@northwesty 's description of “flight to quality” is spot on. Not just because students now apply to non-regional schools, but because so many kids are going to college that for some jobs simply having a college degree isn’t enough. In the stats in the Atlantic article he quoted, the estimate was that approx 85% of graduating seniors would be going to college. Step back and think for a minute about most average graduating classes - does it really make sense for 85% of those students to go to college? No.
There’s been a huge push to make sure everybody who can spell his/her name goes to college, which is ridiculous and has resulted in record numbers of poorly qualified kids going to college. Many of those kids don’t graduate, but many more of them do - but from weak programs.
The last time I advertised for a $12 an hour position at my business over half the applicants had college degrees - and this is in a time of sub-4% unemployment (basically full employment) in my area. When you look closely at those degrees, most are from weak programs but it’s a “college degree.”
With the value of a college degree so greatly diminished by the increase of poorly qualified students in weak programs, parents and students are realizing that one of the few ways to differentiate their degree and hopefully themselves in the future job market is to get that degree from a high quality program (and that means different colleges for different majors). IMO, that’s a large part of what’s driving the increased interest in competitive programs. People are realizing in the future, their degree from Weak U may not help them much in the job market since hundreds of other kids will have the same degree from Weak U yet be startlingly unimpressive, causing employers to question how valuable the degree is.
@milee30 This really does beg the question of which schools are worth going to. Countless threads here extol the idea that you can achieve your dream from nearly any school if you are willing to work hard and take advantage of opportunities. Do you believe that is not true? Is there a level of school where the degree is worthless? I am assuming we are still talking about accredited four year colleges and not online degrees.
It’s not an easy answer. Without writing a novel, here are some of what I believe in short form.
People can create great opportunities out of less than optimal situations. Conversely, certain programs offer more opportunities and make success much more accessible than others.
A person does not have to go to a "top ranked" school to be successful and top ranked schools do not guarantee success.
Quality varies hugely by program. There are tiny, unknown schools who have better individual programs for certain fields than any of the prestigious schools.
For some fields, the college you have a degree from is hugely important and for others it's almost irrelevant as long as it's an accredited four year degree.
There is a level of school where a degree is largely worthless, especially if looking at a cost/benefit.
There are kids who are not ready for college and it's a waste of time and money to send them; the truly awful thing is many of those kids are the ones that end up with huge loans they can't pay back with their worthless or unfinished degrees. IMO, this is a huge social issue and we should be actively working to encourage - not stigmatize - trade schools and non-college certification programs as those would be the absolute best path for many kids.
Finances always, always, always should be a consideration. The best answer for one kid may be different than that of another very similar stat kid simply because financial situation differs. It is what it is.
And my last prediction is that 20-40 years from now, we will not be reading articles about the majority of Fortune 500 CEOs being from random schools. There will continue to be a race to the top and over time certain degrees will be regarded in a different way than others. Just like in the rest of our society, the divide between the top and bottom will widen, with extremes at both ends becoming more extreme.
The problem is not too many kids going to college. The problem is not that kids are getting “worthless” degrees. The problem is that many, many high schools in this country do not deliver a HS education.
My spouse was first gen college. I know his family well, and see what his family members were able to accomplish with a HS diploma. These are people who read widely, wrote beautifully and grammatically, could do more than basic math (i.e. had passed trig, basic algebra, geometry), and via their HS education were exposed to art and music and history and dance. Not college educated- but well rounded citizens who could read, write, think, analyze. And the military helped- not with the GI bill (they didn’t do college) but with discipline and work ethic.
No business looking for these types of skills these days can afford to hire boatloads of HS grads. I read a study about the “credential creep” in health care recently – why do so many jobs like pharmacy tech and other para’s state “college or associates degree required”? Because if you hire a kid with a HS diploma there is zero expectation that the kid knows what a decimal point is. And that could kill someone in a hospital pharmacy.
I don’t blame the “marginal” colleges (except for the for-profit ones which should be shut down; they prey on poor kids and are Pell factories for their shareholders). But while the rest of us are trying to figure out what does Princeton want and is it meaningfully different from what Dartmouth wants, our public education system has fallen apart for millions of kids in America.
Totally agree that the K-12 education has failed in general.
Given that we believe the K-12 education is poor, that proves my point that there is no way in heck that 85% of graduates should be going to college. The answer isn’t shifting unprepared kids into college to pay six figures to get a degree that is the equivalent of what used to be covered in a high school education. And the problem isn’t just with the for-profits, although those tend to be the largest scams.
