Thread: The privileged need to be worried about *something* related to college admissions. And as it's become increasingly clear that they might not have a chance to take the SAT/ACT, or to only take it once, there's something new.
This doesn't mean, of course, "What will replace the SAT at 1500 colleges and universities." That answer is easy: Nothing will. Because it's not necessary.
The question really means, "What will replace the SAT at those 50 colleges the NYT, WSJ and other obsess over because we obsess over?" If you suggest I have cause and effect mixed up, I'll grant that you might be correct.
I suspect that if you go to one of the 400 prep schools that feed the 50 aforementioned colleges, you really have nothing to worry about. Your chances are still slim, but they're not any worse. These schools know your school. They know the counselor. They created the system.
There might be a German word for a phenomenon you hate that benefits you. This is one of those. My wife (who worked in admissions for a decade at two selective institutions) is a college essay tutor.
The requests are coming in fast and heavy.
To make it worse, I tell her to raise her rates, which she won't do. She wants to work with the kids who can afford her more than with the kids who can afford anyone. And she tells me how baffled kids from the other schools are about the essay.
And Jeff Selingo's Atlantic article included this gem.
I went to that university's website. No hint that something like this might doom you.
Earlier, in the WSJ, Jeff wrote this
Huh. I call this the invisible moving target. It's a great technique for managers who--for whatever reason--want people to fail. Just as the objective is never clear, neither is the reason for failure.
You just fail. As planned.
Before we go any farther, no, you bad mind readers, this is not, in fact, an admission by me that tests would be better or fairer or more objective.
Don't @ me.
It's another example of how the process is stacked for kids with the connections.
If you don't believe me, ask yourself this: Why are the kids who do so well on standardized tests (wealthy students) suddenly freaking out even more?
Because that advantage has been taken away. And even though they still have all the advantages, guess what?
They're afraid.
I've written before in my "There is no such thing as need blind" blogpost that almost every single factor colleges (those colleges) favor (except diversity) gives advantages to kids with the wealth and power and privilege. Taking just one of those things away puts them on edge.
This is what's wrong with college admissions. This is what we need to fix: An expensive, esoteric, cryptic, unfair system that ensures those with advantage get to wield it unfairly.
Test optional is just the first step. We need to keep going.
Thread: It seems I'm spending more time telling people why I'm not too interested in the Dartmouth decision than it would take to just put it here. So here goes. I hope this is the last I'll say about it.
First, I've long said that if a college finds value in the SAT, they would be foolish not to use it. I just ask that they do the research, which Dartmouth did. And the lowest-scoring students at Dartmouth end up with a GPA of 3.1 or something like that. Horrible.
I am--frankly--a little suspicious of analysis that shows the SAT is better than HS GPA, because you know damn well if College Board or ACT could make that claim, they'd have done so long ago. They've never even whispered it.
This is the result of the DOJ investigating the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice, which would have allowed this if the student had not withdrawn, but would have forbidden it if the student had notified the offering school that they had deposited elsewhere.
The DOJ treated college just like any other consumer purchase: Suppose car dealers agreed the Subaru dealer could not call you while you were on the way to the Ford dealer to buy the car you had agreed to buy, and offer you a better deal?
Thread: When someone tells you about the big drop in high school graduates, remember 2014. Because by 2037, we'll be back to numbers like we saw in 2014.
What's really compelling is the mix: America will be more diverse, and because different ethnic groups have different college participation rates, that's the big thing going on behind the numbers.
And, of course, New England has known this for a long time.
I've never received so many emails about my writing in CHE as I have for the most recent one about "The Number."
But here's a little insight into that.
Sunday morning, I logged in and checked our Tuition Deposits for Fall first-year students.
By Sunday evening (12 hours later) that number had gone up by 3.7%.
By this morning, it had gone up another 3.2% over that.
Expressed another way, 6.5% of all deposits we currently have came in during the last 24 hours. And we still have a day to go...the day that is traditionally the biggest, or at least one of the biggest.
The Daily Caller (ugh) has memos from the Florida DOE suggesting they were influencing @CollegeBoard on the AP African-American Studies curriculum as early as January 2022, and at the very minimum, July 2022.
So, to everyone who somehow believed that College Board made its own, independent decisions about the framework/curriculum and wrapped it all up in December, 2022, before DeSantis went public: Read this.
I normally wouldn't trust Daily Caller, but this serves their right wing agenda well; it's believable, and, I suspect, even they wouldn't publish a fabricated memo from the Florida DOE.
In order to win the nomination in 2024, DeSantis is going to have to do two things Trump did: