If you're interested in college admissions, standardized testing and bias check out The Atlantic. Here are two articles I read and enjoyed.

• The New College Chaos: 'College admissions officers say they now have many, many more applications than they know how to handle—and, often, less reliable information to help them decide which students to admit'

  In each of the past few years Harvard has received more than 500 applications with double-800 scores, and has accepted just under half of them.

• The Selectivity Illusion: 'Look at the data closely, and the neat hierarchy of selectivity begins to fall apart'.

  In a 1999 study conducted for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Alan B. Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale showed that the selectivity of the schools students attended—given students of similar background and aptitude—made little difference in terms of their later earnings. Specifically, Krueger and Dale compared people who had attended highly selective schools with people who had gotten into comparable schools but had chosen less selective ones. They found that those in the former group earned no more than those in the latter.

  Another interesting excerpt,

  Against the backdrop of an economic culture built around competition and creative destruction, the hierarchy of elite schools appears curiously frozen in time.

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In College and in Despair:

Privacy issues are being discussed at a time when student suicide rates are rising. A study of more than 13,000 Kansas State University students treated at the university counseling center from 1989 to 2001 showed a doubling of the percentage of students who suffered from depression at some point during their college years, to 41 percent, as did the percentage of students described as suicidal, to 9 percent.

A Tight Job Market Dampens Ivy League Hopes

The job outlook is likely to remain difficult for the next batch of college graduates, from elite universities or otherwise, but there is a glimmer of hope: some colleges are reporting an increase in on-campus recruiting so far this fall.

And The Star...

Stay-home student's expenses per year: $9,088:

Tuition fees for students in Canada went up 8 per cent in September, the largest advance since fall 1997, Statistics Canada reported last week.

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(We were hoping Bomber would stay open an extra hour but apparently not).
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