With the recent trend of college admissions becoming more and more competitive, TBR has decided to take an extremely biased, one-sided look at the subject. From the view of the student, as you will soon learn, colleges are screwing us over big time! Quotas, retention rates, projected future endowments, matriculation percentages, are just a few of the things colleges see that our grades, SATs, extracurriculars, interviews, and essay quality can not even begin to predict. Over the past five years, Harvard has rejected 24 kids who have gotten perfect 1600s on their SATs. UPENN accepts 27% of valedictorians who apply, and 15% of salutatorians. Colleges claim they want well-rounded students, yet in US News, Princeton Review and countless other publications geared toward helping students get into college, schools just see all top-performing students as well-rounded now and the criteria for selection are based more and more on minutia. Tiny little details, such as; poor handwriting, 505 word essays, or they didn't like your haircut during your interview are all increasingly important factors in the admissions process. Colleges fail to see what they really want and what their student body needs: a diverse student body in terms of not only race, but financial and geographic background, religious, experiential, and countless other factors. Crunching numbers, reading a half-page essay, and maybe talking to a student for 45 minutes tells them nothing about an applicant. However, it's not only the colleges' fault.

The students have some blame to shoulder as well. College applicants today do not know most of the time, by the start of their senior year of high school where they want to spend the next four years of their life. They need to take a good, long look their sophomore year at what they want to do with their life and find a few colleges that match, then narrowing it down to locations where they would like to be. Students today base alot on selectivity ratings and percieved prestige, and not on what would best fit their lives. Guidance counselors also are at fault here. They do not start early enough telling kids to look at colleges, or work with them in choosing classes to fit their future major, or pay enough attention to them during the application process.

The following is a collection of articles written on the topics mentioned. They should prove useful and insightful to those searching for that perfect school or disheartening to those who have been rejected by their dream school...or hopefully: a wake-up call to those who have chosen the wrong "dream" school.

The New College Chaos

Getting into college has always been stressful. But this year the experience is likely to be different from that of only three or four years ago, and in many ways worse. This, at least, was the implication of an extensive series of interviews that Atlantic reporters conducted over the spring and summer with college admissions officers and high school guidance counselors from across the country. More...

The Selectivity Illusion

Of the many statistics publicized by universities and the college guides that evaluate them, few receive as much attention as those that measure the difficulty of admission. "Selectivity" data—ranging from simple admission rates to statistical profiles of the academic achievement of each school's freshman class—would seem to be useful enough: they provide students with a quick notion of whether their credentials might be a good match for any given school. But these statistics also have an almost fetishistic appeal, as if the more students a school turns away, the nobler the character of the few it admits. More...

Constitution for Racial Equality

ALL THE BLATHER about the University of Michigan race discrimination case has at least proved one thing: The Supreme Court's abandonment of legal reasoning has taken the public by storm! Now everyone treats constitutional law as if it is an ongoing referendum about various public policy issues. Pundits simply assume state colleges are allowed to create a racial stew. It's just a question of whether this or that system is desirable as a public policy matter. We hear about stigmas, legacies, SAT scores, athletes – all of which have nothing to do with the Constitution. More...

Looks Like America?

Is the pornography business racist? Seriously. A cursory — and entirely dispassionate — examination of the marketplace seems to indicate that it is. Pornographers hire on the basis of race all the time. There are porn films, websites, magazines, etc. dedicated solely to African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and, of course, whites. Worse, I suppose, the porn industry regularly traffics in hurtful ethnic slurs — calling young Hispanic women "spicy," for example — the vast, vast, vast majority of which I cannot mention on this family-oriented website (not to be confused with families-of-Orientals fetish sites).More...

The Late-Decision Program

This past year a senior at a competitive public high school in Massachusetts entered what could be described as the ninth circle of college-application hell: she applied to seven schools and got into none. By conventional measures she seemed like a strong candidate. An aspiring aeronautical engineer, she had a 4.1 weighted grade-point average late in her senior year, took mostly honors or Advanced Placement courses, played the upright bass, played softball and field hockey and ran cross-country, and had reached the regional level in a science competition. Her combined SAT score was 1380. She is also related to a longtime faculty member at the school to which she applied early. But none of these things gave any of the highly selective schools to which she applied—Bowdoin, Colby, Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, Vassar, and Wesleyan—sufficient reason to accept her.More...