<p>I was just curious about the admissions process, including how admissions checks their accuracy. Once they go through the admissions process for a class, do they go back to it one or two years later, to see if what they thought about the students was right? In other words, did the students from X HS really live up to their promise? Did the one student they let in but considered really borderline, turn out Phi Beta Kappa? </p>
<p>Basically, I'm asking, how does the admissions staff evaluate whether they do a good job, or a bad job, whether their criteria is on target, or needs revamping? Or at least, whether they guessed right or wrong !</p>
<p>Most schools do track various institutional trends (i.e., grad rates, drop out rates, etc.) but I doubt few look at individual admissions decisions, only the overall picture.</p>
<p>I think individual admissions officers might occasionally track a student or three in an anecdotal kind of way but I don't believe there is much time to study admissions results in anything other than aggregate...too many variables, too much statistical "noise."</p>
<p>Then how do they know if they are being effective? I see many comments about how the SAT's only predict frist year success, and that the GPA is a more reliable predictor of overall success. They must track something to know this, no?</p>
<p>PS - nice to have you back, Carolyn. I hope this means your daughter is doing well?</p>
<p>To tell you the truth, I really don't think that they have the time nor the energy to track all of their decisions. Right after (and usually even before) they get one class settled, they have to start recruiting the next one. (When I've visited my university this summer, I've seen other students already hustling current and curious high school seniors around campus. It was kind of scary knowing that not too long ago, I was one of those perspective students.) </p>
<p>However, as TheDad stated above, probably certain admissions officers do track certain students that they connected or worked closely with over a certain year to make sure they're doing all right, but that's as personal as it gets. I'm sure that the overall adcoms do look over the trends of the class as a whole over the years though. When they are evaluating an application, they really can't know how that person will fare in college no matter how well the kid did in high school. Sometimes the best high school students do horribly in college and vice versa. It's just a guessing game in which the adcom has to usually go with its gut when trying to win.</p>
<p>I know MIT used to track the success of the graduates of various high schools; my HS got an award from them for the excellence of their graduates. </p>
<p>In some cases, a college may track retention rates, i.e. out of the Fall 2005 freshman class, what percentage will actually graduate in 2009.
But that's probably it...</p>
<p>Remember that adcoms are trying to build freshmen CLASSES too. as such, it's not entirely about the individual but also about how they fit into the class too, and therefore, schools track the graduating class but not necessarily the individual students.</p>
<p>The California State University (CSU) keeps track of retention rates, GPAs, and English and Math proficiencies by high school (only California high schools though). So you can look up a high school and a year, and see how many of its students at CSUs continued past their freshman year, how many entered with college-level English skills, and so forth. It's an awesome indicator of grade inflation because it tracks incoming freshmen's highschool GPAs, and what they got on their English and Math proficiency tests. I remember there was this one high school where the average GPA of the freshmen entering CSU was something like a 3.0, but over FIFTY PERCENT of them failed to test into college level English and needed to take remedial classes. I heard the University of California system (UC) also keeps similar statistics, although it doesn't make them available to the public as far as I know. And if they do it, I'm sure other colleges keep track of such information.</p>
<p>The Adcoms may not have the time/resources do it, but institutional researchers and registrars and others may, and that information is naturally going to be shared with the admissions office. I know of studies that have looked at overall performance and performance in certain courses.</p>
<p>You might also be surprised how much anecdotal information gets filtered back, from faculty. It's not as empirical, of course, but it is feedback!</p>
<p>Yes, to all of the above responses; also, those schools with Enrollment Managment Deans or VP's - tracking retention rates, grad rates, employment & grad school placement rates would be part of their overview whether they track the numbers themselves or get the info. from the other uni. offices.
