Advice on College

05/24/2026

05/14/2026

This…

05/09/2026

A Canvas outage has left students and faculty ‘dead in the water’ and rushing to rearrange end of academic year

04/30/2026

8 tips from admissions adviser Andy Lockwood shared on MarketWatch’s “Don’t Short Yourself Live.”

04/07/2026

Economists have a new theory of why graduates of top colleges have so much career success, Rose Horowitch reports. https://theatln.tc/FqLPwxpc

“The graduates of America’s most elite universities dominate our economy and culture so disproportionately that the statistics can seem like a mathematical glitch,” Horowitch writes. Students at Ivy League schools and the similarly selective University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT together comprise less than half a percent of America’s undergraduate population. Yet their alumni represent more than 12 percent of all Fortune 500 CEOs and 13 percent of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the population.

The Brown University economist John Friedman has become convinced that the most important thing a student gets from an Ivy Plus education isn’t instruction or prestige or even connections. “It’s the opportunity to learn how to succeed in an environment filled with the world’s most talented and ambitious people,” Horowitch writes.

“Being in the classroom with all these folks, doing homework assignments, having to cooperate with them in your club, sitting around the dining table with them, figuring out who’s going to live with whom—all that stuff comes together to make these schools really unparalleled training grounds to be in these upper-echelon professional jobs,” Friedman told Horowitch. In other words, what an academically gifted 18-year-old gets from paying Ivy League tuition is exposure to more people like themselves.

Read more at the link.

📸: Brooks Kraft / Getty

02/01/2026

College counselor Sara Harberson used AI to build a college list, research testing policies, and write a college essay, and reported the results.