<p>If you've ever wondered about the arbitrary nature college admissions, this old article from The Daily Beast should bring you up to speed. One particularly apt confession comes from a former admissions officer at an elite Northeastern liberal arts college. He may have been served some bad chicken:</p>
<p>"One night, I got food poisoning at a restaurant in Buffalo. The next day, I rejected all the Buffalo applications."</p>
<p>The attitudes of adcoms expressed in the article really are appalling. 70% of applicants are qualified but only 10% get admitted. Thus, they become unserious about how to draw distinctions. Somehow the system needs to be reformed, or it will only get worse.</p>
<p>Adcoms are arbitrary because there are so many applicants. Students apply to more schools because adcoms are arbitrary. It is a vicious downward spiral.</p>
<p>Most colleges are open admission community colleges or state universities that admit by formula (of grades, rank, and/or test scores). So the arbitrariness or non-repeatability of the admissions process described above does not apply to most college applicants.</p>
<p>Even those state universities that use a somewhat holistic review process tend to design their process for consistency and scalability more than the super-selective private universities do.</p>
<p>As I heard an admissions official once point out – there are 37,000 high schools in the United States. That means every year there are 37,000 valedictorians. Face it, there is no substantive difference among many, many college applications. </p>
<p>No matter what is said publically, decisions on admissions are very much arbitrary. They have to be. I would hope that is a secret to no one. Dirty or otherwise.</p>
<p>Mainly in cases where the school is flooded with applicants of similar academic credentials (typically near the maximum possible using US academic measures), or where they have institutional priorities other than academic ability that they do not want to publicize (legacy, developmental admits, yield protection, etc.). But many students apply to schools that are not like this.</p>
<p>I’ll back up amarkov. Our local high schools say anything over a 4.0 earns the valedictorian award - last year there were over 40 valedictorians. They compete for who gives the speech at graduation. Crazy!</p>
<p>I mean, some of this you ultimately have no control over, but you can hardly blame a human admissions officer at a highly selective school for being completely turned off by the umpteenth “just another Asian math genius with no personality” application they’ve read that day. In some ways, it’s better not to know this and just have faith that what happens happens. Don’t be discouraged by articles like this though, just understand and be prepared for the unexpected. </p>
<p>This was very interesting though, and goes against the “conventional wisdom” on CC: “Any admissions director who uses the line about needing an oboe player is lying. There’s no admissions person in the country with a clue what the student orchestra needs. More likely, Mommy and Daddy gave a $1 million donation. That oboe thing is just a PR ploy.”</p>
<p>this one is pretty hilarious:“After the letters came out, one father called me to complain his son hadn’t gotten in. He said he was an advisor on several TV shows and movies. So I asked him which ones, and he told me the show 90210. Well, that was my favorite show, so I asked him to give me some good gossip. Then the next day I got this huge package filled with stuff from the TV show: original scripts, autographs, etc. And I called him up and said, ‘Thanks for the cool package, but there’s still no way your kid is getting into this college.”</p>
<p>Whenever subjective criteria are included in the admissions process, distortions such as the ones described in the Daily Beast article are guaranteed to happen. The problem is though that the alternative would be something like the Chinese system where there is a fixed number of students that can be taken in every year and they are basically ranked based solely on their scores in some huge national exam. The highest ranked students up to the the total number of available places are admitted and all others below the cutoff score are rejected, even if their actual score is just marginally lower than those of an accepted applicant.</p>
<p>Needless to say, I suppose most Americans, including university faculty, wouldn’t be comfortable with a system like the one I just described, which is completely objective, but narrow-minded, basically measuring only who is the best test-taker, and not necessarily who is the student that could contribute the most to the university community and is more likely to be successful. </p>
<p>Perhaps the British system offers some middle ground between those two extremes, i.e. it does not rely so much on arbitrary and non-academic factors such as “likeability”, race, gender, family background/income or athletic skill as in the US, but, on the other hand, it leaves some room for subjective factors, interviews and letters of recommendation as opposed to relying solely on test scores. In particular, one of the things I like the most about the UK compared to the US is that faculty members, i.e. the people who are actually going to teach the students, are far more involved in undergraduate admissions; in fact, they actually run it as opposed to hiring 20-something “admission officers” whose qualification and motivation are sometimes debatable.</p>
<p>Sigh…So when I get turned down from somewhere, I’ll have to be thinking “was it because I wasn’t smart enough, or did the person just not like the name of my school?”</p>
<p>And this is why I have been adamant with my kids there there is no one perfect school Just like there is no one perfect mate in life – for crying out loud, there are 7 billion people in the world, there is more than one great mate for everyone in that pool. And there is more than one great school for every student. So my kids will apply to 7-8 schools, any of which would be a decent fit. Even if an ad-com at one school has a bad day and rejects them, or doesn’t like the cut of their jib for some reason, if we have done a good job of selecting schools, a different ad-com will like them fine.</p>
<p>Etuck, just assume it was food poisoning. :)</p>
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