Anyone remotely involved in the college admissions process in the past few decades knows it has become, for too many students, high stakes and very, very high anxiety. In this piece, a college admissions counselor looks at the reality and makes a call for a new approach.
Real Compassion in College Admissions (NY Times)
THE college admission process is always stressful, often unfair and may well reward the wrong values. But the recommendations released last month by a Harvard Graduate School of Education project called Making Caring Common will only make things worse. In its report, “Turning the Tide,” the Harvard group suggested that kids take fewer Advanced Placement courses, that colleges should think about making the SAT and the ACT optional, and that all students should participate in what it calls “meaningful” community service activities.
Kids would then write college application essays about what they learned from these experiences. The report’s recommendations were triggered in part by a survey that found that only 22 percent of middle- and high-school students thought that caring for others was more important than personal happiness or individual achievement.
The Absurdity of College Admissions (The Atlantic)
How did getting into an elite school become a frenzied, soul-deadening process?
Acceptance rates at highly selective colleges have plummeted in recent years. Exclusivity has always been baked into their brand: Only about 3 percent of 18-year-olds in the U.S. go to schools that admit fewer than half their applicants, making the “college-admissions mania,” as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson once put it, “a crisis for the 3 percent.” Still, it’s a mania to which more and more teensare subjecting themselves, pressuring applicants to pad their resumés and tout superficial experiences and hobbies, convincing them that attending a prestigious school is paramount. And critics say that mania has even spread into and shaped American culture, often distorting kids’ (and parents’) values, perpetuating economic inequality, and perverting the role of higher education in society as a whole
Should Everyone Go To College? (Psychology Today)
Emerging adults have difficult decisions to make regarding higher education. Proponents of college education tell us a degree means higher wages, while skeptics say educational expenses and delays in earning wages make college a poor investment.
It’s true: College is increasingly expensive and stressful as students try to compete with greater numbers of their peers to get into reputable schools, they face mental healthproblems at alarming rates, graduates face crushing debt, and the job market for college grads is bleak. Why should any of us want to endure college?
Why College Isn’t (and Shouldn’t Have to be) for Everyone (Robert Reich)
With inequality at record levels and almost all the economic gains going to the top, there’s more pressure than ever to get the golden ring. A degree from a prestigious university can open doors to elite business schools and law schools – and to jobs paying hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a year. So parents who can afford it are paying grotesque sums to give their kids an edge.
Getting a Student Loan With Collateral From a Future Job (NY Times)
At Purdue University, some undergraduates will have a new option to help finance their degrees: pledging to pay a percentage of their future incomes in return for funds today. Such programs are not loans. Instead, students get funds to cover current education expenses, and, in return, they agree to pay a percentage of their future income over an agreed-upon period of time.
Though an emerging corner of the educational finance industry, such programs help ease the often crushing debt many American college students face after graduation, proponents say. A small number of lenders have tested the model in recent years, but Purdue is the first American university to officially embrace the concept.
Time For College Admissions To Consider A New Diversity (HuffPost)
It’s the college admissions decision season, a time when colleges and universities beat their chests with statistics for their incoming freshmen classes. But in the midst of all this self-aggrandizement, one term you probably won’t hear referenced is neurodiversity, a concept that stresses the need to recognize neurological differences like Dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and matters that fall along the Autism Spectrum. Despite a growing amount of research, very few, if any, colleges and universities even recognize the term neurodiversity let alone display any specific information on how it factors into consideration for admissions.
$20 Billion in Tax Credits Fails to Increase College Attendance
Taxpayers will file for $20 billion in tax credits for college expenses they paid in 2015, but while those who get them will no doubt be happy, new evidence shows they have no effect on encouraging people to attend college.
Hidden Gold in College Applications (NY Times)
There has been a crescendo lately in talk about how to conduct college admissions in a manner that brings greater socioeconomic diversity to campuses, making them richer places to learn and better engines of social mobility.
Greater Competition for College Places Means Higher Anxiety, too (NY Times)
As the frenzied college application season draws to a close, and students across the country mull their choices, many colleges are trumpeting that it was the most selective year ever. But high school guidance counselors and admissions experts say the heightened competition has turned the process into a anxiety-ridden numbers game.
Ex-Ivy League admissions officers dissect an essay that got a girl into 5 Ivies and Stanford
Former Ivy League admissions officers, with collective experience working in admissions offices at Cornell University, Columbia Business School, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University, provide feedback on an admissions essay that helped win admission to 5 Ivies, plus Stanford.
Don’t Send Your Kids to College. At Least Not Yet. (NY Times)
A growing number of colleges have begun to embrace a novel solution: change the outcomes of college by changing the inputs. What if college freshmen arrived on campus not burnt out from having been “excellent sheep” in high school, but instead refreshed, focused and prepared to take full advantage of the rich resources and opportunities colleges have to offer?