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EDIT: I have expanded my initial Quora response to the following, which I have also reproduced on Medium:Is majoring in liberal arts a mistake for students?Critical Thinking and the Scientific Process First — Humanities LaterIf luck favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur is credited with saying, we’re in danger of becoming a very unlucky nation. Little of the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future.Consider all the science and economics that has been updated, the shifting theories of psychology, the programming languages and political theories that have been developed, and even how many planets our solar system has. Much, like literature and history, should be evaluated against updated, relevant priorities in the 21st century.I feel that liberal arts education in the United States is a minor evolution of 18th century European education. The world needs something more than that. Non-professional undergraduate education needs a new system that teaches students how to learn and judge using the scientific process on issues relating to science, society, and business.Though Jane Austen and Shakespeare might be important, they are far less important than many other things that are more relevant to make an intelligent, continuously learning citizen, and a more adaptable human being in our increasingly more complex, diverse and dynamic world.I would coin a new term, “the liberal sciences,” as this basic education, the test for which would be quite simple: at the end of an undergraduate education, is a student roughly able to understand and discuss the Economist, end-to-end, every week. This modern, non-professional education would meet the original “Greek life purpose” of a liberal arts education, updated for today’s world.The most important things for a general, non-professional or vocational education are critical thinking and problem-solving skills, familiarity with logic and the scientific process, and the ability to use these in forming opinions, discourse, and in making decisions. Other general skills that are also important include — but are not limited to — interpersonal skills and communication skills .So what is wrong with today’s typical liberal arts degree?Neither the old definition of liberal arts nor the current implementation of it is the best use of four years of somebody’s education (if it is to be non-professional). The hardest (and most lucrative) problems to solve are non-technical problems. In my opinion, getting a STEM degree gives you the tools to think about those problems more effectively than a liberal arts degree today; though it is far from a complete way of thinking, and a liberal science degree will do this in an even more complete form.Some of you will point to very successful people who’ve gone to Yale and done well, but you don’t understand statistics. A lot of successful people have started out as liberal arts majors. A lot haven’t. If you’re very driven and intelligent or lucky, you’ll probably be successful in life, even with today’s liberal arts degree. Then again, if you’re that driven and intelligent, you could probably find success with any degree, or even no degree. Apple’s Steve Jobs and Joi Ito (Director of the MIT media lab) are both college dropouts. Joi is a largely self-taught computer scientist, disc jockey, nightclub entrepreneur and technology investor. The top 20% of people in any cohort will do well independent of what curriculum their education follows, or if they had any education at all. If we want to maximize the potential of the other 80%, then we need a new Liberal Sciences curriculum.Yale just decided that Computer Science was important and I like to ask, “if you live in France, shouldn’t you learn French? If you live in the computer world, shouldn’t you learn Computer Science?” What should be the second required language in schools today if we live in a computer world? And if you live in a technology world what must you understand? Traditional education is far behind and the old world tenured professors at our universities with their parochial views and interests will keep dragging them back. My disagreement is not with the goals of a liberal arts education but its implementation and evolution (or lack thereof) from 18th century European education and its purpose. There is too little emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills in schools, even though that was the original goal of such education. Many adults have little understanding of important science and technology issues or, more importantly, how to approach them, which leaves them open to poor decision-making on matters that will affect both their families and society in general.Connections matter and many Ivy League colleges are worth it just to be an alumnus. There are people with the view that liberal arts broadened their vision and gave them great conversational topics. There are those who argue that the humanities are there to teach us what to do with knowledge. As one observer commented: “They should get lawyers to think whether an unjust law is still law. An engineer could contemplate whether Artificial Intelligence is morally good. An architect could pause to think on the merit of building a house fit for purpose. A doctor could be taught whether and how to justify using scarce medical resources for the benefit of one patient and not another. This is the role of humanities — a supplement to STEM and the professions.”In my view creativity, humanism, and ethics are very hard to teach, whereas worldliness and many other skills supposedly taught through the liberal arts are more easily self-taught in a continuously updating fashion if one has a good quantitative, logical and scientific process-oriented base education.The argument goes that a scientific/engineering education lacks enough training in critical thinking skills, creativity, inspiration, innovation and holistic thinking . On the contrary, I argue that the scientific and logical basis of a better liberal sciences education would allow some or all of this — and in a more consistent way. The argument that being logical makes one a linear problem solver and ill prepared for professions that require truly creative problem solving has no merit in my view. The old version of the Liberal Arts curriculum was reasonable in a world of the far less complex 18th century Euro-centric world and an elitist education focused on thinking and leisure. Since the 20th century, despite it’s goals, it has evolved as the “easier curriculum” to get through college and may now be the single biggest reason students pursue it.I do not believe that today’s typical liberal arts degree turns you into a more complete thinker; rather, I believe they limit the dimensionality of your thinking since you have less familiarity with mathematical models (to me it’s the dimensionality of thinking that I find deficient in many people without a rigorous education), and worse statistical understanding of anecdotes and data (which liberal arts was supposedly good at preparing students for but is actually highly deficient at). People in the humanities fields are told that they get taught analytical skills, including how to digest large volumes of information, but I find that by and large such education is poor at imparting these skills. Maybe, that was the intent but the reality is very far from this idealization (again, excluding the top 20%).There is a failing in many college programs that are not pragmatic enough to align and relate liberal arts program to the life of a working adult. From finance to media to management and administration jobs, necessary skills like strategic-thinking, finding trends, and big-picture problem-solving have all evolved in my view to need the more quantitative preparation than today’s degrees provide.Such skills, supposedly the purview of liberal arts education, are best learnt through more quantitative methods today. Many vocational programs from engineering to medicine also need these same skills and need to evolve and broaden to add to their training. But if I could only have one of a liberal arts or an engineering/science education, I’d pick the engineering even if I never intended to work as an engineer and did not know what career I wanted to pursue.I have in fact almost never worked as an engineer but deal exclusively with risk, evolution of capability, innovation, people evaluation, creativity and vision formulation. That is not to say that goal setting, design, and creativity are not important or even critical. In fact these need to be added to most professional and vocational degrees, which are also deficient for today’s practical careers.More and more fields are becoming very quantitative, and it’s becoming harder and harder to go from majoring in English or history to having optionality on various future careers and being an intelligent citizen in a democracy. Math, statistics and science are hard, and school is a great time to learn those areas, whereas many of the liberal arts courses can be pursued after college on the base of a broad education. But without training in the scientific process, logic and critical thinking, discourse and understanding are both made far more difficult.A good illustrative example of the problems of today’s liberal arts education can be found in the writing of well-known author, Malcolm Gladwell, a history major and a one-time writer for The New Yorker. Gladwell famously argued that stories were more important that accuracy or validity without even realizing it. The New Republic called the final chapter of Gladwell’sOutliers, “impervious to all forms of critical thinking” and said that Gladwell believes “a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.” Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake in which Gladwell refers to “eigenvalue” as “Igon Value,” Harvard professor and author Steven Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: “I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.” Unfortunately too many in today’s media are similarly “uneducated” in their interpretation of experts. Storytelling and quotes become a misleading factor instead of being an aid to communicating the accurate facts more easily. His assertions around “10,000 hours” may or may not be true but his arguments for it carry very little weight with me because of the quality of his thinking.Though one example of Malcolm Gladwell does not prove the invalidity of arguments for a Liberal Arts degree, I find this kind of erroneous thinking (anecdotally) true of many humanities and liberal arts graduates. In fact I see the inconsistencies that Gladwell failed to understand (giving him the benefit of the doubt that these were unintentional) in the writings of many authors of articles in supposedly elite publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Again this is not a statistically valid conclusion but the impression across hundreds or thousands of examples of one person. When I do occasionally read articles from these publications, I make a sport of judging the quality of thinking of the writers as I read, based on false arguments, unsupported conclusions, confusion of story telling with factual assertions, mistaking quotes from interviews as facts, misinterpreting statistics, etc. Similar lack of cogent thinking leads to bad decisions, uninformed rhetoric, and lack of critical thinking around topics like nuclear power and GMOs.Unfortunately in an increasingly complex world, all these topics skills that many liberal arts majors even at elite universities fail to muster. The topic of risk and risk assessment from simple personal financial planning to societal topics like income inequality is so poorly understood and considered by most liberal arts majors as to make me pessimistic. I am not arguing that engineering or STEM education is good at these topics but rather that this is not its intent of STEM or professional education. The intent of Liberal Arts education is what Steven Pinker called a “building a self” and I would add “for the technological and dynamically evolving 21st century”.Learning new areas as career paths and interests evolve becomes harder. Traditional European liberal arts education was for the few and the elite. Is that still the goal today? People spend years and a small fortune or lifelong indebtedness to obtain it and employability should be a criterion in addition to an educations’ contribution to intelligent citizenry.Wikipedia defines “the liberal arts as those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that (for Ancient Greece) included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and most importantly, military service. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were the core liberal arts, while arithmetic, geometry, the theory of music, and astronomy also played a (somewhat lesser) part in education.” Today’s ideal list, not anchored in “classical antiquity”would be more expansive and more prioritized in my view.Idealists and those who perceive liberal arts education today as meeting these goals are wrong not in it’s intent but in assessing how well it does this function (and that is an assertion/opinion). I agree that we need a more humanistic education but it is hard to agree or disagree with the current curriculum without defining what humanistic means. Does it really teach critical thinking, logic or the scientific process, things every citizen should know in order to participate in society? Does it allow for intelligent discourse or decision-making across a diverse set of beliefs, situations, preferences, and assumptions?Should we teach our students what we already know, or prepare them to discover more? Memorizing the Gettysburg address is admirable but ultimately worthless; understanding history is interesting, even useful, but not as relevant as topics from the Economist. A student who can apply the scientific process or employ critical thinking skills to solve a big problem has the potential to change the world (or at minimum get a better-paying job). They can actually debate a topic like #blacklivesmatter, income inequality or Climate Change without being subject to “Trumpism” or emotion and biases-based distortions. No wonder half the college graduates who fill jobs as some studies indicate, actually fill jobs that don’t need a college degree! Their degree is not relevant to adding value to an employer (though that is not the only purpose of a degree).Further, even if an ideal curriculum can be stitched together, most liberal arts majors infrequently do it. If the goal is not professional education then it must be general education, which requires many more must-have requirements for me to consider a university degree respectable. Of course others are entitled to their own opinion, though the right answer is testable if one agrees that the goals of such an education are intelligent citizenry and/or employability.For now I am mostly leaving aside matters related to professional, vocational or technical curriculum. I’m also ignoring the not irrelevant and pragmatic issues of education affordability and the burden of student debt, which would argue for a more employment-enabling type of education. The failure I am referring to are two-fold: (1) the failure of curriculums to keep up with the changing needs of modern society and (2) liberal arts becoming the “easy curriculum” for those who shy away from the more demanding majors and prefer an easier, often (but not always) more socially-oriented college life. Ease, not value, or interest instead of value become key criteria in designing a curriculum for many students today. And for those of you who think this is not true, I am asserting based on my experience this is true for the majority of today’s students, but not for every liberal arts student.Not every course is for every student but the criteria need to match the needs of the student and not their indulgences, taking interests and capability into account. “Pursue your passion” even if it increases the probability of getting you into unemployment or homelessness later is advice I have seldom agreed with (yes there are occasions this is warranted, especially for the top or the bottom 20% of students). More on passions later but I’m not saying passions are unimportant. What I am saying is with today’s implementation of a liberal arts curriculum, even at elite universities like Stanford and Yale, I find that many liberal arts majors (excluding roughly the top 20% of students) lack the ability to rigorously defend ideas, make compelling, persuasive arguments, or discourse logically.Steven Pinker — in addition to refuting Gladwell — has a brilliant, clarion opinion on what education ought to be, writing in The New Republic, “It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.”Though I agree, I am not sure this curriculum is more important than the ideas below. Based on the skills defined below any gaps in the above education can be filled in by students post graduation.So what should non-professional elite education entail?If we had enough time in school, I would suggest we do everything. Sadly that is not realistic, so we need a prioritized list of basic requirements because every subject we do cover excludes some other subject given the fixed time we have available. We must decide what is better taught during the limited teaching time we have, and what subjects are easier learnt during personal time or as post-education or graduate pursuits.In the new Liberal Science curriculum I propose, students would master:1. The fundamental tools of learning and analysis, primarily critical thinking, the scientific process or methodology, and approaches to problem solving and diversity.2. Knowledge of a few generally applicable topics and knowledge of the basics such as logic, mathematics, and statistics to judge and model conceptually almost anything one might run into over the next few decades.3. The skills to “dig deep” into their areas of interest in order