Admissions Blog

Undergraduate Admissions Uncensored

12 Reasons Scattergrams Lull Students Into a False Sense of Security

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Scattergrams, the ubiquitous x/y axis graphs that have caught on like wildfire over the last twenty-five years because of their inclusion in Naviance, MaiaLearning, Cialfo, and other online college counseling tools used by thousands of American high schools. Scattergrams purport to show a student’s chances of admission at different colleges and universities by plotting previous students from a particular high school on an x/y axis graph based on such students’ GPAs on one axis and their test scores (ACT or SAT) on the other.

Below is an example of a scattergram for a particular high school showing current students (and parents) at that high school how alumni from that high school fared when applying to University of Maryland College Park from 2010 through 2014.

Two images of scattergrams are included below. On the first one, from Naviance, please note that the scattergram plots the SAT on the x-axis using the old 2400 SAT scale; however, the SAT these days is scored out of 1600. Similarly, the first scattergrams’s high school clearly plots GPA based on a 4.0 scale, but some schools’ scattergrams will have very different numbers of the y-axis because scattergrams can have any sort of GPA scale on them (100, 20, 6, etc.) depending on a school’s grading scale.

The second scattergram image is from Cialfo and captures data for Reed College. It at least shares whether the data plotted represents students who applied Early Decision vs. vs. Early Action vs. something else (which at Reed would be Regular), which some scattergrams don’t share.

The typical student seeing the first of the two  scattergrams above assumes, if he or she has a 3.6 GPA and an SAT score of 1860 he or she is definitely going to get into University of Maryland College Park. Most of the rest of students with that combination of grades and scores would assume, after seeing the above scattergram, that Maryland is at least a huge safety college for them. After all, all students from this high school in the past few years who land in that GPA/score range got into Maryland, as illustrated by all of those green squares.

STOP RIGHT THERE!

The problem is a student with this GPA/score combination could easily get rejected from University of Maryland College Park for any number of reasons that a scattergram will not be able to display. The most common reasons scattergrams lull students into a false sense of security are as follows:

  1. Many selective colleges get more selective every passing year, rendering antiquated past years’ admissions statistics.
  2. Scattergrams don’t show the quality of past applicants’ extracurricular resumes.
  3. Scattergrams don’t show the quality of past applicants’ essay writing skills.
  4. Scattergrams don’t show past applicants’ demographics (rich, middle-class, poor, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, International, etc.). College admissions officers for American colleges – especially selective institutions – often care quite a lot about their applicants’ demographics.
  5. Scattergrams don’t show incredibly important (again, in the eyes of college admissions officers) background information about past applicants’ beyond their demographics. Here we are talking about characteristics like an applicant’s legacy status (Did a past applicant’s mom or dad attend the same college?), athletic prowess (Was a past applicant a highly-sought athletic recruit?), and/or his or her parents’/grandparents’ proclivity for giving money to the college on the scattergram in question.
  6. Most high schools set their scattergrams to hide from current students/parents whether or not past applicants to the college in question applied Rolling Decision, Early Decision, Early Action, Priority Admission, and/or Regular Decision. That’s important information! This is because colleges that offer different admissions plans/deadlines often have very different standards for each such plan/deadline. You can also forget about a scattergram showing whether a past applicant applied for and/or was accepted to the college for fall, spring, or winter term (if such varied options exist at the college in question).
  7. Scattergrams don’t show the quality of past applicants’ teacher and counselor recommendation letters/evaluations.
  8. Scattergrams likely don’t account for whether or not past applicants submitted their ACT scores, SAT scores, both, or neither (in the case of test-optional colleges) to the colleges’ scattergrams on which they are plotted. This is a huge issue in a college admissions environment where there majority of colleges continue to be test-optional.
  9. Unless the scattergram’s GPA axis is a weighted GPA, the GPA axis is not capable of communicating to students and parents the past applicants’ curricular rigor.
  10. Scattergrams don’t show past applicants’ grade trends in high school (colleges care so much about this).
  11. Scattergrams show past applicants’ final GPAs in high school, not their GPAs when they applied to college (usually in the beginning of a student’s senior year). Senior slumps in the final months of past applicants’ senior years often slightly (and sometimes greatly) deflate their final GPAs relative to what their GPAs were in October of their senior years.
  12. Directors of college counseling (the leaders of college counseling offices) can be applicants’ best advocates or worst enemies depending on whether or not these directors have written a strong and compelling high school profile and done everything else they can do to encourage particular colleges to accept their students. Scattergrams don’t note when certain directors’ regimes began and ended; therefore, in a field where many directors of college counseling only stay in their roles for a few years before moving on, a five- or ten-year scattergram could be capturing admissions statistics for students applying from a particular high school under very different college counseling regimes. Some directors write bang-up high school profiles (which are sent to all colleges to which students apply in a particular admissions cycle) and some don’t. Sadly, at some schools, the high school profile is written and designed by the communications team and/or individuals in the admissions, advancement, development, head of school, principal, and or central office! The further removed from college counseling the writers of the high school profile are the more likely the profile will not provide college admissions officers the information they are looking for in a high school profile. Meanwhile, some directors of college counseling make calls for their students or their colleagues’ students, others simply don’t. Some are on a first-name basis with Ivy League admissions officers, some don’t know any. Some act as PR agents for their students, others are real in their recommendation letters, which leads to such letters carrying more weight with admissions officers than those that only share glowing reviews. Scattergrams lull students and parents into thinking (just like point #1 above) that each student plotted on the scattergram had the same college counseling team behind him or her and faced the same college admissions rates from year to year. The fact is, high schools change and colleges change, and as a result, scattergrams fail at capturing subtle or quite large subjective changes to students’ chances from year to year based on how high schools and colleges change.

