1. What’s the trouble with rankings?
Rankings play a key part in many colleges’ admissions strategies across disciplines — they’re a topic not without controversy. This Inside Higher Ed article covers the latest on rankings specifically related to business schools, a discipline that we’re focusing on as we develop our BusinessCAS service.
2. Transform transcripts to facilitate holistic admissions.
Grading students fairly and honestly is difficult, says Willard Dix in this Forbes article, but changes to the standard transcript practices may have an effect beyond just high school. Read through to see how the Mastery Transcript Consortium is leading a major effort to change how high school students’ performance is evaluated.
3. Race — turns out, it’s hard to talk about across the board.
Buzzfeed’s got insight into how some elite college admissions officers talk about race and it’s not very pretty: the documents that the news organization obtained include references to Asian-American applicants as “standard premeds” that are “difficult to pluck out” due to their “having very familiar profiles,” among other phrases for specific nationality groups. This article highlights the tricky subject of race and how it’s conversed about in higher ed admissions.
4. Why aren’t we taking the easy way to increase diversity?
Some of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities mostly attract students from the top of the income distribution, alarming when you consider that higher education attainment has a direct impact on future earnings. In this Washington Post article, the managing director of Ithaka S+R and president emerita of Vassar College explores realistic solutions to this problem.
Recommended Reading
Generation Z Goes to College
Do they have a copy at your local library? WorldCat will tell you.
This generation of students have different motivations, learning styles, characteristics, skill sets and social concerns than previous generations did, something that Suzanne covers quite often in her EMP webinars. In this title, Corey Seemiller and Meghan Grace explore these to maximize educational impact on this group.