Just make admissions rules clear

Just make admissions rules clear
Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 26, 2007
By Kate Holby

The thin letter came recently. If you are a high school senior or a parent of one, this requires no further explanation. Early decision for me meant final rejection by the college over which I spent years obsessing. This rejection, shared by countless grieving high school seniors, has given me pause to reflect on the admission process and the ways in which it could be improved.

Consoling bystanders - my parents, teachers, guidance counselor - trot out the usual bland observations. Rejection is a part of life. Not everyone can be admitted. Get over it, life isn't fair.

It's true, I will get over it. But the fairness part nags a bit. The problem with the application process is that the admissions criteria colleges publicly provide are murky at best.

Grades, class ranking, SAT scores, sports, volunteer work. The list goes on. All we are told is that these things may count, but not how much.

Take the college of my desire, Bowdoin. The school tells prospective applicants that it does not require SAT scores. Nowhere does the school explain what that really means. I suppose SATs are not required because Bowdoin doesn't believe that the scores are a reliable indicator of ability. But they allow applicants to submit SAT scores, and presumably those with high SAT scores do so.

If I don't submit them, does that hurt my chances? Don't bother looking for guidance on the Bowdoin Web site, because it won't tell you. The application also asks whether any relatives attended Bowdoin. But it doesn't say why or how much it counts. Does it count more if my mother attended or my sister? Uncle or grandparent?

The application also asks for my parents' occupations. How does that figure in? Is a carpenter worth more or less than a lawyer? How about varsity sports? Are they important and, if so, which one? Is field hockey better than track? It's not that I'll give up pole vaulting if Bowdoin doesn't appreciate it, but, rather, I will save my heart and application fee for a college that wants a pole vaulter.

The typical college response is that they are not looking for a well-rounded person but a well-rounded class. This is an utterly useless piece of information. For guidance, some hire a college admissions consultant. And that exposes the entire hypocrisy of the process. A former college admissions officer will, for a fee, tell us what a current college admissions officer won't. Too bad if you can't afford one or are naïve enough to think it unnecessary.

I don't care if the college admissions playing field is tilted, skewed, or even upside down. I don't care if they value serving in a soup kitchen over serving up a tennis ball. But it would be nice if we all knew the rules of the game. This is particularly true with early admissions, where many of us spent literally years working hard toward the goal of acceptance by one particular college.

Perhaps the first step of the admissions process should be some frank admissions by the college. Let us know what role we are applying for. Perhaps colleges should list the spots they wish to fill like the help-wanted section: Bowdoin Class of 2012 seeks starting varsity field hockey forward, midfielders considered, goalies need not apply. Or, violin players needed for orchestra, but no saxophones, except perhaps a really good tenor sax.

Colleges, of course, are not solely to blame. Their tactics are "market driven." Who put us in this athlete-favored, SAT-weighted, competitive, arbitrary mode of college selection? It is the majority of people reading this article - the parents of students like us.

This college madness has gone so far that SAT coaches are considered the norm and college consultants the expected. I truly wonder what the pressures of the next generation will be, and if this curtain of hidden rules will ever be parted. But for now, all I am asking for before I put down my emotional and financial deposit, before I dream about the college that is right for me, is a little good, old-fashioned honesty to go with the ivy on the walls.

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Kate Holby of Upper Black Eddy is a senior at Palisades High School.

Foreign buyers findinga 2nd home in the U.S.

Foreign buyers findinga 2nd home in the U.S.
Prices attractive as the dollar declines, real estate slumps
By Leslie Wines
Associated Press, December 25, 2007

Panden Rota, a Nepalese producer of fine rugs, is about to become a Manhattanite, the owner of a sumptuous apartment in the luxurious downtown neighborhood of Battery Park City.

His primary residence will remain in Katmandu, but his new home will allow him to spend more time at U.S. showrooms that display his rugs and with a brother and sister in New York.

"I looked at many places, and I decided that a Manhattan apartment will always hold its value," he said.

Rota is part of a growing wave of foreigners who buy second homes in the U.S. for work and play and as an investment.

Cosmopolitan cities like New York and Miami have long served as second homes for affluent and accomplished foreigners. But the trend is growing. One in five American Realtors has sold a home to a foreign investor in the past year, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Severe dollar declines against the euro and pound have made U.S. homes much cheaper for Europeans. But even foreign buyers without that sort of currency advantage are benefiting from sharp drops in housing prices at a time when problems in mortgage lending are keeping many Americans out of the market.

At the same time, many foreign real estate markets, especially in Europe, have experienced sharp increases in home prices.

