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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
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.
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/
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.