College Admissions

Your admission result is not your final destination. It is simply a turn-and you are allowed to change direction. Every year, thousands of students in Pakistan celebrate their admission, only to realize weeks or months later that they have ended up in the wrong field. Perhaps your merit score pushed you into a program you never loved. Maybe your parents chose "safety" over passion. Or perhaps you simply didn't know enough about the career path before saying yes. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone-and you are not trapped.

Introduction: Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often fails on multi-hop queries that require the synthesis of information from multiple sources. To address this limitation, we propose AtomRAG, a chain-of-prompts algorithm that decomposes a complex query into a series of atomic requirements for information retrieval. Materials and methods: This method utilizes a sequence of planning, parsing, and reasoning prompts to guide a large language model (LLM) in creating an explicit retrieval and synthesis plan before generating a final answer. We evaluated AtomRAG on FRAMES and BRIGHT benchmarks, comparing its performance against standard RAG and non-RAG baselines using an instruction-tuned model (Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct) and a reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B). Results: Our results reveal a significant performance divergence. For the instruction-tuned model, AtomRAG improved accuracy by a relative 14.8% on the complex reasoning tasks in FRAMES. Conversely, the reasoning model proved incompatible with the instructive planning prompts, resulting in a performance degradation. On the less complex BRIGHT benchmark simpler methods performed better. Conclusions: We conclude that the effectiveness of AtomRAG is highly dependent on both query complexity and model architecture.

is a college completion initiative dedicated to increasing the number of Boston Public Schools graduates who earn postsecondary credentials. The partners include the Boston Foundation, the City of Boston, the Boston Public Schools (BPS), the Boston Private Industry Council (PIC), 37 higher education institutionsled by UMass Boston and Bunker Hill Community College-and local nonprofit organizations. Success Boston is focused on low-income, first-generation students of color. The initiative was launched in 2008 in response to a study released by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University and the PIC, which showed that only 35% of BPS graduates who had enrolled in college completed an Associate's or Bachelor's degree by the time they turned 25. Success Boston's theory of change is that cross-sector partnerships, guided by data and mutual accountability, will significantly change the postsecondary trajectory for BPS graduates. Success Boston's strategic framework focuses on helping Boston's high school students "Get Ready, Get In, Get Through" college, then "Get Connected" to jobs. One of Success Boston's intervention efforts is a coaching model. Other key activities within this framework include improving academic preparation and offering as-needed supports through higher education institutions until students successfully attain a degree prepared to enter the workforce. UMDI provides research services to federal, state, and local agencies, non-profits, foundations, and educational institutions. With more than thirty years of contributions and experience, UMDI's Applied Research and Program Evaluation group (ARPE) provides research services and methodological and subject matter expertise on early education and care, K-12 education, higher education, public health, human services, and economic and workforce development, positioning it to bring comprehensive resources and diverse perspectives to its projects. The Institute's research blends quantitative and qualitative methods to deliver findings that help its clients determine needs, assess outcomes, and identify opportunities for improvement. The Institute's philosophy reflects a rigorous but practical orientation, believing that research is most meaningful when findings can be applied to public benefit. The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) improves lives, strengthens communities, and fosters civic engagement through service and volunteering. As the nation's largest grant-maker in support of service and volunteering, CNCS engages Americans of all ages and backgrounds in service to their communities each year through Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and other programs.

Using large-scale national data (n = 3,845), this study employed multiple regressions to analyze U.S. adults’ reports of their relative frequencies playing informal versus formally organized sports generally, and when playing their most played sport, while growing up. As anticipated, we found generational and socioeconomic status differences such that playing more formally organized sports has become more of a hallmark of youth sports participation among the youngest generation and among those from higher socioeconomic status families. Also, more invested and passionate family, community, and individual sports contexts seemingly encouraged more formally organized sports participation for the sport one played the most. Overall, the results indicate that youth sports participation in the U.S. has generally contained a healthy mix of both informal and formal sports– but there have been increasing tilts toward more formal sports, understood to be aided by youth sports commercialization, intensive parenting pressures and cultural reproduction processes.

Provides graduation and college acceptance rates at fourteen high schools established as part of New York City's 2002 new schools initiative. Reviews the new schools' goals and accomplishments in improving outcomes, such as offering advanced courses

School counselors are at the forefront of efforts to improve the college readiness of K-12 students. It is clear that many roadblocks exist with regard to college readiness and adequate access to college counseling. Many public schools serving minority, first-generation, low-income students have school counselors with large caseloads and numerous non-counseling duties leaving them with little time to spend on college counseling (Clinedinst, Koranteng, & Nicola, 2015). This exploratory study aimed to review promising practices that target college and career readiness for students. A deeper investigation was conducted at an urban school serving underrepresented students which revealed an innovative five-year, comprehensive, relationshipdriven school counseling model that promotes equity, fosters social and emotional growth, and supports students and families through college readiness, enrollment, and degree attainment leading to a potential new framework for schools to consider. INNOV...

