<p>This is really an allocation problem, which puts it into the realm of economics: "Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources [seats at Elite U] which have alternative uses [student a, b, ... , z]." So who gets the seats? If there were no rules, (admissions criteria, admission goals, institutional mission), money would be the determining factor with those willing to pay the most getting in. Elite U would then be making huge profits as a result. This would be a signal to others to jump in to Elite U's market. The supply of seats would increase, the price would drop, and more students would find seats. Isn't another way out of this mess to increase the supply of seats? The number of students graduating from high school in the foreseeable future will not be returning to levels of even 5 years ago. I find the behavior of high school students torturing themselves to, "build up stunning credentials" to be quite rational given the cap on seats at Elite U. Why can't Elite U. expand to meet demand? Surely the qualified students are present. If Elite U. so great, why can't they figure out a way to expand faculty while maintaining the quality of the faculty? Haven't they had the endowments and the time to do this? Is Elite U unable to expand, or are they unwilling to do so? Is the risk in trying that they will fail? Or is the risk that in succeeding will they be less elite?</p>
<p>Why can't elite Us expand seats? It's because if the number of seats was expanded, they would no longer be elite Us. They would be the size of state Us, and offer a comparable experience.
There's a good reason why the top schools tend to be mid-sized as opposed to large.</p>
<p>Prestige is gained by the quality of students a school rejects.</p>
<p>Yale's loss is UCLA's gain. No great tragedy there.</p>
<p>Once again, you miss his clearly articulated point:</p>
<p>
[quote]
Further, while admissions people like to believe that they have the discernment to look at 8,000 wonderful applicants and pick, with high accuracy, the 1,600 "superwonderful" ones, there is a huge literature on decision making, much of it reviewed in a classic article in Science 15 years ago by Robyn M. Dawes, David Faust, and Paul E. Meehl, which makes clear that people in such positions are much more confident of their abilities than the data warrant. In other words, picking a fifth of the 8,000 at random might be just as good a way of producing a great class as the tortured scrutiny of folders that is the present practice.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Those admitted to selective colleges (and their parents) will dispute this, as will the Adcoms themselves. Those denied admission (and their parents) may agree. Unfortunately there is no reasonable test of the hypothesis, as there is no control group of randomly selected students with which a comparison can be made.</p>
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[quote]
Why can't Elite U. expand to meet demand?
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</p>
<p>Because the driving force in Elite U. economics is "per student endowment". Expanding enrollment dilutes the amount of per student spending. This translates directly to fewer professors per student and, thus, undermines the very things that attract top students in the first place.</p>
<p>Swarthmore, for example, spent $36,000 per student from its endowment last year (not including $12,000 per student in financial aid). That is almost half of the $74,000 in per student operating expenses last year.</p>
<p>If the school doubled the enrollment, the per student spending from the endowment would drop to $18,000 and the overall per student spending would fall from $74,000 to $56,000. </p>
<p>The student/faculty ratio would increase significantly from the current 8 to 1 levels, because the average revenue from each new student would only be $29,000. </p>
<p>In other words, when per student revenues are less than half of the per student operating costs, you can't "make it up on volume". Each additional student actually undermines the financial position of the school.</p>
<p>In purely economic terms, these Elite U schools have massive numbers of applications because consumers know a good deal when they see one. If Mercedes sold a $74,000 car for $29,000 like Swarthmore does, there would be lines out the front door of car dealership, too.</p>
<p>"money would be the determining factor with those willing to pay the most getting in."</p>
<p>In the Hill-Winston study of COFHE schools (ivies, prestige LACS, etc.)
