It’s Decision Day! Seniors, make sure to get those deposits in - and then celebrate! 

BIGGEST COLLEGE-RELATED NEWS OF THE WEEK

COLLEGE BOARD REVISES AP AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

As College Board rolls out its AP African American Studies curriculum, the class has come under criticism from professors, politicians, and families. Last week, just three months after releasing the curriculum, College Board announced that it would change the course in response to the accusation from stakeholders who claim that the course has been “watered down” due to political pressure from conservative states like Florida, which have said they will not offer the course. The announcement comes ahead of a planned May 3 protest against College Board from civil rights groups and the teachers’ union.  

WAITLISTS START MOVING

It is a bit too soon to tell right now, but we’re hearing that we may see some major waitlist movement this year! For some baseline statistics from the Class of 2026, as well as predictions for 2027, check out this blog post from College Kickstart. We’ll be keeping you updated as we hear more.

 ROOF COLLAPSE NEAR OHIO STATE

Fourteen college students were hospitalized on Saturday after a roof collapsed near The Ohio State University. Students were standing on the roof during a house party, which led to the collapse.

BEST ARTICLES OF THE WEEK

One way to respond to an increase in rejections from so-called “highly rejective” colleges? Rejection parties! High schools, colleges, and even graduate schools are starting to celebrate students’ rejections from colleges, conferences, publications, and more. Students say that these events help them to process the rejection and also to realize that they have a lot of other great options - sounds good to us!

The Today Show’s Jenna Bush Hager shares the #1 piece of advice her mom gave her before she headed off to college: to treat it like a job. Jenna, along with Hoda Kotb, also shared her biggest mistakes and regrets from college - so this is a great article for seniors wondering how to avoid the same pitfalls next year!

As schools become more selective and the college application process becomes more stressful for many students and families, some people are asking, “Is college worth it?” The president of Princeton University, perhaps unsurprisingly, says yes. President Christopher Eisgruber argues that completing college is “a reliable and cost-effective investment.” He points out that most students are not paying sticker price for their degree - 60% of Princeton students, for example, pay an average of $12,000 per year for their degrees, and 25% will pay nothing at all. Eisgruber is in the minority, though, with 56% of Americans telling the Wall Street Journal that a college degree is not worth the cost.

The ethics of the Supreme Court have been in the news a lot lately, and the New York Times is scrutinizing the relationship between George Mason’s Scalia Law School and the justices on the Court. The university hired Justice Neil Gorsuch during his first term on the Court, and added Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh to the faculty quickly after. In doing so, the university has set itself up as a bastion of conservative legal scholarship. The rebranding has led to a huge jump in Scalia Law School’s prestige - it now sits at #30 in the U.S. News law school rankings.

Price-shopping for college? Some schools may provide an estimate of their costs alongside the projected costs for a student at competing colleges. And while it is easy to imagine these cost comparisons could help students and families make an informed choice about their finances, there is a catch - the estimates are often wrong. Actual college costs for an individual family are notoriously difficult to estimate. The company that provides these price comparisons, College Raptor, argues that some information is better than nothing, and that the comparisons do not need to be 100% accurate to be useful to students and families, who are otherwise in the dark about the true costs of college.

A former UVA student wrote an article detailing the accusations against then-UVA senior Morgan Bettinger for threatening Black Lives Matter protesters near Grounds. Though an investigation by the university’s Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights found that Bettinger did not make a threat, she still suffered harassment online and today struggles to overcome the damage to her reputation by the accusations and the school’s inquiry.

OFFICE HAPPENINGS

We are so happy for all of our seniors who have sent in deposits!! Congratulations to everyone for such phenomenal success in an incredibly difficult year. We are so proud of you!

In other news, we are rolling out a new multi-purpose submission form to our juniors and younger students this week and I cannot even TELL you how much work has gone into this behind the scenes - I’m incredibly excited to get it into place!

It streamlines all of the various submission forms we were using before into one link - we had one for STAGE, one for other editing, one for transcripts/test scores, one for parent residency, one for student residency, etc, etc.

And to make things even more exciting (yes, I realize that my idea of exciting is not that exciting to everyone else 😀), we are even incorporating a whole bunch of new forms to help families!

These include ones for application submission and test score preferences, to make sure that we are 100% up to date on any changes that may occur during the process, and another to track demonstrated interest and college visit/contact information to help with all those pesky questions that pop up on supplements. I just love efficiency and I know this is going to make everything even easier on our families!