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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."
College want their admissions process to become a proxy for due diligence in hiring. ("Sally went to XYZ college, so she's more likely to be a valuable employee than Bob who went to a less selective school.") While this makes sense a little bit, it's also scary. For example, does this mean that what kids do in high school will increasingly set their destinies for life? Are XYZ graduates actually better employees, or is it just marketing?
As my friends were in college, I was working as a car mechanic, making around 50k a year. Did that for about three years.
Once some of my friends got out of college, many of them couldn't find a job. For the past 5 years, I've been building my career by working as a programmer and, soon (if things go as they look like they will) as a business analyst for call center database development.
And some of my college-educated friends STILL can't find a job. I'm not saying a college education is worthless, but it is something to consider nowadays.
Living With a Nerd
I also applied for one school, my home University of Granada, in Spain. But that's just because the admissions system is completely transparent and I knew without room for exceptions: They average your high school GPA with the grade in a common regional exam, and then they rank applicants. Starting with the highest grades, they assign them to different schools and majors within. With my grade, I knew I would enter any major of choice, even if every applicant before me also chose that one school and major.
So my question is: what would have you done if you hadn't been accepted? Was it a similar, transparent system, or the more subjective and extensive classic US selection method?
To do list for Windows
Amusingly, I once worked at a company that refused to hire recent graduates from a certain local selective university because they found the graduates to be too egotistical to handle the kind of low profile work that is usually given to new hires with essentially no experience. That is not to say that there were not a lot of very sharp students coming out of that university. They just too often had a superiority complex for a while after they graduated.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
If I hadn't gotten in I would have been extremely surprised that a public college would turn down someone with a near-perfect GPA, an entire semester of AP credits (good for college credit), and relevant extracurricular activity. And concluded that I didn't want to go there after all and gone to the community college for year. Sure, it wasn't totally transparent, but it was pretty obvious.
I know some people don't like stressing about one number, grades, and you can see it to an extreme in Asian countries and the like, but I think it beats stressing over whether you have enough other crap on your resume--in addition to grades, not instead of. Plus I wonder how many people who get into college on something other than their grades actually get a job to pay off their loans. There's a point at which you just say fuck it and use the simpler, more predictable, less "equitable" metric.
Okay, now I'm rambling, but that reminded me of a chapter in a book I read about Canada's hockey player recruiting strategy. Basically, everybody has to compete against other kids born in the same year as them, and as early as age 10 the best players of each year get selected for better training camps. The problem is the kids born in January and February are essentially a year older than the kids born in November and December, and the almost-eleven-year-olds beat the crap out of the just-turned-ten-year-olds, and they get selected. So if you're born in the second half of the year, you can't play hockey in Canada.
The funny thing is Harvey Mudd is one of the best colleges in the country. For some engineering disciplines probably beats out Harvard.
What has amazed me is that while the population of graduating high school students have grown, the number of admission slots to the elite universities have remained relatively constant. So inevidently the process for getting one of those admission slots has become more selective. What I would like to see is someone create a new university or universities that compete with the Harvards, Princetons, and Yales of the world. Some additional effects would be to bring the cost of college down as there is more competition for students and to employ more PhDs who want to work in academia but are having a hard time finding a job due to the lack of new professorship opening up each year.
// Universities are supposed to be non-profit but I just had to throw in #4
1. Start elitist university..
2. Recruit lots of applications for students.
3. Reject 90% of them.
4. PROFIT.
.
So while Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and a handful of others are excellent, there's no point spending the money on a Vanderbilt, USC, or SMU when you can go to a state school or University of Phoenix.
I work in higher ed. I'd advise my own kids that if they don't end up at a really top school that a state school will do just fine. However, I'd certainly avoid them to avoid schools like the University of Phoenix. They're expensive, unremarkable, and poorly regarded.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
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.
This is a huge piece of great advice for HS students! I took the PSAT my sophomore year of HS and did better than anyone else in my school (juniors included). My adviser told me that, with my score, I could get a full-ride to any school I wanted. When PSAT time rolled around for my junior year I came down with appendicitis and missed the test. Later on, when I started looking for scholarships, I was rejected out of hand for 95% of them because sophomore scores can't net you the National Merit Semifinalist title (only junior scores can). That single stroke of shitty luck cost me a lot of $$$. Take the parent's advice to heart young ones.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I interviewed a recent grad from Dartmouth who informed me that he wasn't interested in any projects that were on a schedule or a budget. I told him that he should consider running for public office and he said he was an anarchist and didn't believe in organized government. So I suggested maybe using his own money to finance his own venture and he informed me that he didn't believe in capitalism. I really wanted to hire him simply to see if a few months in the real world would help him understand how life works, but I had other candidates who really wanted to work. I ended up hiring a person who didn't even have her degree yet and she did an excellent job. Colleges don't matter. People matter.
No such thing as an unemployed attorney? Sure there is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/30/AR2010103000211.html/
Of all the problems with the University system in the US, why bring this up?
UCLA gets the most applicants? UCLA is the largest state college in the most populous state in the country. Hardly shocking that it gets a lot of applicants.
How about we talk about the problems with recruiting kids into dead-end majors, the lack of practical training, the idea that even an exhaustive college education isn't sufficient (post-doc anyone?), the student-as-labor model of research or absurdly high administrator salaries?
Actually, of the dozens of applicants I have had with MBA's from UoP, they all were arrogant, overconfident, and exhibited poor decision making skills when tested. They may have been good at one time, but in the past decade when I have been hiring people, the UoP MBA students they have turned out have been marginal.
When I first started looking for people, I eagerly thought that an MBA, even from UoP would be a decent entry point. Some business skills are useful in a Product Management position, even at a junior level.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
As someone who went to Mudd 20-cough years ago, I've found it works well, when seeking employment, as the best school no-one's heard of. Sure everyone and their dog knows MIT and Caltech, but if your interviewer knows Mudd, it's a good sign of a with-it interviewer and a truly tech- (or engineereing- or science-) savvy, non-WTF company. Their self-deprecation pretty much fits this image; underneath it they absolutely know they're elite.
Being a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at one of the big name Ivy League schools, I am yet to see all these "amazing" students. Yes, practically every student get the basics (something that doesn't happen at less selective schools), but give them a problem that requires creativity and you'll see that a handful of students in the class are able to solve it. They might work hard and they are motivated, but it's not like every student is terribly smart.
As someone who has hired and worked with lots of ivy league graduates (and is married to someone from a school in the "ivy range of selectivity and reputation"), I agree, and think you're picking up on something important. The system really rewards conscientiousness and ability to emulate rather than creativity and intelligence per se. My experience is that public schools have a lot more variability, but the outstanding students are just as outstanding.
I don't mean this as a knock on the selective schools or the people who graduate from them--the schools are great as are [most of] the students who go to them. I think, though, that using an ivy degree as an indication of anything in particular is difficult. You're better off just interviewing the person for the job along with other candidates who will look similar in every other way.