<p>A story from the investigative journalism consortium Pro Publica </p>
<p>The</a> Admission Arms Race: Six Ways Colleges Game Their Numbers - ProPublica </p>
<p>lists ways that colleges can manipulate statistics used to rate colleges. Buyer beware.</p>
<p>I’m not sure I would consider all of these ‘manipulative’. ED, for example – say a University gets more qualified applicants than it can accept. If it says, students have an advantage ED because we want students who want to come here, I’m fine with that. Yes, it will boost yield (which may help in some ranking systems), but boosting yield also makes it easier to predict how many students need to be accepted and reduces the chances of under or over acceptance.</p>
<p>The key to me, is whether the school is up front about what it’s doing.</p>
<p>Another one would be the shiny automatic merit scholarships that a lot of privates offer if you apply. Even though that would be nowhere near covering the cost for a year. But you think that maybe if you apply, you’ll get more later in the competitive merit scholarships.</p>
<p>Thankfully, I didn’t fall for that from Liberty (blech) or Lynchburg.</p>
<p>My daughter was - and now, a few days before the decision date is still! inundated by schools offering no-fee, no-essay, fast decision applications with “guaranteed merit scholarships” of anywhere from $5K to $15K to full tuition. We joked about how she should just send them all in, then her high school could really boast about how many scholarship $$ their students were awarded! The free, quick apps, the test optional policies - we saw a lot of that as ploys to game the rankings. The ED thing was frustrating. A Duke rep told my daughter she would have a much better chance of acceptance going ED - and looking at the numbers, the percentage of ED acceptances is FAR higher. But we couldn’t commit without being able to compare offers from all schools. ED really does favor the student whose family can pay the most…</p>
<p>If you accepted ED and the financial aid package isn’t large enough you can get out of the contract.</p>
<p>“If you accepted ED and the financial aid package isn’t large enough you can get out of the contract.”</p>
<p>Yes but that can forfeit good chances at other schools. Like ones where you have to get your application in early to be considered for scholarships. Or ones where you might want to be in an Honors College.</p>
<p>Our college ranking system is a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts where the bright kids end up going to the “top schools” boosting these schools’ rankings, thereby attracting more bright kids, keeping these “top schools” eternally on top of the rankings. This leaves the lower ranked schools few options to get their piece of the pie.</p>
<p>It’s really a very corrupt system if you think about it.</p>
<p>The article makes some very valid points on why attempts to ‘rate’ colleges is very arbitrary.</p>
<p>Schools are supposed to teach ethics,values and morals along with academics. but when schools themselves are unethical and market driven rather than morals driven what kind of products?students they are going to churn out. No wonder the powerful movers and shakers CEO / Politicians etc are so corrupt and self centered and greed driven.</p>
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<p>You can still apply to other schools if you apply ED somewhere… My acceptance to my ED school was actually the last acceptance I received out of my 7 acceptances. You can still apply EA at other places (just to get an early response), and you can really just apply as early as you want under RD. None of the non-ED schools are going to know that you applied ED somewhere. They’ll treat you just like any other applicant. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY ED somewhere would ruin your chances at other places… NO WAY.</p>
<p>If you get rejected from the ED school, you can take an offer from another school. This school will never know you were ED anywhere, and if they want to give you a scholarship or entrance into the Honors Program, they will give you that, no questions asked.
If you get into your ED school, you have to go there (if your financial aid package is sufficient, of course) and either decline other acceptances or retract your application from schools you haven’t heard from yet.</p>
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<p>No, if you apply ED to a school you can still apply EA and RD to any school you want unless otherwise noted in the school’s ED agreement.</p>
<p>You can apply to other schools if you apply ED, but at least in our case we didn’t receive FA information from other schools - even EA schools - before we would have had to commit to the ED school. So no way to compare packages. Once accepted ED, you either have to take it or leave it - you can’t wait to see what might happen with other FA. DD is looking to get a good education with minimal borrowing, so having all the offers on the table at once was important to us. ED works best for people who can afford to pay a lot, or who are less concerned with total debt at graduation.</p>
<p>Getting back to the point of the article though, one poster said “as long as the school is up front it’s not a problem”. But how many schools TELL you how they come up with their stats? For example, SAT scores. Are those SAT scores of accepted students, or admitted? Those numbers could be very different. If a school is often treated as a “safety” school, then the accepted SAT scores may be higher than the admitted. So are the SAT scores reflecting students who apply to the school or who actually attend the school? And as the article pointed out, test-optional schools probably only receive scores from students who performed well, so again your average SAT score is not a true gauge of the student population. In most cases it’s not downright deceptive, it’s just that you can manipulate statistics to show just about anything you want. If you don’t know how the numbers are derived, and especially if you can’t guarantee all schools are deriving them the same way, then you don’t necessarily have valid comparisons.</p>
<p>Conversely, many schools who do not use the common app have a “less desirable” acceptance rate, simply because they don’t get as many applications because it’s not as convenient to apply. If a school switches to the Common app, and gets many times more applications, thereby admitting a much lower number of students, did it somehow suddenly become a better school? Based solely on rankings, yes it did.</p>
<p>Inigo – a number of schools have gone to SCEA for just the reasons you mention. Wealthy families can afford ED. For others, the financial package is important, and even if the family could technically afford a school, it would make a great deal of sense to accept a bigger package at a different school (even if not the student’s first choice).</p>
<p>Other than fivestarsprk, does anyone else consider such practices unethical, or at best, misleading?</p>
<p>So if a school asks an optional question on their application asking you to list the other schools to which you applied, I take it it is a bad idea to answer it if those other schools are more prestigious / competitive? I mean if they are going to game the numbers by rejecting applicants who they think chose them as a safety, it would make sense to not answer these kinds of questions.</p>
<p>I know Rice asks that on their Common App supplement, so I can’t help to wonder if they ask for this reason.</p>