{"id":1134,"date":"2014-12-01T03:34:26","date_gmt":"2014-12-01T03:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2014-12-01T03:34:26","modified_gmt":"2014-12-01T03:34:26","slug":"fun-fact-undergrad-enrollment-has-increased-50-since-1990","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/2014\/12\/01\/fun-fact-undergrad-enrollment-has-increased-50-since-1990\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun fact: Undergrad enrollment has increased 50% since 1990."},"content":{"rendered":"

My younger sister, Grace, got her first college acceptance letter yesterday.\u00a0 (Sorry, she isn\u2019t applying to UPS \u2013 I did try, but apparently being a younger sibling makes her disinclined to follow me to college.)\u00a0 This is a bit weird for me, because she just turned seventeen, and I swear I was seventeen just last year or something, despite our four-year age gap.\u00a0 But besides that, it\u2019s weird because I\u2019ve been hearing all about how awful college applications are, and despite my misperception of my age, college apps feel like a long time ago.\u00a0 The Common App? \u00a0You mean that one website with all the forms and tabs and things?<\/em><\/p>\n

Grace has two older siblings from whom to learn, and thus appears to be far more on top of things than I remember feeling as a senior in high school.\u00a0 Except for one thing: she doesn\u2019t have a \u201ctype\u201d of college.\u00a0 Small liberal arts school?\u00a0 She\u2019s applying to one of those.\u00a0 Varying sizes of state school?\u00a0 Yep.\u00a0 Big private schools?\u00a0 Got those, too.\u00a0 The only consistent thing is that all of the schools are in places of extreme cold \u2013 with the exception of UC Santa Barbara, which our mom made her add to counteract the preponderance of upstate New York and Michigan-types of places.<\/p>\n

I was talking to my cousin over Thanksgiving, and the subject of \u201cif you go back and tell your younger self anything, what would it be?\u201d came up.\u00a0 This particular cousin is my age, went to college for a year, hated it, dropped out, and is now working as a pretty well-paid computer programmer.\u00a0 But he said that he would tell his younger self to go to college.\u00a0 Maybe a different college than the one he briefly attended \u2013 one with a bit more of a small, liberal-arts-type of feel than last time, with its 35,000-strong student body \u2013 but college nevertheless.\u00a0 And not only to go to college, but also to study something that isn\u2019t computer programming; he said he\u2019s noticed that, career-wise, it\u2019s generally a lot better to have multiple areas of expertise.\u00a0 (Interdisciplinarity!\u00a0 Who knew, right?)<\/p>\n

The type of school can clearly make a pretty big difference in your success in college.\u00a0 Unless you\u2019re Grace, who can apparently do anything, like apply to a random mix of schools and take six AP classes this year and intern for a congressman and still<\/em> have me edit her college essays.\u00a0 (I\u2019m going to continue making fun of her for as long as I can, because of my impending battle with College Apps Round Two: Grad School Edition.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My younger sister, Grace, got her first college acceptance letter yesterday.\u00a0 (Sorry, she isn\u2019t applying to UPS \u2013 I did try, but apparently being a younger sibling makes her disinclined to follow me to college.)\u00a0 This is a bit weird … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":386,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leah-shamlian-14"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/386"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1135,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions\/1135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/whatwedo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}