In summary, so much of what colleges will ultimately base their admissions decisions on is NOT captured in scattergrams; therefore, don’t use them as the end all be all when it comes to determining whether a particular college on your list is a Safety, Possible, or Reach. Any college counselor, student, or parent who tells you otherwise has no idea what he or she is talking about.

I frequently get irate parents telling me that I am too pessimistic about their student’s chances at a particular college or university based on what the family sees on a particular college’s scattergram on Naviance, MaiaLearning, or Cialfo. I remind them that I often know the back story on each applicant on the scattergram and/or that there are at lease twelve reasons why the scattergram is only part of the story – especially at the country’s most selective colleges and universities. Sadly, this does not often calm the parents down, and as a result, a few parents hold months-long bouts of resentment towards me – usually until all admissions decisions are released in April, at which point reality sets in – for good or ill. With that said, I am happy when I have a student get into a college that I classified as a Reach that the parents and student thought I should have classified as a Possible or a Safety. It’s my job to help turn all colleges on a student’s list into offers of admission; yet, I need the student’s cooperation and effort if I can make this happen. Sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Scattergrams are trustworthier for colleges that primarily base their admissions decisions on applicants’ grades and scores only. Theses types of colleges were usually those that accepted over 50 of applicants and/or large state universities that asked for the perfunctory essay and extracurricular list but which didn’t have the actual manpower to review these subjective aspects of students’ applications. Such colleges simply defaulted to determining whether or not to accept a student based on his or her scores and grades. Yet, such colleges are increasingly rare because of the current trend of test-optional admissions that is sweeping the nation. Even in such cases where grades and test scores make of the majority of a college’s admissions decision, a student who is quite deficient or exceptionally strong in one or more of the twelve areas listed above could easily become an exception to the rule that the scattergram seems to convey.

Bottom line: strong college counselors always explain this important, complex, and as you can now see, somewhat time-consuming information to students and parents. Such college counselors tend to lean towards being more conservative with their Safety, Possible, and Reach classifications for colleges on their students’ lists than those college counselors who take a relatively two-dimensional approach (x,y axis, anyone?) to college acceptance/rejection prognostication. If you are a student or parent going through the college application process now or in the future, please remember to be skeptical of scattergrams. Though they have valuable data on them, scattergrams only capture some objective data, and they certainly don’t capture the subjective strengths or weaknesses of past college applicants or their college applications.

Want to Fix Financial Aid?

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A previous post this year offered a couple of suggestions on how we can fix financial aid.  If you missed that post, a quick summary:

  • College costs too much;
  • Most people don’t know how to pay for it;
  • Financial aid forms are too lengthy;
  • The reports describing what aid a student gets are too confusing;
  • Everyone hates loans.

I was really hoping the two suggestions I made might generate some thoughtful discussion about how to make college more affordable, and lead us to a point where we were ready to take on changes to financial aid the way the profession is taking on changes in required testing.  Instead, I got crickets.

Undeterred, I’m back with another approach—and this one even sounds like fun.  I haven’t been to many conferences in the last few years, and what I’ve really missed is the conversations at the end of the day where most sentences begin with “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” Those conversations have led to all kinds of changes in the way I counsel students, and they inspire all of us to keep looking for ways to expand access and opportunity.  Without these conversations, work can be a little less inspiring, especially when students who heard Yes from the dream school come in with the financial aid report, and remember why that was a dream school.

