Surviving the College Admissions Madness
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Narrated by:
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Kevin Robert Martin
About this listen
Unconventional. Irreverent. Brutal. Entertaining. Unlike any book written about higher education, Surviving the College Admissions Madness is a complete takedown of a deeply flawed and thoroughly broken system.
Kevin Robert Martin argues that elite universities do not care about their applicants. He observes that college admissions is highly undemocratic and dehumanizing. University bureaucracies alienate applicants from their humanity and sense of self.
Reading essay advice books might help you get in, but they won’t help you stay sane. Surviving and even thriving depend on digging deep into your beliefs and understanding your behaviors within the broader context of society. This isn’t another Admissions 101 “how-to to write a killer essay” book or a promise of “six easy steps” for Ivy League acceptance.
Martin provides helpful advice for avoiding application mistakes, building a reasonable college list, minimizing debt, identifying cognitive errors and distortions, and helping applicants reframe their college applications. This book equips listeners with the vocabulary, frameworks, and tools to make sense of America’s broken higher education system, starting with the admissions gatekeepers.
Surviving the College Admissions Madness is the first of its kind to integrate applicant psychology with the sociology and economics of higher education. Martin observes that a system of bad incentives in education and society wastes hundreds of millions of hours each admissions cycle. It produces profound suffering for tens of thousands of students each year. He writes for families and high school educators who want a deeper understanding of the truth.
Elite college admissions undermines students whether they’re privileged or marginalized, rich or poor, black or white, rural or urban, first-time freshman or transfer, and domestic or international.
Almost everyone loses, even those who get into their dream schools. Elite universities are neither accountable to nor transparent with the public. Early Decision policies and aggressive recruitment and questionable enrollment management practices monopolize universities’ leverage over families’ well-being. Power disparities between universities and families explain why the admissions process is so stressful and exasperating.
Waitlists, appeals, and deferrals keep students in limbo. Endless essay requirements, recommendations, and interviews benefit the university while wasting applicants’ time and making them lose sleep and their sanity. Holistic review corrupts students’ interests and high school learning environments. Students and families rarely realize that the system doesn’t have to be this way.
Application numbers skyrocket while first-year student class sizes remain the same despite COVID-19 virtual learning disruptions. Elite universities claim to care about diversity and college access, yet they are hypocrites. Admission by holistic review has noble origins in the Civil Rights Movement, but nowadays, it serves as a tool for oppression. Holistic review is arbitrary, capricious, and prone to error and bias. Martin proposes admission by partial lottery as one reform among many.
American meritocracy is a myth. Rather than vehicles for upward mobility, elite universities squeeze out the middle class and contribute to wealth inequality. Universities prioritize generating revenue over a genuine commitment to diversity and access.
©2021 Kevin Robert Martin (P)2021 Kevin Robert MartinListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Everyone knows "what's wrong with millennials". Glenn Beck says we've been ruined by "participation trophies". Simon Sinek says we have low self-esteem. An Australian millionaire says millennials could all afford homes if we'd just give up avocado toast. Thanks, millionaire. This millennial is here to prove them all wrong.
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A devastating dream of revolution
- By Kevin Tierney Jr on 11-23-17
By: Malcolm Harris
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The Global Achievement Gap
- Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills our Children Need - and What We Can Do About it
- By: Tony Wagner
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Education expert Tony Wagner situates our school problems in the context of the global knowledge economy and analyzes the skills necessary for our young people to succeed.
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made obsolete by 'MostLikelyToSucceed'-still great
- By MichaelS on 04-01-16
By: Tony Wagner
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Debt-Free U
- How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents
- By: Zac Bissonnette, Andrew Tobias
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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These days, most people assume you need to pay a boatload of money for a quality college education. As a result, students and their parents are willing to go into years of debt and potentially sabotage their financial futures just to get a fancy name on a diploma. But Zac Bissonnette is walking proof that the assumption is not only false, but dangerous.
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Too long winded
- By Raquel on 08-06-13
By: Zac Bissonnette, and others
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Success and Luck
- Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
- By: Robert H. Frank
- Narrated by: Robert H. Frank
- Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine.
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Not what is advertised
- By Andre on 04-18-17
By: Robert H. Frank
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Pedigree
- How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
- By: Lauren A. Rivera
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans are taught to believe that upward mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard, regardless of their social status. Yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree takes listeners behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn't, and why.
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Should have been much much shorter
- By Amazon Customer on 10-13-21
By: Lauren A. Rivera
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Generation Me
- Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before
- By: Jean M. Twenge PhD
- Narrated by: Randye Kaye
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In this provocative new book, psychologist and social commentator Dr. Jean Twenge documents the self-focus of what she calls "Generation Me" - people born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Dr. Twenge explores why her generation is tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious. Dr. Twenge reveals how profoundly different today's young adults are - and makes controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole.
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I mostly agree
- By David Hill on 05-25-20
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Creative Schools
- The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education
- By: Lou Aronica, Ken Robinson
- Narrated by: Ken Robinson PhD
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Ken Robinson is one of the world's most influential voices in education, and his 2006 TED Talk on the subject is the most viewed in the organization's history. Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation's troubled educational system.
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The Answer to Why Students Stop Trying
- By Alison Sattler on 07-21-15
By: Lou Aronica, and others
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What Works
- Gender Equality by Design
- By: Iris Bohnet
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts.
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Excellent book every women and executive should read
- By N LI on 05-10-21
By: Iris Bohnet
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The Nordic Theory of Everything
- In Search of a Better Life
- By: Anu Partanen
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving to America in 2008, Finnish journalist Anu Partanen quickly went from confident, successful professional to wary, self-doubting mess. She found that navigating the basics of everyday life - from buying a cell phone and filing taxes to education and childcare - was much more complicated and stressful than anything she encountered in her homeland. At first she attributed her crippling anxiety to the difficulty of adapting to a freewheeling new culture. But as she got to know Americans better, she discovered they shared her deep apprehension.
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A non-radical perspective on two societies
- By kwdayboise (Kim Day) on 06-20-17
By: Anu Partanen
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The End of Average
- How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness
- By: Todd Rose
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it. The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.
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Good intentions, terrible execution
- By Kristofer Jarl on 05-06-19
By: Todd Rose
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Coming Apart
- The State of White America, 1960–2010
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.
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Brilliant & Flawed
- By Douglas C. Bates on 05-15-12
By: Charles Murray
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The War Against Boys
- How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men
- By: Christina Hoff Sommers
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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An updated and revised edition of the controversial classic - now more relevant than ever - argues that boys are the ones languishing socially and academically, resulting in staggering social and economic costs. After two major waves of feminism and decades of policy reform, women have made massive strides in education. Today they outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic, and vocational well-being. Christina Hoff Sommers contends that it's time to take a hard look at present-day realities and recognize that boys need help.
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Important Book
- By VeritasPlz on 11-05-18