March 26, 2020 Dear The College Board, David Coleman, CEO College Board & Trevor Packer, Senior VP of Advanced Placement & Instruction: While not diminishing the dilemma of how to continue the AP program and administer AP exams in the midst of the current global pandemic, students’ frustrations about reducing the exams to 45 minutes from…
Tag: College selection
Novel COLLEGE-2020
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…
Selecting a College vs. Being Selected by a College
Worries about “not being accepted” to a college are common, since most parents and students believe they’re at the mercy of an admissions officer’s decision. Often, students think, “How do I make my experience, like GPA, test scores and extracurricular activities, match the “right” selection criteria of (insert name of college)?” Few students turn the…
The Costs of Cheating
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…
The Early Admissions Arms Race
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…
The Dilemma
Apparently some town founders in Pennsylvania we’re also parents of high school seniors or community college transfer students who are applying to college. 😆 While college applicants “Desire” to be admitted to the college of their choice and often the freedom of moving away from home, they can also “Panic” about the risk of not…
The State of A College Education, Part 2: The (Un)Fulfilled Promise of a College Degree
As I posited in Part 1, although an exact date is impossible to state, sentiment amongst college graduates is set to decline (as seen in the graph above), testing and possibly exceeding the 2009 lows. As the last of the Millenials graduate college this year (2019), many are disgruntled that the financial prosperty promised by…
Know Your Frenemies AKA Writing College Essays?
Every college, transfer and graduate school applicant is facing their own “mirror” as they brainstorm their life’s story to draft their college essays, which being autobiographical will be some of the toughest writing they’ve ever done. Being educated isn’t just about learning reading, writing and ‘rithmatic, but also understanding ourselves so we understand our life’s…
Here Comes “The College Blues”
Just because a student starts college doesn’t mean that their mindset has caught up to being a college student. First thing last Monday morning, a first-day-of-college-classes student texted me: since she walked into a classroom, where the class lecture was already underway and was at the wrong classroom to boot. Embarassed, she worried that her…
Got Jobs?
Since many attend college in search of “The Golden Ticket”, AKA “a good job”, the above map can give needed information about employment opportunities to both high school seniors and soon-to-be college graduates. With more information about the greatest potential employment in a particular location, students can consider if they’d move somewhere, apply to a…
Guest Post: It’s Okay to Not Know
By Spencer Batute I’m not quite sure how to write one of these personal journey blog posts, as I still don’t feel like I’m at some end goal or vista point that I can look down from and spew some all-seeing knowledge. And I don’t know if I ever will be. But I think that’s…
Summertime, Summertime…
Summer vacation traditionally meant “lazy days “—time to rest and regroup. Yet, for Gen Z’ers and even the preceeding Millenials, summer has become “organized play” and “scheduled interest investigation”, packed into camps, summer school, club sports, and summer reading assignments. But, today’s kids are no different than us as kids—the people who learned from youthful…
Liberal Tech
A recent Forbes article, highlighted the importance of humanities and other liberal arts degrees, despite the cultural norm that STEM is the only means to economic prosperity. The human to human connection is what bridges technology with it’s intended outcome: more efficiency based on information. Although technology is a more efficient means to collate data,…
SAT Adversity Scores
The Wall Street Journal recently unveiled of what’s being called, “SAT Adversity Score”, which is an attempt to address the question of fairness in college admissions, as well as the “nature vs. nurture” debate about what most influences a human to develop their full human potential. In their own executive summary, The College Board reasons…
Guest Post: Encourage Children to Become Experts
Recently, Creative Marbles Consultancy met Dr. Randy OMD, a Homeopathic Doctor specializing in child health care and blogger of CureGuide. Like us, Dr. Randy believes that although children are influenced by their parents, they are individuals with their own life’s purpose. So, in the following, we republish Dr. Randy’s recent blog post elaborating on how…