Application Inflation Has Many Causes and Consequences (Chronicle of Higher Edu.)

Parent Cafe
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<p>Our S is now a freshman (graduated a year early)- and our mailbox is still being flooded with very mis-matched mailings. You can read old threads with his stats-- 750+ all SATIIs, 5s on 4 STEM APs, 3.86 unweighted, good ECs, great recs, yadaa yadaa.
Anyways he was accepted to Caltech, UIUC, MIT, CMU, RPI (safe school) and waitlisted to Stanford.</p>

<p>Now let me tell you what kind of marketing still floods our mailbox-- completely the wrong marketing.
He didn’t get any mail from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn and He gets Dartmouth mail on a fairly regular basis-- and had one Columbia brochure a while back–go figure? Clearly Harvard didn’t even consider him on their marketing profile (it was mutual!) although it was a potential “match” (in so far as anyone might be a match).</p>

<p>What we find interesting is that every small catholic, and Jesuit school on the wazoo has sent him mail (and he’s not even christian!) plus a good number of schools that are so so so so far below his stats-- he wouldn’t have even considered the schools even with a full ride. All three branches of the military academies also hit the box regularly. Tons of mismatched school send repeat postcards and glossy brochures. He has even hit the spam link on the emails and unsubscribe buttons and the mail still keeps coming.</p>

<p>So it’s an interesting twist-- he’s being “recruited” by schools he’s grossly overqualified for and although he was a reasonable match for the top schools-- they did NOT bother send brochures. </p>

<p>I wonder if I can write on the envelope “Unsolicited -return to sender”?</p>

<p>Odd odd odd</p>

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<p>It’s a lovely story(the homeless girl who was accepted by Harvard) and I am happy for her - but did you notice - she applied to 20 colleges! Why?</p>

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<p>My son and I unfortunately did not discover CC until after all of his applications were sent in. He had received tons of mail from every IVY as well as many other prestigious schools. We had gone through the college application game before but my daughters had not been as actively recruited and wanted to stay more local. We were totally drawn in and my son applied to several IVY’s as well as several safeties. Thank goodness for the safeties! The school that by far sent him the most amount of mail was Wash U where he got waitlisted. My son had a difficult time last spring but he ended up at CWRU with a good scholarship and he is loving every minute of it. Everything works out in the end, but I truly regret all the time my son spent on college applications for colleges where he truly had no chance of being admitted. And I regret all those application fees! Yes, we were naive.</p>

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<p>My older son didn’t get any of Harvard’s marketing until late November which kind of surprised me as he was a legacy and had checked off the PSAT line for send me stuff. He had great PSAT scores and grades. I actually really think they are targeting the diamonds in the rough from places that have never considered that they were good enough for Harvard. If it takes a 100 pieces of mail for them to find the 1 kid they want - I think that’s Harvard’s decision to make. That said, I wish more students would look beyond the choice of HYPMCS and the state uni. My older son applied to 8, my younger son to 7, they both had reasonable choices in April. Both ended up at choices that were right for them, and in both cases, not the most highly ranked (according to USNWR) colleges offering them spots.</p>

<p>The homeless girl applied to 20 colleges because except for the need only colleges it’s really hard to predict financial aid packages.</p>

<p>Interestingly neither of my kids ever received a single piece of mail from WUSL even though it has a reputation for sending too much. Instead both kids got lots of mail from colleges that ranked way, way, way below their safeties.</p>

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<p>Yep, it is important to add to this discussion the College Board’s self-interested complicity in the process - the granddaddy in the enrollment management marketing conglomerate. </p>

<p>Hmm … interesting idea … a boycott … how to spread to word to a critical mass of students to not participate in receiving marketing by just bubbling “NO” on the tests. Students (and guidance counselors and parents) would also have to agree to stop participating in researching colleges from all other sources (published guides, test prep companies, third party college websites, ex-adcom tell-all books, news media blogs, etc.) and demand accurate, transparent, full disclosure information from the colleges themselves. Agree to eliminate the middleman - stop spending money, time and energy anywhere else except with high school teaching and guidance staff, and direct inquiries to (not receiving unsolicited information from) the colleges themselves. How about this people - a world where college admissions just involves educators and parents talking to their students about education. Nice, huh?</p>