Comme le dit Nicolas Mascret dans son livre N’oublions pas les bons profs, tout le monde « a forcément un avis sur ce que peut être un bon prof, selon l’endroit d’où il parle et selon sa propre grille de lecture. » Ce constat, somme toute trivial, est confirmé par les résultats d’une recherche doctorale qui visait à documenter les représentations d’élèves, de parents, de directions et d’enseignant-es au regard du « bon enseignant ou de la bonne enseignante du secondaire ». Parmi les éléments nommés par les participant-es se trouvent non seulement des savoirs et habiletés professionnels auxquels il était possible de s’attendre, comme la capacité à instaurer un climat de classe propice à l’apprentissage ou encore celle de créer des liens positifs avec les élèves, mais également des éléments que l’on pourrait qualifier de « personnels », comme l’amour des élèves, l’équité et la bienveillance. Or, les démarches d’évaluation du personnel enseignant n’incluent généralement pas ce type de caractéristiques, se concentrant plutôt sur les gestes professionnels posés par ces professionnel-les. Lors de cette communication, nous proposons une réflexion à la lumière des propos de 21 participant-es, recueillis dans le cadre d’entretiens semi-dirigés réalisés au printemps et à l'automne 2025, concernant la place des vertus, des attitudes et des qualités personnelles (ou dispositions) dans le travail et l’évaluation des enseignant-es. Selon les participant-es rencontrés, ces caractéristiques, loin d’être marginales, sont essentielles dans la poursuite d’une identification toujours plus juste de ce qui caractérise un bon enseignant ou une bonne enseignante du secondaire.

Despite widespread efforts to address barriers to college success, low-income and first-generation students continue to complete college at substantially lower rates that their more advantaged peers. A review of causal research to date has linked comprehensive interventions (e.g. programs that provide students with a combination of financial, academic and social support) to promising persistence and degree attainment outcomes for low-income and first-generation students. However, the body of causal research on the impact of these type of interventions remains nascent. This mixed-methods dissertation study contributes to this critical research area by using rigorous quasi-experimental methods to examine the impact of the Dell Scholars Program on the college persistence trajectories of its participants. An earlier regression-discontinuity study revealed large and significant impacts on degree attainment rates. Specifically, the study found that the program has a 9 percentage-point and 16 percentage-point impacts on four-and six-year bachelor's degree completion rates, respectively . This work builds off this prior investigation in two important ways. First, I couple difference-in-differences and matching analytic strategies to estimate program impacts for Dell Scholars beyond the selection threshold. I find significant impacts on persistence, degree attainment, stopout rates, and dropout

Applying to college is a complex process requiring significant economic and cultural resources. Students from more affluent backgrounds often have the advantage of family support, while low-income students face challenges due to limited access to navigational knowledge, especially in urban schools where counselors are overwhelmed. This qualitative study highlights how near-peer advisors, working alongside school counselors, provide emotional support and trusted guidance in ways that support a wider range of students to engage with and complete the college application process. Based on observations and interviews, we explore how near-peers leverage their unique position to connect marginalized students with college advising resources in highneed urban schools.

We present three interpretative frameworks by which stakeholders can analyze curricular and assessment decisions related to the Common Core State Standards Initiative in English Language Arts-Writing (CCSSI ELA-W). We pay special attention to the assessment efforts of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). Informed by recent work in educational measurement and writing assessment communities, the first framework is a multidisciplinary conceptual analysis of the targeted constructs in the CCSSI ELA-W and their potential measurement. The second framework is provided by the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014) with a primary focus on foundational principles of validity, reliability/precision, and fairness. The third framework is evidence-centered design (ECD), a principled design approach that supports coherent evidentiary assessment arguments. We first illustrate how Standards-based validity arguments and ECD practices have been integrated into assessment work for the CCSSI ELA-W using Smarter Balanced and PARCC assessment reports. We then demonstrate how all three frameworks provide complementary perspectives that can help stakeholders ask principled questions of score interpretation and use. By the end of the nineteenth century in the United States, demand for universal public education had become equated with assurance of participatory democracy. In 1869-1870, 7.48 million students enrolled in kindergarten and grades one through eight. By 1899-1900, that number had risen to 14.98 million. This increase was accompanied by a dramatic rise in high school enrollment as advanced education became necessary for better paying jobs. In 1869-1870, 80,000 students were enrolled in grades nine through twelve. In 1899-1900, that number had risen to 519,000 (Snyder, 1993, p. 34, Table 8). Accompanying this new influx of students were those who believed they knew best how to shape the curriculum. Archetypal responses-the humanism of Charles W. Eliot (1892), the developmentalism of G. Stanley Hall (1883), the social efficiency of Joseph Mayer Rice (1893), and the social meliorism of Lester Frank Ward (1883)-were to continue throughout the twentieth century ). Today, one may identify these enduring themes in the calls for equity by Diane Ravitch (2010), the cognitive modeling of Howard , the emphasis on effective teaching by Bill and Melinda Gates (2015), and the progressivist agenda of Arne Duncan (2015). With enrollment projections for the school year 2015-2016 estimated at 49.8 million public elementary and secondary school students (Snyder & Dillow, 2015, p. 86, Table 203.10), these and other voices emerge to give council on how best to spend a projected education budget of no less than $669 billion (Snyder & Dillow, 2015, p. 58, Table .10). There is a loud roar of voices accompanying initiatives associated with the term "educational reform," which has become nearly deafening as the national debate has turned to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) and associated state-led curricular guidelines for a national school curriculum assessed by two consortia: the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). As the most comprehensive effort in American history to leverage uniform goal-based instruction, the CCSSI is designed to ensure that high school graduates are prepared to take credit-bearing courses in two-or four-year college programs or enter the workforce. At the present writing, forty-two states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity have adopted the CCSSI. Assessments in English language arts and mathematics have taken place in the 2014-2015 school year, and preliminary results are being released at the time of this writing. The development of the CCSSI and its assessment has been accompanied by three categories of criticism: warnings of the dangers of neoliberalism; concerns over the constraint of the writing construct; and fears that the achievement of equity continues to elude educational reform. From their creation (in order to enhance global competitiveness and workplace success) to their solicitation (in order to encourage proposals for next generation assessment systems), the CCSSI have been informed by "a form of cultural politics and a set of economic principles, policies, and practices devoted to handing over as much of social life as possible to private interests" (Gallagher, 2011, p. 453). Referencing this depiction of neoliberalism, Wilson has been critical of the ways that such framing has diminished teacher agency . In interacting with students and teachers, she argued, "you see what matters, and you realize that these grand plans that Bill Gates has for how it is that we're going to improve education just don't make any sense" (p. 299). In similar fashion, warned that the role of the Gates Foundation compromises local efforts such as those sponsored by the National Writing Project, "to gain compliance" with the CCSSI (p. 215). Concentrating on the limits of construct 1/16

Background: An expanded skillset is needed to meet today's shifting workplace demands, which involve collaboration with geographically distributed multidisciplinary teams. As the nature of work changes due to increases in automation and the elevated need to work in multidisciplinary teams, enhanced visions of Workplace English Communication (WEC) are needed to communicate with diverse audiences and effectively use new technologies. Thus, WEC is ranked as one of the top five skills needed for employability. Even so, results of employer surveys report that incoming employees lack communication competency (National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE], 2018). To address this issue, with a focus on WEC teaching and assessment, we describe a framework used to guide the design of WEC modules. We suggest that conceptual frameworks can be used to inform the design process of the module. In

they could stay or restaurants where they could dine. 5 Johnson personalized this for the senator from Mississippi, noting that when "[t]hey drove through your state and when they got hungry, they stopped at grocery stores on the edge of town in colored areas and bought Vienna sausages and beans and ate them with a plastic spoon." 6 Stennis knew all about this sort of segregation in his home state, and he mumbled that he was sure they could find some place to eat. 7 But Johnson, the sometimes crude master politician from rural Texas, ended his jawboning with a story about driving across Mississippi for which Stennis had no response: "[W]hen they had to go to the bathroom, they would stop, pull off on a side road, and Zephyr Wright, the cook of the Vice President of the United States, would squat in the road to pee. And you know, John, that's just bad. That's wrong." 8 For Lyndon Johnson, segregation had become personal. It was not just a violation of people's rights. It was "bad." It was "wrong." When Johnson became president, the struggle for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became personal, and the experience of his cook became part of Johnson's persona and his stock of stories to illustrate his politics and passions. 9 In the end, passage of the 1964 Act was a personal triumph for Johnson, who twisted arms, lobbied senators, and showed all his political skills. 10 Although he was a native white Texan, Johnson 5. Id. 6. Id. 7. Id. 8. Id. Johnson offered a more sanitized version of this story in his autobiography, The Vantage Point. LYNDON B. JOHNSON, THE VANTAGE POINT 154 (1971). Johnson told various versions of this story to many people. The events probably took place when Johnson was actually Senate majority leader, but Johnson, ever the storyteller, changed the date for Stennis. When he was vice president, some of his other black staffers, including Eugene Williams and Helen White Williams, drove Johnson's car across the South, and thus the experience of the Wrights was repeated over and over again, and Johnson knew about their humiliations as well. Id. at 154-55. 9. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was [a]n Act [t]o enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes.

