Some pointers for people who work with students on college applications:

1. The @usedgov will be releasing resources to colleges and universities addressing lawful admissions practices by Aug 15.

2. Don't listen to anyone's advice on how to advise students too much until then. 3. Yes, the @CommonApp opens tomorrow, but students can get to work on everything but the essay while we wait to see what ED says.

4. Chances are, little changes for students or their applications due to the SFFA decision.

2023
College freshmen no longer know how to read literature. 2013
College freshmen no longer know how to read literature

What's extraordinary about the @usnews Best Colleges reputation wurvey is that ANYONE FILLS IT OUT AT ALL.

Let's take a look 🧵

https://twitter.com/jbeowulf/status/1633911097542451202

The most heavily weighted single factor in the Best Colleges rankings is Undergraduate Academic Reputation, which USN calls "Expert Opinion."

Let's talk about some dumb stuff people say about test optional admissions. 🧵 This might take a sec, so here's the tl;dr:

TO policies, in and of themselves, are neither a cure-all for what's wrong with American higher ed nor the end of what's good about it, but the evidence points to their doing some good and no harm.

When your flex shows just how weak you are. For decades, colleges, med schools, and law schools have all made the point that standardized tests exist to show readiness to succeed in college or grad school.

While we're waiting for fall IPEDS data, I got curious about how segregated expensive private high schools are relative to public schools. 🧵 I used the 2019–20 Private School Universe Survey to identify schools that belong to the National Association of Independent Schools and go through twelfth grade. I got public school data from the Dept of Ed in each location. nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/pr…

nytimes.com/2022/09/30/wor… McKinsey has a landing page and a recruiting team dedicated to a single university that claims to be training "citizens" and "citizen leaders." mckinsey.com/careers/studen…

We (or at least writers for the NYTimes) have never not been anxious about college admissions.

A 🧵on why college admissions anxiety is not "runaway and why you probably should not be especially concerned.

https://twitter.com/FrankBruni/status/1535638910092685312

2019

A majority of white people responding to this poll believe it's harder to get into college if you're white.

80% of white Republicans think this, but so do more than 50% of white Democrats. The numbers are slightly less alarming among teenagers surveyed. Teenagers whose parents are Democrats provide some hope.

Almost all the loss in college enrollment due to COVID took place at community colleges.

Community colleges get mentioned once in the piece.

And a high priced college consultant gets 4 paragraphs.
wsj.com/articles/colle… I'd be a lot more interested in a piece that talked about how the decline in enrollment is largely from the for-profit and 2-yr sector and wrestled with why that's occurred. That, of course, would have to be in another newspaper.

Honestly kind of surprised that the @UpshotNYT thought the Stanford paper about features computers can notice in college application essays was worth amplifying (again).

A 🧵 on 3 of the very big problems with the paper.
nytimes.com/2021/05/26/ups… Problem 1. Computers don't admit students to college; people do.

1.1 The paper shows that computers can identify correlations between essay content and income in large data sets.

There's been some coverage of a boom in the number of students applying Early Decision or Restricted Early Action to college this fall. I'm much more interested in the number of students colleges are *admitting* early this year. It's early days yet. Full numbers are not available at many places. Lots of colleges that do ED do 2 rounds of it, so it's too soon to compare this year with last year.

I told myself I would stop reading pieces about admissions lotteries. But I cracked and read that NYT piece. I expected the worst and it was worse than I expected.

https://twitter.com/James_S_Murphy/status/1106659943669776385?s=20

Beyond all the inherent issues with lotteries that I talked about in that thread, here's what really bugged me about this piece: its condescension toward community college professors and presumption about instruction in the Ivy League.

A college degree can transform individuals, families, and communities. One problem is that we give too little recognition to the institutions that have the largest impact on social mobility. THREAD Another problem is not all institutions lead to good outcomes for low-income students. That's why @EdReformNowUSA produced our Social Mobility Elevators brief, which identifies 4-yr institutions that have positive outcomes for students with Pell Grants. edreformnow.org/wp-content/upl…

Here's the 20 worst 4-yr colleges in the country when it comes to enrolling low-income students.

Source: IPEDS data released today Here's the 10 worst 4-year schools when it comes to enrolling low-income students over the past 3 years.

The Washington Post published this shocking chart today.
It's got everything to do with the future of community colleges in the US. Source: washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/… Last week, @NSClearinghouse released some preliminary data on enrollments (It represents about 22% of IHEs.) which looked surprisingly not bad for 4-yr institutions, but terrible for community colleges. Source: nscresearchcenter.org/stay-informed/

Some universities are admitting no grad students in the humanities this year. It should probably be all of them. chronicle.com/article/more-d… There are currently 36 assistant professor listings in the US and Canada for jobs teaching literature in English. 5 are in listed as American lit. 3 are listed as British.

Everyone hates college rankings, but they're not going away. So why not make them do some actual good instead? roanoke.com/opinion/column… This Atlantic piece provides links to 2 decades of people criticizing college rankings, from Malcolm @Gladwell to @opinion_joe. theatlantic.com/education/arch…

Kudos to @NACAC & @AngelBPerez for sharing data on who belongs to the organization. It left me wondering how well the organization represents the field of admissions and, as in all things, who gets best represented and wields power in the field. #RepresentationMatters I'm not surprised, I guess, that 86% of community colleges are not members, EXCEPT transfer is one of the most important issues in college access, equity, and antiracism. #RepresentationMatters

The thing that everyone is going to talk about in the UC Audit are the 64 students who got an unfair advantage. But that is not the real scandal. It's the 600 high schools cut out of a system that has been shown to be antiracist and promote equity.

https://twitter.com/James_S_Murphy/status/1308581164089778177

One of the reasons we fail again and again to fix things like college admissions and other inequitable systems is that we are obsessed with cheaters and grifters and think they're the problem.

This California State Auditor report on UC admissions is kinda great. Come for the corruption, stay for the comics! auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2… What's the first rule of babysitter's club?!?