<p>Yes, Frazzled, I know, the reality is the big guys will still win, this is a pipe dream, but still one can dream … dreaming about change is better than double-speak about accepting reality, IMHO.</p>

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<p>Maybe this works for you because your child goes to a school with guidance counselors and teachers that have the time and ability to do this, or you spend time on CC and are very knowledgeable about colleges. But this is not common at all. At the majority of high schools, guidance counselors have too many students to deal with and more important things to worry about (such as getting people to graduate on time). Things like Naviance not widespread and visits from colleges to the high schools themselves are limited to the large state universities. I believe many of the top colleges try to remedy this by having visits that are directed to an entire metropolitan area rather than high schools, but the publicity for this is generated by the mailings that seem to be criticized here. And people in general are very uninformed about colleges. Again, I went to an average suburban high school in Ohio, and I learned more about Oberlin, Kenyon, Wooster, OWU, Denison, Case Western, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, and many other schools on CC than I did from all other sources combined (well, actually, not Case Western but only because a close family member went there). The point of these mailings is to attract people that would have never considered the college beforehand. I highly doubt that they would spend the money and effort with these if educators and parents were enough.</p>

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<p>I guess the point several posters are making is that it’s unfair to market colleges to students who clearly don’t have a chance at admission. Is it okay then to target students who might have a chance of admission? How about students who should have a chance of admission (provided enough better-qualified students apply elsewhere)? I mean, how does the college know in advance which kids have a strong chance of getting in? They have to read the applications to find out, don’t they? </p>

<p>I have no objection to colleges being pressured to re-examine their marketing practices. They’re obviously not going to do it just because many people think they should. College marketing had zero impact on my kids’ college searches and admission results because we saw it as marketing. If each college’s cover letter had to say “You probably won’t get in because last year we only admitted 7 percent of all applicants and their average stats were 4.0 GPA and 2250 SAT” - well, it would have saved me the trouble of looking that up, I suppose. But I don’t see an implicit promise in “You’re the kind of student we’re looking for” when the admission rate is 7 percent. And yes, I looked up the admission rates. No one is keeping it a secret that Harvard is hard to get into.

Since I agree with PG’s points earlier in the thread, I just wanted to respond to this by saying that my kids are hardly the last in a long line of college grads; they’re second generation. Yes, I gave a crap about the process, primarily because college represented such a huge expenditure for our family (and really, you don’t have to be all that savvy to recognize that). We have a peasant suspicion of people who want to sell us something, and it’s that quality, not a privileged background, that let us tell the difference between marketing and recruiting.</p>

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<p>Haha I remember when I got my Harvard letter and application in the mail…threw it straight into the trash. Not only would I have gotten rejected, but Harvard isn’t even good for the major that I’m pursuing.</p>

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I’m wondering, with the use of online applications and the common application, wouldn’t it be possible for a university to electronically screen the applications and automatically reject anyone with stats below a certain level who didn’t meet the criteria for URM, athlete, or other hook? They could even generate automated “personalized” rejection letters. Then no one even has to give them the 5-10 minute cursory review.</p>

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<p>^^Sure, or like businesses they could have students or assistants or temps screen the apps and set aside or sort applications. I would be surprised if that didn’t happen at many colleges and universities perhaps it’s not an electronic sort but perhaps a manual sort. Why would you have a highly compensated employee sifting through the intitial cut? A smaller college may not need to do this if their admissions employees have the time, but a larger school or a school that is inundated with apps above and beyond what the school is willing or able to support with admissions advisors may very well have an early sort.</p>

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<p>The issue in my honest opinion is that it’s not so much a significant increase in applicants, but rather the increasingly-narrowing scope of “Elite Institutions.” Look, i’m not going to preach that this is just because i’m some narrow minded kid who is only mad because he wasn’t good enough; assuming that over the fact that the system in the US is flawed is very narrow minded. </p>

<p>Each year, students and parents try extremely hard to the best schools in the country. The increasing number of applicants and the lowering acceptance rate is due to a myriad of factors:</p>

<p>1) Ranking Systems-Parents and students want to be proud of the school they or their child attends, and at the beginning and even during the process they look at rankings like US News in World’s, which if anyone looks at the criteria evaluated closely, will find the rankings to be completely subjective and based on factors that quite frankly have nothing to do with how likely an individual will succeed. </p>

