<p>College</a> rankings inflation: Are you overpaying for prestige? - Education - AEI</p>
<p>This doesn’t surprise me in the least. When I was applying to colleges in the 70’s the not very bright kids were applying and getting into GWU, Miami (very big with the kids who wanted to tan all year,) and Emory - along with many other school which have now become “hot.”</p>
<p>Doesn’t surprise me either. I went to college from 1978 - 82. I had a 3.2 GPA, no significant ECs, no honors/AP classes, and a 1240 SAT (690 Verbal, which may have helped since I started as a Journalism major). I got accepted to Penn State (main campus), GWU, and Syracuse. There’s NO WAY I would have been accepted to any of those today. But tell me, does that mean I would no longer be capable of doing well at those universities? I don’t think so. </p>
<p>Now a 3.2 GPA is considered “low”. Which is insane.</p>
<p>Footnote 7 refers to a report indicating that average high school GPAs are around 3.0 recently (versus significantly lower years ago). So 3.2 is probably around the lower end of the “college bound” range today.</p>
<p>Note also the SAT rescaling (score inflation) in the 1990s, so that parents’ generation people may get incorrect impressions of the difficulty of getting into college today if they try to compare their own SAT scores with the 25th-75th percentile scores at colleges today, if they do not remember to account for the rescaling.</p>
<p>However, it is also worth noting that population has increased faster than space at “good” colleges, so that formerly easy to get into schools are much more difficult to get into now.</p>
<p>Hmmm. I’m skeptical about this article. I think what’s really happening is that high-stats students are concentrating at the upper end of the selectivity spectrum more than they did in the past, because the market has become more national and less state-oriented. In other words, a kid who might have applied to and attended Virginia Tech in the past now wants to go to MIT, or Caltech. What the article doesn’t tell you is how SAT score averages have changed at the new additions to the most selective schools. If, as I suspect, they have gone up significantly, that cuts against the idea that it’s all because of grade inflation in high schools.</p>
<p>So my theory is that there aren’t that many more high-achieving kids, but that a change in the market for colleges have made more of them interested in the same schools.</p>
<p>An aside-
Overall average GPA inflation is sort of meaningless in the context of elite school admission IMO. I read somewhere that most high school grade inflation over the past few decades occurred at the lower to middle end. At my high school, in 1974, a 3.9 put you at somewhere around #10 out of 580. There were always a handful of 4.0s but there was no weighting, it didn’t matter whether you took HomeEc or Calculus. So it’s tough to make the comparison.</p>
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<p>Personally, I believe SAT score are much more inflated now than they used to be simply because there is so much more test prep going on. If the percentiles of high scores haven’t changed much, it is just because there are a lot more lower-achieving kids (with no prep) taking the test than before to balance out those that attain higher scores with intense prep and multiple sittings.</p>
<p>I agree with the conclusion that the kids that attend top schools are not fundamentally more academically prepared as a whole than 20 or 30 years ago.</p>
<p>The problem I have with the article isn’t the grade inflation discussion or the talk of “prestige gluts”. It’s the idea that there are significant differences in the cost of attendance at the various schools. From my perspective there are three tiers of pricing for four-year colleges: In-State university ~$20,000, OOS student at a state university ~$35,000 (though more and more schools are realizing they can get away with charging private school numbers for OOS students) and private schools ~$55,000+.</p>
<p>Of course there is some discounting among the tiers as schools vie for ‘prestigious’ students but it never ceases to amaze me the uniformity of the pricing. There’s not even a pretense of adjusting for local cost-of-living differences (eg, Colgate - rural New York - $57K, Carleton - rural Minnesota - $56K, Southern California - Downtown LA - $58K, NYU - NYC - $59K). Who’s fooling who? They charge it because they can get it.</p>
<p>I don’t think affluent families overpaying for prestigious schools is a really big problem. The worse thing is middle class families who are over paying for non-prestigious schools and students that are having a hard time paying for lower tier schools. My current college has an average debt load less than the no-name state university branch campus I attended for camp last summer.</p>
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<p>Except that there are so many exceptions as to render your classification meaningless.</p>
<p>In-state public university in my state: flagship $27,000 and up, depending on major. Non-flagship, $22,000 to $25,000.</p>
<p>Out-of-state public where my daughter is going: $18,000 to $21,000, depending on state of residence (<$15,000 in-state).</p>
<p>Range of privates where she applied: $39,000 to $65,000</p>
<p>If you can’t afford a school, you shouldn’t even consider it…go to the best school you can afford, very simple</p>
<p>Is there really a lot of test prep?
My kids didnt do any ( unless you count taking SAT in7th gd & taking thePSAT).
