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IvyWise in the News

On Land Rich With Colleges and Cows, Amherst, Mass., Finally Gets Its Due By PAUL BASKEN
July 10, 2009


"It definitely will hurt them for college admissions," says Katherine Cohen, Ph.D., founder of IvyWise, a college admission counseling company. "If you're putting yourself out there as someone who spends most of the night partying and drinking rather than making a positive impact on your school and your community, this will affect their chances of getting into a selective college. It simply can't help these kids."

Amherst - known for Emily Dickinson, Shays' Rebellion, and the world's first Frisbee major - is, in fact, the Best College Town in North America.

The title was conferred on Amherst by a Microsoft-owned Web site, Encarta, in the form of a 1,100-word posting by Katherine L. Cohen, a high-dollar consultant who has flexed her college-admissions expertise on every major television network.

And because that's what passes for official in these early days of the Internet, official Amherst jumped on it. Almost immediately after Ms. Cohen's article appeared in May, the University of Massachusetts linked to it on the front of its Web site, declaring: "We're Number 1!"

The Five Colleges consortium - which also includes Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges - also put out a statement trumpeting Ms. Cohen's findings. "We're very proud of that designation," added Amherst's town manager, Laurence R. Shaffer.

Even across the state, where the likes of Harvard and MIT secured Boston a mere fifth-place spot on Ms. Cohen's list, the coronation of the country bumpkin was duly noted. Amherst has long been "a peaceable kingdom which honored the land and the mind in equal measure," Madeleine H. Blais, a professor of journalism at UMass, asserted in a column published by The Boston Globe.

In a tranquil land dotted with cows and tobacco barns, Ms. Cohen seems an unlikely champion. She's a native of Los Angeles, holds degrees from Brown and Yale, and has spent the past decade using her television talents to persuade anxious parents of her ability - through companies named IvyWise and ApplyWise - to win their children seats at big-name universities.

Perhaps even more surprising, it was only in January that Ms. Cohen posted on the Web an entirely different philosophy about the value of ratings in the world of higher education, saying that decisions about choosing colleges are so personal that any rankings are "meaningless."

Of course her ranking of college towns - with Berkeley, Montreal, and Washington lined up behind Amherst - doesn't mean that students should stop paying her company for more personalized recommendations, Ms. Cohen made clear in an interview.

Send ideas to short.subjects@chronicle.com
http://chronicle.com
Section: Short Subjects
Volume 55, Issue 41, Page A6


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