The NY Times Doesn’t Cover College
What’s Kanye wearing? What’s El*n driving? What’s Besos buying? If you believe the answers to these questions are relevant to your life than the New York Times might be the best paper for you to learn about the college process. If you pattern your life choices after what a billionaire or celebrity does, if you…
Cutting Room: The Misguided War on Test Optional
Ever since I was first interviewed for a news story and especially when I was interviewed for the documentaries I was in (both the Test and The Art of Thinking and Netflix’s Operation Varsity Blues). I’ve been fascinated by what’s left out. I asked both producers of the documentaries if they would release the uncut…
Things worth reading
A couple things of note that are worth paying attention to. Jon Boeckenstedt published an analysis of discount rates at colleges and its well worth reading and playing with. If you’re unfamiliar with the term discount rate, it captures aid that isn’t new money (merit aid that is essentially discounting, grants that are discounts, basically…
Race-Conscious Admissions: A Family Guide
Many college bound families, like mine, in the midst of the college journey are wondering what the Supreme Court decision to codify into law the pretense that race doesn’t impact opportunity means for their child’s chance of getting into college. You’re probably also wondering whether you should do anything different than you would have done…
Merit: Myths and Money
Many people believe that merit aid means aid awarded for students who are the smartest and most accomplished, but thats just not true. I just spent months reviewing state-funded “merit” scholarship policies and school-funding policies at flagship universities and what i found WILL SHOCK YOU! All dramatics aside, my report found a few important, and…
My Favorite College Search Things
It’s easy to hard to find information on colleges, its hard to sort out what’s good info from what’s bad. I am constantly sending emails to people about tools to support college search and learning about what tools are good and which aren’t. So I’m going to try to compile my favorite things in this…
#HateRead: Admissions, testing and the media
Back in 2016 I wrote about the media coverage of college admissions and testing issue. I’d taken to fisking articles on Twitter under the hashtag #hateread and thought I needed to provide a bit more explanation of that and nuance. I’m updating it now because, with all that’s going on (waves vaguely at the world),…
Ben Simmons and Educational Testing
In a recent interview with Dr. Rawls-Dill, he mentioned Ben Simmons and an example of how what’s measured and who’s evaluating matters in determining success and quality. This really resonated with me and fine-tuned a sports analogy I’ve been making for years. Ben Simmons’s saga is the perfect example of how we’ve let standardized testing define…
Should You Take the SAT/ACT or Not?
For parents of 10th, 11th and 12th graders, the question of testing looms large (especially this fall as the test optional movement has really taken hold), so let me try to help you out and give you the lowdown to help you make decisions. I’m not going to do a detailed discussion of testing policy,…
College Essay Trauma Porn
My sons make me hopeful about the future. My sons impress me with what they know and can do. My sons often surprise me. But most often my sons amuse me. Today, I share one of the amusements and surprises. My sons (Enid-Michele, my internet daughter wasn’t part of this so that’s why I’m not…
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