I’ve spent a large part of the last two weeks in the Admissions Office gearing up for this year’s admissions cycle. My actual work has been focused on setting up the Student Ambassadors program, an effort to reach out to low-income students by sending Yale students to high schools in their area during breaks that we’ve identified as having a number of high achiever but that don’t traditionally get visited by admissions officers from selective schools like Yale. The University supports the initiative because it helps attract “diamonds in the rough,” increasing the number of low-income students at Yale, but there is of course a larger social benefit: the program addresses the fact that low-income students often don't have guidance counselors walking them through the admissions process or parents paying for SAT courses and helping them apply for scholarships and financial aid. While Ambassadors give presentations on Yale, they usually end up answering more broad questions about admissions and financial aid and often become mentors to the students they visit, guiding them through the application process.

That long introduction was as much a promo for the program (which I would love to see other colleges and universities replicate…if you’re interested, I’d love to talk about how you might start up a similar initiative at your school)  as it was an excuse to my bosses at CampusProgress for my recent absence from the blogs. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest and have college admissions on everyone’s mind, go check out InsideHigherEd’s review of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites, a new book by Mitchell L. Stevens, a sociologist at NYU who spent 18 months working as an admissions officer at an “elite liberal arts college” that he doesn’t name (but that IHE does). My favorite Stevens quote:

I would say that we need to stop expecting so much of the selective college admissions process. If we are really interested in educational opportunity, we should be looking elsewhere. One problem with our public conversation on educational opportunity is that we focus too much on the admissions process and not on the systems that deliver young people to the system.