In search of integrity in admissions

It's kind of a mystery why this is, but in some families and communities, words like "frenzy," "obsession" and "panic" come naturally after "college admissions..." Others just expect to choose some options, fill out applications and wait to see which acceptances arrive — and those include intellectual, tuned-in families with college-educated parents.

Those latter families might not really grasp why there even needs to be a backlash to the frenzy/panic/obsession mode. But the backlash does exist, and it has a leader. This New York Times Magazine interview with Lloyd Thacker of the Education Conservancy is a few weeks old.

Questions for Lloyd Thacker
Head of the Class

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: September 30, 2007

A few years ago, you left your job as a guidance counselor in Portland, Ore., to start the Education Conservancy and take on the college-admissions process. What’s wrong with it, exactly? College admissions has come under the control of commercial interests, at the expense of studenthood.

What kind of word is studenthood? I doubt any English professor would approve. It came to me at 3 a.m., to describe the spirit of educational integrity I am trying to preserve.

One of your main targets is the U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of colleges, which you see as the source of much misery in the world. My goal is to make the list irrelevant, and so far 65 colleges have signed on and agreed not to cooperate with the ranksters. They’re refusing to fill out U.S. News’s reputation survey. And they have agreed not to advertise their rank in any of their publications.

Click to read the rest.