The Selectivity Myth: Most Colleges LESS Selective, Not More

<p>With the increase of population and generally the same amount of college seats, I see no reason to think that selectivity at elite schools has not decreased. However, this doesn’t mean the overall amount of seats at colleges overall has not increased. But no one really cares about selectivity there though.</p>

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<p>What information would someone look at to check how selective those colleges are today, and how selective they were decades ago?</p>

<p>Tokenadult</p>

<p>I have no idea how to check how selective these colleges were decades ago, but I can find the last ten years or so on the internet. Here is the quote that I’m not buying.</p>

<p>“Typical college-going students in the U.S. should be unconcerned about rising selectivity. If anything, they should be concerned about falling selectivity, the phenomenon they will actually experience,” Hoxby writes.</p>

<p>I’m amazed at how accomplished kids are today. My DS got 1560 SATs, while I barely broke 1200’s (yes, it’s been revamped, but still). More impressive though are his ECs, his awards, his extensive APs, and general school involvement. Back in HS, I kept busy w/ babysitting at $0.75 an hour. He gets $25 per hour for tutoring.</p>

<p>My son complained recently that he has had to visit so many schools, and there’s pressure to apply to “8 first choices”. In my day, we applied to one school and maybe a safety. School tours were extremely rare. He’s thinking his generation that will be known as the pressure generation.</p>

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<p>LOL. What an absurd statement. Among 2009 college-bound seniors, exactly 5,899 out of approximate 1.5 million who took the SAT Reasoning Test scored 1550 or higher on CR + M. That’s less than 4/10 of 1%. So if you score 1540 you’re still in the top 1/2 of 1%. And that’s just “pretty good”? As Rep. Barney Frank famously said, “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”</p>

<p>I am still befuddled that the whole test-score driven admissions practices is somehow used to demonstrate selectivity in college admissions.</p>

<p>Let’s face it, the SAT has turned into a game that is manipulated by those so financially endowed and motivated to memorize trivial facts and question analyzing strategies to show an overstated sense of intellect.</p>

<p>College admissions now has little to do with identifying individuals who have the reasoning and learning capacity and intellectual curiousity to take on materials in new disciplines to broaden those skills so that they can attack life’s bigger challenges once they have demonstrated a certain level of mastery of those skills within a discipline.</p>

<p>Now competitive college admissions has turned into finding the most polished tomato in the bin, putting another coat of wax on them and running them through the buffing machine again. They are not interested in what goes on under that shiny red skin, nor how many shortcuts of noxious pesticides or Sulfur Dioxide gas were used to help the apple avoid any blemishes from biological competitors and give the red color to the fruit, but that the fruit on the shelf looks pretty enough for the shopper with too little time to investigate to put in their cart. </p>

<p>After eating these tomatos for a while, it is no wonder why people stop eating their vegetables.</p>

<p>When manipulatable measurable becomes more important than the process, “quality” is usually inflated with unsustainable practices, ultimately resulting in a deteriorating product value over time.</p>

<p>Do you wonder why there has been a return to locally grown produce lately? Not as much need to spiffy it up for long-term storage. Can be picked more maturely by farmer’s whose name is on the box on the market shelf.</p>

<p>Oh, and BTW, the SAT doesn’t measure the ability for a student to analogize between growing tomatos and selecting students for college. The last vestige of analogous reasoning went out of the test (with great relief from students who couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag) a long time ago.</p>

<p>Perhaps I should have used a better term than “dumb-down.” What I meant was that the same kid that takes the test now gets a better score than he would have received back-in-the-day. </p>

<p>That said, the test itself has gotten easier. For example, no more: synonym is to antonym as epistle is to … stuff. Also, they used to put easier math questions at the end of the math sections so only those quick in math would get to them.</p>

<p>Excellent post goaliedad. I totally agree. Getting into college used to be based on the recognition of academic potential. Now it is more about how glossy the applicant is.</p>

<p>There are a lot of interesting points being made in this thread. We went through the college application process with my daughter last year. I was quite shocked by the results, in my opinion she deserved more acceptances than she got. My initial reaction was that colleges are more selective now than they used to be. But I can’t back that up with anything but my own experience and the experience of the people I know.</p>

<p>It’s certainly possible that it isn’t as much about selectivity as it is about the colleges building a diverse class and getting enough full pays. I came away from this last year feeling that, at least for the elite schools, there is a lot of maneuvering and gamesmanship in the colleges application process that I just don’t have any patience for.</p>