to understand how these tools can be applied to one domain and to be equipped to change domains every so often4. Preparation for jobs in a competitive and evolving global economy or preparation for uncertainty about one’s future direction, interest, or areas where opportunities will exist.5. Preparation to continuously evolve and stay current as informed and intelligent citizens of a democracyCritical subject matter should include economics, statistics, mathematics, logic and systems modeling, psychology, computer programming, and current (not historical) cultural evolution (Why rap? Why ISIS? Why suicide bombers? Why the Kardasians and Trump? Why environmentalism and what matters and what does not? And of course the question, are the answers to these questions expert opinions or have some other validity?).Furthermore, certain humanities disciplines such as literature and history should become optional subjects, in much the same way that physics is today (and, of course, I advocate mandatory basic physics study along with the other sciences). And one needs the ability to think through many, if not most, of the social issues we face (which the softer liberal arts subjects ill-prepare one for in my view).Imagine a required course each semester where every student is asked to analyze and debate topics from every issue of a broad publication such as The Economist or Technology Review. And imagine a core curriculum that teaches the core skills to have the discussions above. Such a curriculum would not only provide a platform for understanding in a more relevant context how the physical, political, cultural and technical worlds function, but would also impart instincts for interpreting the world, and prepare students to become active participants in the economy.It would be essential to understand psychology because human behavior and human interaction are important and will continue to be so. I’d like people who are immune to the fallacies and agendas of the media, politicians, advertisers, and marketers because these professions have learned to hack the human brain’s biases (a good description of which are described in Dan Kannehman’s Thinking Fast & Slow and in Dan Gardner’s The Science of Fear). I’d like to teach people how to understand history but not to spend time getting the knowledge of history, which can be done after graduation.I’d like people to read a New York Times article and understand what is an assumption, what’s an assertion by the writer, what are facts, and what are opinions, and maybe even find the biases and contradictions inherent in many articles. We are far beyond the days of the media simply reporting news, shown by the different versions of the “news” that liberal and conservative newspapers in the US report, all as different “truths” of the same event. Learning to parse this media is critical. I’d like people to understand what is statistically valid and what is not. What is a bias or the color of the writer’s point of view.Students should learn the scientific method, and most importantly how to apply its mental model to the world. The scientific method requires that hypotheses be tested in controlled conditions; this can diminish the effects of randomness and, often, personal bias. This is very valuable in a world where too many students fall victim to confirmation biases (people observe what they expect to observe), appeal to new and surprising things, and narrative fallacies (once a narrative has been built, it’s individual elements are more accepted). There are many, many types of human biases defined in psychology that people fall victim to. Failure to understand mathematical models and statistics makes it substantially more difficult to understand critical questions in daily life, from social sciences to science and technology, political issues, health claims and much more.I’d also suggest tackling several general and currently relevant topic areas such as genetics, computer science, systems modeling, econometrics, linguistics modeling, traditional and behavioral economics, and genomics/bioinformatics (not an exhaustive list) which are quickly becoming critical issues for everyday decisions from personal medical decisions to understanding minimum pay, economics of taxes and inequality, immigration, or climate change. E.O. Wilson argues in his book “The Meaning of Human Existence” that it is hard to understand social behavior without understanding multi-level selection theory and the mathematical optimization that nature performed through years of evolutionary iterations. I am not arguing that every educated person should be able to build such a model but rather that they should be able to “think” such a model qualitatively.Not only do these topics expose students to a lot of useful and current information, theories, and algorithms, they may in fact become platforms to teach the scientific process — a process that applies to (and is desperately needed for) logical discourse as much as it applies to science. The scientific process critically needs to be applied to all the issues we discuss socially in order to have intelligent dialog. Even if the specific information becomes irrelevant within a decade (who knows where technology will head next; hugely important cultural phenomena and technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone didn’t exist before 2004, after all), it’s incredibly useful to understand the current frontiers of science and technology as building blocks for the future.It’s not that history or Kafka are not important, but rather it is even more critical to understand if we change the assumptions, environmental conditions and rules that applied to historical events, that would alter the conclusions we draw from historical events today. Every time a student takes one subject they exclude the possibility of taking something else. I find it ironic that those who rely on “history repeating itself” often fail to understand the assumptions that might cause “this time” to be different. The experts we rely on for predictions have about the same accuracy as dart-throwing monkeys according to at least one very exhaustive study by Prof Phil Tetlock. So it is important to understand how to rely on “more likely to be right” experts, as defined in the book Superforecasters. We make a lot of judgments in everyday life and we should be prepared to make them intelligently.Students can use this broad knowledge base to build mental models that will aid them in both further studies and vocations. Charlie Munger, the famous investor from Berkshire Hathaway, speaks about mental models and what he calls “elementary, worldly wisdom.” Munger believes a person can combine models from a wide range of disciplines (economics, mathematics, physics, biology, history, and psychology, among others) into something that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. I have to agree that this cross-disciplinary thinking is becoming an essential skill in today’s increasingly complex world.“The models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department,” Munger explains. “That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines… These models generally fall into two categories: (1) ones that help us simulate time (and predict the future) and better understand how the world works (e.g. understanding a useful idea from like autocatalysis), and (2) ones that help us better understand how our mental processes lead us astray (e.g., availability bias).” I would add that they provide the “common truth” in discussions where the well educated discussants disagree.After grasping the fundamental tools of learning and some broad topical exposure, it’s valuable to “dig deep” in one or two topic areas of interest. For this, I prefer some subject in science or engineering rather than literature or history (bear with me before you have an emotional reaction; I’ll explain in a minute). Obviously, it’s best if students are passionate about a specific topic, but it’s not critical as the passion may develop as they dig in (some students will have passions, but many won’t have any at all). The real value for digging deep is to learn how to dig in; it serves a person for the duration of their life: in school, work, and leisure. As Thomas Huxley said, “learn something about everything and everything about something,” though his saying that does not make it true. Too often, students don’t learn that a quote is not a fact.If students choose options from traditional liberal-education subjects, they should be taught in the context of the critical tools mentioned above. If students want jobs, they should be taught skills where future jobs will exist. If we want them as intelligent citizens, we need to have them understand critical thinking, statistics, economics, how to interpret technology and science developments, and how global game theory applies to local interests. Traditional majors like international relations and political science are passé as base skills and can easily be acquired once a student