This week's reads: Harvard vs. Harvard
IN THE ROOM (A Saturday Series): Harvard says ease the pressure and raise kids of character and purpose. Harvard also just brought back the required SAT. Three reads on the mixed messages & what to do
I’m Monica Milligan. I’ve been in K–12 education for 20+ years, as a teacher, district leader, nonprofit leader, and school board member. I’m also a mom of a 6th and 10th grader. I write Raise Ready Moms to close the gap between what schools know and what families actually hear about how AI is changing childhood.
In the Room #12 | ~6–7-min read
Happy Saturday. And forgive me for going quiet last weekend, we were away on a family vacation.
This post comes courtesy of a stranger on our flight home. My husband and my oldest, who just finished her freshman year, spent the flight seated next to a rising senior hunched over his Common App essay. Over a few hours, the three of them got into it: what college is even for anymore (especially in an AI world), what makes an application actually land, and how any of that connects to what a kid does in high school.
That conversation stuck with me. I’ve spent years inside schools watching the admissions machine run, and a few more running a national college-access and persistence program. And it landed right on top of something I’d been chewing on since I wrote, a few weeks back, about how AI is quietly rewriting the job market your kid is walking toward.
Here’s where my head went. If the job market is changing this fast, then the calculus on which college, or whether the four-year path is even right for your kid, is changing too. And if that’s changing, then how we help them get ready has to change with it. Preparing for college was never a separate track from preparing for an AI world. It’s the same preparation, just wrapped differently.
Which brings me to the report that kept nagging at me the whole flight. In the same stretch of weeks, two arms of Harvard sent parents flatly opposite messages. Harvard’s education school put out a major report arguing we have to ease the achievement pressure that’s crushing teenagers, and raise kids of character and purpose instead. Meanwhile Harvard College, like nearly every school in the Ivy League, just brought back the required SAT. Ease up on your kid. Also, make sure they score higher. Pick one.
That contradiction isn’t really about Harvard. It’s the exact bind you’re standing in as a parent right now, made visible. The culture keeps telling your kid to be more relentless and more relaxed, more accomplished and more whole, all at once. And nobody hands you the instructions for holding both.
So here are three reads, and one thing to do with each.
Harvard’s other message: raise kids of character, not résumés
Making Caring Common (Harvard Graduate School of Education) · June 17, 2026 · ~5-min read
Every few years, a group at Harvard’s ed school called Making Caring Common publishes something titled Turning the Tide, essentially a letter to colleges, schools, and parents about what we should actually be valuing in kids. The 2026 edition, written with the national association of admissions counselors, lands on two findings that stuck with me.
First, a hard number. 34% of teens and 51% of young adults say they experience little or no meaning or purpose in their lives. That should stop all of us cold. Half of the young adults just past the finish line of all this striving are telling researchers they can’t feel the point of any of it.
Second, the part that surprised me, because it cuts against the advice most of us absorbed. The report says we should stop expecting teens to have a single defining “passion.” The pressure to package yourself into one neat story for an application is a big part of what’s hollowing kids out. The goal isn’t a settled passion by age 18. It’s helping a kid figure out what they actually care about, and how that connects to the choices in front of them. Those are different projects, and we’ve been quietly running the wrong one.
For you: Have the purpose conversation in a way that takes pressure off instead of adding it. The trap is turning “what do you care about?” into one more thing your kid has to have an impressive answer for. So name that out loud. Try this, genuinely, no follow-up quiz attached:
“I don’t need you to have your whole life figured out. I honestly don’t. I just want to know what’s felt worth your time lately, and why.”
Then let it be a small, real answer. Not a mission statement. You’re listening for one flicker of a thing they’d do even if it never went on a form. And keep collecting those flickers. Over time, they’re how your kid figures out what actually matters to them, so when the moment comes, you can help connect those values to the paths in front of them.
Meanwhile, the SAT is back (at almost every school that dropped it)
Inside Higher Ed · Oct 13, 2025 · ~4-min read
Here’s the counter-current. The test-optional era that started in the pandemic is basically over at the top schools. With Princeton’s announcement, seven of the eight Ivy League schools have brought back a testing requirement (Columbia is the lone holdout). Stanford, MIT, Georgetown, a long list of big public flagships, same move. Their stated reasons: grade inflation has made an “A” meaningless as a signal, and their own data shows test scores predict how students actually do once they arrive.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read this as “so the pressure’s real, better start prepping in eighth grade.” That’s the wrong lesson. Notice what several of these schools said in their own announcements: a clear requirement actually reduces stress, because it ends the exhausting guessing game of “is my score good enough to send?” The test is one contained, knowable thing. The danger isn’t the test. It’s letting the test metastasize, until it colonizes freshman year and every summer and the dinner table, and quietly crowds out everything the first read said matters.
For you: Put the test in a box, on purpose. It’s a real requirement now, so treat it like one: a defined stretch of prep, mostly junior year, with a start and an end. What it is not allowed to become is the weather your kid lives in for four years. When the anxiety tries to expand (”should we start prepping now?” in ninth grade), that’s your cue to shrink it back down, not feed it.
What selective colleges actually reward (from someone who’s been inside the room)
U.S. News, featuring Jeff Selingo · Feb 5, 2026 · ~5-min read
If you only follow one voice on how admissions really works, make it Jeff Selingo. He spent a year embedded inside admissions offices for his book Who Gets In and Why, and his newer book Dream School is the most level-headed thing I’ve read for parents. His core message is the antidote to the panic.
Two things stuck with me. One: depth beats breadth, every time. Admissions officers are not counting your kid’s eleven activities. They’re looking for the two or three where a kid went deep enough to have something real to show, or say. A padded résumé reads as busy, not committed.
Two: he tells families to drop the “Top 25 or bust” mindset entirely, because it’s both bad for kids’ mental health and, frankly, bad strategy. What actually predicts a good outcome, he argues, is fit: strong job prospects out of that specific school, hands-on learning, and whether a kid can find a place they belong. None of that is on the rankings list.
Put his advice next to the first two reads and the whole thing finally makes sense. The purpose the Harvard report wants, the depth Selingo describes, the character that no test can measure, those aren’t three separate assignments. They’re the same kid, built slowly, doing a few things they care about for real.
For you: This summer, run one quiet reflection with your kid, and ask nothing else of it. Selingo’s version is my favorite: “When this year, did you lose track of time in a good way?” A class, a project, a job, a person, a problem. That’s the thread. You don’t have to turn it into a plan or a program or a college essay. You just have to notice it, and protect it, and let it grow on its own clock.
Three reads, one argument the whole college-admissions world is having with itself. It will keep sending your kid contradictory messages: work harder and also find yourself, be exceptional and also be well. You can’t resolve that contradiction for the whole country. But you can decide which message runs your own house. And I’d put my money, every time, on the boring, durable stuff: a couple of things they love, a character you can point to, a kid who knows what’s worth their time. That outlasts any score.
On Tuesday I’ll get concrete, and personal. My oldest just finished her freshman year, and I’ve been using AI, the same tools everyone’s nervous about, to help her start thinking through her college options and how to actually prepare for them. I’ll walk you through exactly what we did, and what I’d do differently. If you’ve found something that’s working in your own house, hit reply and tell me. The best stuff in this newsletter comes from you.
See you Tuesday.
Monica
Raise Ready is a free newsletter for mothers raising kids who are ready for the world. New issues every Tuesday and Saturday.