<p>That article was a piece of fluff. What is the definition of “the best” ? GPA and SAT - that’s it? It would be more honest to make the process transparent to reveal all the quotas they have in place to get their ideal class. This is an institution that discriminated against jews and gays in the past. They have defined best and brightest any way they wanted to, in terms not easy to pin down. They can do and say and act anyway they please. They spend a lot of money protecting their brand name and convincing as many students as possible to apply every year.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It is quite possible that the incremental cost of processing an additional obviously unqualified application is less than the application fee.</p>
<p>^ That’s an economically sophisticated point about marginal cost of one unit of recruiting followed up by a submitted application, but in general the sophisticated admission offices are not just looking for more applications, but for the applications with the better conversion rate of paying enrolled students (and students can only enroll without dragging down the quality of the college if they are above a certain level of quality). </p>
<p>[Maguire</a> Associates - Services - EMPOWR: Optimizing Student Recruitment](<a href=“http://www.maguireassoc.com/services/empowr.html]Maguire”>http://www.maguireassoc.com/services/empowr.html)</p>
<p>^ shadstatic MIT is extremely competitive as well, maybe less applicants because the school attracts the math&science-y types.</p>
<p><a href=“tokenadult:”>quote</a> </p>
<p>in general the sophisticated admission offices are not just looking for more applications, but for the applications with the better conversion rate of paying enrolled students (and students can only enroll without dragging down the quality of the college if they are above a certain level of quality).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Reposting the same wrong statements with the exact same link claimed as supporting information, doesn’t make them correct. The page you cite (an enrollment consultant’s description of services) makes it very clear that, whatever the population that a university seeks to enroll, increasing applications is always considered a good thing, whether or not the applicants are from the target population. (There is a separate problem of how to allocate the recruitment budget among different pools of potential applicants, and here the enrollment models play a role. But no matter how the school decides to make that allocation, more applications are considered desirable, not a necessary evil or even a cost.) Some quotations from the consultant:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Colleges are looking for more applications, period. Getting more applications from underqualified or uninterested (low yield) students is beneficial financially as well as for marketing. Indeed, the auto-reject, skim and discard, applications are the most profitable of all and the “sophisticated admissions offices” of the Ivy League are the worst offenders in soliciting as many useless, preventable, no-hope applications as possible. To the extent that more applications also leads to more qualified applicants being considered, that too is a win for the college. </p>
<p>As correctly explained in post #42, given an admissions office set up to handle at least a certain minimum number of applications, every additional application represents both a profit and an increase in selectivity, a marketable (statistical) increase in the quality of enrolled students, and other benefits.</p>
<p>^ What part of “are not just looking for” do you not understand?</p>