A few years ago, I was at a conference, and sat in a room with mostly high school counselors who had some bones to pick with the most selective colleges and the way they do admissions. None of their points were unreasonable, of course: They wanted the colleges and universities to be more responsive when […]
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Hot Takes from ACT on Test-optional
Absurdities seem to come in clumps. While I was on the train reading Twitter earlier this week, I saw this. You may not see the final sentence, so I’ve cut it out for you here: As absurdities go, it’s really hard to top that, but later that day I stumbled upon this document from ACT […]
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Our National Saturday Morning Combines
Next week, the NFL Draft will come to Chicago again. For most of us, it will mean a headache of closed streets, crowded restaurants, bad traffic, and a lot of fuss about a system of connecting players and teams that seems archaic or even anti-American to many. For some people who live and die with sports, […]
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Whence comes this new-found concern?
This has been an interesting couple of weeks for college admissions, following an interesting year. The Harvard Graduate School of Education has issued a report entitled Turning the Tide, that advocates for a major overhaul in the way college admissions is done. I spoke to the author of the document last year as he was pulling support together, […]
You might be surprised to learn that Harvard doesn’t care what I think. No one at Cal Tech consults me before making decisions. And no one at the University of Chicago–our neighbor on the south side of Chicago–has ever called and asked me to lunch. This is my influence on higher education in the US. But […]
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My Piece in the Washington Post
No blog post this time; I was asked by Nick Anderson at the Washington Post to pull together my thoughts about the recent announcement by The Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success. They are published on the site; just click here to read them.
A few days ago–probably not coincidentally just before the annual NACAC conference–we got a first look at the long-rumored Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success. Presumably, this group of about 80 high-profile private and large public institutions was founded to improve access, affordability, and success for populations traditionally underserved by our current admissions process. Or, […]
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When Harvard becomes a purple giraffe
One of the very first posts I put on my other blog–the one focused on higher education data–was about the Claremont McKenna test score reporting scandal. You can take a look at it here if you’d like a summary of the data. At the time, I thought the difference between the actual scores (which many […]
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On Undermatching
About July 28th, I was asked to participate on an August 4th panel at The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in DC, to react to two papers presented at their invitation-only conference, Matching all students to post secondary opportunities: How college choice is influenced by institutional, state, and federal policy. With just a week […]
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An Accidental Attack on the SAT and ACT
You may have read or heard recently that more than 60 organizations have combined to file a complaint with the federal government against Harvard University, alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian applicants. And this is not the first time the issue has been raised, of course; late last year a suit was filed in federal court alleging […]
