Has the College Application Process Evolved into an Arms Race?

With the college application season coming to a close, this is the question writer Jennifer Moses attempted to answer in a recent Wall Street Journal article. A video interview with Moses and the Journal’s Kelsey Hubbard can be found here. In the article, Moses outlines several expenses associated with her 17-year-old twins’ college application process: Total cost of her twins’ standardized test fees = $522 Total cost of travel, including air fare, gas, hotels, food and incidentals, for both twins accompanied by one parent each = $3,9908.23 Total cost for private college counselor = $701.25 (to date)

Personal Statements Suck

Cutthroat boarding school interviews. Life-consuming college applications. A controversial essay about obsessing over getting into the “perfect college,” published in Newsweek magazine when she was still in high school. Screening thousands of college application essays (a.k.a. personal statements) through her job at Yale University’s admissions office. These are just some of the experiences that color writer Hannah Friedman’s experience with education. In 2009, Friedman published Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool, a frank memoir of her teenage years at a prestigious boarding prep high school and the ruthless college application process that created a frenzy among her senior classmates. College degree now in hand, the 24-year-old is working on her second book, which will discuss the pitfalls of standardized testing and other evaluation methods that she argues fail to help students succeed. Hannah took some time to chat with BetterGrads and lend [...]

SAT: Study And Triumph!

Okay, so that’s not what it stands for, and that “and” shouldn’t even be capitalized… but riding the wave of college application tips galore, today’s BG piece of advice will focus on prepping for that behemoth of a college app milestone: the SAT. And I nestled in a great vocab study word in that last sentence for those of you cramming for a pending test date. A quick definition: The SAT is a four-hour standardized test that measures if a student is ready for college. While the test used to be scored out of 1600 points, it has since changed its grading structure be scored out of 2400 points (a combination of three 800-point sections: math, critical reading and writing). (While the ACT is another good standardized test to take to supplement SAT scores, which I took as a high schooler, this post will focus on the SAT.) Here’s the [...]