has the basic tools of understanding. And they and many other traditional liberal arts subjects like history or art will be well served in graduate level work. I want to repeat that this is not to claim those “other subjects” are not valuable. I think they are very appropriate for graduate level study.Back to history and literature for a moment — these are great to wrestle with once a student has learned to think critically. My contention is not that these subjects are unimportant, but rather that they are not basic or broad enough “tools for developing learning skills” as they were in the 1800s, because the set of skills needed today has changed. Furthermore, they are topics easily learned by someone trained in the basic disciplines of thinking and learning that I’ve defined above. This isn’t as easy the other way around. A scientist can more easily become a philosopher or writer than a writer or philosopher can become a scientist.If subjects like history and literature are focused on too early, it is easy for someone not to learn to think for themselves and not to question assumptions, conclusions, and expert philosophies. This can do a lot of damage.Separating the aspirational claims by universities from the reality of today’s typical liberal arts education I tend to agree with the views of William Deresiewicz. He was an English professor at Yale from 1998–2008 and recently published the book “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.” Deresiewicz writes on the current state of liberal arts, “At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much. There are exceptions, of course, but professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a ‘nonaggression pact.’” Easy is often the reason students pick liberal arts subjects today.Lots of things are important but what are the most important goals of an education?To repeat, school is a place where every student should have the opportunity to become a potential participant in whatever they might want to tackle in the future, with an appropriate focus not only on what they want to pursue but also, pragmatically, what they will need to do to be productively employed or productive and thinking member of society. By embracing thinking and learning skills, and adding a dash of irreverence and confidence that comes from being able to tackle new arenas (creative writing as a vocational skill, not a liberal arts education, may have a role here, but Macbeth does not make my priority list; we can agree to disagree but if we discourse I want to understand the assumptions that cause us to disagree, something many students are unable to do), hopefully they will be lucky enough to help shape the next few decades or at least be intelligent voters in a democracy and productive participants in their jobs .With the right critical lens, history, philosophy, and literature can help creativity and breadth by opening the mind to new perspectives and ideas. Still, learning about them is secondary to learning the tools of learning except possibly the right approach to philosophy education. Again I want to remind you that none of this applies to the top 20% of students who learn all these skills independent of their education or major. Passions like music or literature (leaving aside the top few students who clearly excel at music or literature) and its history may be best left to self-pursuit, while exploring the structure and theory of music or literature may be a way to teach the right kind of thinking about music and literature!For some small subset of the student body, pursuing passions and developing skills in subjects such as music or sports can be valuable, and I am a fan of schools like Juilliard, but in my view this must be in addition to a required general education especially for the “other 80%”. It’s the lack of balance in general education which I am suggesting needs to be addressed (including for engineering, science and technology subjects’ students. Setting music and sports aside, with the critical thinking tools and exposure to the up-and-coming areas mentioned above, students should be positioned to discover their first passion and begin to understand themselves, or at the least be able to keep up with the changes to come, get (and maintain) productive jobs, and be intelligent citizens.At the very least they should be able to evaluate how much confidence to place in a New York Times study of 11 patients on a new cancer treatment from Mexico or a health supplement from China and to assess the study’s statistical validity and whether the treatment’s economics make sense. And they should understand the relationship between taxes, spending, balanced budgets, and growth better than they understand 15th century English history in preparation for “civic life” to quote the original purpose of a liberal arts education. And if they are to study language or music, Dan Levitin’s book “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” should be first reading or its equivalent in linguistics. It can teach you about a human obsession but also teach you how to build a mathematical model in your head and why and how Indian music is different than Latin music. In fact, these should be required for all education, not just liberal arts education, along with the other books mentioned above.The role of passion and emotion in life is best epitomized by a quote (unknown source) I once saw that says the most important things in life are best decided by the heart and not logic. For the rest we need logic and consistency. The “what” may be emotion and passion based but the “how” often (yes, sometimes the journey is the reward) needs a different approach that intelligent citizens should possess and education should teach.I am sure I have missed some points of view, so I look forward to starting a valuable dialogue on this important topic.

Hello,I can relate to your skepticism regarding any program in the analytics domain. There are hundreds of courses offered by numerous organizations catering to different market segments. Finding the right program that meets your requirements can be cumbersome.I inquired about programs offered by Great Lakes Institute of Management, Jigsaw Academy, IIIT-B and Upgrad, Aegis School of Business and online MOOCs on Udemy and DataCamp. I compared the programs on parameters like course content, faculty experience, course fee, schedule flexibility, application orientation and mentoring facilities. I finally selected the PG Diploma Course in Data Science [PGDDS] by IIIT-B and Upgrad as the aforementioned parameters specific to this program aligned with my learning objectives.I belong to the 4th Cohort of this program and after completing 5 months of the coursework I can share my experience and opinions.Is this program the right fit for me?The answer to this question will vary from person to person. As I had no prior experience in this domain, I was looking for a program with a beginner to intermediate course framework along with well-defined course structure.The program at IIIT-B offers 8 courses encompassing analytical tools like R, Python, Tableau, Excel, SQL, Hadoop* and Spark*. Domain specialization options in either banking, healthcare or e-commerce analytics along with a 3-month capstone project provides a platform to implement concepts in a practical setting. Interesting application-based case studies and assignments encourage you to incrementally improve your skills and foster healthy competition among the cohort. With weekly submissions and periodic evaluations, the program ensures that you keep abreast with the rest of your cohort. I often find that people register for online MOOCs but often fail to complete the course on time due to lack of motivation and there are no provisions for mentors to keep track of your progress and performance.Since this program is not bound by traditional classroom constraints, flexibility in terms of learning hours makes it beneficial for working professionals to balance work commitment with their desire to pursue a certification program in Data Science. Accessibility on mobile or web platforms options makes accessing content easy and instantaneous.Student mentoring along with career guidance facilities makes this program unique as it can help you assess roles in the analytics domain that match your skill set and experience. For someone entering this domain as a novice, these insights can be crucial in shaping future career decisions.The majority of individuals looking for a study program in analytics are beginners looking to gain some experience in the domain and develop their skill set. This program covers most of these bases and is, therefore, a worthy option to be considered. The program costs roughly 2.25 lakhs at the time of my application and there are some payment flexibility options if required.I will acknowledge that there are many free platforms to learn specific concepts from Google, edX, and Coursera. However, for many students trying to learn from these resources without guidance or a