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University admissions offices face the significant challenge of managing high volumes of inquiries efficiently while maintaining response quality, which critically impacts prospective students' perceptions. This paper addresses the issues of response time and information accuracy by proposing an AI system integrating a fine-tuned language model with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). While RAG effectively retrieves relevant information from large datasets, its performance in narrow, complex domains like university admissions can be limited without adaptation, potentially leading to contextually inadequate responses due to the intricate rules and specific details involved. To overcome this, we fine-tuned the model on a curated dataset specific to admissions processes, enhancing its ability to interpret RAG-provided data accurately and generate domain-relevant outputs. This hybrid approach leverages RAG's ability to access up-to-date information and fine-tuning's capacity to embed nuanced domain understanding. We further explored optimization strategies for the response generation logic, experimenting with settings to balance response quality and speed, aiming for consistently high-quality outputs that meet the specific requirements of admissions communications.

From 1994: nicholas leVenstein is founder of Access Technology Corporation, a software compa ny based in Chicago, IL, specializing in com puterized publications and electronic data interchange systems. Levenstein graduated from Yale University (CT) in 1989 with a B.A. in History.

The paper examines STEM education and economic growth through the perspective of a mismatch curriculum with the present realities. Nigeria embraces STEM education and all the schools from primary to tertiary institution engage their students in the acquisition of STEM knowledge and skills. However, the curriculum seems not to transform the students to a point of self-reliance after graduation from their respective curricular and discipline of choice. What is common therefore is massive unemployment, graduate over-dependent on white collar jobs which seems a mirage backup with youth restiveness crisis in all the geo-political zones in the country. Thus, in this paper STEM education curriculum in Nigeria, Nigeria economic growth, curriculum mismatch with present realities and the way forward were discussed. The paper thereafter recommended among others that all curricular in higher institutions (universities, polytechnics and colleges of education) in Nigeria should be reviewed to meet with the societal present demands. In this respect, every curriculum should have an annexure of two to three threads for students to acquire the basic knowledge and self-reliance skills that will empower them after graduation.

Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides on the fate of affirmative action, this essay highlights a need to address the unappreciated extent of advantage that the intercollegiate athletics system provides to affluent white students. Drawing on public data sets, we test for the presence of affluent white advantage via race-neutral preferences conferred through athletics at
elite schools that also practice race-conscious admissions, by comparing to schools that are legally prohibited under state law from doing so. The latter set, from the University of California system, is a natural experiment in facially race-neutral admissions. We show that at elite institutions like
Harvard and University of North Carolina, well-resourced white students receive considerable cumulative benefits from athletics which do not extend to Asian American applicants. Compared to this athletic advantage, affirmative action gives only a "modest plus" to African American and Latinx applicants And because of athletics and other admission by exception strategies, race neutral admissions do not ensure representation of minoritized groups at institutions. We join the substantial scholarly consensus showing that these facially race-neutral policies in fact are not
race neutral. They create advantages for white applicants. Overlooking the role of athletics, we argue, contributes to a distorted view of affirmative action, merit, and therefore race-conscious admissions.

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In response to data indicating that states having fewer post-secondary enrollees in two-year colleges had higher baccalaureate attainment, a study was undertaken to examine the possibility that a major state commitment to community colleges in response to demands for access means lower baccalaureate completion rates. The study compared Florida and California, states with the heaviest reliance on community colleges in highly selective and stratified systems of higher education, with Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois, states with more accessible four-year institutions and varying reliance on community colleges. Baccalaureate completion rates were determined by dividing the number of four-year college graduates by the total higher education enrollment. The stvly report examines the demographic characteristics of high school graduates from 1980-82 who attended post-secondary institutions, and the relationship between student characteristics and choice of post-secondary institutions. Next, detailed descriptions are provided of the systems of higher education in Florida, California, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. The report then examines college attendance patterns and baccalaureate completion rates in each of these states between 1975 and 1988. The final sections of the report provide study findings, examine the impact of state funding structure on completion rates, and present policy recommendations. Principal findings indicate that states with a greater commitment to community colleges have lower levels of baccalaureate completion, and that neither higher state expenditures per student nor lower tuition increases completion rates. Data tables and an 81-item bibliography are included. (PAA)

Graduating from college or university is a major life goal, and not meeting the requirements can be overwhelming. However, understanding the potential consequences, exploring available solutions, and considering alternative options can help you turn the situation around. Let's dive into what happens if you don't meet graduation requirements and how to navigate this challenge.