Welcome to the Rosenblatt College Counseling blog.  My name is Ken Rosenblatt, your host, and you can find my biography at the “About Me” heading/link above.

I will be posting material here about every two weeks.  What can you expect to find here?

This blog focuses on issues confronting parents and college consultants (also known as college counselors) in navigating college selection and admissions.

Some of my posts will be aimed primarily at parents.  I will discuss topics such as the increasing importance of the PSAT, various facets of the new SAT arriving in 2016, technical “fixes” and “clarifications” in the rules for interpreting standardized tests adopted by various colleges, such as which colleges allow “superscoring” of the SAT and ACT (and what superscoring is in the first place), the growing phenomenon of “test optional” schools, and changes in college financing and student aid.  College admissions is an amazingly complex “game”, and parents and consultants alike have an interest in sorting out the players and keeping track of rule changes.

Some parents and consultants are interested in news and information about college for students with special needs.  As you can see from the link above (“Additional Services for Students with Special Needs”), the college selection and admission process is more difficult for these students.  I work with these students, and will share and solicit approaches and strategies which increase their access to, and success at, colleges.

Other posts will be aimed squarely at my colleagues, college consultants.  I decided to become a consultant because my experience with the admissions and selection process as a parent convinced me that the Internet has changed the essence of how we accomplish our mission:  to find the college which best fits a student.  I believe that the Internet is a huge, and – when used correctly – largely reliable resource for college selection and admission.  You can, and should, mine it regularly to uncover data and insights available nowhere else.

I will use this blog to demonstrate how a data-driven approach can augment results obtained by the “tried and true” methods of relying on guidebooks, campus visits, and the like.  Read down the next few posts to find a data driven discussion of the dilemmas facing current and prospective engineering undergraduates in the United States.

Although a blog is by definition a work in progress, my current plan is to offer the reader three different types of “posts”.

First, I will monitor the Internet and report (to be accurate, mostly re-report) news items of interest about college selection and admission, occasionally with commentary.

Second, I will provide that staple of many college consultants, the trip report.  This is where your intrepid correspondent visits a college, and in few hundred words conveys something about the atmosphere of the college and its student body.  In addition to the standard topics, I will often focus on services provided for special needs students.

Third, I will publish longer form pieces.  For example, in addition to the upcoming piece on dilemmas facing engineering undergraduates, I plan over the next few months to discuss a methodology for considering hard data (admissions statistics) and soft data (web sites such as “College Confidential”) in college selection, techniques to evaluate a college’s commitment to students with special needs, and the effects of the changing demography of college campuses on college admissions strategy.

Finally, a blog without comments is a lonely place.  I welcome different perspectives, and encourage readers, particularly college counselors, to have their say in the Comments section for each post.  I particularly welcome disagreement because that is how we all become better at what we do.

For now, this blog is moderated, meaning that I have to approve each comment before it is posted.  This is about spam prevention, not censorship, but you may notice a brief delay in the posting of your comments.

Thank you for visiting.  Please return often.