refined course structure might find it overwhelming leading to ineffective learning. On the resume front completing these courses from these free repositories will inevitably help you improve your skill but may not garner much interest when mentioned in your CV/resume. Having completed a certified program from a reputed institution like IIIT-B gives you that brand advantage. You may choose to do the PG diploma program from IIIT-B and chose specific MOOCs to complement your learning or to specialize in certain topics. This will greatly improve your chances of breaking into the analytics job market. [I will take this opportunity to mention that the PGDDS program doesn’t cover specific topics in detail. For example, the statistics aspect is not covered in as much detail as one might expect. However, the course content encourages you to read additional reference material to broaden your knowledge. This content gap can be covered and supplemented by online MOOCs and reference books].I strongly encourage you to identify your learning objectives and list down topics that you might want to learn. Then access the course brochures like the one on PG Diploma in Data Science | Data Science Certification | UpGrad and assess if your requirements align with the curriculum. Interact with the present cohort through LinkedIn forum and weigh out the benefits versus the investment. This will help you narrow down on which program is the right fit for you.[Below I’ve provided detailed inputs regarding different facets of the PGDDS program]Program Curriculum:A brief summary of the courses covered in this program:The topics covered are from basic to intermediate level. Therefore novices in this domain will not have any learning disadvantages. Each course has weekly deliverable and accompanied by industry relevant case studies and assignments. Course performance is periodically evaluated through examinations on completed courses. A GPA system is followed and a score report can be viewed at any time on the platform.The course content is refined and well curated. There is a logical flow, and transition between modules and courses leading to a conducive and effective learning experience. I urge you to experience the platform and sample content by creating a free account on the http://learn.upgrad.com website. There is access to one module introducing terms in data science and concepts in Analytics along with a sample case study.Faculty and Industry Experts:The curated course content is delivered through subject matter experts comprising of professors from IIIT-B and industry experts from relevant analytics firms. Instructions and course concepts are explained vividly through clear illustrations and relevant examples.I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions conducted by Mr. Anand S. CEO at Gramener. His anecdotes from his professional career provide a memorable learning opportunity.Weekly Live sessions are conducted where the students can post relevant questions and doubts that will be cleared by the relevant subject matter expert or professor.Duration and Time Commitment:The course is spread over a duration of 11 months and weekly time commitment is stated as 8–10 hours but it often takes around 12–14 hours per week to cover the topics effectively.Diversely adroit Cohort and Discussion Forum Advantage:Each cohort comprises of 300+ students from diverse backgrounds, professional domains and age groups. The benefit of this diversity is leveraged through the discussion forum on the platform. An enthusiastic cohort ensures constructive discussions on topics relevant to Data Science and timely guidance to resolve doubts. Upgrad also conducts occasional social gatherings to provide an opportunity to interact with the members of the cohort in major cities.Student Mentor and Career Guidance Mentor:Each student is assigned a student mentor who keeps track of their performance and provides weekly updates along with any support or assistance with respect to the course. Apart from this, there is a team of teaching assistants to clear subject matter doubts.Each student can select a career guidance mentor from a diverse pool of established professional in the analytics domain. This is crucial for the student as it provides insights into possible analytical roles that align with your profile. Along with insights into resume building and developing a career plan.Certification from a Premiere Institute:Successful completion of the program requirements will result in the Issue of a Post Graduate Diploma in Data Science from the International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore. This certification in combination with a matured analytical skill set can significantly open up opportunities in the professional data analytics market.Collaborations through Group Case Studies:Members of the cohort must form teams of 4 students and collaborate on a series of case studies. This provides an opportunity to work as a time to collectively formulate an innovative solution to the given business problem. I collaborated with one student from Philippines and two students from Kenya for my case studies. It provides a unique opportunity to interact with and learn from other students in the cohort.In conclusion, I urge you to consider this program as a noteworthy option while selecting a certification program. Source material on the course content and course deliverable and match it against your learning objectives. Consider the advantages in the aforementioned post and weigh the cost of the program against the projected educational benefits. Lastly, reach out to the current cohort of the program and discuss your doubts with them. Make your final decision based on all these inputs and your experience. I wish you the best of luck. May the force be with you.

Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers is one of the best books published on what it is like to work at a highly selective college or university admission office. Steinberg was given almost unheard of access to the way Wesleyan conducts the business of selecting students who best fit their institutional needs.My short answer is pretty simple: Yes and No. I will try to show why this seeming contradiction forms a larger frame that has room for both ways of painting the picture.Given that the book, at least by today’s standards, is old, the first thing to address is whether the book still accurately describes what goes on in admission at Wesleyan. For those who have not read the book, a bit of plot summary might be useful. I use the word plot because although the book is not a novel, it does trace the story of one particular admission officer, Ralph Figueroa, and the fates of a number of students too.The focus on one office and one person allows Steinberg to let the life he depicts stand for the larger admission office staff at Wesleyan and for selective admission officers as a whole. We follow Ralph through an admission season, which includes recruiting trips to schools that in some cases are looked at as among the best in the US, and others that serve the Native American population who have tremendous challenges in front of them. We also see that “reading season’ is a several month journey into the stats, words and activities of thousands of talented students. There is little else that goes on in an admission officer’s life except evaluation during this period of time. However, once the reading season ends there are recruitment activities that are necessary for helping to enroll the lucky few who have been admitted. And shortly after that the whole cycle begins again. The book was originally a part of Steinberg’s excellent NY Times Choice Blog. (Unfortunately, he no longer writes the blog. It is still a great resource; even the old entries are useful.)We also get to follow the admission process through the experiences of students who have applied to a variety of selective schools and we discover what their outcomes are. We come to root for some as we read the book and we share in the good news and are moved by how hard it is when some get told no. As a whole, the book lets people in on some inside views of both schools and students as they go through what has become a much more complicated and much more competitive process than it used to be even a generation ago. Most parents say, and rightly so, that they would never get in to most of the highly selective schools that they were accepted to given the huge increase in applications from around the US and the world. Acceptance rates have fallen dramatically at top schools, something I have addressed before. It is not only much harder than it used to get accepted in to top schools, it is much harder to predict who will get in top schools too.The book, which came out in 2002, nevertheless, still rings true in a number of important ways. In fact, Wesleyan had Mr. Steinberg back on campus not that long ago (2013) and listed ten things he got right about the admission process. I won’t list all of them, but there are three that I think