<p>2) Accessability-For some odd reason, in my school anyways, everyone assumes that the top 20 schools all are focused on undergraduate students and are very open to allowing them into internships and research. To contrast, many argue that it is endowments, not the desire to teach that draw professors toward these schools. On top of that, a portion of these schools really focus more on graduate research than the undergrad students and, like every school, are full of TAs adjuncts and temp professors. However, I will not generalize because I know for a fact WASHU only has one english class taught by TAs.</p>

<p>3) “It’s a great school, I’m going to succeed here.”-this idea that every student will be able to succeed in a noteworthy school is false. There have been multiple studies on the idea of multiple intelligences and it’s simply false to assume each kid will both be able to handle the workload and succeed at these schools. Students are no longer looking at schools where they feel most comfortable and in some cases are going to schools for the name or for their parents. Even the former Dean of MIT addressed this, “…a few weeks after sending the acceptance/rejection letters for the Class of 2006, I received a reply from a father…’You rejected my son. He’s devastated. See you in court… I received another letter…from the man’s son. It read: ‘Thank you for not admitting me to MIT. This is the best day of my life.’" </p>

<p>4) Perception of Success-Because of the publicity the schools get, many people assume that the wealthy all went to IVY League schools. But you can’t assume that because 1.) A students personal qualities and motivation ultimately affect what they do in school and ultimately that determines their “propensity for success” and 2.) There are plenty of examples of people that did go to good schools and become success but there are also plenty of people that went to what’s considered less than adequate schools or even dropped out but still became successful. Look at the Fortune 500 CEOs </p>

<p>[Where</a> the Fortune 50 CEOs Went to College - TIME](<a href=“http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1227055,00.html]Where”>http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1227055,00.html)</p>

<p>These people succeed because of who they were, not where they went, and this is what people refuse to see.</p>

<p>5) What I call the “Applicant Paradox”-It’s not secret that about twenty to thirty years ago, many schools only required SAT/ACT scores and a class report with GPA. Today, you need ECs, Comm Service, great scores, GPA; anything that will make you stand out amongst the applicants. Because of this, applicants will undergo unnecessary stress and accumulate almost questionable levels of Comm service, ECs and more because they want to look different from the pack. But the more people that apply, the more effort and essential crap the have to add to their applications, which in the end make them look more similar than different. </p>

<p>(On a side note I believe a majority of those ECs and Comm service hours are a bunch of BS and some students do them not out of altruism, but because they know they have to do it to get noticed…not all applicants are like this)</p>

<p>There are over 4000 institutions of higher learning in this country alone, yet the media and mainstream society is forcing every to look at maybe the top 50. People don’t like to hear that they aren’t meant to be at the top 20 schools. This isn’t bad, it’s simply that they offer an environment for a specific group of students, not every applicant.</p>

<p>Call me whatever you like: cynic, sour-grape, idiot but the fact is still fact: admissions is becoming more difficult, and society has become so enveloped in it that a simple, non-specific postcard automatically causes someone to assume that they are meant for a specific school.</p>

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<p>sylvan and momofthree - But why even have unqualified students spend the time on the app and the money on the fee and apply? Why not put a big bold statement on the website saying that students below a 3.8 unweighted GPA and 2200 SAT need not apply - or whatever the criteria might be? I’ll tell you why - because colleges WANT unqualified apps. They boost their application numbers, increase their selectivity and line their pockets with the app fees of these hapless students. It’s a con game basically.</p>

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<p>Oh my god, this is quite possibly one of the most ridiculous statements I’ve ever heard.</p>

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<p>Apologies, *2000</p>

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<p>I don’t know specifically that colleges “want” unqualified apps. More likely they don’t care as long as it isn’t financially burdensome to sort through them. They are being “rewarded” by outside and third party companies profiting from the process like CB and publishers of books and magazines. It is making it easier for them to meet their student demo goals. Target marketing is dependent on the consumers choosing to believe a certain set of claims and bestowing certain attributes on those products. Changing consumer beliefs is very difficult. Outcomes based data is not abundant enough for undergraduate degrees to change public opinion and colleges have no real business reason to use outcomes based data since the student cycle is only realistically every year. Consumers will continue to impart attributes to those colleges/universities that are media visible and consumers are brand loyal. Who wants to believe that a $20,000 car is the equivalent of a $50,000 car or that a public education can garner someone the same results as a private education so kids will continue to dump applications by the thousands into a handful of schools believing that they deserve that education or have earned that education or that the education they get at those schools will somehow give them a great return over time and parents want to believe because their opinion is validated by what they read. </p>

