Notes Toward a Master's Thesis in Sociology of Higher Education

Somebody should look to see if there's a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school.

We had pretty decent weather-- cool but seasonal, sunny in the morning, clouding over in the afternoon-- for today's Open House. Last year, we had dreary rain at least one of the Open House days. I'd like to think that something as random and trivial as the weather wouldn't really influence a high school student's college decision, but then, I've heard stupider things...

More like this

Monday is the decision deadline for accepted students to decide whether they're coming here next year, and we've had a slow parade of people getting tours of the department and suchlike over the last few weeks. We've also had a couple "Open House" events, where accepted students and their families…
There was an interesting collision of articles about college admissions in my RSS feeds the other day. Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily had a post about a proposal to make college admissions random. The idea is that we could reduce stress on students and parents by having colleges identify those…
One of my two classes this term (Quantum Optics) is a junior/senior level elective, and when I teach those sorts of classes, I like to invite the students over to the house for dinner (they're paying $40K/year for the Liberal Arts College Experience, after all...). The problem this year is that it'…
The last time I talked about our job search, I got a lot of comments of the form "Why does the process take so damn long?" As the first of our short list candidates shows up today for a campus visit/ interview, I thought I'd go through a sketch of what we do, and why it takes so long. I'm going to…

It honestly did help make the decision between grad school in California vs. grad school in Maryland a little easier.

This is something I have observed for myself. The 3 schools I ended up going to for undergrad and grad school were all ones I visited on sunny days. It was sunny the day I interviewed for my current job, too (in January in Minnesota, no less). Of course, there were some schools I did not go to that I visited on sunny days.