need a bit of a gloss.Wesleyan practices “holistic” admissions. There’s no SAT cut-off or minimum GPA to get into Wesleyan. Nothing as staunchly empirical as the University of Michigan’s longtime admissions formula. Instead, admissions officers combine numbers like GPAs and test scores with raw, human decisions regarding abstract qualities like “character,” “diversity,” and “merit.” (Of course, that’s not to mention the obviously charged negotiations over legacy admits, athletic recruits, celebrity children, and talented oboists.) Steinberg intimately examines an unscientific, complicated admissions process whose (largely antisemitic) origins Malcolm Gladwell later traced in a popular New Yorker article, “Getting In.” It’s messy stuff, and sometimes there are no easy answers, as in the case of Mig Pensoneau, a Native-American applicant with a rough academic history who ends up dropping out of Wesleyan.I applaud the writers of the Wesleyan overview for being far more forthcoming about the quirks that are a part of ‘holistic’ admission. From a shady past that was part of an effort to suppress Jewish students from going Ivy (the better place to find out about this is to read the long but worth reading book The Chosen), holistic admission is the screening process that lets them look at more than just numbers. Most student and families support the abstract notion of holistic admission until they find out how much falls under this rubric. Holistic admission can mean a legacy at a school gets a boost, and in some schools this boost is huge, Holistic admission can mean that an athlete with less than stellar academics in virtually every measurable way may still be invited to join one of the most elite schools in the US. Each school has its own institutional priorities and holistic admission gives them leeway to pursue what they think is in the best interest of the school. It's important to remember that schools are first and foremost about what is best for them even if this means that some students will discover that despite having doe all about anyone can do to get into the school, they still will end up short. What drives some parents and students to distraction (and a few to law suits) is that they “know” another student with much weaker credentials got accepted. And it is likely true that there are students on the most elite campuses whose academic credentials are far weaker. Wesleyan, again with uncharacteristic openness, admits this:Wesleyan really wants more science students and more athletes. Wesleyan remains one of the few top liberal arts colleges where science majors can expect to do original research as undergraduates, and Steinberg’s book reveals how a proven interest in science can give you a huge boost in the admissions process. (A former admissions officer tells Steinberg, “Someone once asked me, ‘Would you take a kid with high physics scores and nothing else?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ The faculty wants them, and the faculty needs them.”) It also reveals Wesleyan’s longtime struggle to be taken seriously on the athletic fields. Steinberg interviews former Dean of Admissions and current Vice President for University Relations Barbara-Jan Wilson, who apparently went to great lengths to improve communication between the admissions officers and coaches. (“I always believed that if the New York Times wanted to write about a draft dodger, they’d call us,” Wilson tells Steinberg. “If they were looking for a good student athlete, they’d call Williams.” But this is a source of frustration: “At Wesleyan you could find a great student athlete,” she protests. “It’s a stereotype.”)These words are one place that helps to answer your question in specific terms. Wesleyan is different than some of the other highly ranked schools in its commitment to giving an edge in admission to students who have a passion for the sciences. As the school is more well known for its arts and humanities and social science the school wishes to increase the number of science students to make sure there is a balance and to ensure there are enough students talking classes in the sciences as majors. This would certainly not be true at a place, for example, at a school like MIT. They might give an edge to the poet or the artist over a strong science student. Each of the top schools has slightly different institutional priorities and so what Steinberg writes about applies in specific terms to one school. Nevertheless, each school does have its own way of giving certain individuals or groups an edge in admission.The last of the things that Wesleyan says that Steinberg gets right is in some ways the most controversial:Wesleyan admissions officers are often in close contact with guidance counselors at top prep schools. If you went to Exeter or Trinity or whatever, chances are your guidance counselor told Wesleyan about you. The Gatekeepers traces a long-term friendship between Ralph Figueroa and college classmate Sharon Merrow, who becomes a dean at the Harvard-Westlake School. Merrow frequently gives Ralph hints about her favorite students, and nudges him for insider tips when they end up applying to Wes. In the case of Julianna Bentes, Ralph had been secretly tracking her since she was in ninth grade. (Creepy? Don’t hate the player, hate the game.)There are many stories in the media about how students from privilege get all sorts of advantages when applying to the most selective schools. The data is there to show that students whose parents make above the top 1% have a distinct edge in admission. Some argue that this should happen as the students attend great schools and have the opportunity to do things outside of school that costs a lot of money (summer camps, travel, internships via networking etc.). The things I have just mentioned should certainly be looked at as ways a student may stand out in ways those who cannot afford these opportunities cannot. This is simply, to me, the way that life is unfair to those who are not at the high end of the income bracket.What The Gatekeepers shows, however, that not only does attending a great school provides wonderful educational opportunities, it also provides the student with access to admission officers that the vast majority of students do not have. If an admission officer has a great working relationship with a counselor and the counselor calls an admission officer to lobby on behalf of an individual or group of students this does seem an unfair advantage. The final comment from Wesleyan’s writers "don’t hate the player hate the game", sounds like a nice sound bite but it still makes it easy to overlook what a small group of students get that most don’t. Having said this however, a number of the top schools have made great efforts to visit schools and communities that are primarily low income. Harvard, Princeton and Yale have done this for years. Other schools, who do not have as much money set aside for financial aid, simply cannot afford to do as much. But The Gatekeepers also shows that Ralph makes a special effort to encourage Native Americans to apply to Wesleyan. Most schools do not target this group, but some target low-income students and almost all target other under-represented groups. Once again, each school will have a slightly different approach depending on what it feels will best support their needs academically, on the playing field, in certain academic majors ad among targeted groups of students.NoIf The Gatekeepers still has much to teach us about how selective admission works, it also does not address in a substantive way a number of things that have become much larger issues since the book was published. It also does not address how far apart some schools are from each other in using these things that affect admission decisions. I will mention just a few.Early Decision/EarlyAction:One of the factors that is a part of US News rankings is selectivity. The more applications a school gets is one part of the equation but the other is what the response rate of those students who are offered admission. At about the time The Gatekeepers came out there was a rush for the top schools to get rid of early decision. This came about after stats were published that demonstrated that the vast majority of all ED students were not eligible for financial aid. Needy students often shop for the best package they could find, so applying early could limit their choices. Remember that Early Decision is a binding agreement. If a student applies Early Decision and is accepted then the student has to withdraw all other applications. The advantage for early decision for schools is that the more they take early (which happens in November/December) the fewer they will have to offer to in regular decision.Regular decision notifications go out in March or early April and at that point a student will typically have a number of schools to choose from. Getting students to apply ED means that they will have no other choice if accepted and this increases the yield (the percentage of student