<p>This weekend's New York Times has an education supplement which includes this interesting article about college admissions. Among other things, it talks about the effects of increased use of the Common App and marketing.
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/education/edlife/07HOOVER-t.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/education/edlife/07HOOVER-t.html</a></p>
<p>We just had our reading meeting (where we kick off application reading for the new year [what the what?]) and in it we discussed, briefly, how lucky we have been in the admissions office at Tufts to have a president who isn’t pressuring us to raise the number of applicants. </p>
<p>We’re pretty confident that if we slimmed down our supplement we’d hit a record pool, and would likely come close to a 20k large app pool. But, personally, I’d feel like we made decisions based on weaker and less complete information and we would sacrifice qualitative quality in favor of quantative. I have mixed feelings about articles like this one - on the surface they tend to bemoan the fervor around admissions and the ballooning of applicant numbers and the stress that brings. But, at the same time many of these articles seem to celebrate that ballooning, implicitly (and often explicitly) stating that more applicants = better school. </p>
<p>I know our supplement can be daunting, but I’m glad to have a manageable applicant load and glad that Tufts can find ways to represent its personality in the application we use to select its students.</p>
<p>I haven’t read former Tufts Dean Robert Sternberg’s book College Admissions for the 21st Century yet, but I suspect it’s worth a read for a lot of people who’ve been asking questions on the Tufts forum. </p>
<p>It describes the Kaleidoscope Project, of which that daunting Tufts supplement is a part. Sternberg and Dean of Admissions Lee Coffin not only wanted to expand the sorts of measures used in admissions beyond the usual ones, they also measured the outcome in terms of freshman year successes. It wasn’t a goal, but interestingly, Tufts also found that for each year that they’ve used the “new” supplement, average SAT scores have also gone up.</p>
<p>My son is probably a little weird, but it was a question on the supplement that made my son want to apply to Tufts!</p>
<p>Are you guys saying we’ll find out Friday (tomorrow) via snail mail or online?</p>
<p>^^wrong thread, sorry!!</p>