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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?
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
Which is why I applied to exactly ONE college, where I knew I would get in wanted to go. Half the people I know apply to Stanford and crap just so their parents can brag about it, and brag even more if they get accepted. They have no intention of actually going there.
But frankly, the elephant in the room is that the students they DO accept get stuck with loans they can't pay off--proving their education was wildly overpriced. Being from a Big-Name School these days just isn't worth the extra $50,000. It's insane.
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
Maybe high schools should start advertising the merits of vocational and tech schools a little bit more. I remember my high school councilor advocating four year college to a lot of students that, quite frankly, just weren't going to do well in four year college (disinterested in abstract concepts, prefer working on something tangible, rather than developing math problems or theses, far too lazy to put more than an hour-a-day on homework, etc.). We have this obsession in the States with four year degrees, acting like employees without one are incompetent and useless. We have students that don't want to attend college attending college because they are told there's no other way to succeed in the world. And, simultaneously, it seems like fewer and fewer college kids I know are actually prepared for the world that they are put into. Few know how to maintain a car. Most don't understand the first thing about taxes. The concept of fiscal responsibility is lost on many of them. Hell, most kids I know didn't even know how to cook before heading off to college.
So maybe this increase in college applications is indicative of the trend that, when a society obsesses over a college degree in all walks of life, then that is one thing that most coming-of-age adults value.
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As a student who attends a very selective engineering school, I have long since realized that is the case. While convenient for me, the trend is disturbing from an ethical point of view.
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
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.)
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.
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.
Colleges get $50 (sometimes $100) from each applicant. That means that if Brown or Stanford increase their applicant pool by 5,000 people in a year, thats an extra quarter million they are making, minimum.
What's easier than making money from overpriced tuition? Convincing underqualified people to apply, taking their application fee, and instantly throwing out their application in a GPA/SAT filter.
Undergrads at prestigious universities are just the suckers that pay for all the R&D the grad students do. Do yourself a favor and research the undergrad programs in your state. There's a good chance you'll find an excellent program at a fraction of the cost. Of course you won't get the brand name recognition.. But you also won't be in debt the rest of your life.
I've always heard that unless you go to one of the top schools in the nation for your degree, it doesn't really matter where you go. 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 suppose there are regional exceptions (if you plan on staying in North Texas, SMU can be worth the money) or certain professions (USC is a much better choice for budding Speilbergs than just about any other college in the country), but outside of those two specifics it just doesn't matter a whole lot.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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.
On the other hand, one could argue that the education you get is largely unrelated to the school you attend. I would instantly pick an A student from UC Berkeley (or even someone from a cow college in flyover country) who was actively involved in outside projects over a C student at MIT who wasn't involved in outside projects. At an undergrad level, you can get the basic skills anywhere, and beyond that basic level, what you get out of your college education is directly proportional to what you put in. In the grand scheme of things, I'm not convinced that there's a dime's worth of difference on the average between a Berkeley grad who puts in the effort and an MIT grad who does the same. Most of what you really will need to know on the job, you'll be picking up in your first few weeks anyway, and (good) employers know this.
The only real advantage I can see for MIT and other schools that have strong specialization in a particular area over smaller, less specialized schools is that students have more opportunities to work in various areas of specialization that would not be feasible at other schools. This matters if you are hiring somebody in that area of specialization, but only for maybe a few years after graduation. After that, the field has changed too much for what they learned to be relevant anyway. The ability of a graduate to learn is far, far more relevant to that person's success than which specific pieces of information the person has learned upon graduation. Also, a fair amount of what you need to know for a given job is going to be specific to that job anyway, so it is critically important to be able to hit the ground running and learn as you go. That matters much more than what you know going in.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
To a certain extent; I'd extend the top school list down more, though. Like Vanderbilt is first-rate, has a strong alum network and great academic reputation nationwide (no, I didn't go there). USC probably not worth the money, even if you want to be the next Spielberg. SMU is way too expensive unless you're staying in Dallas and need to rely on the alumni network. I would not lump University of Phoenix together with even obscure state schools. I would always take the state school over UoP.
To add to the parent's point, there are tiers. There is the top tier populated with the Harvards and MITs. There is the second tier populated with good schools (both public and private). Going to one of these will look good on a resume but shouldn't make any recruiter drool. The third tier is populated with the safety schools of students who went to the first and second; you can still get a good education but it's not going to jump out on a resume. Fourth tier would have trade schools like University of Phoenix.
Disclaimer: I literally put these definitions together on the spot. Feel free to critique them but understand they are underdeveloped definitions.
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.
I think there's maybe an exception for known bottom of the bucket schools too. I mean, University of Phoenix is no 'any real college'.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
No such thing as an unemployed attorney? Sure there is: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/30/AR2010103000211.html/
And that should be considered a serious problem, because even high school students who do take their high school education seriously are adversely affected by how not seriously everyone around them takes it. And that factor is affected generally by how rich and/or white your neighborhood is.
In addition to that, high school students who take their education seriously are affected adversely by teachers who don't. There are many high school teachers who have an unjustifiably low opinion of their students. They're convinced that high school students are mindless dummies who are capable of no intelligent activity beyond regurgitating information - and acting on this theory, they eliminate any element of actual teaching/learning from their course material in favor of a "here is information, you must memorize, you must pass test" approach. That, in turn, interferes with the education of the students who actually do care. These are often the same teachers that demand complete respect from students while giving none in return. They don't realize that they don't even deserve respect. From my experience and observations, most high school teachers are not like this, but the above profile does describe a minority significant enough to interfere with the quality of education. And that's not even taking into consideration the teachers (at least in the US) who base their curricula on the contents of horribly inadequate state-administered tests.
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.
"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.