Alabama and Texas square off tonight in college football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) title game (although Boise State just finished undefeated, won its own BCS game, and has a justifiable claim to the title as well). While Ben Miller has already analyzed how well the bowl schools do in terms of graduating their students, the [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'College Admissions'
The Quidditch Pitch
Lauren Edelson is a smart, high-achieving high school senior. She’s been visiting some of the top liberal arts colleges in the nation, trying to imagine herself at each of these schools. Unfortunately, she’s been a little underwhelmed:
Back when I was a junior, before I’d printed off an application or visited a campus, I had high [...]
Crossing the Finish Line: College Admissions
Crossing the Finish Line, a new and impressive book by former Princeton president William Bowen, former Macalaster College president Michael McPherson, and Matthew Chingos, relied on two massive databases on the entering class of 1999–one on 96,000 first-time freshmen and 30,000 entering transfer students at 21 flagship universities and the other on 108,000 freshmen and [...]
A Challenge to Greg Mankiw
Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard University, and he runs a fairly popular blog. Today he writes about the difficulty in selecting 15 applicants for his freshman seminar from a pool of 200 qualified applicants:
I am teaching a Harvard freshman seminar this semester (in addition to ec 10), and one of my [...]
The Myth of Too Many Great Students
In the course of a witty and poignant reflection on his daughter’s college search, Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes:
The dirty secret of the American educational system is that there’s a glut of good kids — excellent grades, first-rate test scores, a blizzard of extracurriculars. We’ve all read the stories of the despairing admissions [...]
Truth Hurts
In a story about college admissions rejection letters and where they fall on the nice-to-mean continuum (really), the Wall Street Journal reports:
Most Discouraging: Boston University. To students who have family ties to the university, its letter begins: “We give special attention to applicants whose families have a tradition of study at Boston University. We have [...]
Dear Rejected Student,
It is with deep regret that I write to inform you we are unable to offer you a spot in the class of 2013 at Desired University. You may be asking what was lacking in your application; for most of our applicants the honest answer is nothing. We received thousands of applications from incredibly talented [...]
Slumdog Ivy Leaguer
Wake Forest University is hosting a conference this week on making the SAT optional for admission, and they invited Daniel Golden to headline. Golden, author of a book called The Price of Admission that documents all the ways children of wealth and privilege are favored in college admissions, was an interesting choice to headline this [...]
The College Admissions Lottery
It’s a cruel irony that the more people buy into the notion that there’s a “right” college or university out there for them (a myth that’s perpetuated by the schools themselves), the harder it is for students to get in. Kids and their parents see how hard it is to get into “good” schools so [...]
Diminishing Funds = Diminishing Leverage
It’s too bad the Washington Post reporter covering a new piece of higher education legislation in Virginia didn’t read the bill’s fiscal impact statement. If she had, she might not have portrayed the it as evenhandedly as she did. The legislation, which would force Virginia institutions to enroll at least 80 percent of their undergraduates [...]
High School Seniors Are Like Opilio Crab
I love the Deadliest Catch, an action filled Discovery Channel show about Alaskan crab fishermen. I might just eat crab instead of turkey this year because Captain Phil asked me to. But I’ve never been able to find the education connection I needed to write about the Deadliest Catch on Quick & Ed–until now (not [...]
Cash-strapped Colleges
With headlines predicting a steep recession, colleges and universities are already making budget cuts. Compare what some schools are saying about the financial crisis:
Morton Schapiro, president of Williams College in Massachusetts, which has long had a commitment to accepting students without considering their financial situation, said he doubted that all colleges with such full need-blind [...]
Harvard and the Myth of Tightening College Admissions
The New York Times reports today that applications to Harvard are up an amazing 19% over last year, with other elite schools like the University of Chicago, Amherst, and Northwestern seeing double-digit increases. This allows newspapers to get a jump on the annual circulation-goosing college admissions panic story, which usually doesn’t run for another few [...]
Undeserved Publicity for Harvard
The Wall Street Journal is flashing the headline “Harvard Cuts Undergrad Prices” at the top of its Web site at the moment, along with an article that begins:
Harvard University sweetened its financial aid for middle class and upper middle-class families, responding to criticism that elite colleges have become unaffordable for ordinary Americans.
That’s almost right, except [...]
How Colleges Short-Change Women
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, USA Today editorial writer Richard Whitmire, author of a forthcoming book about how K-12 schools supposedly short-change boys, looks at the issue of gender discrimination in college admissions. Says($) Whitmire:
In desperate attempts to keep their campuses from swinging hugely female, as far more women than men apply to college [...]
Intersecting Interests in College Rankings
Ever since a number of small liberal arts colleges announced their intention to abstain from this year’s rankings by U.S. News & World Report, the debate about the ranking’s merits has been reinvigorated. Commenting today on the university presidents’ decision, Robert Samuelson contends:
“What their students will learn, if they’re paying attention, is a life lesson [...]
The Be-All End-All College Credential
M.I.T. Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones was fired after revelations that she lied about having a college degree 28 years ago when she first applied for an entry level job that didn’t require a college degree. Everyone at M.I.T. seems to think she was doing a fantastic job and will be sorely missed.
If that’s the [...]
Admission Impossible?
Over at The American Prospect Online, here’s my take on why it’s not actually getting harder and harder for high school students to get into a good college, despite what you read in the newspaper every year.
Panic! Some More
Since the college admission panic story has already been beaten to death by Reuter’s, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, the Washington Post obviously had no choice but to go above the fold with exactly the same story today. This is what happens when there’s a big education story that (A) writes [...]
Panic! At the Rich Suburban High School
Q: When does a tiny statistical change in a number that affects a miniscule number of people merit breathless coverage in the New York Times?
A: When the number has something–anything–to do with Harvard and the status anxieties the suburban upper-middle class.
In an uncharacteristic display of restraint, the Times ran it’s annual exercise in college admissions [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.