<p>I like Jonri's suggestions.</p>
<p>Side note: internationals are convenient whipping boys (and girls) used to make students (and their parents) feel outraged by giving them an explanation why they didn't get into colleges X, Y, or Z. The cold hard truth is: take out the internationals and it's extremely likely you still wouldn't have gotten in anyway. And then you'd have to blame someone or something else.</p>
<p>
Yep. May I suggest blaming athletes and URM's? I don't think anyone has ever mentioned them before in this context.</p>
<p>I'd do away with the SAT. (ACT, too... but I find the College Board's practices pretty irksome in a lot of ways).</p>
<p>I would also prohibit colleges from using the same entity that administers tests to gather financial aid data for them. CB is "nonprofit" in name only -- in practice it gouges us financially every which way it can. Between the SAT administration & reporting costs, the $18-23 cost per school for the CSS Profile, and the $80 cost for each test, they are making a lot of money from anxious students, and it is in their financial interest to keep the anxiety level high.</p>
<p>I'd get rid of EA/ED in all its guises and forms. Have just one round of applications and decisions and be done with it.</p>
<p>Venkat,</p>
<p>Your objection to eliminating legacy preference violates the "magic wand" hypothesis. Sure colleges would resist. It would take national legislation. But do you think legacy candidates bring anything with them to enrich the community? All the other preferences internatonal, athletic, URM at least have an argument that they do. In additon, eliminating the legacy preference might rescue countless students from going to schools that they really don't want to be at but feel they have to go to because the legacy preference makes it the "best" school they can get into.</p>
<p>For the last time, international is NOT a "preference." It is a DISADVANTAGE. It does the OPPOSITE of legacy. If legacy is +10 proverbial admissions points (going with the theme of the "How perfect if your application?" thread), international is -50.</p>
<p>
[quote]
For the last time, international is NOT a "preference." It is a DISADVANTAGE.
[/quote]
Psssst. Camelia. They don't care that there is no preference or even that it is more difficult for an international applicant. They don't want ANY international applicant taken over ANY qualified 'merican lad or lassie. God Save the Queen, </p>
<p>or 54'40" or Fight,</p>
<p>or My Country Right or Wrong(ish).</p>
<p>Camelia,</p>
<p>I apologize on that, I agree with you. International is not a preference. See post#14.</p>
<p>I don't think most admissions practices are troubling, per se; it's the lack of transparency that creates tension and misunderstanding. In addition to disclosing admit rates and stats for various lanes of the admissions pool (legacy, recruited athlete, international, URM, etc.), in my fantasy world, schools would cheerfully share:</p>
<p>-whether they have caps on the number of students receiving self-help only (loans and work study, but no grant)
-whether they have a target % of the class that must be admitted w/ $0 FA
-the standardized test scores of both submitting and non-submitting students (for SAT optional institutions)
-what types of "merit-within-need" incentives they use (for 100%-need schools)
-if they have any "drop-dead" threshold for GPA or test scores that render students more or less inadmissible
-the number of athletic tips they allow and how they are allocated among teams
-differences in standardized test scores/GPAs for admitted students who graduated from private schools vs. public schools
-any admissions caps or targets for such categories as internationals, ALANA students, in-state, etc.</p>
<p>Such glimpses inside the admissions office would make things seem a lot more rational (after the initial shock had worn off :)</p>
<p>I think greater transparency is a fairly universal theme here. To be slightly cynical, I think the reason that it doesn't happen is, in part, the desire on the part of colleges to encourage students who have no chance to apply anyway. This increases the appareant selctivity of the school under the USNWR rankings. That is why I suggested earlier that USNWR abandon the use of the ratio of admitted students/total applicants as one of their measures of selctivity. If this occured colelges would atually have an incentive to give students good data so that they could slef sellect and reduce the number of applications that ad coms would have to plow through. It would also cut down on the waste of paper from all that mail that colleges send out to students trying to entice them to send in applications.</p>