"There are markets like Paris and London and the south of France where some home values have gone up 100 percent," said Christian Voelkers of the Hamburg Realtor Engel & Volkers Group. "At the same time, U.S. prices have either stayed put or come down."

Engel & Volkers, which caters to wealthy clients, plans to open 300 residential sales offices across the U.S. in the next few years. The currency advantage is greatest for British citizens, given that each pound is worth well over $2. By contrast, the euro is worth about $1.45, while the Canadian dollar in recent weeks is hovering near parity with its U.S. counterpart.

"At this point, the English are more actively looking in Manhattan than American buyers," said Ivan Hakimian of New York's Itzhaki Properties.

Mia Wilkinson, a transplanted Englishwoman who works for Rubloff Residential Properties in Chicago, deals often with British and other foreign executives transferred to the U.S.

"Before, people would stay in corporate rentals," she said. "But now these same people are turning around and buying properties."

Wilkinson, who has been in the U.S. six years, has bought property in Chicago.

The expansion of foreign real-estate investment in the U.S. also means that areas that once were not popular with international buyers are receiving interest. Doug Aitkin, who works for North Carolina's World Trade Center, said the Research Triangle area, comprising the cities of Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill, is getting inquiries from French and Scandinavian home buyers, a new phenomenon.

In Los Angeles, demand from wealthy South Koreans for attractive condo towers and mid-level-rise buildings has helped revitalize the once-forlorn downtown neighborhood, said Johanna Gunther, a senior vice president with the Ryness Co.

And Canadian buyers eager to enjoy Arizona's dry, warm climate reportedly are giving Scottsdale's phlegmatic residential real estate market a boost.

The National Association of Realtors found that 7.3 percent of the houses sold last year in Florida went to foreign buyers. Miami, in particular, is a magnet for buyers from throughout Latin America and Europe, helping to mitigate the fallout from the area's housing slump.

Despite the news waves of foreign buyers in many U.S. markets, few suggest international investors by themselves can entirely offset the nation's housing crisis, brought on by the failure of many subprime mortgage loans made to home buyers with weak credit histories.

The fact that international investors are helping to prop up some troubled housing markets only emphasizes the level of stress in residential real estate, said Constantine Valhouli, a principal with Boston's Hammersmith Group.

"Relying on foreign real estate investors is fundamentally as risky as relying on subprime mortgages," Valhouli said, noting that both distort demand and can conceal the depths of the problem U.S. home buyers and sellers face.

"Foreign buyers aren't going to save the U.S. housing market. They're just a temporary fix like a finger in the dike. Fundamentals matter."

2008 Forecast

Indians' Road to Success

Indians' Road to Success
By CRAIG KARMIN and JACKIE RANGE
Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2007
Hopefuls Go to Far-Flung Test Sites Due to Chartered Analysts' Dispute

Vikash Kumar, a business student in India, took a trip to Nepal last week with four friends. To get there and back, they traveled for hours by airplane, taxi and rickshaw. They passed through border areas menaced by bandits.

They aren't adventure-seekers, or even tourists. Mr. Kumar and his friends are simply trying to take the Chartered Financial Analyst exam.

Passing the CFA -- a series of three grueling, six-hour tests covering economics, accounting and markets -- opens the door to high-paying financial jobs. India's booming economy is triggering a concurrent boom in CFAs: This year, India had been expected to produce more than 10,000 candidates, according to the U.S.-based CFA Institute, more than anywhere except North America. Just seven years ago, India produced less than 250.

But a long-simmering trademark spat over who has the right to use the letters "CFA" in India has thrown this year's process into disarray.

So, CFA hopefuls like Mr. Kumar are traveling the globe for alternative sites. Test-takers have ended up as far away as Sri Lanka, Oman and Nebraska.

That is, if they can get a flight. The exodus is so great that flights to Nepal in early June (an exam date there) were booked up, even though it was monsoon season, one of the worst possible times to travel in South Asia. Some CFA hopefuls trying to go to Singapore at the last minute got tripped up by the three-day waiting period for a visa, missing tests there.

Internet chat rooms are packed with frustrated CFA candidates. "Let's start off the day on a positive note and start praying to GOD" that the exams will take place, wrote someone signed "Jigz" this year in a CFA community on the social-networking Web site Orkut.

That elicited a string of sarcastic responses. Usually, people pray to pass an exam, someone retorted, but "we pray in order to sit for the exam!"

Other posts seek help finding the best test sites abroad. "ok, so who is travelling to colombo/bangkok?" asks one poster. "i am for sure....cant risk katmandu with the maoist c- happening there" -- a reference to political violence stirred up by Nepal's Mao-inspired rebels.