<p>It trickles down when there is huge focus on the “problem” of too many kids applying to too few schools which causes a trickle down effect of kids applying to more and more colleges. You can argue that Tickle Me Elmo or Furby or Cabbage Patch is different than acceptance to MIT but the consumer behavior is really identical. Consumers hear that it’s the ‘best’ holiday gift, consumers hear that it’s in “short supply” and consumers rush to scoop it up lest they be left in the dust or they scoop it up in hopes of reselling and making a quick buck. Tickle Me Elmo, Furby and Cabbage Patch era consumers are the same adults that are today guiding their students into the college process.</p>

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<p>Call me naive, but I think that if a university is going to use the motto “Veritas,” then the admissions office ought to put some effort into aligning the statements in their recruiting letters with truth, in a rather exacting form.</p>

<p>The limit on the number of applications works well in the British system, because the admissions are driven by academics, and EC’s and/or moving essays play essentially no role. This makes admissions much more predictable–so 5 apps are all that are needed. Not so, in the US, in my opinion. A student who has the combination of a rigorous curriculum with a high GPA, high SAT scores, strong EC’s (but not “knock them out of the ballpark” caliber), excellence of character and the recommenders to appreciate the person’s accomplishments and unique qualities is still playing a game of roulette at any particular “top” school. If a student of this type wants to attend a “top” school, then I think multiple applications are needed, because the outcomes are too unpredictable. (I realize that this doesn’t apply at some schools, where a relatively predictable number of the relatively predictable students get into HYPSM+C each year–but that is not most high schools.)</p>

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<p>Agreed - this is a big problem.</p>

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<p>Shavras, this is not the kind of publicity that is being criticized here - a postcard announcing a college fair is vastly different from a personalized letter encouraging a student to consider applying. And, these target-market metro visits still do not potentially reach all the students in greatest need that you seem to be worried about. There are large swaths of the country that these tours miss, and students may not have the transportation to get to the tours that are not quite close enough to home.</p>

<p>What you bring up here is a counseling problem, not a marketing problem. High school students need and deserve student-centered college counseling from someone who does not have financial conflict of interest in the outcome of their application choices and admissions success. Yes, the reality is that many students don’t get effective counseling. But is there nothing to be done about that? It seems that there ought to be other potential remedies for lack of high school counseling besides more direct mail marketing to students. For instance, how about a “Counsel for America’s College Bound Youth” program for all the college grads who want work experience in education but who are squeezed out of Teach for America? Instead of college admissions offices hiring students to cull thousand of excess applications, how about placing the same students in internships in high schools to assist high school guidance counselors? How about all the CC parents and students who are now experts on everything college, fanning out and volunteering some time to counsel students other than their own?</p>

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<p>If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it.</p>

<p>It reminds me of all those letters the kids get about how they were chosen among the best of the best to attend a Washington DC leadership camp (or Medical camp, etc). With the price they charge I am assuming the parents who choose to send their kids must be somewhat educated yet they still seem to think this was a special honor. I am not implying that these “camps” are not good, just that the way they are marketing them is a bit deceptive.</p>

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<p>At least, they are only camp. There are there to make money unlike our venerable higher eucation institute the public not only repect highly also trust enough to give them a huge tax break to carry on providing a leadership our society sorely need. They blatantly mislead and we say whoever was fooled are not "educated sophisticated’. Thank goodness, they are providing a “learning opportunity” to our already stressed out seniors. How did we come to this?</p>

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<p>You echoed my sentiments exactly. As I stated earlier, students in England know with some safe predictability whether or not they will get into one if the more elite schools because acceptances are exclusively based on merit. In the US, the college’s desire to have a diverse class (URM, first generation, recruited athletes, international, geographic diversity, socio-economic diversity, etc.) makes it almost impossible to predict odds of acceptance. Consequently, high stat Anglo and Asian, middle-class students who have their hearts set on schools in the top 25, must continue to apply to numerous schools.</p>