<p>I'm just curious what you suppose the future of admissions will be. Compared to thirty years ago, admissions now are absolutely crazy. Do you suppose it will keep getting exponentially harder until it's required to win a nobel prize/ get a perfect 5600 on the SAT VI/ cure cancer (haha I'm exaggerating, I know :p) to even be considered for top schools? Or have we already hit the peak and things will level off?</p>
<p>This year is actually supposed to be the hardest year (I won’t say ever, because who knows about the future) but basically it’s going to get easier from now on. It was so difficult because of the enormous size of the HS class of 2009 and the economic issues universities and families alike have been having.</p>
<p>I think there will be no class of 2037 for Harvard. For the c/o 2036. their admissions rate reached a record low 0.001% when 100 were accepted out of 100,000. It will consist of 50 Athletic Recruits, 40 URM (In this year this means white people) and 10 “other students.” Admissions officers, so used to denying so many applicants, accidentally denied the entire class.</p>
<p>^lol. Yeah I heard somewhere that white people are going to be the minority in the future. Strange, huh?</p>
<p>I think it’ll drop off a bit after this year but eventually there will be steady increases again as the population gets bigger and bigger. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Harvard has a 1% admit rate.</p>
<p>They’ll be able to find out people being dishonest about their applications like that. Especially after those Carnegie Mellon professors polish off their brain/thought-reading machine. (I’m serious, did anyone else see that extremely disturbing episode of 60 minutes?)</p>
<p>Or maybe there won’t even be colleges as we know it. We could just spend our days hooked up to computers or something, with only online education.</p>
<p>By 2040 universities become a novelty. People take classes taught by computer programs online and with some oversight somehow (maybe taken in a proctored room)? Because of the high capacity and low cost of educating a student, most colleges will just take everyone who applies.</p>
<p>by then, due to massive overpopulation, we will have colonized the moon. The first ever established institute of higher learning on the moon will be called Dravrah. Students will be heckling for a spot there.
Who cares about Harvard? 1st ever established institute in the now fallen US? pshhht. 1% acceptance rate? Dravrah has a .00000000000000000000000000000000001% acceptance rate.</p>
<p>
of the entire population? One way or the other, everyone will get some kind of Harvard education.</p>
<p>QwertyKey: We already have a prototype. It’s called Wikipedia.</p>
<p>or maybe by then the admissions officers won’t be able to handle the 1,000,000 applications so they’ll use a mega-computer that calculates whether or not you should be admitted. But the robots beat out most of the humans for spots. They have perfect memory and learn the best. </p>
<p>lol. this thread is getting interesting.</p>
<p>hmmm… colleges are already starting the whole “satellite education” thing. I think it’s half of normal tuition. i read about it here:
<a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02/03/cut_rate_campus/[/url]”>http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02/03/cut_rate_campus/</a></p>
<p>Hundreds of schools that are now considered third-tier schools (or below) will rise in prestige and strength, as we have seen happening over the past few decades. HYP will always remain HYP, but many more schools that are definitely sufficient but not mentioned often on CC, that are currently considered “good but not great” schools, will skyrocket to second-tier status, maybe. Along the way, new institutions will be born to take their leftover places on the list of anonymous schools. Also, maybe more online schools will pop up, and actually gain prestige. Maybe an online institution will be born out of some Ivies–that would be an interesting project.</p>
<p>I fear for my childrens’ chances of admission, still. :-(</p>
<p>In 3520 AD, Earth will be a back water planet with no usable resources, only maintained by the Human Federation only due to its historic/intrinsic value. Other than a minimal and badly managed tourist/resort industry the planet will have little else to offer. </p>
<p>The most selective Universities and Astronautic/Techonology schools will be with the core trading planet hubs closer to the intergalactic wormholes. They will have an acceptance rate of less than 0.01 percent, drawing from the Federation’s trillions of citizens and millions of inhabited worlds. </p>
<p>Entire North America will be an ecological preserve, dedicated to those eccentric few who wish to study the dead English language. Harvard will be a bear preserve, UC Berkeley will be underwater, and Yale will be a Chuck E Cheese.</p>
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</p>