A little more than a generation ago, white male Americans could easily count on a middle class or greater lifestyle with just a high school education. No longer remotely the landscape, some for the better and some for the worse. As the trend away from manufacturing and agriculture and towards knowledge-based business increases, first a college degree was the entry point. As the trend continues, there will be increasing stratification to consider what type of degree and from what college. Without a major change in our K-12 education and our industrial base, I don’t see how this trend would alter.
“Countless threads here extol the idea that you can achieve your dream from nearly any school if you are willing to work hard and take advantage of opportunities.”
@milee30 covered it very well, but no, rigor is not the same everywhere.
However, that doesn’t mean that opportunities and rigor can only be found at those top schools so many kids kill themselves to get in to, either.
Many colleges that just aren’t that hard to get in to can still prepare a driven student quite well. Remember that at a research U, you’re not limited to just undergrad classes, for that matter, you’re not just limited to just what your school offers (as so many schools, like MIT, dump all their course material online now).
As an example, Arizona is almost open admissions (they reject hardly anyone), but is also one of the top schools in the country for optical engineering. The kids who can’t handle algebra and go to 'Zona aren’t making it through the optical engineering major there and the optical engineering grads from 'Zona don’t do badly.
I couldn’t agree more that we need alternative career paths besides college. Germany does this extremely well. I also agree that there are many kids who should not be going to college and certainly not directly from high school.
The students that I worry about are the 3.0-3.5 kids who do have the ability to succeed and have career goals that require college. Today there are many places which welcome these students. My worry was that with the selectivity soaring at so many schools which used to be obtainable, those opportunities would disappear. In other words, that ten years from now schools like Ursinus will be admitting less than 30% of the applicants. However,I believe that you have addressed those concerns.
With regard to worthless degrees, so much of that depends more on the subject then on the college. A degree in an in demand field has a good chance of leading to decent job opportunities from most places. If your degree is in philosophy, or french literature or gender studies, that degree is going to be very hard to market. It may not be much better from a top tier school. All students need some idea of how they will use whatever degree they obtain.
Earlier posters mentioned Lehigh’s admission is holistic and applicants need to show demonstrated interest. I believe that is true In our case, our oldest son is a freshman at Lehigh in the IBE program (Integrated Business Engineering) and is a recipient of the Founder’s scholarship. The scholarship was unexpected. However, he did have top stats (not tippy top perfect) and met with a regional interviewer bc visiting wasn’t possible. He also felt he wrote the most interesting essays for Lehigh because it was his last application for submission and he thought Lehigh’s questions were different than other college app prompts. (He applied to 15 colleges; the original list was 12, but I got super panicked that he didn’t have enough safeties so he applied to 3 additional schools to humor me). He didn’t have a #1 school in mind. At the end, he received acceptances from 12 schools, 2 rejections (MIT, Mudd) and 1 waitlist (Rice). It came down to 3 schools - Northwestern, USC, and Lehigh. After finally visiting Lehigh, it became his clear choice, IBE was the right fit for him and he was really impressed with the upperclassmen of IBE he met. He didn’t care that hardly anyone at his HS or our community never head of Lehigh and he didn’t care that people thought Northwestern had a higher ranking. He made the right decision for him bc he’s having a fantastic year so far. He said he enjoying his classes, and he’s studying and learning for himself.
There are many CC posters on other threads who think the ad coms at various schools really miss the mark with their super high stat students. In our experience, we feel that the ad coms at the colleges he applied knew that he was the right fit or not. MIT and Mudd rejections were totally valid; no doubt he was just one of many tens of thousands of students who had similar stats and interests, but he didn’t have the extraordinary accomplishments that made him stand out.
@PurpleTitan No disrespect intended towards philosophy. A bright, articulate, logical thinker with good language and communication skills will find a place in life. Many majors can facilitate that. I do think that when you are choosing a degree that doesn’t automatically lead to a specific career - computer science, engineering, accounting, nursing etc. You need to go in with a clear idea of how you are going to use that degree. What is it going to offer you? Can the school you choose deliver on what you are actually trying to accomplish?
"The problem is that many, many high schools in this country do not deliver a HS education.
My spouse was first gen college. I know his family well, and see what his family members were able to accomplish with a HS diploma."
I don’t know how old your in-laws are, so I’ll give a couple of data points. In 1900, only 10% of 14-17yos were enrolled in high school. In 1945, it was 60%. In the 1990s, it was 90%. My guess is that the top 20-30% of high school grads today will have equivalent knowledge to your in-laws by the time they’re adults with grown children, although exposure to different fields will obviously vary - grads now will be familiar with computers, but less familiar with cursive, for instance.
