Blake’s College Map, located in the college counseling area, will have a noteworthy change when it is posted for the class of 2018. The map will still show all of the schools our seniors will be attending next year, but unlike past iterations of the map, student names will not be included.

The primary reason that names will be removed is, according to college counselor Jim Mahoney, that students frequently didn’t want to have their college of choice be shown to everyone at the school. About past years, Mahoney says that “each year we [college counseling] would hear from more and more kids behind the scenes who didn’t want their name on the map … kids who maybe didn’t get their first choice or had to make a decision based on cost or other factors that have them feel less promotional about their choice.”

It is also important to note that Blake’s tradition of posting student decisions is very uncommon, as Mr. Mahoney states that “we really couldn’t find another independent school that put student names on a map the way we did.”

When told about the change coming to the map, some seniors had very excited reactions. Linus Bendel-Stenzel ‘18 says that the removal of names is “fantastic because it lets people be anonymous when they want to, and otherwise, they can tell people [about their school of choice] if they want to.”

Other seniors were less positive about the change. Campbell Morrison ‘18 feels that Blake “just tries to make getting into college seem not stressful instead of just acknowledging that it is stressful. They just try to then dissociate kids from their colleges that they got in to.”

Mr. Mahoney summarized the decision by saying “we want to be proud of our students but we also want to honor those students that don’t feel comfortable having their name and college put up for the whole school to see. There are a lot of opportunities for kids to tell people where they’re going but we didn’t feel institutionally that that was our job to publicize it.”