mostly available to students on government assistance
This is such a weird framing of the fee waiver requirement. Fee waivers largely use free and reduced lunch qualification as a criterion but there are other ways to qualify. And while accurate calling free and reduced lunch is strange since most people probably think of that as the welfare or food stamp program.
hat ETS and ACT Inc.
why has the author shifted to ETS from College Board, they are different organizations.
Some argue that, because of this unfairness, college degrees in general are a scam and should not be held in such high regard. But that point of view is easier to hold the more advantages you have. Studies largely show that the more privileged you are, the better off you’re going to be with or without a college degree. According to one study, if you’re black or a woman, regardless of your financial background, getting a college degree ups your chances to earn more, whereas “the differential college earnings premium by family-income background is more evident among men and whites.” Shifting the goalposts from “everyone should have a college degree” to “college is a scam” just keeps the same people in power and privilege. When experts, administrators, and parents argue over testing and admissions, it’s because the stakes are still high.
This paragraph is great! I'd like to see this as an entire article!
ETS and ACT Inc. can also impact how colleges see their applicants. “I get literally at least a call a day from some working-class student who busted their butt to increase their SAT or ACT scores, and then have ETS or ACT suspend their scores and accuse them of cheating,” says Andre Green, the executive director of FairTest.
FairTest is the only national org to which people accused of cheating can turn so of course they get a volume of calls. I'd love this to have been quantified. If FairTest gets 3 calls a day for a full calendar year, that is still only 1095 cases out of 4 million tests administered.
ACT Inc. also offer test prep materials, from $99 live-streaming study sessions to official study guides.
ACT's paid programs are actually Kaplan Test Prep products offered via ACT. Why not mention that? But also ACT has a free product ACT academy. The paid ACT products are also available for free with the fee waiver. So many strange omissions that seem to skew the story.
ETS had a total revenue of $1.4 billion, with their president making $1.1 million. ACT Inc. had a total revenue of just over $353 million, with their CEO/director making $800k.
Why is the salary of the College Board CEO excluded here? And the company revenue.
Some argue that the test itself is inherently biased in terms of how it’s written
Why not cite the research here? "Some argue" is such a bad journalistic copout.
The SAT began to follow suit, and over the decades both tests have gone through overhauls with the goal of being an objective representation of a student’s readiness for college
This is a weird interpretation of what changes to the tests have meant. With every version of test content the test makers have contended that it predicted success in college.
the SAT started as an aptitude test
A definition of what an "aptitude test" is supposed to be would have been helpful here. The connection to "only good at taking the SAT" is the repetition of a trope that is probably incorrect.
huge blow to the big business of testing
Even at many/most test optional schools more than 70% of students still submit scores so this again represents that the author isn't fully informed about these issues.
often in order to promote a more diverse applicant pool — and to weed out unfair advantages.
I think most colleges would not cite this as primary factors in going test optional.
abusing their nonprofit status by holding a monopoly on college testing and, thus, admission
In my decades in test preparation and college access this has not the the accusations I've seen against these organizations. They are actually not even a monopoly given that ITS 2 DIFFERENT COMPANIES, maybe she meant duopoly (if thats a thing).
the College Board, which develops the SAT, PSAT, and AP curriculum, and ACT Inc., which administers the test of the same name.
read: College Board does all these things and ACT gives the ACT.
This might be the shadiest line in the entire piece. Why do ACT so bad.
their families are paying hundreds of dollars just to be considered
This is so hyperbolic and inaccurate its shameful. Even if a family takes both the SAT and ACT with essay twice each and pays full costs the cost for that is $263, which is technically hundreds of dollars but only barely.
Fee waivers are available
This phrasing seems to conform with a desire to be hyperbolic rather than informative. Fee waivers cover 2 administrations of the SAT or SAT Subject Tests. So a low income student can either take the SAT twice for free or take the SAT once and then up to 3 Subject Tests on another day.
$22 for each of the SAT subject tests, not including the $26 registration fee
Again, the details here are muddied at best. The fee to take 1 Subject Test is $26. The fee for 2 subject tests on the same day is $26 + $22.
Also only a very small subset of colleges require or recommend that students submit subject tests, so this inclusion here is unnecessary and simply inflammatory.
community colleg
I'm fairly certain this is inaccurate. I believe the vast majority if not all community colleges have no admissions test requirement.
The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)
Anyone who calls the SAT Scholastic Aptitude Test is demonstration their outdated and minimal awareness of the test and issues surrounding it.
Also the fact that she says "(originally American College Test)" suggests that the author has awareness that the ACT became an initialism but she's not aware of the same change for the more famous SAT?
basically unavoidable: the cost of taking the SAT or ACT.
This isn't true.
It costs a lot of money to get into college. There’s the cost of high school extracurriculars and test prep, all the things that are supposed to give a student a better shot at getting into the “best” school
What's interesting here is right off the bat the author seems to make assumption that paying for extracurriculars and test prep are REQUIRED and COMMON. That suggests a certain vantage about college application that is disassociated from that of large swaths of society.
James Murphy
Mr Jameson Murpheosonberg.
15,000
Most people could pay that, right? I know it is a lot but still.
“the impact of this will be felt most by low-income students who are already subjected to closer scrutiny and less belief in their abilities.”
That is almost exactly what I said in class! Like father, like son!
