Dartmouth & Its Unionizing Basketball Team, the SAT, and the Feds Bungle Financial Aid Simplification

Nerd alert. I love reading books about writing. The latest to catch my attention? It’s coauthored by my friend Todd Rogers, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Jessica Lasky-Fink. It’s titled Writing for Busy Readers. And it has an incredibly useful companion AI tool, which will help you write better emails—or tell you what grade level your writing is (I used this tool for my forthcoming book to make sure the prose wasn’t above roughly a 7th-grade level).

Now I’m thrilled to offer paid subscribers a chance to win Todd and Jessica’s book. Three lucky paid subscribers will win a free copy just by entering your information here by April 1st! (And yes, if you won Ryan Craig’s book last month, you can enter this raffle as well).

If you’re not a paid subscriber but want access to this and other benefits—like paid-only newsletters, the ability to comment, chat, and more—you can…

On to the update…

It’s no secret that the Department of Education’s rollout of the simplified Free Application for Financial Aid (FAFSA) has been… complicated.

In a pair of Future U. episodes, Jeff Selingo and I delved not so much into why this occurred, but instead on what the implications for higher ed will be.

In our most recent episode, we first welcomed Andrew LaCasse to the show. Andrew was a senior education policy advisor on the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions for eight years. There he worked alongside Sen. Lamar Alexander as he worked to simplify the FAFSA (for the last couple years Andrew’s served as the head of policy at Guild). Andrew gave us a fascinating behind-the-scenes telling of just how the effort to simplify FAFSA became a law—and what the goals for the simplification were.

We then brought the president of Colorado Mesa University, John Marshall, on the show, because it’s telling applicants that regardless of what happens with the federal government, they’ll give them a binding offer for financial aid. We asked why the University made that choice. Then John talked about some of the more concerning aspects of the broader simplification independent of the rollout.

In a prior episode, Jeff and I also offered our own takes on what this bungled rollout will mean. And that wasn’t all. We also talked about Dartmouth’s decision to begin requiring standardized tests again for admissions—a decision that’s now trickled down to Yale, Brown, and more. We stayed up in Hanover then for one more topic that, as Jeff said, finds college presidents and boards “kind of asleep at the wheel” on. That’s the treatment of their NCAA athletic teams as employees. Which is what led to Dartmouth’s basketball team—which finished dead last in the Ivy League—to vote to unionize recently. Check out all of our thoughts.

A Bachelor’s in Three Years?

The Boston Globe’s editorial board opined on the recent move by accreditors to start allowing colleges to off three-year bachelor’s degrees. They interviewed me for the piece. Consistent with my view that we should promote competency-based or mastery learning, here’s my quote:

“I’d much rather be certifying demonstrations of learning as opposed to focusing on is it three years or is it four years.”

What’s the Future for the Apple Vision Pro?

The Apple Vision Pro has properly turned heads in a big way around the future of virtual reality and augmented reality. Just check out the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern’s video review, for example. And prepare to be wowed.

But will VR and AR remain a closed, proprietary system in the long run? How is it likely to evolve? Here’s my prediction:

Thanks as always for reading, writing, and listening.