Today is March 25, a day I have unilaterally labeled as test optional admissions day. Today is also the birthday of fellow Iowan Norman Borlaug, winner of the Nobel Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal, who was once described as “Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived” for his efforts that […]

I’ll do my best to make this an evergreen post: One I can just point to when we read yet another opinion article by the same types of people insisting that removing the SATs is going to harm first-generation and/or low-income and/or students of color and/or anyone who attends an under-resourced high school. The latest […]

I’ve been a member of NACAC for a long time, and even though I’m from Iowa, my most frequent observations about the organization’s limitations have centered on its propensity to avoid confrontation. It was usually more Iowa-nice than even I could handle. Of course, I can only imagine how hard it must be to run […]

I remember an early 1990’s encounter with a university president who had an interesting take on higher education: He pointed out that there are really only a few institutions that have existed largely in their current form since the latter part of the Middle Ages: Some German breweries, The Catholic Church, and Higher Education. I […]

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were experiencing a wave of colleges and universities going test-optional for freshman admission. And with societal change in California, and all the Ivy League institutions deciding they can make admissions decisions without the benefit of an SAT or ACT score (at least for one year), the wave has […]

Most colleges are still zodiac optional.

Now that California has put the ACT and SAT in the ICU, I suspect there will be many meetings in the coming weeks about how the companies remain viable going forward. The COVID-19 pandemic had already struck a body blow, of course, and there have been suggestions that the companies will have to dramatically restructure […]

News has just broken that College Board has decided to cancel the June SAT, and many people believe that ACT will follow suit.  Just a few thoughts: Who cares?  ACT and College Board are private companies who sell a suspect service to colleges, which colleges force students to pay for, via real costs (money) and […]

It took COVID-19 only a month to do what twenty years of research could not do: Start the landslide of colleges and universities going test-optional. I’ve written so much about the topic since my former institution went test-optional in 2011 that I won’t bother to rehash in detail all the reasons why test-optional is a […]

The auto-suggest feature on my phone’s keyboard learned “coronavirus” in record time, it seems, and now gives me “Corvallis” and “coronavirus” as the only two options when I type c-o-r. No wonder. It’s pretty much all we’ve heard on the news in the past few weeks, and with a long list of campuses curtailing in-person […]