In a former career life, I was a college dean. Since the term dean differs from school to school, I was the head of the admissions department. The school that I served at is a medium sized school, in a medium sized town in the heart of the south. We had mild winters and hot summers.

The situation that catapulted me into this position was that the previous administration had been pretty stagnant for the last two decades. Nepotism had run rampant, and the school had one glaring problem: There might be 1500 new students in the Fall Quarter, but the graduation rates were something like 1% over six years. Several programs had gone years between actually managing to have a single student graduate. Not to go into too much detail, but there was a lawsuit and an investigation by SACS, the schools accrediting body. Rather than have an institution with the state in the name get defrocked publicly, the state stepped in and fired the entire administration, and cleaned out some of the departments too. That's where I come in. When I was given the position, I was to turn around the flagging enrollment as well as the retention issues.

Turning around the enrollment numbers was really just a matter of getting out and recruiting. Just advertising, 'Hey, we're not run like a slum anymore!' The retention issues had to receive a lot of attention, though. One problem we had in trying to fix the retention issues being that the local populace was poorly served by local schools. As a blanket we set up a proctoring room and began mandatory institutional placement testing of all incoming students.

Which brings us to the first few bits of practical advice I can give to young Christians who want to further their education:

Point 1: Not everyone is right for college. You need to carefully consider your degree path and aptitudes to come to an educated decision regarding pursuing a college degree.

Point 2: The SAT and ACT are only supposed to gauge your performance for the first year of post-secondary education.

Point 3: If you want an actual test to indicate your potential aptitudes, try the ASVAB test. This can help you out if you are teetering between college and trade school. Just be ready to deal with military recruiters bugging you if you do well in several of the areas on it.

Another common factor would be pressure from mom and dad to attend college so you can 'get a good job.'

Point 4: Don't get pushed into college. I intend to deal with this topic later.

So let's say you have weighed all these factors, and decided that getting a college degree is right for you. What you can expect is to fill out an application. Generally this will ask for general info, which schools you have attended, and for copies of transcripts and any test scores.

Point 5: Do your best to be comprehensive and honest on correspondence with the college.

Proverbs 11:3 says:

The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.

I worked at a state school, so basically if you met the criteria and followed the rules you were pretty sure to get in. You wouldn't believe the number of students who got booted for dishonesty on the application. By far the most common scenario was flunking out of another college and neglecting to state that on the Application. Flunking out was not treated as a massive issue as long as the guidelines were followed, lying on the application was subject to immediate dismissal. On top of that the student would be expected to repay tuition and financial aid they received during that time. In later years we'd avert this out by running the students through the NSLDS federal database before making a decision about admitting the student. You can flunk out of a school and continue college elsewhere, but you have to meet some conditions. Again, it's important to follow the rules.

We had a cross town rival which was a small private college. The one scenario we'd see often was a kid applying, getting run through the database, and finding out they'd not listed a school they had flunked out of. We'd let them officially know we needed to see transcripts from this school. A lot, and I mean a lot would head over to this small private college and enroll. The private school was a little lax and didn't run their checks of the federal database until later on. Usually this resulted in some students getting kicked out of the private school for academic dishonesty. They'd wind up applying to us again, with one transcript where they got the boot for 'failure to meet academic standards' and another where they got the boot for academic dishonesty. That was pretty much a death blow for their college career as we wouldn't accept them.

Another popular way to screw up centered around certain departments requiring an essay to apply to the department. What this meant was that in order to declare a major in that field, you had to submit a short essay to the department and be approved. I had a meeting with one of the department heads of a department that required this once. He showed me a stack of the essays on his desk. All of them were plagiarized. Some hadn't even bothered removing the hyperlinks from the page footer. That pretty much instantly weeded them from getting into that major.

In the next part, I'll discuss college professors.