That case should sadden all of us. What a damning indictment of the college admissions system.
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Well, I didn’t mean to suggest that this is the only place, because it certainly is not. Though I’ll add that, in my experience at least, a lot of people do seem to know about it.
If you’re talking about acceptance rates, then that’s on them. Likewise with the mailings. HS counselors and lots of other people seem to know that those mailings don’t mean anything. Google can save from that misunderstanding for Pete’s sake.
One of my kids was a recruited athlete with Chicago and, knowing her the way I do and having even the vaguest sense of UofC, I knew, or made an informed guess, that (1) the coach was probably not going to be the difference in her getting in (high scores, mixed grades) and (2) she didn’t belong there. The reason for the mixed grades was work ethic and maturity. Late bloomer. Chicago would have been too much for her. So I said, “I’m not supporting you pursuing that recruitment.”
And honestly it didn’t take that much to figure it out, and I didn’t even need this place for that information. You just have to be involved, read, know your kid and reach out to a few informed sources.
The blame game is a dead end.
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Probably the most sage advice in this thread.
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I disagree. This seems to absolve the colleges and puts everything on the parents and students.
I’ve worked on some consumer protection legal matters over the years, and colleges, just like any other business, should be held to a standard of accountability. The rankings gaming that goes on is a perfect example of the irrational exuberance that colleges are creating to get more to apply, boost their “selectivity”, which in turn increases their financial attractiveness to lenders/investors/students. These entities are businesses, pure and simple, and they better make d**n sure that the information they provide everyone, whether students or investors, is accurate. I only realized recently how much bond issuance that colleges are engaging in: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-university-bonds/facing-pandemic-squeeze-universities-hit-bond-markets-for-cheap-cash-idUSKCN25721A
I won’t re-hash the currently pending issues here, but there are clearly some notable ones. See, e.g., Eastern District of Pennsylvania | Former Temple Business School Dean Sentenced to Over One Year in Prison for Rankings Fraud Scheme | United States Department of Justice
Ok, fine. Marketing email etc are just that. Like almost all marketing stuff I receive on snail or e-mail, it goes into the trash can. I laughed out loud when I was taking the trash out and saw my D’s UChicago’s massive brochure at the top of the recycling bin. I am glad my D knows to disregard this stuff. It’s not that Chicago is unworthy, but she recognizes spin and marketing much better than I did at her age.
What is deeply troubling to me is any school that games rankings to get more applicants, to increase “selectivity” or “being elite.”
I fully appreciate that parents and students should be researching etc. But smart folks are scammed, in either the legal or moral sense, all the time. To the extent that any college contributes to this environment, they too should bear accountability, whether moral, civil, or, in a few instances, criminal.
I was totally clueless about these issues a few years ago. CC has made me really aware of these things. But, to some degree, I have the luxury of time to research things. By contrast, many families are just struggling to get by, much less having the time or even realizing the need to research how realistic a college’s ranking is, for example.
It’s not all on the students/parents. That’s my net point.
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I agree. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Some of it is deeply ingrained mythology. The idea that you can rank schools in a way that’s meaningful to everyone using them, and that you’ll only be successful if you attend T20, T50, TWhatever, is a farce.
My son attended a private high school that attracts quite a few foreign students. When asked about their aspirations, they could only articulate one thing…“Top 50 University.” They couldn’t expand on what that will do for them. Bizarre, but they’ve bought the mythology we are selling.
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Yes. And as a result you have kids applying to 10+ T20 schools in search of prestige despite the fact that many of the schools have nothing in common except for prestige.
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It’s not bizarre if you come from overseas. In some countries there are literally three universities which provide the on-ramp to the diplomatic corps, senior corporate roles, influential roles in government and NGO’s. Get into one of them-- you are set for life. End up somewhere else? You’ll be earning the equivalent of $60K per year for the rest of your life as a middle manager, dentist, physician, or engineer.
So kids from other places assume that the US works the same way.
And the mythology is not “deeply ingrained”. My HS class was far too preoccupied with getting an educational deferment (the boys) so you wouldn’t end up in Viet Nam to care about “is JHU more prestigious than Northwestern”. Virtually every college bound senior applied to two colleges- our flagship (not commutable) and the satellite campus (commutable on public transportation.) Period full stop. And this was in one of the HS ranked at the top of a state with strong public schools.
The mania for “going away” had not yet hit-- we’re not talking about two centuries of rankings here!
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USNWR hadn’t started ranking colleges at that time. The war was long over by the time they did. Are suggesting that the current climate is the same as it was more than 50 years ago?
I’m suggesting that we shouldn’t deal in the trope that “the rankings are deeply ingrained in the US”. Higher Ed began in the US in the 1600’s. The rankings insanity is a relatively recent trend, and the same people who BUY the magazines (or now subscribe) are the same people that can give the rankings the heave-ho. If there were no market, there’d be no ranking.
I’m personally hopeful that as families realize the crazy costs (why does a third tier private have the same sticker price as Harvard or Stanford? ) the pendulum will swing back, and voters will make it clear to their state legislators that they’d like their state U system to be high quality, accessible, and affordable to tax payers. That movement can’t happen (at least on a broad scale) as long as people are willing to take out a second mortgage to send their kid “away”.