And yes, the feedback from faculty is always heard....particularly at semester Convocations!</p>
<p>Schools sometimes track entire classes as part of special studies. Back in the 60s and early 70s, Williams admitted 10% of their class as part of their "A Better Chance" initiative. Some folks thought it was an affirmative action effort; others an attempt to beef up the football team (the football team DID become a powerhouse in this period.) Basically, the idea was to admit 10% of the student body with stats, etc. below what was normal, and track their success. The results they found at the time was that they couldn't find any significant differences between the 10% and the rest of the student body after four years.</p>
<p>Smith did the same for 3 years, from 1999-2002, to try to determine whether entering SAT scores were a predictor of student success after students arrived. The found no association (mind you, these were of students already admitted.) Other schools: Bates, Mt. Holyoke, Bowdoin, etc. have studied whether students who do not submit SAT scores as part of the admissions process do better or worse once on campus. (No correlation with better academic results.)</p>
<p>The flaw in all of these studies is that they can't compare these results with the students they don't admit.</p>
<p>The adcoms get huge feedback from the faculty (according to a friend of mine who just retired as assistant admissions dean at one of those prestigious LACs.) She says that, on the whole, they aren't happy campers, and adcoms often find themselves pulled between admitting students who make the stats look good and those whom the faculty actually want.</p>
<p>while there may be institutional attempts to track admission results, I think that by and large they are shooting in the dark. If you read the book "The Gatekeepers" you'll see that many of the adcoms are young and change jobs every few years. So even if there was a desire to see how things turned out, the odds are that 5 or 6 years later most of the adcoms who made the decisions are gone.</p>
<p>by Klitgaard in 1985, I think, looked at this question and some of the conclusions I remember are that nothing predicts academic success as well as SAT scores and grades, and nothing predicts leadership qualities better than demonstrated leadership qualities in high school. Obvious, I suppose but not welcome to some. Anyway, the interesting point I remember is that the author was an admissions officer for the Kennedy School of Govt at Harvard, and said that one experiment the admissions committee did was to admit kids based on personal qualities and lower scores for a few years, and that the result was a noticeably nicer class. Harvard discontinued that experiment.</p>
<p>I have some other comments, but I'll put them in my college trip report in a new thread.</p>
<p>What does an adcom do if they have accepted a student and then three years later the sibling applies --would they check on how the first student is doing then?</p>
<p>Unless the student was a standout in one way or another, I really don't think the adcom is going to track and judge the student's sibling based on how well the first student was doing. They deal with thousands of students each year. I really don't think they have the time to go into a detailed analysis of two siblings that are a year apart in the admissions game let alone three years. It may help in terms of legacy (if they count siblings as such), but I think that's about it.</p>
<p>I don't think one student and his/her sibling has anything to do with the other. The adcoms (at least at the large universities where they get thousands of applicants) base the admission on each student's own merits, and especially if the school doesn't bother to conduct interviews, they probably wouldn't have the time or energy or inclination to even think of checking.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that, with electronic records etc., it is rather easy to do the research discussed here. I am quite certain elite colleges look at such things. When I get a chance, I'll peruse the ed research literature to see what it says.</p>
<p>Another point: colleges that offer a "conditional" acceptance to a summer program - where they are basically saying we are taking a chance on you since you don't meet our typical standards - will, of course be tracking outcomes. Most of the time, this conditional acceptance will require the student to attend some courses for credit during the summer as well as study skills and writing skills etc. And after the successful completion of the summer courses, they may offer a reduced course load and other support during the freshmen yr. with the goal that the student will be integrated into the normal class schedule by the soph. yr.</p>
<p>A school offering any conditional program like this will be able to see if their standards for admission need fine-tuning; i.e. maybe we can admit more kids with "B-" grades or lower SAT's, but they may need to have the additional support as mentioned above to successfully navigate the college.</p>
<p>There are two different questions in here. 1. Were they right to admit applicant A, considering A's subsequent performance?
2. Were they right to admit applicant A over applicant B? It is often said that adcoms could throw out the whole class of admitted students and admit a whole new class from further down the list and the new class would do as well as the actually admitted one. So this second question is unanswerable.
As for question 1, there have been studies showing the correlation (or lack thereof) of SAT scores and 1st -year performance, AP scores and college performance, etc... But really, for adcoms, the most important measure of whether they were right or not are the retention and graduation rates. There will be individual mistakes; and profs have been known to wonder why some students made it into their college/class. But if a college has a high freshman retention rate and a graduation rate in the high 90s, I suspect adcoms don't see the need for further studies or second-guessing their decisions</p>