<p>Stanford, not ivies. Isn’t that obvious?</p>
<p>
trillions of Chinese or Indians, I am not sure which one.</p>
<p>On a serious note, I think the admissions, like every it seems, became a bubble. Everything got so hyped up and so inflated. Admissions became war and kids did things to just look good on a piece of paper. And now, like everything again, the bubble is starting to depress. With the combination of economic turmoil and the above mentioned size of this year’s class being gone, I think admissions is going to start coming down a bit. </p>
<p>The economical recession basically brought everything into perspective and I think will change admissions for a while.</p>
<p>I agree with Sugar Magnolia. My mom was worried about my 12 year old brother, but then I was like “each lower school will get increasingly better students, so they will get better overall.” I heard somewhere (bio textbook, possibly) that the population will not keep increasing. Instead, we will become like some European countries that experience negative or zero population growth. But, I definitely think students will become more qualified as time goes on. If I had billions of dollars right now, I’d start an awesome university.</p>
<p>White people are arguably already a minority of the world population. I guess it depends how you define each group, but I’m pretty sure “Asian” people are the plurality of the world population, and possibly the majority. </p>
<p>For the application pressure issues in light of demographic trends, see my FAQ: </p>
<p>DEMOGRAPHICS </p>
<p>Population trends in the United States are not the only issue influencing the competitiveness of college admission here. The children already born show us what the expected number of high school students are in various years, but the number of high school students in the United States, which is expected to begin declining in a few years, isn’t the whole story. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/education/09admissions.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/education/09admissions.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp</a> </p>
<p>First of all, if more students who begin high school go on to college, there will be more applicants to college even with a declining number of high school students. And that is the trend in the United States and worldwide. </p>
<p>Second, colleges in the United States accept applications from all over the world, so it is quite possible that demographic trends in the United States will not be the main influence on how many students apply to college. The cohorts of high-school-age students are still increasing in size in some countries (NOT most of Europe). </p>
<p>Third, even if the number of applicants to colleges overall stays the same, or even declines, the number of applicants to the most competitive colleges may still increase. The trend around the world is a “flight to quality” of students trying to get into the best college they can in increasing numbers, and increasing their consensus about which colleges to put at the top of their application lists. I do not expect college admission to be any easier for my youngest child than for my oldest child, even though she is part of a smaller birth cohort in the United States. </p>
<p>And now I would add to this that at the very most selective colleges that have just announced new financial aid plans, next year’s (and the following year’s) crush of applicants will be larger than ever. When colleges that are already acknowledged to be great colleges start reducing their net cost down to what the majority of families in the United States can afford, those colleges will receive more applications from all parts of the United States, and very likely from all over the world. </p>
<p>The Economist magazine published a brief article about these trends in April 2008. </p>
<p>[University</a> admissions | Accepted | Economist.com](<a href=“Accepted”>Accepted)</p>
<p>Has anyone looked back at that 50’s and 60’s and realized how ridiculously simple college admissions where?</p>
<p>Just imagine how intense the admissions process will become 50 years from now.</p>
<p>There will have to be some sort of drastic reform of the way admissions are played out. Currently, things are such a crapshoot that eventually schools will have to keep lowering and lowering their standards due to the competitve nature of the system. The “game” to get into colleges will get tougher and tougher, because the competition won’t just be with other kids in this country, but other kids worldwide as well. Maybe it will be changed to a system that relies on numbers only? Maybe it will be changed to be strictly about personal character?</p>
<p>No one can say exactly what it will be. All I know is, it will suck even 15 years from now. HYP will eventually have to bottom out.</p>
<p>I hope the admissions cycle for the class of 2011 will be easy.</p>