Yes, “stay in your lane” has become a mantra (and I don’t like clichés). But as this year’s admissions decisions began dribbling out last fall, many of my deferred/waitlisted students and families have experienced pain and frustration when they heard about peers who were admitted to the colleges which had put them on hold. How can they have been waitlisted with such stellar numbers? College admissions has never been, and can never be, a true meritocracy. This issue is not spe

With all the deferrals and delays, many students are just getting started. They're finally getting news from colleges, but there are still plenty of schools they haven’t heard from. In other years, my CRM creates a spreadsheet that gives a clear overview of who got in and who didn’t. While there is never certainty of what the outcomes will be, this crazy year went beyond the limits of my software. I want my data to be deep because my colleagues and I agreed to share all our f

Every year, I hear a story about a student “who got in nowhere” through the grapevine. That can only happen when there was a bad college list, usually one based on rankings. Why do I advise families to emphasize fit over college rankings? It’s because no ranking is a reliable indicator of the experience a student will have in college or after graduation. You might be surprised to learn that college rankings are simply designed for marketing and profit of the third parties tha

Now that Netflix just dropped the trailer for its new docudrama, “Operation: Varsity Blues,” many of us in the independent education community are worried. Never mind that Rick Singer was a scam artist. The media refers to him as a “college counselor,” and I’m betting the film will too. What’s troubling is that the unpredictability of college admissions evokes the “smoke and mirrors” theories that I wrote about in my article “Amateurs vs. Professionals” in 2019. The baked-in