A few Ivy League schools say the tests enable them to find students of promise from low-income families. But not all sociologists agree.
Former Harvard President Claudine Gay, left, speaks as former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill listens during a House hearing in December 2023 − before they both resigned.
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
Threats from disappointed donors over the language used during campus protests about the Israel-Hamas conflict have become angrier and more public than in the past.
Harvard President Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania then-President Elizabeth Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth testify before Congress on Dec. 5, 2023.
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University codes of conduct support their mission to educate. But it’s not easy to balance those codes with the values of free speech, as the resignation of a prominent university president shows.
Claudine Gay will become Harvard’s second female president and first Black president in July 2023.
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Elite universities have been giving special preference to children of prior graduates for more than a century. Has the time come for that practice to stop? A sociologist weighs in.
Students at Ecole Polytechnique. Their alumni network is one of the most powerful and may lead some to the top of a large French company.
J. Barande/École Polytechnique
When the directors of a company are graduates of the same school as the executive, their ability to hold the executive accountable for his or her decisions becomes compromised.
Over 5,000 student-athletes were directly affected by a recent wave of shutdowns of intercollegiate sports teams.
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Shutting down sports teams can save schools millions of dollars but create longer-term challenges for enrollment, fundraising and campus life.
Robert F. Smith speaks onstage during the 2019 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple Of Hope Awards on Dec. 12, 2018, in New York City.
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With more colleges and universities than ever making the SAT or ACT optional for admission, two scholars weigh in on what that means for students and their families.
William ‘Rick’ Singer founder of the Edge College & Career Network, pleaded guilty to charges in a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal.
AP Photo/Steven Senne
An expert explains the many reasons why people behave in an unethical manner and what research shows on why the wealthy have a need to maintain their higher status.
U.S. Attorney for District of Massachusetts Andrew Lelling announces indictments in a sweeping college admissions bribery scandal March 12.
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The college admission cheating scandal recently announced by the Department of Justice shows why colleges should admit students via lottery, argues an expert on college admissions.
Recruited athletes often get a leg up in the admissions process.
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The college admission scandal that involved big bribes, coaches and Hollywood actors grew out of a system that favors rich parents and gives coaches too much leeway in admissions, a scholar argues.
Could a random admissions process help spare universities from legal trouble and save time and money?
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Colleges and universities are often criticized for how they admit students from diverse groups. A college admissions scholar suggests an admissions lottery could help make the process more fair.
T.M. Landry College Prep co-founders Tracey and Michael Landry have stepped down from the school’s board as authorities investigate a wide range of allegations against the school, from academic fraud to physical abuse.
T.M. Landry College Prep
T.M. Landry College Prep, facing allegations of abuse, is known for getting students from poor backgrounds into Ivy League schools. An education scholar says the school’s focus was misplaced.
MIT hackathon, 2014.
Mason Marino, Che-Wei Wang, Andrew Whitacre / Flickr
How can elite institutions and an elite territory originate key collaborative practices such as hacking, open knowledge and open innovation? We found out during a recent visit.
Black power militant H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael (right) appeared at a sit-in protest at Columbia University in New York City on April 26, 1968.
AP
The 1968 protests at Columbia University led the institution to abandon a gym project that residents considered racist and cut off its defense work – and generated worldwide attention in the process.
More and more students at Harvard are examining their admission files to try to understand how they got in. The U.S. government is also plans to examine the files as part of a discrimination case filed by 63 Asian- American groups.
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Students and government officials alike hope Harvard’s admission files will yield clues about who gets in and why, but a Harvard researcher says their efforts will be in vain.
Harvard, located along the Charles River in Cambridge, boasts the largest endowment at $37.6 billion.
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