I suspect most kids who are actual middle income to low, dont take any courses and barely glance at books their parents bring home from the library.</p>
<p>I think there is MUCH more test prep among the upper middle and upper class. Such things barely even existed when I took the SAT. I’m sure they could study that.</p>
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<p>So if the number of institutions has actually been decreasing, as stated in the article, doesn’t this extra million students help explain increased exclusivity? The authors claim it doesn’t, but I’m not sure they proved their point.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if test prep is a big thing in my affluent high school. But the results would make me question why anybody would use it, when most people from there end up at the mediocre state flagship or some no-name equivalent.</p>
<p>I think test scores are seperate from making a college list. ( also flagship schools- imo dont seem to be mediocre just by definition)
But if students werent doing well on the tests, despite preparation, that seems to indicate a disconnect, especially with the correlation between test scores and affluence.</p>
<p>“If, as I suspect, they have gone up significantly, that cuts against the idea that it’s all because of grade inflation in high schools.”</p>
<p>They have. They’ve gone up even in the years since recentering in the 1990s.</p>
<p>Verbal has hardly changed while math is up what I would call “a bit”. </p>
<p>[Fast</a> Facts](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171]Fast”>Fast Facts: SAT scores (171))</p>
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<p>I partially agree with this. I do think the market has become more national. More kids than ever are applying to HYPSM, the rest of the Ivies, and other super-elites like Caltech and Chicago. And that has created a strong secondary market for the next tranche of private schools—schools like Emory, Wash U, Carnegie Mellon, Tufts, USC, or even a little further down the rankings, U Miami and George Washington. These schools were once sleepy and not-so selective, primarily drawing on a regional base, but they’ve become more “national” and more selective, picking up a lot of relatively high-stat Ivy wannabes who don’t get admitted to the Ivies. That’s pushing them into the Barron’s “most competitive” category—which if you read the fine print, isn’t exactly MIT-level: median B+ HS GPA, median student top 20% of HS class, median SAT scores 655+. That’s really the main finding of the “study,” which isn’t very sophisticated.</p>
<p>I’m not sure, though, that this change is coming at the expense of public universities, which seemed to be the implication of what Hunt was saying. I don’t see any evidence of that. In fact, I think the top publics, e.g., UC Berkeley, Michigan, UVA, UCLA, are attracting student bodies that are as strong or stronger than those they’ve attracted in the past, in part because they, too, are in the “most competitive” category and pretty highly ranked in US News.</p>
<p>In fact, if you look at the SAT/ACT medians for top publics, they’re pretty comparable to those at similarly-ranked privates—and the publics have a lot more students. There are 52 schools ranked among the top 50 research universities by US News (due to a 3-way tie for #50). Among those 52 schools, only 16 are public, while 36 are private. Yet there are roughly 50% more students at the 16 publics than at the 36 privates. And even those figures are misleading, because the private total (255,901) is inflated by a couple of very large outliers, NYU with almost 23,000 undergrads and USC with over 17,000, Bottom line, we’re talking about very small numbers of higher-stats kids becoming more prestige- and ranking-conscious in the past, enough to tip a small handful of private colleges into the “most competitive” category. Those students are probably similar to students who would have been spread over a broader array of less-competitive, less highly-ranked, largely local or regional schools, both public and private, in the past. But it’s not even clear that those schools are any the worse for it, because in a nation with 3,000 or so colleges and universities and 19.7 million college students, all it takes is the occasional high-stats kid here or there to shift her focus to the top 50 rankings in order for schools in the bottom half of the top 50 to move up pretty sharply in selectivity. The nation’s top 52 research universities have room for only about 3% of the nation’s college students; the top 36 private research universities have room for only about 1.3%. It takes only a very subtle shift in college selection preferences to make the bottom half of that group of nouveau-elite privates much more selective than they were in the past.</p>
<p>But I don’t think any of this is news to anyone who’s been paying attention, and it certainly doesn’t merit the breathless, slightly scandalized, yellow-journalism style in which this “study” is written.</p>
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If we’re talking about the top level scores, I don’t know if the percentages have increased much, but the raw numbers of students with high scores has increased significantly.
Maybe it’s partly due to just more kids taking the exam.</p>
<p>In 1996 around 45K students scored over 700 on the verbal, and around 60K scored over 700 on the math.</p>
<p>In 2012 around 75K students scored over 700 on the verbal and around 110K on the math.</p>
<p>Before re-centering the numbers scoring over 700 on either part were significantly lower. </p>
<p>As a person who tutored the math part of the SAT for a few years, I think the increased scores can be at least partially attributed to test prep and the fact that a lot of the standardized tests kids take as a matter of course these days (NCLB, etc) are multiple choice and at least somewhat similar to the SAT.</p>