Thread: The NY Post decided to write an article about the new book by @jselingo
I am no New York expert but I don't get a good impression from the Post most times I read an article there.
But I thought this might be an exception. It's not.
First problem: They don't
More than 50 is technically accurate. But it's probably actually more like 1500. Still, of course, the reality is that it only matters at 50 at most, and--no offense intended--University of Toledo is probably not one of them.
I've worked at six colleges, and while this technology wasn't around until recently, even if it had been, it would have maybe been used at one of them.
That's because there are only two types of colleges in the US: Those that deny students they would like to admit (maybe 40) and those that admit students they'd probably like to deny (everyone else.)
Admissions is not usually a process of turning down well qualified students.
I always get a chuckle out of the unnecessary use of quotation marks. It makes me fill like I'm being lectured.
I went to Catholic school with nuns, NY Post. You don't scare me.
Yes, college enrollment boomed in the 60s. But it's not just the baby boom. It was two offshoots of the military industrial complex: The GI Bill and the Vietnam War. College-educated parents wanted their kids to go to college, and to avoid the draft.
I believe College Board Student Search Service started in the mid 1970s but am too lazy to look right now. Anyway, it wasn't just selectivity; it was survival. Peak live births in the US happened in 1957. Colleges could see the drop coming.
In order: False, false, probably true probably true, probably true, and probably true. But the rejoinders are based on fault premises.
I suspect--but might be wrong--that the "Latting Index" is used at Emory, given that the Chief Enrollment Officer there is John Latting. While it's true many colleges use an index, I don't know that they all use his.
The two paragraphs make me hate my profession. Botany and football are "quirky?" Only if the kid is trying to grow non-GMO modified vegan footballs. It's more likely he's an athlete, which is another story all together.
And low-income kids reading that second paragraph
And I believe my good looks are why I have over 5,000 followers on the Twitters, mother who is way too involved in her kid's college search (I bet he applied early and checked "no" on the financial aid question.
Good golly, Miss Molly
Which sentence is more wrong: Charles Manson was misunderstood; Barney Rubble was the greatest actor of the 60's, or the first sentence in this paragraph?
This is true, but it's probably the exact opposite of what the author thinks.
I want to be clear: I've not yet read Jeff's book, and my criticism is of this piece of sloppy journalism, not the book it's reviewing. It's laden with the same misconceptions many in the media have of how we do our work, and it lumps college admissions into one big thing.
Several years ago, I wrote a chapter in this book, which was intended to be the text for the first class in a master's program in Higher Ed. You can read most of that chapter here. amazon.com/Contemporary-C…
Some snippets, which I think are relevant
And this
And this:
We are not monolithic. Talking about "College Admissions" is not about college admissions. It's about that office, at that one college, based on that university's mission and goals.
That's it.
These colors are all blue. But they're not the same color.
So, it's up to us to keep explaining this. We owe it to ourselves and to the kids who want and deserve a chance at college.
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: