What if You Threw a Scandal, and No One Cared?

I’m not even going to link to the stories, as they’re so abundant and common: Over the past several years, many colleges have been caught (or sometimes admitted without getting caught) doing things to inflate the profile of the incoming class.  Usually, this is the freshman class and SAT manipulation (Emory, Baylor, Claremont McKenna); sometimes it’s class […]

Life, and EM: A Series of Trade-offs.

There are very few people who understand that Enrollment Management is, at some level, an exercise in managing trade-offs.  Even though the old Michelob Light commercial suggests that you can have it all, in fact, you can’t.  And in reality, if you could, you wouldn’t be working in higher education. (Those of you who know me […]

Test-optional admissions: A year hence

If you’re a visitor to this site, you know about DePaul University’s decision to become test-optional for freshman admission.  With just a few days to go before our final, official count of freshmen (the fall census), the results from our first admissions cycle are interesting: About ten percent of all applicants applied as test-optional About […]

College Admission: The Kardashian Effect

The other night my wife and I were sitting on our deck with guests and long-time friends Nancy and Al Maly from Grinnell.  Among us we have about 60 years of college admission experience, so naturally the topic tends to come up when we get together.  That, and Al’s fascination with the proper way to […]

Some more thinking about Test Optional

This week at DePaul begins a series of farewells as Helmut Epp leaves the position of Provost that he’s held for seven of his 38 years at DePaul.  The Newsline Story that should be out tomorrow contains a brief summary of an amazing life led by a remarkable man.  But this copy, taken from the […]

A Response to Flowing Data

This morning, after being out of the office for a long weekend because of NATO in Chicago, I checked traffic on this blog.  It was far higher than usual, most of it coming from this post by Kim Rees at Flowing Data, who was very condescending about my post on visualizing ACT Scores. I like […]