<p>I spent a lot of time looking at the results threads for a couple of the top schools. Take a look. You can say these kids are “glossy,” but that’s not what I see. What I see is that as more opportunities have opened up for more kids, even in smaller cities and towns, the kids who are real achievers are taking advantage of those opportunities and are doing really impressive stuff.</p>

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<p>The appearance of a shortage of any good that has been successfully marketed as a non-commodity will indeed drive up the amount people are willing to pay for said product. Worked very well with Beanie Babies (for those of you who remember). </p>

<p>If I remember the line correctly from Fried Green Tomatos, “The secret’s in the sauce.”</p>

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<p>Anyone can use pesticides and SO2 gas on their tomatos these days…</p>

<p>Really, these kids are very well leveraged (the pesticides and SO2 gas). Doesn’t necessarily make them any more capable than the ghetto kid whose parents can’t even send him/her to a state-wide academic competition because they don’t have a car.</p>

<p>Step back and think to yourself, how do I know how intellectually capable someone is? You hold a conversation, of course. You talk about subjects of interest to the 2 parties and when someone connects different things in a way that you hadn’t thought about before, you raise your opinion of his/her intellect. The master of trivia in the office is not necessarily the person who can make things happen. </p>

<p>Why does someone need an artificial measurement of intellegence like test scores to tell them that someone is intellectually capable? It is because they don’t want to spend the time and resources to do the actual work. The same reason someone picks the shiny red tomatos in a plastic wrapped 4-pack at the supermarket. Asking the produce manager where and when these tomatos came from usually gets you a blank stare at most stores. But most of us don’t want to put in the effort to go to a farmer’s market to find food that is better. That involves extra effort and some risk (there may not be tomatos in stock that day).</p>

<p>GoalieDad,
Convenience is only part of the reason for the rise of standardized testing in admissions testing. Some others are grade inflation, and desire to avoid subjective decisions. You only see what suits your ideological preoccupations, and ironically are a poster child for explaining why interviews are losing credibility.</p>

<p>Does it matter so much if colleges are admitting the “wrong people?” How else are they supposed to determine who is the best applicant? I guess a lottery would be for the best.</p>

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Gee, I would have thought that the way to identify people who can make things happen is to see if they, in fact, made anything happen. Lots of people can talk their way through interviews pretty well. But what did they actually accomplish in the context of their opportunities? Sure, some kids are overly packaged. But some are all talk, too.</p>

<p>“My son complained recently that he has had to visit so many schools, and there’s pressure to apply to “8 first choices”. In my day, we applied to one school and maybe a safety. School tours were extremely rare. He’s thinking his generation that will be known as the pressure generation.”</p>

<p>More choices give students more pressures. It 's no good for mental health. And more choices has nothing to do with iif student would get a better education</p>

<p>This thread reminds my of something I learned while teaching high school. I asked one of my students, just in passing, where he was applying to college. He said his top school was Yale.</p>

<p>Later, I told the GC, who was a friend of mine, that I was shocked that this kid was considering attending Yale. I never know he was that kind of student.</p>

<p>The GCs response? “He isn’t that kind of student and will not get accepted at Yale” (and he didn’t). It was then that I realized that many of the applicants to top colleges are kidding themselves and have no chance. They are fodder for the education mill and a way for colleges to drive up they’re selectivity numbers (while pocketing nice fees for the application).</p>

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You might try doing a bit more research on a poster before misidentifying his objectives.</p>

<p>Admissions has nothing to do with ideology. Wasn’t looking to turn this into the Parent Cafe - Elections. </p>

<p>As much as you like to bash grade inflation, if you knew anything about admissions you’d know that colleges who do their homework request a grading profile along with a writeup describing their school’s profile (percentage sent to college, demographic info, etc.) from any school along with the transcript. From that, they can (if not provided) figure out an approximate rank of a student.</p>

<p>And while yes, you can center a standardized test across a broader population, a single test is easier for a student to game than 4 years of high school. And while grade distribution is known to the college, who went to how many Kaplan classes before taking the SAT is not known to the college. And yes, good test preparation can raise a test score between 100 and 200 points. Tell me why you think this is ideology?</p>

<p>And if you think interviews are subjective and that only objective criteria should be used in college admissions, then lets simplify Harvard. Those of you without 1600’s on the SAT, don’t even bother applying. Those of you who don’t have a dozen AP classes offered at your school, don’t even dream about wearing crimson. Shall I continue.</p>

<p>And whether you like it or not, subjective decisions are made by college admissions officers at highly selective institutions. They read the essay.</p>

