Your odds of getting into some of the nation's most prestigious colleges are shrinking.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to tackle another election-year blockbuster and will decide whether the University of Texas' race-conscious admission policies violate the rights of white applicants.
Now that we have Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina, on the Supreme Court, the esteemed body will soon find itself in the middle of a telenovela.
An admissions officer at Claremont McKenna College in California has resigned after the school's president revealed that the officer had inflated college entrance examination scores for incoming freshmen since 2005.
As education scandals go, the news that students at some of the best high schools on Long Island paid others to take their College Board tests seems mild. The Long Island scandal pales behind the sex scandal at Penn State.
A college student is accused of accepting thousands of dollars to take the SAT exam for New York high school students.
College Republicans organize a protest against legislation that would allow race to be considered in college admissions.
Campus Republicans at the University of California Berkeley have cooked up a storm of controversy with their plans for a bake sale.
Andrew Ferguson makes the college admissions process feel a lot like an M. Night Shyamalan movie: Plenty of drama and tension. Maybe a little terror. And plot twists that will leave parents saying, "I did not see that coming."
With about 2,400 four-year universities located in the U.S., high school students may find the actual process of applying to college as anxiety inducing as waiting for an acceptance letter.
Early on, in the 1950s, Robert Sternberg flubbed IQ tests, and his elementary school branded him a loser. "As a result of my low scores, my teachers thought I was stupid, and I did too," he writes in his passionate new book, College Admissions for the 21st Century. "They never came out and told us our IQ scores, but one could tell from the way the teachers acted I was a mediocre student, which made my teachers happy because they got what they expected." In a "self-fulfilling prophecy," Sternberg performed a little bit worse each year. But he lucked out in fourth grade when a teacher "had high expectations for me." He got A's and altered his "entire future trajectory."
Kajal Kumar knows the value of a good education. She's a career woman who poured years of her life into studying to become a certified public accountant with an MBA.
As high school seniors across the country are hard at work polishing their college applications, let's take a look at some of the stranger questions those wacky admissions officers have asked.
Sometimes you need a little starter cash to get things going.
A Philadelphia-area day care center said Thursday that members of a private swim club made racist comments about the center's children, and the club then canceled their swimming privileges.
Dear Annie: I lost my job at Lehman Brothers last September and have not succeeded in finding another finance position (for obvious reasons). But finance is all I know. While I was working at the firm, I completed almost one year of course work toward an MBA. I'm thinking of trying to transfer my credits to a full-time program and finishing the degree, which just seems like a more productive use of my time than job hunting right now. Do you agree? Also, will admissions people hold it against me that I worked at a failed firm, even though I had nothing to do with the problems? -Out in the Cold
CNN's Atika Shubert reports on some brain-teaser questions asked in admissions interviews for Oxford University.
You might expect Oxford and Cambridge universities to ask prospective students to compare the works of Chaucer to Boccaccio or to explain the theory of relativity.
John McCain returned to Virginia this weekend for what was expected to be his final visit to the crucial battleground state before Tuesday's election and insisted the race for the White House was far from over.
A recent controversy at Baylor University has brought new attention to the widespread misuse of standardized college admission tests to rank the quality of America's colleges and universities.
Jen Wang of Short Hills, New Jersey, took her first SAT when she was in sixth grade, long before she would start filling out college applications.
Wake Forest University will no longer require applicants to take the SAT and ACT exams, boosting a movement to lessen the importance of standardized tests in college admissions
Getting accepted into a top MBA program is an arduous, time-consuming process, with plenty of potential pitfalls along the way. Witness that the most prestigious and selective schools - Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, and their ilk - say they accept only 10% of all those who apply.
To improve her chances of getting into a good college, Caitlin Pickavance, a 17-year-old high school senior from Danville, Calif., has been working with a private college coach since her freshman year (cost: $800).
Laurel Herter wishes she'd canceled the college tour trip as soon as she heard the dismal forecast.
The dean of admissions at one of America's most prestigious schools resigned on Thursday after the university discovered she had lied about her academic credentials.
A $500 SAT class? A private counselor for $30,000? If that's what it takes. Anything to get my baby into Yale.
The application process for business schools is beginning, sparking the annual frenzy of activity - and copious questions.
It's the summer before your senior year, and you're sweating.
In a pair of cases that could reignite disputes over race and public education, the Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide what role affirmative action should play in assigning students to competitive spots in elementary and secondary schools.
Colleges throughout the United States are accommodating students displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
SALEM, Ore. (CNN/Money) - Here is a pop quiz:
Congratulations, your kid did well on the SAT. But the girl next door did even better.
The Nott's Memorial Building, dedicated in 1878 and named after Union College's former president Eliaphet Nott, looks like a gigantic 16-sided stone cylinder. This isn't as bad as it sounds once yo...
