Best college admission podcast ever👏👏Thank you so much the YCBK team👍👍

This is an amazing free resource that has ZERO ads! The hosts cover several different topics on each episode. I seem to always learn something new in each episode— highly recommended! Topics include: college planning advice, answering listener questions, addressing current issues in the news, interviews with knowledgeable experts, and specific college spotlights.

I cannot overstate how amazing all this free, specific, in-depth information about every topic college admissions. Stuck has top experts, a deep look at a variety of colleges, and a calming mix of realism and idealism that is unique and grounding.

I like that you relay current, valuable information in an interesting, and not panic-inducing way. Also that you don’t sugarcoat the obvious.

I’ve listened to this podcast for the past year and plan to continue to listen for the next few years while my kids are in high school. Each episode has been tremendously helpful in understanding the college admissions landscape and more. It covers current topics with a lot of depth.

This is a show that doesn’t sugarcoat the info and they do not avoid controversial topics.

Interesting information, but it’s very frustrating to have interviews broken up into different episodes, especially given the poor search ability within the Apple Podcast app.

I’ve been doing a lot of research, have read a bunch of books, and this podcast is the most helpful resource I’ve found for understanding and navigating the process. It’s NOT like when we applied to college. At all. (Btw ignore the titles and just listen to episodes from new to old, skipping sections that don’t apply to your family.) Thank you Mark and team!!

I like all your content, but I really appreciate your recent comment that you don’t know what to say about the war. I empathize as I don’t know what to say either. I have wonderful friends and acquaintances both Jewish & Muslim. Sometimes the most honest thing we can say is I don’t know.

I listened to most YCBK episodes for over a year, spanning all of 2023, as we prepared to send our kid to college. There is much information here that is incredibly valuable and that you won’t get anywhere else. It’s a great view into how admissions officers think. On the other hand, I was frequently frustrated by the persistent racial biases of the hosts. There was almost a denial that race is a major hook at selective institutions: whenever they would list ‘hooks,’ race was either excluded or mentioned last. One co-host seemed, after every mention of white students, compelled to add “who are often the most privileged.” (She works at a very expensive private school.) Colleges were chided that they needed to “do the work” to admit more black students. It felt like every episode had multiple comments about race, even when that was not germain to the topic. Race is a high priority for this podcast, and maybe that’s fair, as it may represent the views of admissions officers as a whole. Coverage of the lawsuit against Harvard was particularly biased (those plaintiffs just “don’t understand”). The content is also unorganized, so I found myself skipping around a lot. To get the most out of it, you need to listen to several episodes back to back. The long digressions are easy to deal with by skipping ahead. I learned a lot from my year of listening, but the insights were scattered across many, many hours. And it felt like the hosts’ strongly support the admissions process being a tool primarily to provide racial equity and that this is the primary axis schools should use when building a diverse class. A more diverse (by viewpoint, not skin tone) set of hosts would make this a better listen.