“It seems to me that the harm is to the students who worked diligently on a daily basis to apply to all of those schools. What good did it do them? They were used as a prop in a publicity stunt.”
Correct. Their time is finite. Their patience for listening to adult instruction is finite. The adults here need to do their jobs and use that precious time wisely. The kids are learning a memorable lesson that this is the right way to apply to grad school, jobs, etc., when it is not.
The colleges are also harmed by this waste of time. Most of them are probably poorly funded directionals that exist in order to provide wider college access to their communities. A lot of staff hours are abused when you apply to 100+ schools. Those staff hours could go to other low-resource students who need help.
^^ Grad school? Did you read the stats above? More of these kids have parents in jail than parents with college degrees. Your willingness to condemn the act while ignoring the bigger picture is telling.
Are colleges harmed? Nearly all colleges do everything in their power to increase applications. If she is that overqualified it took the admissions department 5 minutes to accept her. If she’s not, she’s not wasting their time. If you want to reduce the number of applications everywhere, make it more difficult to apply. Add 2 school specific essays and require students to ask for waivers. Limit apps to a fixed number for everyone. Don’t blame the student for exploiting rules and then suggest she’s damaging those that made them.
My kids received a lot of application waivers for colleges they weren’t going to attend, so no, they did not just send them in to hope for a scholarship to add to their list so their high schools could claim $1billion in scholarships awarded. We did the reverse, researched all the schools and each of mine applied to only one school. To be honest, there was a $2 charge for the transcript from the high school as their guidance office didn’t eat that cost, so there were no totally free applications and applying to 150 schools would have cost me $300 (x 2 kids, $600), plus the stamps to mail them (school also didn’t eat that cost, they gave you the transcript to mail in), so another 88 cents x 300= $264. To achieve what?
If this girl spent even 10 minutes on each application, that’s 1490 minutes wasted by her, probably another 1490 minutes wasted by people in her school’s office, and a whole lot more than that wasted by the schools she applied to. She would have had to put 10 schools on the FAFSA list, remove them and add 10 more - 14 times! (or maybe more assuming there were applications where she was not accepted). I hope universities spent more than 10 minutes looking at an application, trying to qualify the student for FA. Harvard and Yale state they spend 30-60 minutes on every application, even those that are never going anywhere because of the stats of the student.
Everyone claims schools spend too much on administration, on paperwork, on compliance. This is one example of why. Even if this girl was a top student who would have had a full ride somewhere, I don’t think she found it by this method of shotgun applications where her only criteria for applying was a free application. If she would have researched 10 schools, followed up with them and asked about extra scholarships, might she not have received more from one of those schools, some attention from an AO who thought she really was special and not just another free application that she took 10 minutes on?
@EyeVeee “Don’t blame the student for exploiting rules and then suggest she’s damaging those that made them.”
“Condemning this practice without fully knowing the impact it has on an underserved and economically challenged community is to me, superficial and hypocritical.”
I don’t think anyone here is blaming the student. The adults at her school are directing her to do this for some purpose that they believe is a benefit to them.
I don’t even really mind that the school does this. As you suggest, perhaps the publicity helps them get a few more students into college. Maybe get the attention of more parents and students. That is great! I am glad they are trying to get more students into college.
It is the fact that they waste the students time, that I have a problem with. If they did this with their own time I would think it was fine.
@twoinanddone - The investment by the high school isn’t admin or compliance…it’s marketing. It may actually be a very shrewd way to spend money on free advertising that suggests excellence to an unsophisticated audience.
@Much2learn - I agree it is a waste of time, but it’s spent in pursuit of an artificial goal that is obviously important to her. You and I and everyone else here would counsel our children to focus, but that’s not where these kids are growing up. If a pointless promotion via artificial goals gives a few kids some self-esteem and a chance at an education…those who know better shouldn’t trash those involved in situations they can’t comprehend.
Marketing, yes, but it is a charter school. Should they be doing this taxpayer money? Would we approve of this at a public high school, that resources are used to send hundreds of applications just so the school could say it had millions in scholarships?
One thing that I wonder about this: Do schools know how many other schools a candidate has applied to? If I worked in admissions (I don’t), and I saw that a student had applied to over 100 other schools, I would be inclined to just dump the application in the “no” pile and quickly go on to the next one.
This is a failure on the part of her school. How does encouraging low income students to create “artificial goals” help them? They don’t need a pat on the head. They need real, definable goals that actually benefit them in some way; the time spent on over 100 useless college acceptances could have been spent on improving test scores and finding matches for her.
Another thing I noticed is that the school she is considering is Tennessee State U, which has a middle 50% of 16-20 on the ACT. So it is a reasonable guess that she has around an 18 ACT score.
To me, a student at that level is not what I would think of as "College ready."They will probably have some degree of remediation and there is a significant chance they will not graduate from college. It really would not take a huge amount of work for decent educators to help a student like that add two or three points to their ACT by learning fundamental skills that would really improve their odds of college success. Instead, when they could have made the effort to help her, they took advantage of her instead. Very disappointing.