4 Predictions for Test Prep and Admissions in 2017

There goes another year. Seemingly no sooner than it started, 2016 has packed up and stormed off, leaving many dizzy in its wake. Now that 2017 is underway, its time to dust off the old Veritas Prep crystal ball and see what may be in store for 2017 in the worlds of test preparation and admissions. Odds are that we wont be right on all of these and we may even manage to get all four wrong but lets dig in and predict a few things that we expect to see in 2017: One-year MBA programs will reach a tipping point in the United States. For decades, one-year programs have been more popular in Europe than in the United States, although some prominent American programs, such as Kellogg, have moved to expand their one-year programs in recent years. With more and more articles appearing in the media about students and their families questioning the costs of higher education, accelerated programs will keep looking more and more appealing to applicants who dont want to spend six figures on an MBA. The globalization of management graduate education will continue, and more American business schools will start to embrace whats traditionally been a more Euro-flavored program type. Video prompts will become much more common in business school applications. Yes, we predicted this last year, and it didnt quite come to fruition. But, schools are becoming more and more comfortable with video as a medium for learning about applicants, and probably more importantly applicants themselves mostly seem to be comfortable with video. In AIGACs 2016 MBA Applicant Survey, only 16% of applicants surveyed said that video responses were the most challenging part of the application. Thats far smaller than the percentage of applicants who said that standardized tests (61%) and written essays (46%) were the most challenging! Rotman, Yale, Kellogg, and McCombs have helped blaze a video trail that we expect others will soon follow. An Asia-scale cheating scandal will hit the SAT or ACT in the United States. News articles about standardized test cheating scandals like this one and this one seem to come out nearly every month. Much of the blame lies with the pressure that students and especially their families put on themselves to do well on these exams. Its also greed. For every student that will do anything to do well on an exam, theres a person or company whos happy to take their money and do whatever it takes to give that student a leg up. Sometimes that means legally and ethically training that student to perform to the best of their ability, but many other times it means falsifying documents or providing students with live test questions for large sums of money. This kind of greed exists everywhere in the world, and its only a matter of time until a similar large-scale scandal happens in the U.S. Community colleges will gain a lot more recognition. Did you know that more than half of students who enroll in college first do so at a community college? Most Americans dont know that, even though community colleges have been the engine that educates millions of Americans each year. Well see the federal government putting more emphasis on jobs and job training in the coming year, and community colleges are perfectly positioned to serve that role. While it remains to be seen whether community colleges get all of the funding they need to keep serving their mission, we expect that, at a minimum, theyll start to get more recognition for the job they do to train and retrain Americas workforce. Happy New Year, everyone. We cant wait to check back in 2018 and see how this year turned out! By Scott Shrum