- 70% of the students come from the top quintile in income (likely about 50% from the top 3%)
- 11% from the upper middle quintile
- 7% from the middle quintile
- 5% from the lower-middle quintile
- 5% from the lowest quintile</p>
<p>In a companion study, Winston found that there were some 3X as many "academically qualified" students in the bottom two quintiles than were actaully attending these schools.</p>
<p>"Unfortunately there is no reasonable test of the hypothesis, as there is no control group of randomly selected students with which a comparison can be made."</p>
<p>There is a reasonable test hypothesis that a high schooler who didn't play quarterback in high school won't quarterback the college team; the non-legacy won't turn into a legacy; the classics nerd won't major in engineering; the tuba player won't be playing the oboe; and the non-developmental admit won't be handing the college a five-million dollar check anytime soon. These are all, a'hem, highly discernible. ;)</p>
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[quote]
Once again, you miss his clearly articulated point:
[/quote]
</p>
<p>But, Prof. Schwartz also misses a point. Swarthmore and the other elite colleges are not trying to identify the "best" applicants. They are trying to identify "good enough" applicants to fill the long lists of specific slots resulting from each schools institutional priorities. "Good enough" students to fill the athletic teams. "Good enough" students to fill the engineering department. "Good enough" students to major in Classics. "Good enough" students who are politically active. "Good enough" students who participate in drama productions. "Good enough" students to reach the desired levels of diversity. And, so on and so forth.</p>
<p>The admissions game is all about being "good enough" and filling a slot at your targeted schools. One half of the equation without the other will earn, at best, a polite courtesy waitlist. It's the failure to understand the two-pronged nature of the beast that leads to so many puzzled applicants wondering why they didn't get in with their 2400 SATs and stellar GPAs.</p>
<p>There are schools that do not ask applicants for their intended major and do not ask them to declare it for two years after attending and whose admissions staff deny considering major when making admissions decisions, and who have a good distribution of students. (How's that for a "run-on" sentence?) It appears that one could do a lottery pick. If filling a major is important, one could weight the picks as they do in the NBA lottery. I would bet that after a few years of Schwartz's system, student performance and individual student outcomes would be unchanged.</p>
<p>I remember reading that a former Harvard president said he felt confident that anyone with a 650 on the SAT Verbal could do quite well at the school. It would be interesting to see just how big the lottery pool would actually be.</p>
<p>I am with Mini on this one. I can't even decide if author is serious (and largely ignorant of the admissions process) or is just trying to illustrate a good example of a strawman argument. Come on, how many of even the very wealthy spend a year's worth of college tuition for SAT prep? How many kids think taking easy classes will get them into an elite college? How many are willing to spend lots of time on ECs just for the hope of an edge on college admissions?</p>
<p>I think adcoms are pretty good at looking past SATs and GPAs and attempt to really evaluate the applicants. The system may not always work perfectly, but it is much better than names in a hat.</p>
<p>"Isn't another way out of this mess to increase the supply of seats?"</p>
<p>No, because if there were five times as many seats, the seats would have about 1/5 the value they currently have, and people wouldn't fight so hard to get one. A huge part of the cachet of these schools is that not everyone who wants to go gets in, so if you DO get in, you carry the school's imprimatur of approval for the rest of your life. If everyone could go to Harvard, no one would care about going. (Random assignment of kids would have the same effect.)</p>
<p>I wonder if the author would propose that Swarthmore should choose its faculty by drawing names from a hat, too. After all, there are hundreds of terrific new PhD's looking for jobs every year. There's so much emphasis on getting recommendations from the famous faculty and getting published in the right journals, when the PhD candidates should instead be motivated by a pure love of research! Random assignment of teaching jobs would get rid of all the cut-throat madness in the academic job market. This professor would be just as happy to be at Slippery Rock instead of Swarthmore...right? Apparently he thinks the students ought to be.</p>
<p>But that is not the hypothesis to be tested. The alternative hypothesis is that a random selection of the applicants will yield a reasonable distribution of athletes, legacies, musicians, and wealthy students, such that all of those positions will be filled (well, maybe not the oboe player...).</p>
<p>Hanna, love your post!!</p>
<p>"But that is not the hypothesis to be tested. The alternative hypothesis is that a random selection of the applicants will yield a reasonable distribution of athletes, legacies, musicians, and wealthy students, such that all of those positions will be filled (well, maybe not the oboe player...)"</p>
<p>I don't know where you work, but does your employer play random selection in fulfilling its corporate mission?</p>
<p>Point taken.</p>
<p>Lol actually I was deferred from Penn Early Decision, and received a likely letter from Dartmouth...</p>
<p>The truth is, there is some degree of randomness in college admissions, but only for SOME people. The top get in, the bottom are shuffled out...the maybe pile? There are several articles with an in depth look at the admissions process at Penn, U Chicago, and Williams, and sometimes an outstanding candidate is about to be rejected when someone realizes a small facet of their application; it is not hard to imagine that a candidate could be admitted at 7 oclock in the morning and rejected at 5 at night; it is also not hard to imagine a candidate could be accepted if their initial read was from someone who could empathize with their essays, rather than someone who had no understanding of what was written. </p>
<p>One thing I happen to agree with in the article is an over reliance on "fit". It is difficult to predict what college life will be like before enrolling, and it also must be said that college environments can be completely different for two people at the same college! While fit is indeed a factor in college selection, academic setting by far the most important factor for any serious college applicant.</p>
<p>
[quote]
does your employer play random selection in fulfilling its corporate mission?