“Aunt Becky”
What is that?
at least nine college coaches, and 33 parents, in an admissions-bribery and test-cheating scheme to get their kids into highly selective colleges, including Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown.
That is so many!
Leave it to the very rich to devise a scheme whereby the bribes they pay on behalf of their children are tax-deductible.
Preach!
Ruh ro
What does that mea???
Huffman’s daughter and dozens of other wealthy families cheat and bribe their way into college.
Just like those racist-ass kids in my class
25-YEAR-OLD POSED AS DALLAS ISD STUDENT TO RELIVE BASKETBALL GLORY AT HILLCREST HIGH
Haha
His name has churned
annotate
A few months after that, she was homeless, and little Emir was born while she had no permanent address.
Did this lead to medical debt? This also probably hindered her ability to get a job?
Janey Scholars paid Disla’s expenses to study abroad in Europe one semester and, at graduation, covered the $15,000 in additional school loans she had taken out. But the safety net that had helped propel her in high school and college evaporated after Dartmouth.
Another example of the trials that arise at the transition periods in life. When students are moving from HS to college or college to career are particularly fragile moments.
Plenty of young adults and fresh college graduates face unexpected challenges and struggle with mental health. What Disla did not have — what many of Boston’s valedictorians do not have — was the luxury to drift, to not get things exactly right, to make mistakes. Even if they completed college, Disla and many of her peers lacked parents who had navigated the white-collar job market before them. They had limited professional networks and connections. They had no financial cushion to soften life’s inevitable blows.
This paragraph is particularly telling! This also shows the lie of the "bootstrap" and "work harder" arguments.
Disla the depth of her desperation as a new mother, jobless and coping with the crippling effects of depression and anxiety.
Holy crap!
Madelyn Disla beamed from the stage as she received her diploma from Dartmouth College that spring day in 2011
Whoo hoo! Another success story. However, this series seems to implicitly frame graduating from an Ivy League school as the expectation for the vals. I wish this series started with establishing more clear definitions of success and expectations. The Ivy league has somewhere around an average of 9% admission rate. And about a 99% graduation rate. But also there is an average family income north of $150k per year.
She ended up mastering English and graduating with a sociology degree in 2012. She even made the dean’s list one semester.
Holy crap! One advisor! One advisor made all the difference between graduating in 5 years and floundering! Colleges need to do better!
she had been in the United States for only four years when she went off to college. Yes, she was the 2007 valedictorian at Boston International High School,
What does this say about the HS system? What does this point to about the failures of the college admissions system? How is her level of English fluency captured (or not) by test scores (if not at all what good are they doing)?
American International College
The 6 year graduation rate at the college is only 44%. The transfer out rate is 43%. The freshman retention rate is 72%
now-closed Monument High School
This is at least the 2nd closed school mentioned in the series. How many of Boston's schools are closed? If these schools are so precarious that they are closed 12 years after these students graduate, what does it mean about the state of those schools when these students were there?
Though his BU degree is in physics, he went on to earn a nursing degree from UMass Boston
I wish The Globe highlighted the stats more. This guy has 2 degrees. How long did it take? Why did they spend so little ink on the success story but so much on those who struggled more?
A week before Matos began at Boston University, his mother took her own life. He started classes anyway,
Holy crap! What did the school do to support him? Did they even know? Did his high school counselors know? Did they support him? Was he caught in that period of ambiguity when he is out of high school but not in college and had little or no support from either institution?
But Tavares said Smith made it difficult for her to return.
I wish I knew the details of this.
He soared in the more intimate environment and graduated in 2010
If he soared at a different school (admittedly with a different major) does this mean he was "not prepared for college" or that the college was not prepared to support him or that the huge impersonal BU was not the right college for this student? (ugh... here we can trot out the fit trope)
he had to take physics.
Is this not a failure of the college admissions office? Should they not know that physics is required for the major he wanted? How was he admitted if that was required?
Boston College,
This is the second student profiled who ran into trouble at BC. The article seems to frame the responsibility on society, the high school, the student's level of preparedness but never the school. Is the problem the colleges? Are colleges perpetuating structures that exclude all but the most wealthy?
In the end, though, almost 80 percent graduated with a four-year degree,
This I believe is at odds with a headline for the series that claimed "A quarter of the 93 valedictorians" from 2005 to 2007 who were in Faces of Excellence did not graduate in 6 years. So did they get the degree just not in 6 years? Did they not get a degree?
Thrust into an alien, privileged world,
Is this what college is? A privileged world?
Blackwood began recording lectures so he could listen to them again, eventually becoming a steady B student.
Why is the narrative that a steady B student ill prepared for college? Why is getting Bs "an uppercut to the jaw"?
Blackwood soon found himself at sea, flummoxed by the blizzard of choices and decisions he now had to make for himself.
This sentence is strange considering that previously the framing seemed to be that he was academically unprepared for college. I really want reporting to clarify these things.
to write his essay about his mother’s death
The constant pressure on black and brown children to expose their pain to others simply to be considered for college is frightening.
guidance counselor encouraged him to check it off on the Common Application
One of the problems with the ease of multi-school application systems. Would he had looked closer at this school and its culture if he had to apply separately?
Nearly 80 percent of the valedictorians we interviewed became the first in their families to go to college, an achievement often crowned by a generous scholarship.
Wow. nearly 80% of Boston vals were first generation!