who accept offers). Harvard and Princeton tried to get the movement going, but it did not filter down and a few schools that did follow have backed off in some way. In almost every other case when HPY does something big, others scramble to follow the leader but not this case. Very few changed (and some that did change have since changed back to either early decision or early action.) Why? It was not in their best interest from an institutional perspective. Harvard, Princeton and Yale's yield is already very high.1 Harvard has the highest yield rate of any school (see chart) other schools not that far down the top schools list do not have that luxury.Wesleyan, for example, has two ED plans. One has a November 1 deadline and the other Jan1. This dual strategy helps them because while some students may have applied to other top schools early in November they have heard whether they have been admitted by Mid-December. If they have been turned town at their original top choice they still can apply ED by Jan 1. Why would a student want to apply ED? The answer is simple. The acceptance rate for ED students is much higher than it is for regular decision. It is a significant advantage because the schools benefit from enrolling many strong students who are locked in as enrolling students. Duke, this year filled almost 50% of its class through ED. This means that the competition for regular decision candidates will be far, far tougher than it was for the ED students. Places like Penn make it clear that ED is an advantage too.Early action, which some schools, like Harvard, Princeton and Yale offer, also has a November deadline, but should a student be offered admission they are not required to withdraw all other applications and commit to enroll. A student will hear a decision before the Jan 1 application regular decision deadline from other schools, but almost anyone who gets in to the HYP early action will go. This is not as true for most other schools that offer EA. However, they use the time they have from December to the May 1 national reply date (when deposits to schools are due) to woo students. They invite them for special programs and send unending emails etc. They recruit in ways that were largely unheard of a decade ago including Tweets, Facebook pages, Instagram, blogs etc.I tell students who are looking at places like the Ivies, Stanford, and Wesleyan that they should plan on applying to a school early. ED is a bit trickier as it is binding, but the benefit in terms of getting in now weighs so heavily that it may be worth it. See chart for differences in acceptance rates for early vs. regular decisionAs already mentioned, low income students do not apply early nearly as often as those that can pay because they want to weigh the aid options they might get. Low-income student may face more challenges because of early programs but schools with lots of aid money try to give low-income student a break in admission and provide generous funding too. This year Harvard, for example, offered to a significantly higher proportion of low-income students EA than they did the year before.Profile:If there is one easy way to see how top schools are different from one another in terms of admission and, as a consequence, in terms of the make up of the study body, it is through a document called the profile. Typically, a profile describes the applicant pool, the students who have been offered admission and the students who have accepted the offer. It is meant to give families, students and educators a snapshot of the kinds of students who fit in the mix of enrolling students. While what I have just written is accurate as far as it goes, it is also far from comprehensive. A profile is also a marketing tool. Students and families can learn a lot about what the school values by looking at what information the schools include in their published profiles ad what information they leave out too.Harvard, for example, on their official admitted student profile does not list any academic numbers. There is nothing listed about Rank in Class, GPA or SAT/ACT scores. Instead they list the number of applications, the number admitted, where the applications apply from, the race of the students and financial aid information. Why would they leave out the stats that most would want to see when deciding whether a student has much of a chance of being admitted? Harvard is smart. If they listed the numbers I have just mentioned it would discourage many students form applying. Don’t believe me? Here are the stats that were left out as published by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper:The average self-reported unweighted GPA on a 4.0 scale was 3.94. Fifty-four percent of students reported a perfect 4.0.Freshmen reported an average composite SAT score of 2237. The reported average subject score was consistent across the three sections, with an average of 748 in the math section, 746 on writing, and 744 on critical reading.Source: Harvard CrimsonThese daunting numbers might discourage students that Harvard wants to apply (and in some cases enroll. For example low income and under-represented students, have, as I have mentioned, lower scores in the aggregate compared to other groups. Harvard wants to recruit more of these students and posting numbers that say that only near perfection gets in will discourage applications. Remember that schools' rankings are affected by how many applications they get, so Harvard is casting a wide net. There have been a number of stories condemning highly selective schools for encouraging applications from students who have no chance of getting in, something I have written about (and actually defend when it comes to the decision of schools to encourage or dissuade students from applying). Given the institutional priorities of enrolling a diverse student body it makes sense for Harvard to downplay how hard it is to get in.Wesleyan’s profile is far different than Harvard’s. While they too list the number of applicants, number accepted and enrolled, they also provide some numeric data. For a small school like Wesleyan and for ultra competitive schools like Harvard they are trying to make each space count. How they count however, is somewhat different.Here are some details from the Wesleyan profile:SAT: 2100 averageClass RankingClass Rank Reported 31%Top 10%: 63% of enrolled studentsTop 20%: 83% of enrolled studentsSecondary SchoolPublic 49%Other 51%Wesleyan demonstrates that they are a school that looks for most of its student to have high test scores. Despite all the critics of the SAT/ACT, standardized tests doe predict well at the end of the bell cure. Both Harvard and Wesleyan look for students who are near the top of the testing spectrum. What is different, however, between Harvard and Wesleyan is how many students at Wesleyan were not necessarily at or near the top of their secondary school class It needs to be noted that most private high schools and many highly ranked public schools do not rank students as they know that many students outside the top 1o% are often penalized at this statistic is used by the US News rankings. While many schools will simply turn down students who are not in the top 10%, Wesleyan does not follow this model. It is rare indeed for a top ranked school to enroll nearly 40% of its ranked students out of the top 10%. Harvard on the other hand, has almost an entire class in the top 10% and of those many are in the top 1%. The majority of its students have perfect grades. These differences between the schools are significant. Wesleyan looks to enroll students who are great testers but may not have had perfect grades.Another difference between Harvard (I am using Harvard as shorthand for all the Ivies, Stanford and a few other of the most selective universities and colleges) and Wesleyan is the percentage of public school students they enroll. Less than half of the class comes from public schools at Wesleyan. Over 61% of Harvard’s students come from public schools; small liberal arts colleges often draw many of their students form private schools. These students are used to the Harkness table and other seminar classes that are small, and they know they will find this in many of their classes at places like Wesleyan, Williams, Amherst, Middlebury etc.Finally, schools will have will be differences between male/female percentages and racial composition.. Small Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs) tend to draw far more female applicants than males. Males, the theory goes, often want to go to places that have big time sports programs (This statement applies only to the aggregate. I know some female fans that are as rabid supporters of their school as any 10 men put together). There is sort of an unwritten law however that highly selective Liberal Arts Colleges will never enroll a class over 61% female. This brings up the issue as to whether it is harder for females to get in and the answer, it seems, is yes.There is some good data about this but since holistic admission