So how about this?  What if we go to the people who run financial aid offices, and ask them how they would improve financial aid?  This happens all the time in the business world; the way to improve the delivery of a service is to ask the people delivering the service.

Since we’re talking about serious money here, this needs to be something a little more casual than just a conversation over a couple of beers, so let’s put together some guidelines:

Financial aid folks, identify what you would change about the world of financial aid, and why.  It can be one thing; it could be myriad things.  I have a bias towards access, so I’d likely be more interested in the parts of financial aid that keep kids from coming to college, staying in college, or making the most in college.

Give me some data.  Some of the best ideas are those that come from the gut, but in this case, those ideas relate to money, and that involves recordkeeping.  Show me how this affects kids.

Tell me what you ‘d do to fix this problem, and why you think this would solve the problem.  As is typically the case here, this needs to be the right mix of practical and blue sky, where we blow up enough of the current system without tossing out the parts that work.  “Let’s start over” may sound exciting, but it isn’t a plan.  I’m looking for something that’s partly a plan with wings, and partly a dream with legs.

Tell me how you know if you fixed the problem—what data points will change, what procedures will be updated, what students will worship the ground you walk on as a result of these changes?

Tell me what could go wrong—why it might not work, why it might work but just for your school, and what unintended consequences might arise.  In some cases, the answer here might be “beats me’, but even that answer can be explained in detail.  “There aren’t any” isn’t an answer—it just means you haven’t thought about it much.

What will you get if you send me this information and I like the idea?  Well, my plan would be to pick the best three ideas, and give each of them $300,000—100 grand a year for three years—to implement the plan.  You’ll need to include a budget to show what you’d do with the money—and using it for financial aid itself is OK—and you’ll need to track the money to make sure you can show what it actually went to.  But show me you’ve got a plan that’s part pipe dream, and you may get the chance to make it come true.

Now.  About the money.

I don’t exactly have a million dollars lying around, and something tells me there might not be a lot of foundations willing to give me the money if I go to them and simply say “How about if we try and fix financial aid?” I do think they might provide some funding for innovative ideas made by experienced financial aid professionals who work at the grass roots.  That’s why we need to start with your proposals—if I go to them with real plans, they’re much mor likely to sign on. So you may get nothing, other than a chance to step back, re-picture the big picture, and think about your work in a different way. But you may get more.

If that’s of interest to you, I’m at collegeisyours.com

Let’s see where this goes.

January Application Deadlines Are Just a Bad Idea

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The story is worth hearing, and even listening to again.  You came home from college for the holidays, and Mom or Dad was preparing the traditional roast.  You’d somehow eaten this dish a thousand times without ever seeing it prepared, so you were horrified and fascinated to watch them lop off a half pound or so from the back of the roast and toss it in the trash—perfectly good food.  You composed yourself enough to make asking why they did this sound downright casual.  “My mother made it this way” was the response—and it was just too convenient that the mother in question was also in the room.  “That’s right” she added, “and my mother made it the same way.”

The resolution of the issue had to wait until Sunday, when great grandmother joined the family for dinner.  Seated at the table with the roast right in front of everyone, the sensory elements were perfectly aligned to ask the question- why cut the roast?  “I learned to do that from my mother.  The pan we had was too small for a full roast, so we always had to trim it to size.”

And there is the fascination.  No other generation had the same limitation of pan or oven, but the roast trimming continued without questioning or consideration for three generations.

It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to consider just how many implications this tale of roast trimming exist in college admissions, and nowhere is that more clearly the case than with application and notification deadlines.  Long before any kind of Internet presence, January 1 was an application deadline for hundreds of colleges.  Remarkably enough, this pre-high tech deadline didn’t make much sense even back then, since the deadline was a postmark deadline, but post offices were never open on New Year’s Day—in fact, depending on how small your town was back then, post offices across smalltown America were hard to find open after noon on the 31st.

