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Conceptual and Methodological Problems in Research on College Undermatch "Access to the nation's most selective colleges remains starkly unequal, with students in the lowest income quartile constituting less than 4% of enrollment," say Michael Bastedo and Allyson Flaster (University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) in this article in Educational Researcher. "Students in the top SES quartile comprise 69% of enrollment at institutions that admit fewer than a third of their applicants…" One increasingly popular explanation for this enrollment gap is undermatching - academically able low-income students not applying to selective colleges for which they are qualified, settling instead for lower-tier institutions. Bastedo and Flaster are skeptical about this theory for three reasons First, they don't believe there is good evidence about the life benefits of attending different tiers of college, and most measures of college "quality" are quite unscientific. Life advantages might accrue at the extremes - going to a highly selective college versus a low-quality community college - but the evidence about the whole middle range is "quite muddy," say Bastedo and Flaster. Among the factors that need to be looked at more carefully are a college's graduation rate, students' debt burden, placement in graduate or professional schools, and post-graduate earnings. Second, the authors question whether it's possible for researchers to predict which low-income students will get into selective colleges to which they haven't yet applied. Competition for seats in these colleges has become much more intense in recent years, and extra-curricular activities, alumni parents, athletic prowess, and other intangibles play an increasingly important part. In many of these areas, higher-SES students have great advantages. Third, even if we look only at SAT scores and GPAs, high-achieving disadvantaged students are still not as competitive as the undermatching advocate

"College isn't for everyone. Let's stop pretending it is."

Very controversial right now. Excellent article. But the Common Core is College & Career Ready.......what does that say about this article?

The partnership between Khan Academy and the College Board directly addresses one of the greatest inequities around college entrance exams: the culture of high-priced test preparation. Now, for the first time, all students have the opportunity to practice for the SAT with completely free, best-in-class materials

Study: High school grades best predictor of college success - not SAT/ACT scores

One of my favorite topics to discuss. And why do we think the SAT is going to be redesigned for Class of 2016? Clearly because we need to align it to the Common Core. More info to come on this....what do you think John?

College deans have written about incoming freshman being "crispies" or "teacups": the crispies so burned out by the pressures of high school that they get to college unable to engage in the work, and the teacups so fragile or overprotected in their formative years that they fall apart at the first stress they encounter.  What can/should k-12 leaders do?

Seton Hall, Princeton entrepreneurs make 'America's Coolest College Startups' list

Project Look Sharp is a media literacy initiative of Ithaca College that develops and provides lesson plans, media materials, training, and support for the effective integration of media literacy with critical thinking into classroom curricula at all education levels, including integration with the new common core standards.

Official blog of the US DOE

FREE educational resources for middle school, high school, and college.

active-learning-harvard Some students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill have been improving their test scores by more than 3 percentage points on average in the past year, and it's largely the result of a Harvard-created software that emphasizes active learning. The software, which is called Learning Catalytics, was implemented by Professor Kelly Hogan, the Director of Instructional Innovation for the College of Arts and Sciences and the Senior Lecturer in the Biology Department, in her non-majors Biology class in the fall of 2013."

Not a bad idea