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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I started researching college admissions process for my DC who is a junior in HS. I kept encountering fit repeatedly, so wanted to learn what it is and how it originated. Here are a few interesting tidbits:

- The term "College Fit" was largely popularized as a counter-movement to the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

- As rankings convinced families there was a single "best" college, independent counselors and progressive admissions officers needed a counter-argument. They began preaching "fit" to tell students that the best college was actually the one that suited them.

- Loren Pope is arguably the most important figure in popularizing this version of "fit." His seminal book, Colleges That Change Lives (1996), explicitly argued that small, lesser-known schools could be a better "fit" for a student's development than a prestigious Ivy League university.

- If Loren Pope lit the flame, Lloyd Thacker turned it into a bonfire. A former admissions officer, Thacker founded the Education Conservancy in 2004 [b]specifically to combat the commercialization of admissions. [u]His book[/u],[/b] College Unranked, became a manifesto for the "fit over prestige" movement.

- The concept reached mass cultural saturation with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni’s 2015 bestseller, Where You Go Is Not Who You Will Be. Bruni aggregated all the previous decades of research and philosophy into a mainstream argument, effectively cementing "fit" as the standard advice given to every middle-class American family.

[/quote]

me likey the irony[/quote]

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