Postmark deadlines are now a thing of the past, but there are other issues to consider with January 1.  A clear number of high schools close for the holidays around December 23 if not sooner.  This leaves most students largely on their own to put the finishing touches on the first major, multi-component task they’ve had to negotiate in their young lives—that, or it compels counseling offices everywhere to assemble some makeshift effort to offer support here and there at a time when counselors most need a break of their own. (Although there was one high school who was floating a “guarantee” that every counselor would check their email every day of the December break, thus denying everyone a chance to rest and recover.  Talk about a happy new year…)

Even the efforts to offer some kind of support over vacation can miss the mark, especially for students who are the first in their family to apply to college.  I am not a disciple of the “applying to college is rocket science” school, nor do I believe young people learn much about deadlines by treating them like they are amorphous, when they are not.  Still, given that this is the first major multi-tasking activity most young people have that has a fairly big consequence attached to it, it isn’t unreasonable to hope the deadline would permit them the chance to have counsel—and even more important, face-to-face support—to complete the task, something a finger-wagging “just plan ahead” overlooks in a brazen, cold way.  If we then add on the fact that nearly every admissions office is empty and unavailable for student support on January 1st, it’s easy to see every director of admission with carving knife in hand, ready to lay waste to a couple of pounds of perfectly good applications, all in the name of “we’ve always done it this way.”

At the risk of sounding like someone who has never run or even worked in an admissions office, the answer seems simple—this is a practice that needs to stop.  The easiest alternative would be requiring all materials to be submitted by the second Tuesday in January, a time when even the most luxurious of December vacations is over, where students have had time to seek the help they need, and everyone has had time to refresh their energies in a meaningful way.  Doing something challenging doesn’t mean it has to be inhumane, and the family man in me suggests that, for as much as I value the lessons learned in applying to college, there are more important things to consider over the holidays, like developing a strategy for a successful entry in the annual family gingerbread building contest.  This is the final holiday of youth, and it deserves recognition, and space, as such.  It’s possible to do that and develop a strong college portfolio, given the right deadline.

This isn’t the only deadline that could use some attention.  November 1, November 15, and May 1 all landed on a Sunday last school year, leaving students with a couple of days to do the best they could with what little they knew.  Again, this is especially true for students whose family has no experience applying to college.  Since these students tend to come from urban and rural schools where counseling ratios are typically astronomical, it’s easy to hope colleges would want to nurture applications from these populations, rather than throw more barriers in the way of these talented, but raw, applicants.

There are many other facets of the college application process where roast trimming can apply, especially when considering every facet of the application is easier for students who come from a background of wealth.  This aspect seems easy enough to start with, since its effects are easy enough to understand.  Let’s put the January 1 deadline and its impact back in its sheath.

The Ideal Size & Composition of Your College List

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How many colleges should be on your college list, and how many of these colleges should be safety schools, target schools, or reach schools? Use the guidelines to keep yourself organized and focused.

To The Media: End the College Application Nightmare Stories

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It figures that August 1 landed on a Sunday this year.  What used to be just another beach day took on special significance a few years ago, when Common Application chose August 1 to launch its updates for the coming school year.  It’s exciting to be sure, but with a hint of melancholy, as a few overly enthusiastic parents use the occasion to tell their high school seniors “Summer’s over”, while the seniors meekly head towards the nearest computer, even on a weekend, muttering “But what if I don’t want it to be?”

Happily, more than a few colleges agree with the seniors.  While there was a stream—OK, a torrent—of colleges Twittering students on Sunday to hurry up and apply, more than a few colleges said “Start today if you want to, but our deadline isn’t until January.  Take your time.”  I had planned on thanking each of those colleges for posting such a message in the face of application mania.  I’m pleased to say there were too many to do so.

But this is just the start, and here’s hoping more colleges get on board.  The last two years of schooling have left this year’s seniors in pretty bad shape.  Day after day of waking up to find out if school is in person, online, both, or neither may have left them flexible, but it has also left them exhausted.  Students who fit every element of one (and certainly not the only) likely college-bound profile—from the suburbs, in a college prep curriculum, with two well-off parents who went to college—are saying out loud they just don’t think applying to college is worth the hassle.  That’s not because of the Delta rebound; it’s because their last couple of years of school have left them unsure of themselves and their ability to control their destiny.  Since any college admissions rep will tell you the key to a successful application is to let the student drive the bus, this is a huge problem.

Part of the solution lies with us.  August is peach and melon season in Michigan, a time when very rational people who never eat fruit feel a swelling in their taste buds that can only be satiated by interaction with produce that is truly a little slice of heaven.