The notion of Maoists attacking business-school types in the Himalayas might sound far-fetched. But it is a deadly serious concern. Just ask Abhishek Verma, 26 years old, who traveled to Katmandu this year for the CFA exam only to find the city shut down by the Maoist insurgency, which is protesting government corruption and opposes the Nepalese monarchy.

Because the city was shut down, Mr. Verma had trouble finding a taxi to take him from the airport to the hotel. And once he did, he was promptly stopped by a Maoist who threatened to set the car on fire.

The taxi driver, he says, pleaded that his passengers were foreigners, not Nepalese, and was finally allowed to proceed unharmed.

"We were so afraid," Mr. Verma recalls.

The dispute over India's CFA exams boils down to this: For more than a decade, the Virginia-based CFA Institute -- which administers exams world-wide -- worked with a local licensee in India. In recent years, the local licensee broke off, launched its own certification program dubbed the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India, and launched a campaign to prohibit the American firm from operating in India. The ICFAI also has opened business schools in India.

Both sides blame each other. "The fault rests with CFA alone," says S.R. Mallela, a member of the board of governors of ICFAI in Hyderabad.

The CFA says it has every legal right to operate in India, and blames the ICFAI for causing headaches for Indian students. "The burden is placed most heavily on those who don't have the means," says Jeffrey J. Diermeier, president and chief executive of the CFA Institute.

While test-takers could take the ICFA test in India, many prefer to obtain the CFA's certificate. "The ICFA doesn't even carry much weight in India," says Jasmit Singh Chandhok, a CFA candidate from New Delhi.

Which is why he flew to Bangkok a few months ago to take the CFA exam. At the test site in Thailand, he says, he was surprised to see that about a third of the 300 people in the test room there were also Indian.

"In one corner, there were four guys I knew from home," he says.

According to the CFA, Indian candidates this year have traveled to at least 16 countries to take the exam. The CFA Institute has tried to ease the financial cost by cutting a $300 check for any Indian who tested abroad. CFA registration and materials can cost more than $2,500 for all three exams needed to receive the designation, an immense sum in India, where a fairly typical urban office job might pay only $3,500 a year.

Earlier this year, Karan Mehta, a securities analyst in New Delhi, decided to take the test in Omaha, Neb., because he was going to be there anyway for a wedding. He landed a few hours before the test, bleary-eyed from the 18½-hour flight, took a quick nap, then went straight to the exam room.

Afterward, he says, he strolled around Omaha, hoping that he might bump into famed investor Warren Buffett, who lives there. "But he was too hard to find," Mr. Mehta says.

The vast majority of traveling test-takers so far have headed for Nepal, India's neighbor to the north. Nepal is close enough to India that people can get there overland, avoiding costly plane tickets and visa hassles.

Among them was Mr. Kumar, 26, the business student who went to Katmandu with his friends. While he was able to get a flight into Nepal, he wasn't able to get a round-trip ticket to fly back out.

So, after taking the test on Dec. 2, they flew to the Nepalese town of Simara, went from there to Birganj by taxi, and then by auto-rickshaw across the border. Then, it was just a seven-hour taxi ride for the five of them to Patna.

It was worth the hassle, Mr. Kumar says. "For getting into a good career, into investment banks and all, CFA's quite mandatory these days."

He had better hope the trip winds up better than it did for Nikita Sharma, 25, who traveled a similar route earlier this year. She flew to Katmandu in June to take the CFA. But traveling overland on the way back, she got stranded on her bus for 15 hours after an accident in Nepal blocked traffic.

Ms. Sharma says that she and her two friends thought about abandoning the bus and trying to hike out. But "we also got scared, if we started walking, if we would be able to save ourselves from the animals."

Instead, they stuck it out and subsisted on mango juice. At least a dozen people on the bus, including them, were also CFA candidates, she estimates.

Despite all the hassles, Ms. Sharma had no regrets -- until, that is, she learned a few weeks later that she hadn't passed the exam.

"If one had passed," Ms. Sharma says ruefully, "then one would have cherished the moment."

Obscene Losses

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Claremont, Williams Mega-Gifts Finance Fight Against Ivy League

Claremont, Williams Mega-Gifts Finance Fight Against Ivy League
Bloomberg, Oct-22-07
By Matthew Keenan

Liberal arts colleges in the U.S. are attracting alumni gifts of $10 million or more at a record pace to finance their competition with Ivy League universities for the nation's premier students.

Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts surpassed its $400 million capital campaign goal in June. Vermont's Middlebury College is almost halfway to its $500 million target, the most ambitious yet for any liberal arts institution. Claremont McKenna College in California received a record $200 million last month from investor Robert Day.

