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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."
Well, it depends. Some schools ARE better than others. I hardly think you'd consider an engineering degree from MIT equivalent to an engineering degree from UC Berkley - not knocking their program there, just saying that MIT's is better. However, for the majority of colleges, no, it doesn't matter much because few people are going to know EVERY program at EVERY college to judge on how your specific choice of college affected your education.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
That is how it is in law school. A lot of law firms put a lot of weight on GPA and what school one graduated from. A tier 1 college (as per US News and World Report) will get one hired essentially anywhere. If someone came from a lower tier, they would need to have a resume with entries to compensate for not having Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, or UT by their academic section.
This doesn't say that a lower tier is a bad thing -- there is no such thing as an unemployed attorney unless they get disbarred, but the plum positions starting from graduating are essentially about what tier you came from, all things being equal.
To be fair, this means the Ivies are the best. Despite a staggering price tag, they still appear to be worth it.
The other side of that coin is that the vast majority of private colleges and out-of-state public colleges are simply not worth full price. There are limited exceptions, but mostly you shouldn't bother unless you can get a scholarship (and if your intellect is formidable enough to exceed the capabilities of your state's flagship university, it's good enough to get you a scholarship at a good one).
Toward that end, I have one piece of advice for any 9th or 10th graders reading this: practice and study for the PSAT. Your high school may not place much emphasis on it, especially if you live in a rural area; they may not even tell you when it will be offered. MAKE SURE YOU TAKE IT IN 11TH GRADE. A sufficiently high score (and if you're in a low-achieving state, that score won't be all that high) will make you a National Merit Semifinalist, which is enough to get you a full ride at quite a lot of universities and at least half tuition at many others. It will also open up other scholarship opportunities. And apply for every scholarship you hear of; $1000 here and there adds up.
Dude, I went to Princeton. At least in the engineering school, you do not "coast" on academics. It's a 70hr/wk workload. I graduated with honors - with a C+ average.
You sweat blood to get a BSE degree at Princeton.
Ditto for pol sci or international studies; the Woodrow Wilson school is incredibly hard.
Maybe as an art major or something, but the majority of programs is *hard*.
OK, I can't spead for Harvard or Yale, no doubt they're a cake walk.
The biggest name schools aren't so expensive. The Ivies, and I assume Stanford, won't leave you with more than ~$20k of debt, and places like Yale and Princeton replaced loans with grants a few years back, leaving you with 0 debt. If you made the mistake of having a college fund, though, the amount they expect you to pay will magically increase by exactly the size of that fund.
True. At Stanford, children from families making less than $100k pay Zero tuition. Children from families that make less than $250k receive academic aid so that they end up paying less than if they had gone to a state school unassisted. I believe Harvard is going to start doing something similar.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/february8/tuition-financial-aid-020910.html
"This is the millennial generation, the so called "trophy kids""
This is nothing new or unique to this generation, it's called the "inexperience of youth", it's been going on for millenia and old farts like you and me have been complaining about it since the dead sea was just not felling very well.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." - Socrates
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.