prospects for postdoctoral researchers in university labs; near indentured servitude for holders of temporary work visas.

Its not that Americas science and engineering firms dont have enough applicants. They have plenty. They just want to ensure a steady oversupply of trained STEM professionals so they can continue to employ them cheaply.

Of course that makes a lot of sense for such firms, but lets be careful about using a few companies human resource desires to formulate national education policy.

LoudCloud Systems, providers of the LoudCloud Learning Management Ecosystems for Higher Education and K12, believes that “One Size Does Not Fit All” when it comes to providing solutions faced by 21st century administrators, educators and learners. Supported by two new technologies, the Adaptive Reader Technology (ART) and the Behavioral Analytics Reporting System (BARS), LoudCloud’s Learning Management Ecosystems are fully adaptive and can be configured to meet specific academic and technology needs of today’s institutions, universities, and schools for a personalized learning and teaching experience.

A noteworthy 2011 for LoudCloud comprised of new innovative features, rave reviews and client acquisitions that included Grand Canyon University (LOPE), Career Education Corporation (CECO) and Jefferson County School District, Colorado, positioned LoudCloud as an emerging leader in providing scalable, adaptable and data-driven instructional technology solutions to some of the world’s leading educational institutions. With the first fully adaptive and configurable platforms, LoudCloud will continue to provide next generation solutions and tools that affect positive performance to educators and learners in 2012.

“We believe that each institution should have a unique learning environment and our modular design enables us to create a custom learning environment for every institution. We also believe that to deliver a better educational experience, a high quality educational platform must capture, profile, statistically analyze, and help improve content, student learning, and instructional engagement,” Manoj Kutty, CEO LoudCloud Systems shared. “Our customers have sought a radical departure from legacy solutions and instead, differentiating their eLearning programs by leveraging the latest in advanced learning technologies to deliver a highly personalized, adaptive and engaging student experience on a flexible and scalable platform.”

LoudCloud’s Adaptive Reader Technology (ART) was developed to improve graduation and student success rates by accelerating mastery of learning and improving student engagement and retention through data driven instruction. LoudCloud’s adaptive technology captures and statistically analyzes over 300 variables from student demographics, course engagement and assessment data to deliver necessary content, supplementary materials, remedial instruction, tutoring support and personalized feedback based on each learner’s profile.

LoudCloud’s Behavioral Analytics Reporting Systems (BARS) logs and audits every click activity of its users on the platform, thereby analyzing the behavioral pattern of each user. The patterns and reports generated through this engine help both educators and administrators, apart from students themselves to apply timely remediation at their points of need.

In addition to a fully adaptive and configurable Learning Management System, LoudCloud Systems is also announcing new initiatives for 2012. LoudCloud Systems will be hosting their first quarterly Lightning Forum on April 19, 2012 in Phoenix Arizona. The LoudCloud Lightning Forum is a dynamic one-day event with where attendees will be given an up-close review of the acclaimed Learning Management Systems, deployment updates from recently acquired customers in Higher Education and K12 and panel discussions around issues and solutions with educators, administrators and instructional designers.

About LoudCloud Systems The LoudCloud Ecosystems have become the preferred choice of institutions across the spectrum of K12 and Higher Education who believe more is possible, and are not satisfied in accepting the limitations of first-generation learning management systems

Founded in 2010 in Dallas, TX, our management team brings many decades of education technology experience, backed by leaders and pioneers in the industry and hailing from institutions such as Stanford University, Harvard University, Grand Canyon University and California Community Colleges.