Destigmatizing CTE
We’ll soon be departing CTE Month; while we’re running on the remaining fumes, here’s one last article about CTE education.
The Aquaculture Pioneers program launched in 2022 to support growth of Maine’s aquaculture industry and continue to cultivate talent in this important sector. Funding for this exciting program has been made possible through the Builders Initiative through a grant awarded to FocusMaine and Educate Maine. We work with employers across the downeast, mid-coast, and southern coastal regions to support experiential learning opportunities at farms and hatcheries.
Participants in the Aquaculture Pioneers program can receive internship credit through their high school or higher education institution. Participants will also be enrolled as pre-apprentices to provide them with credit if/when they are interested in pursuing an aquaculture registered apprenticeship in the future.
In 2023 Aquaculture Pioneers was officially recognized as a certified pre-apprenticeship program by the Maine Department of Labor – Maine Apprenticeship Program. This pre-apprenticeship is directly connected to the nation’s only Shellfish and Seaweed Aquaculture Technician registered apprenticeship program sponsored by the Maine Aquaculture Association.
Employers who host Aquaculture Pioneers will become partner employers of Maine Career Catalyst (MCC) giving them access to added program support and a community of like-minded employers interested in elevating experiential learning in Maine. Pioneers hired through this initiative will be enrolled in the MCC program and will become a part of a cohort focused on building skills and their network in Maine’s aquaculture sector.
Participant applications are available NOW and will be accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis until all positions are filled.
Yale Goes “Test Flexible”
The big news this week is Yale’s announcement that it will again require standardized tests for the 2025-2026 admissions cycle (and presumably beyond). If you’re playing along at home, here’s the breakdown of Ivy–and some other influential schools–test requirement changes. Thus far. Stay tuned, there is sure to be more news coming soon…
Columbia: permanently test-optional
Dartmouth: reinstated mandatory testing
MIT: reinstated mandatory testing
Georgia Tech: reinstated mandatory testing
Georgetown: reinstated mandatory testing
Michigan: as of the email stamped 9:57 AM on Friday 2/23/24, test-optional for at least one more year
Yale: newly Test “Flexible”
“What the heck is test-flexible,” you ask? Well, in a sea of other acronyms and idiosyncratic terms associated with college admissions, there is now one more: test-flexible. Yale appears to have just made it up; I can’t find any previous references. As the name suggests, “Test-Flexible” means that you must submit some kind of standardized test score, but you get to decide which option is right for you. So if you don’t submit SAT scores you can submit ACT scores. Or AP scores. Or IB scores. Or? Long and short of it, you’re not getting in without submitting standardized testing scores of one type or another. Just a few years ago colleges were describing being “liberated” from the tyranny of the test; now testing requirements are resurging like a phoenix.
Each school has published some form of “why we made this decision” to require standardized test scores or make them optional. Concern for the impact on traditionally underserved/marginalized populations and first-gen students is often cited as the reason. What is most interesting about this common theme is that some schools interpret the available data to read that NOT requiring standardized testing harms the most vulnerable students; these students remain undiscovered where the SAT would have once pulled them out of obscurity. The other view is that testing serves as a gatekeeper that significantly disadvantages students from impoverished backgrounds, who lack access to AP classes, test prep opportunities, and other amenities readily available to more affluent students. The efficacy of requiring test scores or not depends on who you ask and what data they offer. The Chronicle of Higher Education characterizes this as “a crowded and passionate conversation,” which it sketches out but does not resolve. So in the end we leave it to 17 year olds to puzzle through on their own.
My chief concern with the resurgence of standardized testing’s role in admissions is that it adds back a heapin’ helpin’ of what there is already plenty of in higher education: ambiguity. Advising students over the past few years, it was easy to make the case that a student could skip out on the SAT and still gain access to quality institutions. They didn’t have to walk that gauntlet. Taking that pressure off has made a huge difference for kids, many of whom fared far better if they decided to test because it wasn’t do or die.
Of course, this has been true since Fairtest came into being in 1985, but the perception of the average high school student is that the SAT is “make or break.” This was certainly true when my classmates and I all reported to a neighboring yet unfamiliar high school in the fall of 1986. You could feel it in the air, the sense that the trajectory of your life would be determined by how well you fared over the next three hours or so. These teenagers, now Gen X parents, are just now finally starting to believe that their kiddoes won’t be destined for a life of rue and misery if they don’t submit test scores–now the landscape is becoming muddled and uncertain again. Let’s not kid ourselves; the Ivies have an outsized influence on the American consciousness. The fact that three of the Ivies have now taken a stand–a different one for each college–is going to exert enormous influence on the college-going culture.
High-anxiety students have been soothed by the salve of test optional/test blind assurances for the past few years. Now, it seems, we are going back the other way; we will no longer be able to assuage the very real terror that standardized testing strikes in the hearts of many of our kids. And to what end? Life is already super complicated for teenagers.
More ambiguity is certainly not going to make it any easier.
The College Spy Admissions 101 Series
Our friend and former colleague Michelle McAnaney does a stellar job helping parents understand the “big picture” in college admissions. She has another College 101 session coming up in March. If you are having a difficult time wrapping your head around just how much the admissions landscape has changed, you won’t want to miss this!
NACAC (National Association of College Admissions Counselors) College Fairs
FAFSA Simplification: How it Started, How It’s Going
Let me sum it up for you: not well.
The federal Department of Education has launched a help site to alert users to known user-interface issues and to communicate work-arounds that have been developed to overcome them.
Meanwhile, in order to keep the process moving forward, colleges are taking matters into their own hands and developing work-arounds.
Five Tips for Parents Stuck in the Financial Aid “Dead Zone”
Middle class families often find themselves in the unwelcome position of making too much but not enough. Unlike affluent families able to simply pay the full sticker price and, conversely, impoverished families that qualify for every form of financial aid imaginable, middle class families are left to fend for themselves. Here are some tips if you find yourself in this most unwelcome situation.
Kids Are Stressed
“In preparation for an upcoming meeting of my school’s parent/teacher/student organization, I recently asked three of my most talented teachers to help me answer an important question: What do high schoolers wish their parents knew? After roughly 130 students weighed in, I was surprised to learn that the number one issue students wanted their parents to know was that they were highly stressed.” Read on…
Gen Zyn
Do you know what a Zynbabwe is? Or an upper-decky lip pillow? OK, here’s an easier one — how about just Zyn? Read on…
Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health (Trigger Warning-Suicide)
“The teenager on the other end of the phone struggles with social media, struggles with body shaming and feelings of inadequacy, struggles with depression and anxiety. Since age 10 or 11, when she first started dancing with a youth ballet company, she would pull up Instagram and fixate on other dancers—looking at their bodies, comparing them with hers.
At night, after getting home from dance sessions, she’d take a shower, lie in bed with her phone, and scroll, scroll, scroll.
“I would be scrolling for hours—like an hour, two hours, looking at what these other girls could do and their bodies, and comparing them to me. I can’t do that. I don’t look like that,” says the teenager, who’s now 18.
Over the phone, she comes across as smart, candid, articulate, and direct, her bright soprano digging hard and deep into every question asked. She does not hold back. She does not want to hold back. After all she’s been through, she wants people to hear and understand.
