College Application Inflation — Marketing Meets Admissions

gollum123 sends this quote from the Chronicle of Higher Education: "The numbers keep rising, the superlatives keep glowing. Each year, selective colleges promote their application totals, along with the virtues of their applicants. For this fall's freshman class, the statistics reached remarkable levels. Stanford received a record 32,022 applications from students it called 'simply amazing,' and accepted 7 percent of them. Brown saw an unprecedented 30,135 applicants, who left the admissions staff 'deeply impressed and at times awed.' Nine percent were admitted. Such announcements tell a story in which colleges get better — and students get more amazing — every year. In reality, the narrative is far more complex, and the implications far less sunny for students as well as colleges caught up in the cruel cycle of selectivity. To some degree, the increases are inevitable: the college-bound population has grown, and so, too, has the number of applications students file, thanks in part to online technology. But wherever it is raining applications, colleges have helped seed the clouds — by recruiting widely and aggressively for ever more applicants. Many colleges have made applying as simple as updating a Facebook page. Some deans and guidance counselors complain that it's too easy. They question the ethics of intense recruitment by colleges that reject the overwhelming majority of applicants. Today's application inflation is a cause and symptom of the uncertainty in admissions."

Comments

The Ivy League is the worst

[Animats]

The Ivy League is the worst. Getting into MIT is hard, but so is going to MIT. (Despite this, if you get into MIT, you have a 90% chance of graduating.) Getting into the Ivy League schools is hard, but then you can make contacts and coast on academics. George Bush Jr. went to Yale and Harvard, after all.

(I went to Stanford, in CS, in the 1980s. The education was at best mediocre.)

Re:Will high school grades determine kids' destini

[viking099]

Or that they have a good sense of humor.

Like that one school I saw a flyer for:
"Attend Harvey Mudd! Then you tell people where you went to school can say it quickly and make people think you were saying, 'Harvard Med!'"

Re:Start a new college

[blair1q]

One flaw in your plan:

All the non-"elitist" universities tried to do exactly that. But the "elitist" universities out-competed them for competent staff and other marketable superiorities.

You'll be starting out at the bottom of the list. Just rejecting 90% of your applicant's won't help you climb it.

(And yes, I get the joke, but not everyone else will, because some of them didn't go to good schools...)

Re:Will high school grades determine kids' destini

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming in #2 only to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Re:Not to mention, what's the reward?

[ciaohound]

We've run all the call centers out of the United States and into places like India and Mexico :)