Archive : College Admissions

Perhaps it started on a January day in Chicago when elementary school students greeted teacher Frankie Beecroft, recently named Veritas Prep’s Worldwide Instructor of the Year, with an enthusiastic “Good Morning, Teacher of the World!” But maybe it started well before that, in classrooms and at dinner tables in Missouri and Michigan, New Jersey and Norway as the students who would become the leaders of Veritas Prep were inspired by teachers. Whatever the genesis, our lifelong appreciation of teachers and our firm belief that they deserve recognition for their yeoman efforts has led us here.

A week ago today, few people outside of greater Fort Myers knew anything about Florida Gulf Coast University. What a difference a week makes. #FGCU has been consistently trending on Twitter for days, now, and the admissions website crashed shortly after the Eagles dispatched Georgetown in Friday’s match-up  FGCU is on the map now, joining Gonzaga, Virginia Commonwealth, George Mason, and several other schools that built a national reputation on the strength of an NCAA Tournament run.

The people behind The Common Application have just released the new essay prompts (PDF link) for college applicants who apply in the 2013-2014 admissions season. As noted in The Common Application Board of Directors’ announcement, these new prompts are the result of two years of discussion about where essays fit in the overall college admissions process. This is the first big change to the essays in years (including to the word counts!), and it’s clear that the Common Application Board didn’t take the task of reworking these essays lightly.

There is no shortage of opinion and points of view here at Veritas Prep. We’re an opinionated lot, and we’re also not afraid to stick out our necks and make a few predictions about how we see the worlds of test prep and admissions evolving in the coming year. The following are four trends and news items we expect to see emerge at some point in 2013:

At least one Top 20 MBA program will introduce an all-online MBA program.
Right now, Kenan-Flagler’s MBA@UNC is still the only game in town when it comes to top-tier business schools offering real, full-blown MBAs available online. The segment certainly still has a ways to go in terms of burnishing online education’s reputation, and UNC has tried to tackle this problem head-on with ads that go as far as to warn that you probably can’t get into its program. With most of the elite American universities making much more aggressive strides into online education (most frequently with MIT & Harvard’s edX or Stanford’s Coursera), it’s not hard to imagine that another top-ranked business school will soon move to offer a full MBA over the Internet in 2013.

When I was in high school, I was received over half a million dollars in scholarship offers. Because some of these scholarship offers were school-specific, I ended up actually receiving approximately $237,000 to go to college. Needless to say, these scholarships still covered the cost of tuition, housing, textbooks, food, and all other college-related expenses during my undergraduate career.

Believe it or not, 2012 is almost over. If you’re reading this, it means that the world hasn’t ended, and that at least some of us still have electricity and Internet access, so we’re ending on a good note! As we at Veritas Prep wind down the year, we thought we’d share some of our biggest news, best posts, and most interesting topics from the past 12 months.

Here at Veritas Prep, we waited years before entering the SAT prep industry. We only wanted to launch our SAT course once we were certain we could give students a far better course than what was already on the market. We’ve felt the same way about college admissions: We had no interest in offering such a service until we knew we could give high school students something far better than what they could find anywhere else.

Last year, we met Dr. Michele Hernández and Mimi Doe, two of the premier college admissions counselors in the country. For years they have been running Boston-based Application Boot Camp®, a four-day workshop known for its effectiveness in helping students get into the country’s most competitive universities. For the decade, the $14,000 program has had a waiting list as only a few dozen students each year have been able to get step-by-step college application advice. Yes, it’s that popular, and it’s that exclusive. Why? Because they get results.