The Crush

If you pay attention to the world of college admissions, then you not only know this guy, chances are he’s helped you form your understanding of what goes on in said world. Eric Hoover has been writing about admissions for about as long as current college freshmen have been alive. What has changed over that period of time? What are the constants? If I give him enough beers, will he tell me who the next big names are that will be going “test optional”???

Here’s the collection of stories Eric did about Nepali students trying to get to college in the US.

Link to “The Verification Trap” about the pitfalls of applying for financial aid while poor in this country.

Link to the article that won Eric the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award called “The Arc of Her Survival.”

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The post Episode 34: Eric Hoover of the Chronicle of Higher Education appeared first on The Crush.

Professor Marybeth Gasman is the Director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions and a professor of education. Soon she’s moving herself and her center to Rutgers University in New Jersey.

In this country, there are over 700 2 and 4-year colleges and universities designated as Minority Serving Institutions which educate 26% of ALL college students and over 40% of college students of color. Almost 80% of their students receive Pell grants, and these schools include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and Asian American and Native Pacific Islander Serving Institutions.

Professor Marybeth Gasman has helped institutionalize and elevate the work of these critical American spaces, their staff, faculty, and students as the director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania and has learned a lot along the way.

***SUPPORT COLLEGE SIGNING DAY ON MAY 1st!***

FURTHER READING/VIEWING/LISTENING

The post Episode 33: Professor Marybeth Gasman appeared first on The Crush.

This week it became known via a federal indictment that rich people used their wealth to break the law in a variety of appalling ways, all with a mind to skip the line and receive guaranteed admission to famous/elite/highly-selective colleges. Nobody knows more about this world than Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Eric Hoover…let’s unpack #AuntBeckyGate emergency-style!

So much more to read here:

“Bribery Scandal Reveals ‘Weak Spots’ in the Admissions System. Don’t Look so Shocked.” (Hoover, Chronicle)

“Admissions Officers Didn’t Create the Scandal. But They Helped Shape the Culture That Spawned it.” (Hoover, Chronicle)

“They’re Already Rich. Why Were These Parents so Fixated on Elite Colleges?” (Becky Supiano, Chronicle)

“Born on Third, Stealing Home, Paying off the Ump: The Unhinged Greed of College Cheats” (James Murphy, Vanity Fair)

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

…And hey I was on Good Morning America, so that’s cool!

Part 1

Part 2

The post Episode 32 ***🚨EMERGENCY AUNT BECKY SCANDAL PODCAST With Eric Hoover🚨*** appeared first on The Crush.

Temple University Economics Professor Doug Webber does some fascinating research on the impact of our academic choices in college. In a world plagued by a lust for prestige, how much does it really matter in terms of your ability to earn a good living?

I’m thrilled to have Doug back as my first repeat guest! Make sure and take a listen to Episode 18 where we discuss the value of New York State’s “Excelsior Scholarship” which is meant to provide a free college education to a certain segment of New York’s households. Here we spend more time on the research that really occupies his time, which is the impact of college on the labor force. Are there good jobs for humanities majors? Will you, in fact, be doomed if you do not attend a Top 25 US News-ranked school? Are the robots coming for our jobs, and how soon? Professor Webber was kind enough to host me in his fancy corner office on campus at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.

Further listening/reading:

“My Little Hundred Million” Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History

“It Depends What you Study, Not Where” The Economist, 2015

“Examining the Interstate Mobility of Recent College Graduates” Kelchen and Webber, 2018

“Is College Worth it? Going Beyond Averages” Webber, Third Way, 2018

The post Episode 31 – Doug Webber 2: The Return of Doug Webber! appeared first on The Crush.

Nike and Oregon – the state as well as its flagship university – go way back, and their relationship became a template for underfunded state universities all over the country. Josh Hunt takes a deep dive into this complicated and painful reality in his new book, “The University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education.”

I grew up in Portland, Oregon alongside the growth of Nike from a hip local shoe company to a global empire. Michael Moore’s film “The Big One” came out in my junior year of high school, and first blasted Phil Knight and Nike’s lack of action to curb its exploitative labor practices into the national spotlight. We all saw the swooshes on the jerseys of athletes at Oregon, and also at Michigan, Florida State, and my alma mater USC. But I definitely never understood the depth and breadth of the bargain Oregon and its then-president, Dave Frohnmayer, made with Knight and Nike, and the grip its implications still has on our public systems of higher education. But then I read this book, and I encourage you all to read it too.