permits schools to keep at least some institutional priorities under wraps, Wesleyan and 56% females They do list this on their profile, as it is, for a liberal arts school, a good statistic. It will not discourage males from applying. (Surprisingly, perhaps, applications from males tend to drop when the female percentage at schools is too high.)Harvard does not even list the male/female percentage on their official profile. The student newspaper posts it: 50.1% male. If I had to guess why this statistic is not included, it is because it is too perfect. The institutional goals again affect individual students. I could be wrong and it is random that the percentage is perfect, but if I had to guess the Harvard admission office uses data on male/female offers, acceptance rates and lots data analysis to try to achieve the ‘perfect’ mix.While gender balance at schools may differ or may be perfect, there is another issue that The Gatekeepers does not address in any detail that has become an increasingly reported to the public --the percentage of Asians that are a part of each entering class. Both Harvard and Wesleyan have about 20% Asians populations in the their incoming class. This percentage is far higher than it used to be for both schools, but given the performance of Asians in class and on the SAT the percentages it could (and some would say should) well be higher. Asians score better on the SAT than anyone else by a wide margin and there is now a law suit that has been filed on behalf of Asians who were not admitted to Harvard. I won’t go into detail as I have written about this issue before, but from the stats that have been gathered it looks like, from the outside, that it is far harder for Asians to get a spot at the Ivies. Whether this is true at some other schools is harder to tell. At schools like Berkeley that are largely number driven for admission, Asians comprise nearly half the class.Deep DataWhile The Gatekeepers show the human side of admission officers’ jobs and how they advocate for individual students, it does not address in detail what has now become a reality in any “business” today—deep data. Schools can now run numbers and stats that vastly improve the information they need to recruit students they most wish to enroll to meet their institutional needs.In addition, they can run data to help enroll the students they accept. The human touch is certainly still an important part of the process, but now it is supported by much more information than was available even a few short years ago. The most selective schools are not dependent on deep data to enroll great students, but they can use the information to get exactly what they want. Schools that are out of the group of the most elite institutions now need the deep data as they have issues with finding enough students to enroll to meet enrollment goals (getting enough students and enough students who can afford the costs).Ability to payAt schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, they have enough money set aside to support any student they admit who does not have the ability to pay. But the number of schools, even highly selective schools, who have this ability shrinks each year. There are schools that say they meet full need, and that is accurate, but they can say this because they are “need aware” when making decisions. The cost of education at the most selective schools now is in excess of $60,000 a year. There are few schools left that have the resources to pay for all the qualified low-income students who might add to the mix of students. The high cost of education has now become a much bigger topic than it was when The Gatekeeperscame out. The debt load on students now, in the aggregate, exceeds the debt during the housing bubble. Changes need to happen and while the new Obama plan may help some attend community college for free, those still hoping to get into the most selective schools without adequate funds will, except for the very elite schools, face tougher odds.Marketing, enrollment management, demonstrated interest, The Common ApplicationThe last series of things that have changed since The Gatekeepers came out logically follow from several things I have already mentioned.. Schools are trying to market themselves in ways that will improve their rankings. They are using data to do this but also have been given large budgets and increased staff to attract the students that will help them fulfill their mission. One of the big changes that has come about is something I have mentioned in other posts—the deans of admission have gradually been replaced at many colleges and universities by enrollment mangers. This is not the case at the Ivies the most selective LACs, but at many selective schools, the deans of admission are not the ones in charge of the much more broad based and bureaucratic effort to get exactly the mix of students they both want and need. For example, schools look increasingly at a students’ “demonstrated interest” in the school. Those who have not visited, have not opened emails sent by the school, and who have not shown other ways that they know the school and see it as a fit may not be offered admission as the schools think the student has probably put their particular school low on the list of places to enroll.Remember that yield of students is a crucial part of what drives rankings. Part of what has happened since The Gatekeepers has been a significant rise in the number of applications an individual student applies to. It used to be 6 or 8 was perceived as more than enough. For those seeking admission at highly selective schools this is a low number now. The competition to get in has increased so much that it is hard to tell if a student will be admitted; therefore, students will submit more applications in hopes that at least one top school will say yes. There are many students now who submit more that 12 applications and this has been aided by The Common Application. In the last few years the number of schools that use this form has rise significantly. Students go to their portal and fill out information that can then be sent, with a push of a button, to hundreds of schools. The most elite schools use The Common Application, although most also have supplements that require additional essays and other information. Nevertheless, the technology has made it much easier to apply to more schools which in turn makes it more difficult for schools to know how serious the student is about enrolling. This cycle brings us back to what I said above: early decision and early action numbers have risen as students use this to demonstrate interest and schools use it to increase yield.All told, the whole process has taken on a much more bureaucratic and business like approach. At the same time, schools can now craft individualized emails and tweets and other marketing efforts to woo students. Schools are reaching larger audience all over the world and the crafting marketing strategies that speak directly to individual students. Some call the whole admission process arbitrary, but the way schools at the top select students is anything but.For those trying to get in, the whole process has become a huge time commitment and it is incredibly complex and confusing .As a result, families are seeking extra help. There has been a huge increase in the number of private counselors who help families negotiate all the variables. When The Gatekeepers came out, private counselors were often looked at in negative terms by schools, but the reality now is that the schools (in some cases) depend on these counselors to help great students stand out (and even in some cases to provide the schools themselves with information that will help them with decisions. I feel sorry for students and families now. The process which was already full of stress on these wonderful students who Steinberg so movingly portrays in his book has now increased by orders of magnitude. Students keep continue to ask directly or indirectly what the top schools look for and what is the ideal student.Each school has different answers, but at the most selective schools the answers are far more complex than they used to be. How much more complicated can things get? It is hard to know the answer to this very tough question. My answer will have to wait as I really do not know. I only hope that there might be a slowing of the arms race that are the rankings games so that students could begin to worry more about finding the best fit rather than the highest ranking school. I am not optimistic this will happen any time soon.***********************************************************************1: It surprises some people to see the vast differences in yield rates but it should not. Most students tend to accept the offer of the school with the highest ranking. I wish more students would think about match and also about whether it is in their best interest to compete with many of the most successful secondary students in the world for 4 years. The stress of trying to keep up is high