<p>I would not make kids wait as long as they do. Also give them some initial feedback as to the application, no chance, little chance, 50/50, no problem.</p>
<p>Lots of great ideas here.</p>
<p>On the issue of international students, which is slightly off topic: I absolutely agree that there should be some international students on campus. What troubles me is that some colleges are making a major effort to recruit more internationals. I know Harvard is (it made a point of that in its press release about its applicant numbers), and when I was at Brown in the fall the director talked a lot about its overseas recruiting and how the admissions person kept running into other adreps wherever she went. </p>
<p>By amping up their recruiting, colleges are saying they want more internationals to apply. Which means one of two things -- either they want to increase the percentage of internationals on campus, which would bump nationals off campus, or they want more applications for the same number of spots, making it even more difficult for internationals to get accepted. So, in some ways I agree with menloparkmom.</p>
<p>(cameliasinensis, you seem like such a great kid, and your anxiety comes through in these posts. My fingers are crossed for you.)</p>
<p>I like the idea of rolling admissions for every school. This waiting is BS. This way you can send in the finaid info when you know you are accepted. It may even cut down on the amount of colleges kids apply to. </p>
<p>Get rid of the common app too.</p>
<p>
[quote]
That is why I suggested earlier that USNWR abandon the use of the ratio of admitted students/total applicants as one of their measures of selctivity
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Along the same line of thinking, I'll suggest including all applicant statistics(SAT score, class rank etc) as an indicator of how self selective pool of applicants of school are. Selective school tend to attract selective applicants and this is should also be an indicator of school's academic reputation.</p>
<p>
[quote]
By amping up their recruiting, colleges are saying they want more internationals to apply. Which means one of two things
[/quote]
</p>
<p>What it means is simply that those colleges are looking for the "most qualified" students wherever they can find them, which sounds eminently fair to me. The way an American student responds to this is by raising his or her level of qualifications up to the world standard. That's a good thing for American students, to be aware of what students in other countries are learning in high school.</p>
<p>I'll do Curious14 one better: as Emperor of the Universe, I would dispatch a time-travel operative back to ensure that USNews never published such an idiotic rankings system in the first place. Their existence has greatly distorted much of the discussion about colleges.</p>
<p>I like Ray's idea. As long as giving feedback, why not include something like "essays great/weak, or recoms gt/weak? Perhaps with some feedback, some students will add more realistic safety and match schools to their list. An applicant would have an incentive to apply early in sr year, not wait until the last minute</p>
<p>Just think of this..High School Life w/o USNWR College Rankings! Or Books about the BEST schools! This data, and I use the word VERY loosely, has IMHO nearly single handedly fed this frenzy. Why not just publish the stats from the previous year, simply to show students what the cut-off would be. I find it so disturbing that colleges go to such lengths to increase applications. This is such a disservice to kids. If it didn't lift their ranking, they wouldn't do it, and this whole process could begin to return to what it should be. Rankings are stupid, colleges are not sports teams.
P.S. Camelia - I think you are going to be accepted to many great places. I have afriend like you, sort of a student w/o a country. She did fine, and so will you. Keep your chin up, kiddo</p>
<p>Emporer of the Universe,</p>
<p>I'm not inclined to blow away the USNWR rankings. Something else would surely take their place and they do provide a lot of interesting information in one place. A few years back they realized that including yield in the rankings led to bad behavior on the part of colleges, e.g. rejecting excellant applicants because they assumed they would not accept the college's offer, and abandoned the use of yield.</p>
<p>The fact that FA for internationals is virtually nonexistent is going by the wayside more and more, as colleges, in an effort to meet their diversity goals, are now offering very competetive packages, and last year, Dr. Marx, said that it was his goal to extablish meeting 100% of FN for internationals, as well. Right now, they get some nice aid, but not the 100% magic number, but that, too, is coming.</p>