General Education Advice

Every October, I have some version of the same conversation with a junior in our office — recently a student from Madison, sharp kid, solid student — who shrugs when I bring up the PSAT. “It doesn’t count, right? It’s just practice.” Technically, true. Colleges never see a PSAT score. But I’ve spent over two […]

Every fall, I sit across from a senior — sometimes at our office in Old Saybrook, sometimes over Zoom with a family in Guilford or Madison — who says some version of the same thing: “I thought I was done with this.” For most students, they’re right. By October of senior year, the testing chapter […]

My inbox this morning is flooded with thank-you notes from students who just received their August SAT scores. For some, this means admission chances have skyrocketed to their first choice.  For others, the chance of merit aid has dramatically increased.  For all… the pressure is off. For many high school seniors, the October SAT represents […]

Relevant excerpt – published in The Hill: According to a 2025 report by faculty at the University of California, San Diego, a math placement exam for freshmen found that a quarter of those who tested below middle-school level had perfect 4.0 GPAs in their high school math classes. Inflated grades are worse than useless — they lie. Colleges do […]

When I started this work in the early 2000s, I was grateful that my own educational background had prepared me for it. I’d graduated from Georgetown, then Penn Law, and earned a master’s at Penn’s Fels School of Government — years spent immersed in high-stakes higher education as a student myself, before I ever tried […]

A few years ago, I was working with Joe, a sophomore at East Lyme High School in Connecticut. He told me that his teachers, at least two of them, really didn’t like him, and that he understood why. Teens change quickly, and boys in particular seem to do it in fits and starts. They can […]

My next book will focus on the launch decade—the now-extended era spanning ages 16 to 26 during which young people work toward financial independence. The phrase “failure to launch” has become so commonplace that it may no longer carry the heavy impact it did just a few years ago. To be clear, launching does not […]

Twenty Years In: What Actually Separates Our Biggest Successes I’ve been working with young adults for over two decades now. In that time, you start to notice patterns — not hunches, but real, repeatable conclusions about what separates the students who thrive from the students who merely get by. Two of those conclusions stand out […]

I remember working with John, a junior at Guilford High School in Connecticut, who possessed what I would call latent ambition. He wanted to accomplish something significant, but he did not yet know where to direct his energy. John had performed reasonably well during his freshman and sophomore years, but his sophomore-year PSAT score of […]

Connecticut Juniors: The PSAT Is the Real Kickoff to College Yes. I know. School has just started. If you’re a parent in Connecticut, school this week probably felt a bit overwhelming, both to you and your children. Some of that might have been fun, some of that might have been exciting, and, unquestionably, the busyness […]