[/quote]
Its actually an academic mission, and one thing we do which I think is unfortunately absent from most selective school admissions is interview. Its remarkable how different the applicant with 5-star stats may appear after even a brief conversation.</p>
<p>One of the nice things about the US system of higher education, compared to say the French or the Japanese, is that there is a, more or less, continuous gradient of status. So that while getting into any single "high status" college or university is a bit of a crap shoot getting into at least one high status college is a near certainty for a bright student who works hard and has taken a reasonable approach to the application process. I disagree with the author's underlying premise that it's all chance so let's draw names form a hat. That is only true if you take the position that only one school will do. It's also nice that "high status" is a multi-dimentional thing depending on the students area of interest.</p>
<p>drb:</p>
<p>A lot of selective schools actually try to interview every applicants, including international ones. </p>
<p>In response to another point by Hanna, I don't think it's even an issue of size. S wanted a school that was close enough to a LAC but had graduate prorams. Bingo. Mid-sized research university. That left out not only some terrific LACs but also some terrific state universities with very strong math programs.</p>
<p>interesteddad,</p>
<p>I don't disagree. Price caps ("a $74,000 car for $29,000"), tend to create long lines. If the price is allowed to increase, less endowment money is used per student, capacity can be expanded, and the line gets shorter. Elite U could allow this to happen, but they choose not to. I don't believe their motives are nefarious in not doing so, and for the most part they are well intentioned in trying to make their institution accessible across the economic spectrum rather than auctioning seats to the highest bidder. However, if students obsessing over getting in to Elite U is a problem, "badly broken", as the author states, then Elite U can't pretend it is not a part of the problem.</p>
<p>The author somehow has this notion that random selection of students from a qualified pool will result in student's efforts to gain a competitive advantage. No so. A lottery has been created and the only way to improve your chances is to buy more tickets, i.e. apply to more elite schools. The result: more applications, lower admission rates, more obsessing, and greater advantage to the students who have the time and money to apply to all of the elites. For the author to say, "Parents could relax a little about high school, middle school and even preschool placements", is short sighted. Perhaps the current obsessing parents and students can relax, but there will now be an even larger group of different parents and students whose goal is to make it into the lottery, and they will do so by doing taking SAT prep classes and attending summer seminars, and all other manner of obsessive behavior. The vicious cycle starts yet again.</p>
<p>"However, if students obsessing over getting in to Elite U is a problem, "badly broken", as the author states, then Elite U can't pretend it is not a part of the problem."</p>
<p>If there is a problem it is so relatively small, and so highly contained by race and class, that I would hope prestige colleges and universities have bigger fish to fry. (After all, the system is netting them what they want and need, a cohort of academically - and athletically and musically (etc.) - talented students, the majority of whose parents are well-prepared to pay full freight, a slightly smaller cohort for whom just a little discount from full-freight will entice them to come, much smaller groupings in other income categories, a smattering of other race and ethnicities on campus, relatively happy alumni, enough wealthy matriculants with open wallets, and enough rejections of "less qualified" applicants so to increase prestige. Problem? Can't see how a "crapshoot" would help them when they have this down to such a successful science.)</p>