College Admissions

People consider many factors when picking colleges or deciding to become online students. What is a college’s reputation, for example? Does it offer a range of interesting and appropriate majors? Is it affordable?
Those are important factors to consider. However according to Dr. Robert J. Massa, you should also think about your learning style when picking [...]

College acceptance letters will be arriving soon. So will college rejection letters. If you’re a student who has been waiting to see how you will fare, you’ll spread out all those letters on your kitchen table, take stock, and see what your options are.
Let’s take a look at what could happen, and what you next [...]

“Admission,” the new film that stars Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, is cute, perky, and funny – just the way a romantic comedy should be. But the movie also teaches some important lessons about getting into college.
The movie casts Tina Fey as Portia, a college admissions officer at Princeton. Paul Rudd plays a private-school teacher [...]

“A young woman wrote that she took a summer course and she meant to say in 'organismic biology' but she wrote 'orgasmic biology' and went on to say it was the best course she'd ever taken. We didn't reject her for that outright, but it makes you look twice.”- An Ivy League admissions officer quoted [...]

All across America, tens of thousands of students are cooling their heels until April, when college acceptance letters will arrive in the mail.
If you’re one of them, you already know how it feels. After all those months – years, actually – of intense preparation to get into college, it’s a letdown. Until a few months [...]

Les Perelman, Ph.D., recently retired after spending 26 years teaching writing at MIT. He is still affiliated with that institution, where he is now researching ways to improve students’ writing skills.
Perelman is no fan of the SAT. He believes that the test’s writing section and essay are essentially useless – completely unable to help colleges [...]

In future posts, we’ll cover strategies for writing different kinds of essays – SAT essays, essays on tests, and more. Today, we’ll cover the college application essay.
There are actually two kinds of college application essays . . .
1)      The writing sample that you include in the common application online.
2)      An essay that is required as [...]

If you got accepted to the college of your choice via early admission in December, congratulations! You are probably kicking back and smiling while your friends are waiting anxiously for their acceptance letters to arrive in April.
If you’re in that second category – sitting and waiting and waiting for your letters to arrive – I’d [...]

All the posts we publish on the StraighterLine Blog are masterpieces – of course! However, some are apparently more mastery than others.
These posts are the best of 2012 and a few from 2011 that continue to be some of our readers favorites.
CAREERS
Your resume is your landing page.  In our electronic age, your resume will work [...]

When you stop to break the process down, it becomes clear that the traditional way of getting into college is incredibly complicated. Most college applicants go through some or all of these steps . . .

They take AP classes and tests to increase their chances of getting into college.
They hire SAT and ACT tutors. Then [...]

On-campus college interviews are as scarce as dinosaurs in argyle sweaters these days. They’ve almost disappeared for a very simple reason: colleges are screening so many applications that they just don’t have the time to call you in for a traditional across-the-desk conversation. It’s more likely that any interviews you get will be with alumni [...]

Over the last few years, grade inflation has become a hot topic at American colleges and universities. In case you don’t know, grade inflation is the practice of raising students’ grades so that they all dowell in a class. Many colleges and universities have silently engaged in it because it helps more of their students get into [...]

There’s a very simple answer to the question that is posed in the title of today’s post.
The answer is no. No college coach anywhere can guarantee admission to an Ivy League school. Some of the best independent college counselors canimprove your chances of getting into an elite school. But guarantee it? It just doesn’t work that way.
There [...]

In years past, the College Board has been forced to hire actual human beings to grade all those essays. But according to “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously,” an article by Michael Winerip in The New York Times, that is about to change.

“Affirmative action for the rich” hasn’t gone away, according to Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who writes on education for The New York Times. In a withering new blog post, he has the courage to attack colleges’ longstanding tradition of giving special admissions consideration to “legacy applicants” who are the children of alumni. (In other words, if Mommy or Daddy went to Harvard, you are going to enjoy a competitive edge if you apply.)