Brace yourselves… there’s going to be a whole lot of disappointment in the milieu this week. A legion of highly selective colleges released decisions last week, with predictable results… and Ivy Day (the day that all of the Ivies simultaneously release their RD decisions) is Thursday. Acceptance rates for many schools are again in the single digits; the vast majority of students who apply to these schools will not get in. Staying nauseously optimistic is difficult under these circumstances, but that is why we insist that kids have choices in all three categories (reach, reasonable, likely) so that they are covered in any scenario that develops.
At this time of year, social media overflows with posts of X kid with XY stats who did not get into Z college. Ivy Day is filled with disappointment because, hello, the HUGE majority of kids do not get accepted to these colleges. Harvard’s acceptance rate last year was 3%, and more colleges than ever before have acceptance rates that are in the single digits. Kids are asking, “What more could I have done?”. Read on…
A Thank You Letter to the College that Rejected Me
Dear Duke (insert the name of the college that rejected you here) University,
I’m just writing to thank you. Thank you for what, you ask? For the big fat rejection email, you sent me 15 months ago. On the day I received your rejection I was ready to become a Blue Devil (insert your rejection college’s mascot here). My mom may or may not have even bought me a Duke baseball hat in anticipation of my acceptance. Read on…
For several years around 2014, David McCormick spent a few weeks each summer teaching neuroscience to Buddhist monks in Tibetan monasteries in India. He brought back lessons in the nature of happiness.
“Even though people in rural India have, most of the time, far fewer material goods than we do—and certainly monks have very few material possessions—they appear to be much happier,” says McCormick, a Presidential Chair and director of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. “They’re much calmer, peaceful, connected, loving, kind.”
Each time McCormick returned to the US, he was jarred by the reintroduction to American attitudes. Despite this country’s advantages, he says—the abundance of food, clean hot or cold water with the turn of a faucet handle, reliable electricity—“our minds are a living hell.”
“We’ve convinced ourselves somehow that life is terrible and it’s getting worse,” says McCormick. There are certainly tremendous problems, he adds, “but we’ve lost the appreciation of life and a connection with the world around us.”
Like the Energizer Bunny, the FAFSA SNAFU Keeps Going, and Going, and Going
The notoriously rocky rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FASFA) keeps getting rockier.
On Friday, the Education Department acknowledged that a calculation error by the office of Federal Student Aid led to inaccurate aid estimates on hundreds of thousands of Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, processed in the past few months.
What is your Waypoint?
Capriciously sailing a wind powered vessel around willy-nilly without a plan is a really bad idea. Safe and responsible navigation requires a waypoint--the target coordinates for where your journey will lead. Where you are headed. Where your journey will end.
It’s also a bad idea (albeit not life threatening) to sally forth blindly into your future without some sense of where you want to end up. You don’t have to figure it all out before you set out; you can set intermediate waypoints as you approach your end goal.
As we began yet another admissions cycle with our juniors, we wanted to develop a conceptual model that would help kids (and parents) understand their choices after high school, without creating a caste system in which some options are valued over others.
We kicked a lot of ideas around and ended up here:
It’s a circle, so there is no implied beginning or end, and therefore no implied order of importance.
Each piece of pie is the same size, so no implied import is granted to one slice at the expense of another.
There’s enough pie for everyone. Each student gets to pick the slice that is best for them, while leaving plenty for others.
It’s a pie chart. Who doesn’t love pie?
With this graphic as the organizing concept around which we are building our curriculum, we completely revamped our Postsecondary Guide (which I wrote much of prior to 2007, and it showed) and are proud to share it with you.
https://chrhs.fivetowns.net/student_services/counseling
DWF: Direct to workforce without any additional training or education beyond high school; Students who have completed a CTE program at MCST often have sufficient skills, industry certifications, and experience to enter the workforce without the need for any additional training. They graduate work-ready on day one.
WFD: Participation in a workforce development program that trains students for a particular career; Often, but not always, this includes the Maine Community College System https://www.mccs.me.edu/workforce-training/train-my-workforce/ .
MIL: Military service, which involves additional training for the jobs which a recruit qualifies based on their ASVAB scores; People who are in the service have jobs while they are in that often help land them jobs when they are out.
CCT: Community College/Trade; Free community college has exploded enrollments in the Maine Community College System (MCCS), but there are other trade schools too, many associated with Maine's boatbuilding heritage. There is no dichotomy between college and trade schools. Many students pursue a trade at a community college. College and trade school are not separate entities.
FYC: Four-year colleges with reasonable acceptance rates making it possible for a broad spectrum of students to enroll.
SLC: Selective colleges require a completely different parallel process that extends way beyond what students applying to reasonably accessible FYCs need to complete before applying. If 18,000 kids are applying for 1,400 available slots, students need to distinguish themselves through rigorous academics, plentiful co-curricular participation, and favorable intangibles that exude the certain je ne sais quoi that the school’s enrollment management folks have targeted for a particular admission cycle. There’s just no way to know if your profile is the “right” one in any given year, so you have to (over) prepare for any possibility.
There is a strong argument for including GAP as a 7th pie piece, but gap experiences are interim steps on the way to one of these more enduring categories; you don’t GAP forever. Plus seven pie pieces would throw the whole thing off. So if you must, picture a gap experience in your sequence between graduation and the Pathways Wheel.
It’s worth emphasizing that one is not destined to be in the same particular category forever. One of the great things about education is that you can take a break and come back to it as your life circumstances change. It’s like a train that you can get on and off as necessary.