Consultant Wants Athletic Admissions Abolished

Michele Hernandez '89, a former Dartmouth admissions officer who has spun her experience in Ivy admissions into a lucrative career helping high schoolers earn admission to elite colleges and universities, is featured in the opinion pages of the New York Times with a piece under the headline:

Colleges Should Get Rid of the SAT and ACT and Abolish Preferences

One of her suggestions in the piece (LINK):

Abolish all preferences, including legacy, V.I.P.-development, athletic – especially Ivy football, which is responsible for the largest number of slots – and minority priority admissions.

Hernandez also writes:

The majority of students applying to elite colleges spend hundreds of hours doing SAT/ACT prep

Green Alert Take: Well, I can safely report that one student who applied to elite colleges and graduated from one did not spend hundreds of hours doing SAT/ACT prep. In fact, I don't know if she spent an hour doing it. OK, we did have a shower curtain with SAT words printed on it ;-)

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The Notre Dame 247 site writes about Jerry Tillery, the 6-foot-7, 300-pound defensive lineman who took a recruiting trip to Dartmouth after committing to the Fighting Irish. He graduated from high school early to be able to take part in spring football and is already making an impact in South Bend. From the story (LINK):

The Shreveport (La.) native started running with Notre Dame’s first-team defense six practices in to his first taste of college football.

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Dartmouth has announced that women's rugby will be the college's 35th varsity sport. (LINK)

Dartmouth joins Harvard and Brown as Ivies sponsoring the sport at the varsity level. Five schools are needed for a sport to have an official Ivy League championship.

Green Alert Take: I'm hardly an expert but rugby seems to be a reasonable Title IX analog to football with regard to participation and the nature of the sport.