<p>The essay is an opportunity for someone to project an image about themself (not necessarily their total self) that is SUBJECTIVELY evaluated on the BIASES of the admissions officers. It is often a contrived piece, often (for the well-to-do) coached by paid professionals. Unfortunately, the admissions officers don’t get to see the man behind the curtain. </p>

<p>So if we are going to have the biases of admissions officers enter into the admissions decision, why not put the candidate face to face (or at least teleconferenced) for a real interview, just like they will see when they graduate and have to get a job. You can coach a child actor only so much, but a skilled people handler can quickly identify the posers, the wanna-be’s, and the other cardboard candidates from honest, motivated applicants who have the normal warts of everyday people, answer questions and talk honestly, and are not just applying for that stamp of approval that admissions to a competitive school gives, but the opportunity to run with the bigger dogs.</p>

<p>You’ve got me pegged as a right-wing ideolog who wants to protect his inherited power through the old-boys admissions club.</p>

<p>WRONG!</p>

<p>I am actually quite cynical with regards to both sides of the political spectrum. It just seems CC gives me more easy opportunities to bash the soft-headed left than the neaderthal right.</p>

<p>I’ve spent a lifetime watching the paid political hacks on both sides of the political spectrum use weak rhetoric and poorly thought out policies on the weak minds of the undereducated public to grab control of the levers of state and use them to reward their political cronies. None of them are out to truly educate (teach the art of logical thinking and discecting discourse) the public, as sheep are easier to lead than critical thinkers. </p>

<p>And for the most part institutions of higher education are not exactly immune from this either, as their missions of building great collections of knowledge (why do you think libraries were always in the middle of the early great universities of the world?) have devolved into chasing the almighty endowment dollar which they want to use to buy the knowledge (through the researchers) of other schools (not to mention enriching themselves for creating an image for the school).</p>

<p>Sorry to come off as such a crank, but this whole “selectivity” issue is back a$$ward. Great scholars should come to schools not because they keep out those who don’t meet their perceived measurement of greatness, but because they are looking for a less filtered pool of thinking where new ideas can be born. The posers who come in will largely amuse themselves while the real work of critical thinking will take place among those who truly can communicate and understand different ideas without the pretense of what it looks like.</p>

<p>Getting off my not-so-ideological soapbox</p>

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<p>Yes, it would be nice if admissions folks could spend a couple hours in a school observing who was asking intellegent questions in class, suggesting appropriate, related arguments to a class dicussion and the like. However, I do accept that we can’t have it all in college admissions. But do we really need to reduce it to a 5-hour test where some people spend 500 hours preparing and others 5 minutes?</p>

<p>If lots of people talk their way through inteviews, you’ve probably got the wrong people doing the interviewing. And quite frankly, when you look at who they have in admissions offices and what they pay, it is quite amazing that they can filter out any of the BS artists when they actually interview people. These are often recent graduates whose greatest asset is their ability to sell the image of the school as a place where hip people like them go.</p>

<p>I’d think that schools would actuall be better off requiring a senior professor to sit in on every admissions interview and ask probing questions and give an evaluation of whether or not an applicant posesses the critical thinking skills, genuine intellectual curiousity, and communicaiton skills necessary to contribute to a classroom discussion where all of the students are trying to come to a broader understanding of a topic as guided by the professor.</p>

<p>Of course, this isn’t how universities are organized anymore. This isn’t about the concept of fellowships (the idea of being a contributing fellow as a student somehow doesn’t really happen until grad school in the best of situations these days). No, undergraduate education (and much of our graduate education these days) is more about certifying that a person has a basic set of knowledge and not much more.</p>

<p>“I’d think that schools would actuall be better off requiring a senior professor to sit in on every admissions interview”</p>

<p>I’m going to take a wild guess that the professors would not be too happy with this idea, and I don’t blame them a bit. Let them write books, research, and mentor theses. Or are you are planning to have the admissions personnel replace them, in your great FIX ?</p>

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Actually, considering the flak I hear from professors about the undergraduates they have to instruct (from both the ones who hate instruction and those who enjoy it), they’d probalby warm up quite quickly to the idea of they or their colleagues being able to filter out some of the problems out of their classrooms. </p>

<p>Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for admissions folks in the admissions process, as someone has to gather the relevent information to be evaluated in the admissions decision (the interview isn’t the only thing to consider, but it should confirm the other credentials of the candidate), but there is an old saying, “If you want me to cook, at least let me buy the groceries” that could and should be applied to the professors here. </p>

<p>Those who don’t wish to be accountable for the undergraduates they select and develop, shouldn’t be teaching. And you can’t hold someone accountable for inputs they have no informed say in.</p>