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Two words from my immediately prior post: “irrational exuberance”. When the USNWR etc rankings came out, I don’t think the colleges were gaming them. AFAIK, that’s a recent trend.
As I mentioned before, to the extent that ANY college is engaged in gaming, this is far more than a “trope.” It’s a ticket to massive cash inflows to colleges, whether from students/parents, lenders, investors, public grants etc.
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Recency and how deeply something is ingrained are unrelated. How old is the internet? Twitter? TikTok?
As for cost, why should Stanford or Harvard cost what they cost, let alone the “third tier private” schools?
Students and families are rushing in droves to prestigious schools, as determined by rank, because they think it’s important for future success. For almost everyone, FGLIs being the exception, a student’s success potential is baked in at the time they graduate from high school, regardless of where they go to college.
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As I heard it being discussed once and see often in school, cost is associated with quality in the human mind. When costs started to rise those that didn’t keep up were perceived as lesser - not an inexpensive good buy. The human mind also loves to have others see their worth. Therefore, it was better for colleges to raise their price and give students merit aid (win/win on perceived quality/worth) than it was to keep prices lower even if it means the typical student pays the same amount without raising the price and giving the aid.
It’s similar to why every college needs a great gym, dorms, and landscaping - which also raise the cost. Those colleges without them were deemed outdated and crappy, so were no longer considered even if they were less expensive. You can still see these comments now on cc when kids/parents evaluate colleges. It’s better to cost more and get students than cost less and fade away. The number of parents/kids looking for a good buy and willing to put up with the trade off isn’t enough to stay in business.
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I respect your opinion, but mine differs. Sure, it should go w/o saying that rankings (or any other) fraud should be dealt with severely, and publicly too so that the school’s rep takes a hit. That’s stipulated and beyond that to which I intended to respond in this thread.
So other than fraud, this all still sounds too much like the advertisement made me buy it. On some level, people have to take ownership of their actions. What I see here is an assumption in our culture that colleges are these benevolent actors that should only exist as bastions of fairness and transparency. It’s an interesting conversation when applied to public universities, but for the privates, even those that use federal research money, it’s not an assumption I’ve ever made.
Even mediocre public high schools have counselors with some idea about the basics. The lack of a fair distribution of esoteric information like “violin not good for Asian applicants these days” is not a societal ill that is going to make me lose too much sleep. Wealth and access have always provided those with both a leg up and will continue to do so until we come up with a better system. But the democratization of information through search engines and other online sources has closed that gap considerably.
Why didn’t someone tell me that 8th grade is when we tend to lose girls in math? Why didn’t someone tell me my lovely D (the soccer recruit), who garnered a lot of (likely too much) male attention in school, would have been FAR better off at an all girls’ school (something I’m now quite convinced of btw)? And mind you I had plenty of access to information and should have gotten that one right, but I didn’t, and that has led to some pain points. It’s all good now, but the truth is I screwed that one up.
Whatever I did or did not do is on me, and I live with that. If I had a kid who got into zero schools or wasted $1,000s on pipe dream applications, sorry … that’s on me, not the schools.
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I’ve seen you post this several times, and while it’s obviously true that kids who have their acts together in high school are going to enjoy a high probability of success, don’t discount the late bloomers. There are plenty of us out there.
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I will give you a real-world example that just happened a few minutes ago. Our cleaning lady (privileged, I agree) is from Central America. We were discussing our kids’ respective college admissions just now (hers have all graduated or are in college). She’s been with us for years.
No one in her family had ever been to college, and she told me it was so difficult to figure out where to apply, how to apply, financial aid, etc. She didn’t know where to turn and basically trialed and errored it, child by child.
By contrast, I am here on CC, something which she clearly didn’t know about, having spent tons of time researching and querying the good folks here. Had I known the things I know today, mainly because of CC, I would have advised her on what to do for her kids just a few years ago. But even a few years ago, I had no idea about these issues, and I’m reasonably well-educated and informed.
Even absent fraud, the colleges too need to take responsibility for THEIR own behavior. They are not passive ivory towers of academia. They are businesses, with their top admin folks making huge salaries etc. Most of these private universities are non-profits and have grown massively because of their tax-free status, which is cash out of all of our pockets.
With respect to today’s US higher ed system, I think our economist friends would call it “asymmetry of information”. Yes, the information is all there (but, on reflection, it actually isn’t), but you the consumer have to know where to find it and THAT you need to find it. To the extent I’m correct on the information issue, my feeble understanding of econ is that asymmetry leads to “market failure”. IMHO, that’s what we have with the US higher ed system: market failure.
Shall we take the easy CC way out and agree to disagree!? 
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People seem to forget that this student had an excellent acceptance to match their high GPA and music. Not every application is going to be accepted everywhere at low acceptance schools.
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Always a good exercise in judgment. 
And, btw, I don’t really disagree with too much of what you’ve said, and I hope that I’m not coming across as callous. I feel for your cleaning lady and others in her situation. I’ll add that even though, as we agreed, that the information is there, like it was for me in the example I gave, life is indeed quite full and there is a lot to do and it’s not easy to make yourself an expert at everything.
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Very true!
It is just overwhelming what there is to know. Stuff like ED, ED2, EA, REA, SCEA, etc was completely new to me.
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What a ridiculous and short sighted assumption. I’d suggest you widen your social circle. This isn’t true for literally anyone I know.
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