Thomas Jefferson considered himself the father of the University of Virginia, and like any father he left a complicated legacy. "Our university is the last of my mortal cares and the last service I...
When Miles Rodriguez entered his senior year of high school, he naturally turned to his school counselor for advice on college. He soon found out that he was on his own. "The counselor didn't even ...
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann Farrar Straus & Giroux, 406 pages
Paying for your kids' college education is one thing. At least you can decide how to save your money and where to invest it. Getting them into the school of their dreams is an entirely different ma...
Only well-known schools are excellent values, right? Not necessarily--as our rankings on page 108 demonstrate. To dispel more such myths, we consulted more than two dozen education experts, college...
If you're packing up your car this summer for a trip to the beach or the mountains, take pity on those of us off to something far less relaxing. We're the ones with kids who have just finished thei...
As students begin their senior year of high school, most parents think that their kids are already lagging behind in the college admissions game. (If your child is savvy enough to want to get an ea...
CONGRATULATIONS!" "WAY TO GO!" NICE COMPLIMENTS--and heartfelt too--all directed at my wife and me from friends, family, even comparative strangers. The happy occasion was our son Jamie's graduatio...
Your son or daughter knows this by now: Don't start an assignment the night before it's due. The same applies for a successful college search. In this case, starting four years in advance is probab...
Like any concerned parent, you want your child to attend a great college. But what makes a school great? Everyone seems to have a different answer to that question. To the heads of major universiti...
Forget what you learned in Physics 101. When it comes to college costs, what goes up just keeps going up. Tuition soared 126% during the 1980s, more than twice as much as the consumer price index, ...
The growth of any industry tends to spawn new businesses that feed off it, and higher education, now a $140-billion-a-year enterprise, is no exception. During the past two decades, helping parents ...
Kristin Lindeberg, 18, of Minneapolis could have gone to the well-regarded University of Minnesota (in-state tuition and fees: $3,289). But the school had proposed dropping its humanities departmen...
Your college countdown actually begins when your child becomes a high school freshman and embarks on the four-year course of study that eventually leads to college. This calendar, designed to be us...
Being somewhat prejudiced against conspiracy theories, we were a bit slow to embrace one that surfaced last year in the course of the never-ending racial rows over college admissions. The theory pe...
Colleges are so hard up for new students -- yet so strapped for scholarship money to offer these recruits -- that the admissions game is getting frantic and, to some observers, a little dishonest. ...
If your children are easily swayed by the slick advertisements for designer sneakers or sodas, just wait until college admissions officers start messing with their heads. Faced with a shrinking poo...
Soon after this article is printed, it will take up residence in the Nexis database and, apparently, become the only verbiage in disk memory whose author is unenthusiastic about diversity in educat...
Meeting deadlines is a small but important part of the college admissions process. Failure to file the right form at the right time could conceivably hurt your chances of getting financial aid or a...
THE DECADE that just wound down has tweaked awake an old ganglion most Americans prefer to leave at rest: class consciousness. Unprecedented numbers of people got rich, and many are eager to conver...
With a somewhat volatile mixture of dismay and hilarity, your correspondent has been following the recent strange proceedings on Asian-American civil rights problems. These have taken the form of a...
I would like to congratulate writer Eric Schurenberg for an accurate, outstanding yet frightening article on ''The Agony of College Admissions'' (May). As a junior in high school I feel the tremend...
Marketing is the M word that creates confusion in college admissions. But that's not the only problem. An atmosphere of half-truths and rumors has settled like a fog around the process, contributin...
; In a better world, we would not put our children through this. Every high school senior would know precisely what he or she wanted out of higher education; college admissions directors would hone...
COVER STORY: THE SACRIFICE OF THE CHILDREN
If you are wondering how the pressure of college admissions is playing out at even the best schools, you need look no farther than Shaker Heights High, outside Cleveland. If guidance counselors at ...
Every year, colleges publish viewbooks teeming with four-color pictures of lawns, lakes and lolling students. Some facts are available too, such as home states of students and the number of volumes...
Nobody has ever accused the Harvard Business School of being an ivory tower, a refuge for woolly-minded scholars out of touch with real life. No, this is a worldly institution and a great worldly s...
A rite of autumn for many high school students and their parents is to visit the colleges on their wish list. But what precisely should you look for? By knowing how to size up an institution, you c...
With today's college-age generation 15% smaller than it was in the peak years of the mid-1970s, you might expect that joining the freshman class of the best schools would be easier to achieve. Surp...
America's founding fathers believed that the new republic, in forsaking a hereditary nobility, must look to a ''natural aristocracy'' for its leadership. Two centuries later, the country generally ...