This same thirst wells up in the media every August, but it isn’t for fruit—it’s for stories about the confusing, terrifying, uncertain world of college admissions.  With a new crop of high school seniors every year, journalists eagerly seize on their newness to college admissions, highlighting profiles of bright young people who find themselves flummoxed over how to apply to college, and when to apply to college.  Curiously, these stories rarely display a student’s confusion over where to apply to college, since the media only covers students who are considering the same 25 colleges ever year that admit about 5 percent of their applicant pool.  “She’s a National Honor Society president, but she can’t get her arms around Yale’s application.” Of course, these same students would be equally baffled by using a plumber’s wrench for the first time, and they easily get the hang of this college thing two weeks into the process.  But apparently, that’s not the point. The very first time they do something new, they don’t completely understand it.  My goodness.

The impact of this approach to college application coverage can’t be understated.  Thousands of students have already had to give up most of their summers at the insistence of parents who have caught the angst early, eager to make sure that college essay sparkles, unaware that the number one cause of weak essays isn’t underwriting, but overwriting.

Parents who haven’t been on their seniors about college since Father’s Day read these August articles and panic, fearing their child is now “behind”.  They plop their senior in front of a computer screen and tell them they can’t come out until an application is finished—for a college that doesn’t even start reading applications until January 10.

Parents whose children really understand themselves, and had no intention of applying to these schools, now feel their child is “losing out” on something, and suddenly insist that an application or two to the Big 25 is a good idea, “just to see what happens”, even though their student is well aware of what will happen.

This brand of media attention has never served high school seniors well, and it’s likely to make matters even worse for this year’s seniors, who are looking to gain their footing after two years of scholastic uncertainty.  In the interest of their well being—or, to use a phrase that is on the verge of becoming unimportant due to its overuse, their mental health—how about a few less media stories on the impossibility of getting into college and its excessive expense, and a few more stories about the 75% or so of colleges who admit more than 50% of their applicants, and the many colleges who are forgiving institutionally-based student loans?  Could the media finally discover the urban and rural colleges whose buildings have not a hint of ivy that are turning around the lives of students who didn’t have the opportunity to take 7 AP classes in high school, students who are shining academically?  How about the students who are making community college work, earning a degree that costs less from start to finish than one year of Harvard, all while the students typically work about 30 hours a week?

It’s certainly true many people turn to the media to read stories that will fuel their dreams—that’s why so many people follow the Olympics, and replay the video of the woman who was reunited with her dog after two years.  But stories about the uncertainty of the college selection process don’t feed students’ sense of the possible; they nourish their nightmares.  They’ve had enough of that these past two years, and may be headed for more.  The best thing the press can do for them, and for our society, is to admit there are more than 25 good colleges in this country, and wake the students to a better vision of how to apply to college, other than run a gauntlet that, at the end of the day, is largely of the media’s own making.

Your College Application Must Demonstrate Addiction

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The most successful college applicants (the ones who get into America’s top colleges) demonstrate interest AND demonstrate addiction. Yes, you read that right. Watch the video to learn more.

Great College Application Essays Have Something in Common

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What do nearly all successful college application essays have in common? Hint: it’s not their topic, structure, tone, or grammatical tense. It’s something about the essay’s first draft. Watch the video below to learn more.

If you want to get into even the most selective colleges and universities, make sure to prioritize the drafting process for your college application essays. If you want more help through the drafting process, learn more about working with me here.

Master the Post-Application Follow Up

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For many seniors, once they’ve submitted their application it’s time to check out. Bad idea. Don’t assume the colleges that you’ve applied to have everything they need in order to start reviewing your application. Proactively follow up with colleges a few days after you believe they should have everything they need to start reviewing your application file in order to ensure that they in fact do. Otherwise, your application may be put on ice for too long and in the process you could lose out on getting in entirely!

All About Early Action: Restricted/Single-Choice & Unrestricted

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When you apply to a college or university Early Action you are submitting your application by a specific early deadline and will receive your decision earlier than regular decision, usually, though not always, before the end of December. Although you may be admitted early, you are not committed to enroll at that college. Yet, there are two types of Early Action:

EA Unrestricted – when you are free to apply to more than one college with “Early” plans at the same time.

EA restricted (REA) or single choice – when you are not allowed to apply to other colleges with “Early” plans at the same time (though usually with carve outs for public colleges and universities).

Always read the fine print of the admissions plan you are agreeing to before you sign and submit anything to a college or university.

What Needs to Change in College Admissions

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The ups and downs of the quarantine gave college admissions officers and school counselors a taste of application life to come, as the birth rate for high school graduates continues to slide, and the need to develop new approaches to recruit students increases.  As the profession continues to try and improve college access, and knowing that small differences can make a big difference, here are some considerations for both sides of the desk to ponder this summer over a well-deserved glass of lemonade:

Colleges—move your deadline dates.  November 1 (early applications), January 1 (regular applications), and May 1 (many deposits) are all big dates in the college application world—and they all fell on a Sunday or a holiday this year.  I don’t understand this, since the admissions offices weren’t open, and the vast majority of high school seniors had no access to counselors or other application helpers the day of and before the deadlines.

