Letter from the Chairman
I am pleased to submit to you the results of nearly three years of work by the College Board’s Task Force on Admissions in the 21st Century. The submission comes in three parts. The first is this letter that serves as the foreword to our formal report to you and to our profession. The second is our task force report, Opens in a new windowPreserving the Dream of America: An Open Letter to Professionals in Admissions, Financial Aid and Counseling. The third is a data compilation, Opens in a new windowSelected Data on P-20 Education in America, a fairly comprehensive review of 10 significant indicators of the nation’s educational health.
A frequent theme in a wide variety of meetings involving College Board members — the annual forum, regional meetings and gatherings of various councils — is that admission processes and practices are changing. They are changing on the part of students and their families as well as on the part of the secondary and higher education communities.
In Preserving the Dream of America, we try to speak to our community, however inarticulately, about the importance of these issues. In support of that vision, we developed a 10-part statement of the values that should guide our community as it moves forward. By community, we mean admission, financial aid, school counseling and enrollment management professionals — the people whose voices we try to represent. We believe that we speak for our community when we assert that we must rededicate ourselves and our institutions to serving the public good if we are to realize our hopes for the nation.
I hope you can take heart from what we learned: It is in struggling with complexity that we discover simplicity; it is in confusion that we find clarity; and it is in maintaining the dream that is America that we fulfill ourselves as educators.
Jerome A. Lucido
Vice Provost for Enrollment, Policy and Management
University of Southern California
Read the task force chairman’s full message in the two reports linked above.