The college admissions process...

The University of Sydney taken from Trekearth.com

One of the things that we think about here at our school is how the college admissions process shapes how we do business as a school. One of the things we seems to debate is whether the high school learning process is valued in and of itself or if it is merely valued as the vehicle to get one into college.

Recently, one of our college councilors had an argument with a college admissions officer from a prominent New England small college. Essentially, the argument was over what was the true GPA of the student in question. Our view was that the entire transcript had earned the kid his/her GPA while the CA officer was only concerned with "the essential 5": math, English, history, science, foreign language.

My first reaction was to think about the colleges and their own visual and performing arts faculty/facilities/curriculum. For these liberal arts colleges, who are they hoping will fill this part of their campus? Are they drafting any artists/musicians/actors etc to fill these spots? How do these schools approach this end of education? Do they value certain parts of their own school over others?

It just seems to me like we are swinging the education pendulum towards a automatons and valuing only what we can measure. My hope is that this discussion will help figure out ways we can value the things that we can not "fill in a bubble" about: Expeditionary Learning, Aesthetics, Studio Based Learning, Community Based Learning, Brainstorming, Problem Solving etc. If you followed the link in the last post, the website for the conference at the Southeast Center for Education in the Arts is an excellent resource for beginning this conversation...