FOLLOW THE EXCESS DEMAND.  Sherman Dorn is not impressed with a local newspaper hyping college-acceptance anxiety.

The truth about college-admission anxieties is that wealthy parents and school officials in wealthy communities have done far more to perpetuate such anxieties than anything George W. Bush did either as governor or president. Quick question: did commercial test-prep books flood your nearest bookstore before or after former President Bush signed NCLB in January 2002? As David Labaree points out, plenty of parents push for public schools to serve their private interests, in this case by helping their children gain admission into nominally elite colleges and universities. As Maryland teacher Ken Bernstein told me when I suggested that Race to Nowhere ignored the fact that most colleges were non-competitive: "parents of my AP kids don't want to hear about non-competitive colleges."

Rightly or wrongly, parents of AP kids might perceive the non-competitive colleges as subprime party schools, or as purveyors of degrees etiolated by the imperatives of Retention and Completion.

He goes on with some suggestions for anxious parents, and for high schoolers contemplating college.

You can control your own academic work; you cannot control idiosyncratic decisions that try to split admissions from rejections for large groups of students who have very similar academic records. The second stage is the part of college admissions that's a crapshoot, and our advice to our daughter was that instead of trying to "look good" by guessing and then gaming what presumably colleges are looking for, it made much better sense just to be herself and not worry about the part of decision-making that was much more random than the "would graduate if admitted" filter. This advice was pretty easy parenting because that was how she was treating the admissions process, and so what we said was more a matter of inoculating her against later anxieties when we thought her friends might be talking about their own admissions anxieties. 

As it turned out, my daughter had a reasonable choice of institutions that admitted her, and of her close friends in high school, I think there was only one case of a rejection by a first-choice school. The limits on where her friends could attend college was not who admitted them but what they and their parents could afford. I can assure you all that the Rutgers and Georgia Tech financial aid offices have missed huge opportunities with two incredibly hardworking young women, but faculty at the University of Florida will gain the benefit.

His favorable mention of Florida contrasts with the attitude of one of the students interviewed by St. Petersburg Times reporter Rebecca Catalanello.

But now, a little more than a week after colleges finished notifying students of their admissions decisions, [St. Petersburg High senior Marcus] Carter isn't feeling like the star pupil people tell him he is. He applied to five schools, then found himself wait-listed at his top two choices and denied at a third. Though accepted at his two safety schools — the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida — he's holding out hope that when things shake out at Duke University, he will rise off the wait list.

In Professor Dorn's view, Mr Carter and many of the anxious students and parents, advanced placement or not, are crying with their mouths full.

I'm not worried about my daughter's friends, nor would I be if they had expressed concerns about all the "problems" of students Catalanello followed. I am far more worried about students I teach (or students like them) who have problems affording books, or being able to study more each week than working, or who make poor choices about how to spend weekends. I worry about students who think a 10-12 page term paper is too long. I worry about students who are in violent relationships. I worry about students for all sorts of real problems, but not whether they got some notional prize for being admitted to all the competitive colleges they applied to.

And his daughter applying to Florida apparently without reference to its Big Time Sports prowess, and Mr Carter treating Gainesville as a safety school, suggest that the Popular Perspective of Big Time Sports as front porch is misplaced.

The latest must-have item for a big-time college football program is a statue, or statues, The Orlando Sentinel reported. The University of Florida, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and Auburn University have all recently unveiled statues of football greats (coaches and players). The article noted that these honors are not just coming at the end of careers, as might have been the case in the past.

Sports statues: the new marker of a safety school?