This needs to change.  Yes, students need to be responsible, and should learn to plan ahead—but perhaps that lesson is better applied to deadlines for things they’ve done before (like papers), not with things they are doing for the first time (like applying to college).  The first Tuesday in November, the second Tuesday in January, and the first Tuesday in May would solve this problem nicely, increasing the quality and quantity of applications to boot. Georgia Tech made the move, and they get kaboodles of applications.  It’s an easy, but important, change.

High Schools—stop working holidays.  Moving the January 1 deadline to a date when high schools are in session is also overdue for school counselors, who have taken a serious shellacking this year with all the student mental health issues arising from COVID.  School counselors have always been overworked, but never able to use the December holidays to recover, since they were expected to help their students make January 1 college deadlines.

It’s time to take a stand.  Assuming the colleges move their deadlines, counselors need to learn to let go.  Send a note to all senior families early in November, letting them know your vacation is—well, a vacation.  If you really can’t let go of your students for that long—or if the colleges unwisely cling to January 1– set two days of vacation for online office hours, and take a breath all the other days.  You have mastered online office hours this year.  Let them be your friend.

Colleges—keep innovating.  One (and perhaps the only) upside of the quarantine was the ability of college admissions offices to adapt major chunks of their traditional approach to recruitment. Test optional, drive-thru tours, and online high school visits suggested it might be OK for everyone to get their hopes up, that some real college admissions reform was in the air.

Yes.  Well.

In a post-vaccine world, we see more signs of returning to “normal” than creating new normal.  Reinventing the entire admissions process is no easy feat, to be sure, but how hard might it be for admissions offices to spend half a day this summer doing “What ifs” to one part of the application process?  Do that for five years, and you have a new admissions paradigm, and a more accessible one—the thing you say you keep wanting.

High schools— mental health and college access aren’t either/or.  I will legitimately blow my top if I read one more post from a high school counselor insisting that the increase in COVID-related mental health needs makes it impossible to do any effective college counseling.

School counseling as a profession has long been showing a mental health bias at the expense of quality college counseling, and this year just seems to have widened the gap.   Counselor training programs plant the seeds of this bias— training programs devote about 7 classes to mental health training, and none to college counseling—and all of this must stop, if only because the dichotomy is a false one.

Discouraged, depressed high school students light up like a hilltop church on Christmas Eve when I tell them college gives them a fresh start to life and learning, proof enough that college counseling affects mental health.  That, plus the American School Counselor Association says college counseling is part of the job.  Counselors truly are overworked, so they can’t do everything they want in any part of counseling.  That said, college can still be part of a key to a better self.  More counselors need to see that, and act on it.

Everyone—stop beating up on the Ivies.  The Ivies and their equally tough-to-get-into institutions largely decided to go test optional this year.  For some reason, this gave a lot of students with B averages the hope that they too could pahk the cah in the yahd, now that they didn’t have to reveal their test scores.

So—more students applied to the Ivies this year than last year.  The Ivies didn’t admit more students this year than last year.  That means their admit rate had to go down, and more students were denied.

That isn’t news—it’s math.  And if you want to blame the Ivies for encouraging students to apply who didn’t really stand a chance of getting in, you’re going to need to make a thousand more jackets for that club.  If you think the Ivies take too few Pell-eligible students, say that.  If you think they admit too many legacies, stay that.  But don’t beat them up for proving the laws of basic ratios.  Any other college in their shoes would have to do the same thing. (Besides, it’s the national media who has left our society with the impression that there are only 25 colleges in America.)

Everyone—about Kiddos.  It’s no secret that college is largely a time of youth, especially with the expansion of adolescence into the early twenties and beyond. But college is also a time to help young people embrace the opportunities of adulthood, skills and attitudes that sometimes require setting the desires of self to one side.

This goal would be more easily achieved if we saw students—and if they saw themselves– as capable of embracing a larger sense of self by referring to them as students, not Kiddos.  They don’t need to grow up in a hurry or, with the right kind of help, succumb to the media images of college choice as a high stakes pressure cooker.  But they also need something more than just a pat on the head and a verbal affirmation that’s the equivalent of a lollipop. Let’s try calling them students.