Many students, each year apply and believe they should be admitted to an elite college—defined statistically by yield, selection rate, and its inverse, rejection rate. So when reality dawns in the spring and applicants realize instead they are part of the 95% of those who will not be admitted to an elite college, they are…
The root cause of the financial crisis was purely human factor. This human factor is the completely false sense of omnipotence, self-importance and entitlement among the country’s elite, as well as the nurturing of these beliefs at Ivy League colleges and other elite universities the US will be doomed to suffer other calamities every bit…
The sentiments of a current second-year college student attending a public flagship university in California when reflecting on the perils of the academic meritocracy: Rewarding/punishing requires less effort [by faculty and students] though, making it the easier default [system for measuring academic performance]. Assigning expectations, whether positive or negative, is a low-effort path that leads…
March 13, 2020 is Gen Z’s “Day of Infamy”, when K-12 school campuses closed due to COVID-related health risks, sequestering an entire generation of youth in the midst of their coming of age. Amidst the sudden, and now ever-extending health emergency, precipitating continued distance learning and canceled extracurricular activities, the emotional toll on teens only…
As part of a series of posts, I’ll analyze each of the University of California’s (UC) 14 Comprehensive Review factors which admissions officers will apply to select their incoming first year and transfer classes. The first post can be reviewed here, and in this second post, the following factor will be examined: Number of, content…
In a recent interview with Gabrielle Wanneh of Education Week, I discussed my Open Letter to The College Board about the 2020 Advanced Placement (AP) Exams. In my piece, I specifically highlighted the issues about the integrity of the the modified, online format, which as of Monday, May 11, thousands of students have begun taking:…
Amidst the COVID-19 health crisis disrupting educational and instructional continuity, students, parents, and educators are asking and being asked questions about the current educational process, which is also spurring discussions about the value of education. The following is a selection of education-related news stories from the past few weeks, offering insights about the shifts…
A student who attends a public flagship university in California characterizes distance learning as: Chaos is an apt description. Zoom is challenging to manage and pre-recorded lectures lack humor. It’s difficult to focus on lectures… Third year undergraduate The student, like many others, struggles to continue learning, conflicted about missing friends and her life in…
Educators and students, participants in the Modern American Educational Industrial Complex, are mere glimmers of the Jeffersonian ideals of “essential merit”, which historian Joseph F. Kett defines as: …merit that rests on specific and visible achievements by an individual that were thought, in turn, to reflect that individual’s estimable character…’Merit’ was that quality in the…
To date, thirteen of the top twenty-five US News & World Report nationally ranked universities, all adopted Pass/No Pass-style grading systems for the spring term, due to the COVID-19 health crisis: Although Pass/No Pass is the default system at UC Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Princeton and Yale, students can still “opt-in” to be awarded…
An online, distance learning college education is not what most four-year college students and their parents paid (or borrowed) to experience. With college closures, the holistic “college experience” has been truncated, as entire university communities have been dispersed, with no late-night dorm floor existential debates, no clubs, no socializing—stripped down to simply content delivery through…
Recent articles highlighting cheating in college here and here and here, may be shocking to some or just an everyday commonplace for others or somewhere in between both reactions. However, none of the authors of the aforementioned articles question why students and seemingly more students than in the past believe that cheating in college is…
According to the Common Application, “around 860,000” applications were submitted on November 1, 2019 for Early Action, Early Decision and Regular Decision application deadlines, which for the first time, exceeded the “around 720,000” applications submitted last year on January 1 for traditional Regular Decision deadlines. The increasingly competitive nature of the college admissions process—evident in…
As the saying goes, “For every system, there is a counter system.” And, the recent Federal indictments of 50 individuals only becomes the latest example of an educational counter-system. College coaches, athletic department administrators, parents, and Rick Singer, the independent college admissions consultant, collectively found a way around the admissions office, the “front door” of…
I often listen to students’ and parents’ worries about high school grades that are any other letter but an A. The A grade has become synonymous with “smart”, “the key to college acceptances” and “bragging rights”. But, in the quest to “achieve”, often the confidence in knowing oneself and one’s strengths, so as to boldly…
