I had another title all picked out for this post: It was going to be “An Interesting Week for the College Board” or something like that. But after I typed the title, I realized that the College Board and the Catholic Church share a lot in common, at least from where I sit. (And this […]
It started sort of innocently enough: A post of a Facebook page for college admissions officers. It was one of those questions that high school or independent counselors post asking/complaining (often, with just cause) about some college practice. It was there, buried in a longer response: ” I wish I understood why yield was still a […]
It’s Saturday, October 19, exactly 167 years to-the-day after the first of my ancestors to come to America arrived in the United States at the port of New Orleans, on a ship from Bremen, Germany called Manco. In fact, it was so long ago, Germany wasn’t even a country then. If you’re interested, here’s the […]
Have you heard? It’s the end of April, which means it’s almost May 1. If you don’t know what that means, or why it’s so important to people like me, you’re not in admissions or enrollment management or financial aid. We all know. And it has nothing to do with dancing around poles with streamers. May 1 […]
I promised myself at a very young age I was not going to turn into my father. That promise now lies tattered and torn along the primrose path of my youth and middle age. Admissions has its cycles, most days somewhat less dramatic than The Great Circle of Life featured in the Lion King. Or […]
You’ve undoubtedly heard by now about Suzy Lee Weiss, the young woman who wrote To All the Colleges That Rejected Me in the Wall Street Journal. The privileged Ms. Weiss, it seems, felt bruised and battered by the college admissions process. Or did she? She’s now suggesting that her article was intended as satire; indeed most people who cite […]
I don’t remember when I first heard about Goodhart’s Law, but it was probably several years ago. But as I think about the higher education in general, and admissions specifically, it seems to be more and more relevant to our daily lives. Goodhart’s Law was first articulated by Charles Goodhart in a 1975 paper, as “As soon as […]
I like provocative, abstract, conceptual ideas as much as anybody. Even absurd comparisons can sometimes be instructive. I think this has to do with my appreciation for what Samuel Johnson called the “Metaphysical Poets,” like John Donne and Andrew Marvel. The poets shared a flair for something Johnson called “discordia concors” or finding similarities in things […]
“Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, just backwards and in high heels.” –Frank and Ernest As I checked my Twitter feed this morning, the tweets came fast and furious: Grinnell College will stay need blind, but will think about raising loan caps and will try to recruit more wealthy students. Read it again. I’m […]
I graduated from high school in 1977 (I’m 54…to save you the math). Up until then, I had lived my whole life in Dubuque, a great place to be from, and a city that is probably in better shape today than it was then. In our family, you went to Catholic School, but after sophomore […]
Jon Boeckenstedt's Admissions Weblog 