Three of America’s smartest and most experienced college admissions officers, Sarah D. Donahue, William R. Fitzsimmons and Marlyn McGrath Lewis of Harvard, had a piece in the Harvard Crimson recently saying, among other things, that they planned to “work with secondary schools in a renewed effort to make applying to college less complicated and stressful than it is today.”
I am not certain how that is going to happen in their case. They rejected a record 91.03 percent of applicants to Harvard this year. It seems to me the only way to reduce stress in their process is to franchise the brand name so we can have McHarvards in Beltsville, Md., Kankakee, Ill., Pismo Beach, Calif., and other deserving locales.