"A flood of students unexpectedly accepted admission offers. A UC campus was caught off guard. Administrators scoured the files of the admitted and took a hard line on those who had failed to meet paperwork deadlines. They withdrew more than 500 offers, causing a furor.
The year was 2015, the campus Santa Cruz.
The storm that UC Irvine recently unleashed when it took a similar approach to overenrollment was unusual but hardly unheard of on the nation’s college campuses. Experts say the two UC cases and others like them at Temple University in Philadelphia and St. Mary’s College of Maryland underscore the vagaries of enrollment prediction — a discipline that aims to meld the science of data analysis with the guesswork of anticipating teenage whims." …
A landscape of colleges that is growing extremely selective needs to change their formula and accept fewer students. I don’t see why students should once again be punished for a college’s failure to plan. Colleges that are usually a backup are going to have higher yields now that top 20 schools are rejecting highly qualified students. They created this monster. It’s their job to fix it.
You can’t predict with real accuracy. What a 17 year old wants in September is not necessarily what they want 9 months later. What a parent is ready, willing and able to pay may change…things change, life happens. Ask any newly minted senior if they want to leave the state for college, many will say yes, but when push comes to shove, lots of those kids get cold feet. I guess you have to draw the line somewhere and these over enrolled schools picked paperwork deadlines as the line. Maybe they should have stuck to their deadlines in the first place, seems kind of cruel to recind an acceptance that never should have been given in the first place.
Perhaps limit the number of applications to 5. Use a point system like the UK that way you know exactly what schools you are qualified for and you can cut out the high reaches and the super safeties. Encourage kids to see other educational opportunities as viable. Set caps on the number of OOS students that any given state uni can accept and make that number no more than 20% OOS. Ensure families are notified of, need based financial aid merit and scholarship $ earlier in the application process, particularly the need based funding. I don’t know, I am not the professional!
We keep talking about how the admissions process is broken, someday someone is going to actually start working on fixing it, right?