Further Reading and Listening

The post Episode 30! Josh Hunt on “The University of Nike” appeared first on The Crush.

Emmi Harward is the Executive Director of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools (ACCIS), and it’s her job to keep her finger on the pulse of the college counseling profession so she can help her members do their best work helping kids apply to college.

As they put it “ACCIS is a national membership organization providing support, shared knowledge, and professional development programming for college counselors based in independent (non-public) schools across the country and internationally. ACCIS counts nearly 600 schools as members, represented by over 1700 counselors and office assistants working to support the students in their care.” Emmi spends her time in airports, schools, and her home base of San Diego, California, and joined me in new york, and she and I talked in a conference room in the Collegewise New York City world headquarters at WeWork on 49th street in Manhattan.

Further reading: NACAC State of College Admissions 2018

The post Episode 29: Emmi Harward of ACCIS appeared first on The Crush.

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The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success emerged 3 years ago to provide an alternative application platform for, at first, 32 colleges, and now over 150 of them. Executive Director Annie Reznik is helping this group of colleges execute a mission to improve the college attendance and graduation chances for more of the kinds of students who don’t go and don’t graduate.

Further reading:

List of Coalition Application member institutions

Coalition Application Board of Directors

Breakaway Group Seeks ‘Retro Common App’ (Chronicle of Higher Ed, 2014)

Coalition of the WIlling or the Wealthy? (Inside Higher Ed, 2015)

The Common Application Has Been Accused of Running a ‘Collusive Cartel’ in the Admissions Industry (Daily Pennsylvanian, 2017)

How Admissions Competition Brought New Rivalries, Strange Bedfellows, and ‘An Us-Versus-Us’ Lawsuit (Chronicle of Higher Ed, 2018)

Why One College Has Second Thoughts About Joining the Coalition – and Another Has High Hopes (Chronicle of Higher Ed, 2018)

The post Episode 28: Annie Reznik on the Coalition Application appeared first on The Crush.

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Reach Higher is former First Lady Michelle Obama’s college access initiative, operating under the leadership of my guest this episode, Eric Waldo. 

He’s hard at work countering the systematic efforts to dismantle the education policies of his old bosses, Barack Obama, Arne Duncan and John King. Reach Higher is responsible – and perhaps best known – for College Signing Day, but also for recognizing the School Counselor of the Year, for their Beating the Odds Summit to control “summer melt” and make sure students who enroll in college actually show up there in the fall, and UpNext, an innovative texting platform to deliver important college admissions information to students’ cell phones.

Eric and I spoke from the annual NACAC conference in Salt Lake City, UT.

Articles referenced at the end of this episode:

College Scorecard Cuts the Context

DeVos Ends Obama-Era Safeguards Aimed at Abuses by For-Profit Colleges

8 Facts That Will Make You Think Twice Before Enrolling at For-Profit College

The post Episode 27: Eric Waldo of Reach Higher appeared first on The Crush.

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6 million people attend community colleges in this country, and yet we somehow don’t tend to consider it as “college.”

Bart Grachan earns his keep doing everything he can to help students succeed at LaGuardia Community College, and also to helping us all change the conversation to include these students, their concerns as well as their successes.

Community colleges disproportionately serve low-income and minority students and can act as a massive social mobility device, but we put a lot of roadblocks in the way of these students making the most of this experience, especially as pertains to transferring to a 4-year college and graduating on time. In addition to helping us understand the role of community colleges in our national system of higher ed, Bart talks about those roadblocks and the kinds of things that 4-year institutions could do to help these students on their road to success.

You can learn more about community colleges here at the Community College Research Center at Columbia’s Teachers College.

The post Episode 26: Bart Grachan on Community Colleges appeared first on The Crush.

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It’s a company with a loyal following to rival almost any brand, and everyone in college admissions is buying it. Slate is the technology of choice that admissions offices use to read applications and manage every interaction that students make with that office, from mailing list subscription to every click on an email to admission notification.

I talk to Technolutions/Slate CEO Alexander Clark about his personal path to creating Slate, why it’s so popular among admissions offices, and where it’s headed. We also discussed any would-be rivalry with Naviance, the phenomenon that is the Slate Summit, digital privacy issues, and how Slate figures into the conversation around “demonstrated interest.”

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The post Episode 25: Alexander Clark, CEO and Founder of Technolutions/Slate appeared first on The Crush.