After reading over this thread, I’ve noticed that a lot of people think that kids who are looking for good merit scholarships/high need-based grants are better off applying RD. As someone who got accepted to Lehigh EDI with a full ride (I got both merit and need-based aid), I would certainly disagree. From my own experience with Lehigh, I genuinely think that they just want to see applicants who have challenged themselves academically, who have had leadership positions through which they impacted their communities and who have shown significant demonstrated interest.
An important thing to remember is that Lehigh has a very strong school spirit which they want to retain with every incoming class. They have also been trying hard to add more diversity and have been vocal about accepting more students from URMs, so that automatically decreases your chances if you’re from an area that they usually recruit from (PA, NJ). Yes, this does mean that a lot of qualified candidates will get rejected, however, it also means that the college will be a more diverse environment where most kids really know why they want to attend Lehigh.
I personally think that applying for any school which has an acceptance rate between 20 and 40 percent is a gamble. They want to have high yield rates, low acceptance rates, and high average scores. They want to increase their rankings. More people need to recognize that most schools that have been discussed here are incredible and that most good students would be happy to attend them. Why treat them as safeties then? I am sure that schools like Lehigh will provide almost the same opportunities as an Ivy would, so the fact that it doesn’t have as big of a name shouldn’t be a reason to consider it a safety. If it’s a good school which places emphasis on demonstrated interest, it shouldn’t be a safety for anyone.
A quick note to all the parents of Lehigh applicants: I was so sorry to hear that so many qualified kids have gotten rejected/waitlisted. However, your kids seem to have amazing stats and I’m more than sure that they will be happy at the school they end up choosing. This is a complicated process and please don’t take those decisions personally.
If parents of future applicants or future applicants themselves need any tips for applying, I’d be happy to help - just shoot me a message!
“Worthless” relative to what? If it is in comparison to having just a high school diploma, then almost any bachelor’s degree is not “worthless”, because, however devalued a generic bachelor’s degree from a college without any prestige is these days, it is not as devalued as a high school diploma. (However, a generic bachelor’s degree from a college without any prestige may not necessarily be worth the cost, depending on what it costs.)
On the other hand, for some people, a generic bachelor’s degree from a college without any prestige may not fare well in comparison to some other types of post-high-school education, such as for some skilled trades, fire academy, police academy, etc…
Many of those 85% are not seeking bachelor’s degrees. “College” includes going to community college for non-bachelor’s-degree education in various other skills. Unfortunately, the community colleges often have to offer remedial (high school level) courses for students whose high schools have failed them.
“With regard to worthless degrees, so much of that depends more on the subject then on the college. A degree in an in demand field has a good chance of leading to decent job opportunities from most places. If your degree is in philosophy, or french literature or gender studies, that degree is going to be very hard to market. It may not be much better from a top tier school. All students need some idea of how they will use whatever degree they obtain.”
No. The “worthless degrees” are overly specialized pre-professional degrees when the bottom falls out of the economy. In the mid to late 1990’s colleges all over America were rushing to put “e-commerce” majors into place. And droves of kids signed on. And then in 2001 the tech bubble burst and those kids were stuck with a truly worthless major. Amazon didn’t want kids with an e-commerce degree- it wanted kids with degrees in math and computer science. Google didn’t want kids with an e-commerce degree- it wanted engineers and yes- philosophy majors, and political science majors.
Major in Travel and Tourism? Sounds great when the hospitality sector is booming. Try getting a job if you’re the person graduating in the summer of 2009. Major in Construction management? Fantastic during the boom years, horrible during the bust years. Etc.
Degrees which teach kids to read, write, analyze, think will hold up over time (as long as they are rigorous). Degrees which teach a kid to get a job at a cruise line in the years when that sector is laying off 10% of it’s employees and discontinuing its management training program?
Going back to the original post, what this tells me is that SAT score alone is a poor predictor of admission at Lehigh. This is consistent with Lehigh’s CDS, which marks 5 admission criteria as more important than test scores. This is also consistent with Lehigh’s website, which talks about 8 criteria they are looking for in their admissions decisions, none of which is test scores. You’ll find a similar relationship at many selective colleges. Just having high test scores alone is rarely enough. One thing that is unique about Lehigh is Lehigh’s website mentions demonstrated interest is important, and their CDS marks demonstrated interest as important as test scores. This alone usually indicates a good portion of high stat applicants are going to be rejected.