Schools have grown savvy in reaching out to alumni for ``mega-gifts,'' Michael Schoenfeld, Middlebury's vice president for college advancement, said in an interview. ``There is a need, there is the competition and there is the capacity of donors who are able to make a gift like that.''

For colleges with less than 3,000 students to compete with larger Ivy League universities for talented high-schoolers, alumni must help fund scholarships, attract professors and improve campuses, officials at the schools said. Universities are also seeking record sums, with Stanford, near Palo Alto, California, aiming to raise $4.3 billion. Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York; and Columbia University, in New York City, each set $4 billion goals.

Middlebury has drawn $50 million from an anonymous donor and $23.5 million from Shelby M.C. Davis, founder of New York money manager Davis Advisors. The school, in the midst of a five-year campaign, assigns eight of 65 development employees to donors capable of giving $100,000 to $5 million each.

Just three officials, including President Ronald Liebowitz, solicit gifts above that amount. Volunteers such as Richard Fuld, chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in New York, also help the school tap affluent donors. Founded in 1800, Middlebury has about 2,350 undergraduates, compared with 6,700 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Wellesley's Example

Wellesley College, the Massachusetts women's college founded in 1870 whose alumnae include U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, set a standard for liberal arts fundraising by gathering $472.3 million in a campaign that ended in 2005.

U.S. colleges and universities gathered an all-time high of $28 billion in contributions in 2006.

When Williams President Morton Schapiro took office in 2000, he drew up a strategic plan that resulted in a 15 percent increase in faculty, a new student center and greater financial aid, said Steve Birrell, vice president for alumni relations and development.

``We had needs coming out of the strategic plan that were of a different magnitude than we could support with so-called normal fundraising,'' which doesn't involve specially solicited mega-gifts, Birrell, 65, said in an interview from the school's campus in Williamstown.

Signature Gift

Williams, founded in 1793 with funds bequeathed by Colonel Ephraim Williams, publicly opened its campaign in the fall of 2003, after two years of preparation. The 2,000-student school's drive reached $413.3 million last week, and will continue through next year.

The signature gift was $20 million for a theater and dance center by Herbert Allen Jr., chairman of investment firm Allen & Co. in New York. The 1962 Williams graduate has a fortune valued at $2 billion by Forbes magazine.

Unlike universities more than twice their size, liberal arts colleges don't have medical schools or other research facilities that draw corporate and foundation grants, said John Lippincott, 58, president of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Smaller schools rely instead on a cadre of deep-pocketed alumni.

Williams Donors

``You certainly are not going to achieve that goal in a period of five, six or seven years by accumulating small gifts,'' said Lippincott, whose Washington-based group represents marketing, communications and fundraising officials from 3,300 schools.

About 85 percent of the Williams money came from 2 percent of donors, including seven contributions of $10 million to $20 million each, Birrell said. At Middlebury, officials say a ``rule of 76'' calls for 76 gifts that together cover 76 percent of funds raised.

Claremont McKenna, with about 1,150 students, started soliciting gifts in March 2006 and plans to go public with the campaign next year.

Day's Donation

The school, founded in 1946, received $200 million in September from Day, an economics major who started TCW Group Inc., a Los Angeles-based investment firm that manages $70 billion. The gift will support students specializing in finance, accounting and leadership psychology.

His donation followed a $20 million gift by the Seattle- based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund science scholarships.

George Roberts, co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., gave $20 million in October 2006. Roberts, a 1966 graduate, is seeking $40 million in matching gifts from other donors to create endowed faculty chairs. His initiative is more than halfway to its goal, showing that a culture of philanthropy has taken hold among alumni, said Claremont McKenna President Pamela Gann.

`Big Partner'

``People feel that they can have a high impact at a liberal arts college,'' the 58-year-old Gann said. ``A $20 million gift goes a lot further here than at a research university today. I think that matters. People feel like, `Oh, I'm a big partner.' And you are.''

Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York, launched a $400 million drive in March, and plans to reach that goal in three years, after taking in $234.4 million already.

``Our alumni are prepared to make those kinds of commitments,'' said Murray Decock, 48, vice president for institutional advancement.

Colgate got $27 million from Robert Hung Ngai Ho, a 1956 graduate, and dedicated its 121,000-square-foot science center to him last month. The school, founded in 1819, now has about 2,700 students.

Daniel Benton, the chief executive officer of hedge fund firm Andor Capital Management, in New York, gave $25 million. The 1980 graduate issued Colgate a challenge, making his gift contingent on the school's finding contributors for at least $25 million more in chunks of $1 million or greater. In March, 19 donors stepped forward with $27.9 million.