Finally, a full week of school for all the Fairfax County parents out there! 👏👏👏

BIGGEST COLLEGE-RELATED NEWS OF THE WEEK

HARVARD & CALTECH WILL REQUIRE TEST SCORES 

On Thursday, both Harvard and Caltech announced they will reinstitute standardized testing as a requirement for admission. Test-optional policies were instituted with the intent to help low-income students; however, as we have mentioned before, a new study by Opportunity Insights found that test scores help admissions officers identify highly talented students from low-income groups who would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Harvard and Caltech join a growing number of schools that have reversed their test-optional policies, including Brown, Yale, Darthmouth, MIT, Georgetown, Purdue and University of Texas at Austin. If you ask me, the timeline in which these changes have been announced seems a little unfair. Most of our juniors have had their testing plans in place for 9-12 months already, and it’s a little late for schools to be pivoting like this. At this point, we recommend that all students applying to highly selective schools should operate as if they will need test scores for next year.

PRIVATE EQUITY IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD, COLLEGE ADMISSIONS EDITION

When I first read this article, I thought it was a late April Fool’s joke - but it wasn’t! ACT, Inc., the company behind the ACT, announced last Wednesday that it is shifting from a non-profit to a for-profit company. The new company will be majority-owned by Nexus Capital Management, a Los Angeles-based private equity investment firm. This comes after years of struggling to break even. The non-profit reported a net loss of $12 million and a 44% decrease in assets at the end of the 2022 fiscal year. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, it reported a net loss of $60.5 million. The new for-profit is describing itself as a “public benefit” corporation.” It will not have tax-exempt status, but its board is supposed to take the public good, as well as shareholders’ interests, into account.

What does this mean for families? No one really knows quite yet, but in the meantime, test pricing will NOT change as a result of the new partnership. Currently, ACT costs $93 with the writing portion of the test, and $68 without. This includes the option to send the test score to four colleges, but we recommend that students wait to see all of their scores before making the decision about which scores to send where.

CAITLIN CLARK: “THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER 22”

University of Iowa announced last week that they are retiring Clark’s No. 22, the number she wore in her four years with the Hawkeyes. No women’s basketball player at Iowa will ever wear a jersey with that number; it will always belong to Clark. “There will never be another 22,” the team wrote on social media. I’m not crying, you’re crying!

To add to the excitement, Clark was named the #1 WNBA draft pick yesterday and selected by the Indiana Fever! We’re excited to watch her career play out.

BIDEN AUTHORIZES ANOTHER ROUND OF DEBT FORGIVENESS 

The Biden Administration stated last Friday that it will cancel an additional $7.4 billion in student debt, coming to a total of $153 billion in student loan forgiveness from the administration. Biden’s income-driven repayment plan, known as SAVE (Saving on Valuable Education), will erase student debt after 10 years of payments, compared with the 20-plus years in other existing plans. It will also wipe away the accrued interest for loan balances that are bigger than the amounts that were initially borrowed. Republicans have criticized the program, and assert that Biden is circumventing the Supreme Court, which struck down another version of it last year. They also argue that it is unfair to transfer the cost of repaying these loans to American taxpayers who chose not to go to college or worked to pay for it themselves. With the November elections approaching, this national conversation is just heating up.

BEST ARTICLES OF THE WEEK

As I mentioned in last week’s update, the cost of college education has risen to $95K at some elite colleges. A Bloomberg piece suggested that students who are not accepted to Ivy League schools are better off considering public flagship universities, rather than enrolling in the next-most prestigious school that accepted them. Public schools can be a much better investment than one of the private, elite “Hidden Ivies.”

Their study of more than 1,500 non-profit colleges found that the return on investment (ROI) at many of these elite, private institutions is 9% less than the ROI at the states’ public flagships. Those who paid less by attending a public school had an advantage when it came to building wealth by saving for a house or retirement. Some experts pointed out, however, that success should not only be considered in terms of dollars and cents.

Looking for insight into your brooding or anxious teenager’s mind?  A new documentary called “The Teen Brain” came out yesterday. It’s a ten minute video, and may be worth watching! Top neuroscientists and a slew of teenagers were consulted for the project, which shares medical reasons that explain why teens feel and experience emotions more deeply compared to adults.  Experts said the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions, becomes sensitive and grows in size during adolescence. This documentary comes at a time that teens in particular are facing a mental health crisis, CDC data shows. Last year, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory warning of an urgent public health issue regarding social media usage and youth mental health.

FAFSA has done it again! Just when we thought that colleges could finally start putting together aid packages for students, schools are reporting major errors in the tax information that was automatically populated in the FAFSA form. The Education Department has at last processed and released FAFSA forms to colleges, but they are fraught with mistakes, leading financial aid offices to distrust the data and to manually correct the information themselves. 

For example, some fields in the forms processed by the Department were blank, had the wrong codes, imported incorrect or partial tax data from the IRS, or incorrectly calculated the students’ eligibility for federal grants. Some of these errors will require the applicants themselves to correct them. Many institutions have pushed back their May 1 enrollment deadline to help students.  Some institutions like University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are being even more flexible, and will allow students to decide once they know their financial situation. My guess is that we will see a lot of waitlist movement this summer as a result of these extended deadlines.

And lastly - I almost didn’t post this, but this New York Times piece entitled The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex is one of the most disturbing and shocking articles I have ever read (and this is coming from someone who has curated articles relating to adolescents every single week for years!). It was almost unbelievable.

I decided to go ahead and post it because of the seriousness of the issue, and I really do think all parents should make time to discuss it with their high school and college-age children. I sent the link to some girlfriends yesterday, and one of them responded: “each line in this article gets more and more crazy.” That was my exact reaction, too. I was stunned by the percentages quoted, and by the time I got to the brain damage part I was in absolute disbelief. At the end of the day, kids need to be educated about the long-term impact of the choices they are making - and my guess is that most of them simply have no idea.

OFFICE HAPPENINGS

We are having a blast helping our seniors navigate through their acceptances to make their final college choices - this is the hardest part of the process in many ways, but definitely the most fun!

In the meantime, our juniors have been BUSY! We are in our second week of spring check-in meetings and they are all hard at work on their essays. A few are nearly finished at this point! It’s so amazing to cross that major milestone off the list early - not only does it get the actual work out of the way, it leaves them with a well-deserved feeling of accomplishment and motivates them to continue making headway in the application process.

Have a great week!