I’m not asking you to feel sorry for anyone. I’m suggesting you reserve your contempt for those responsible for creating the environment in which students with the credentials to get into top tier schools mistakenly think their odds of getting in approach the overall admission rate. From your previous posts it appears you recognize the schools do nothing to dissuade applicants and much to encourage them. I agree that students who apply to a dozen top 30 schools are potentially setting themselves up for a string of disappointments and that it is important to have some more accessible options in the mix, but that doesn’t mean multiple applications to top tier schools isn’t an economically viable and advantageous strategy for many. The financial aid makes it a far better bet than the 1 in 1000 full ride merit scholarship at a school of little interest to or poor fit for the student in question.
Caltech looks for students who are demonstrably passionate about STEM (from the stories they tell in their essays and their activities) and have shown not only their ability to excel in what they’ve done but also their ability to kick it up a few notches when necessary. That requires an in-depth holistic view of its applicants, taking into account all their other activities (in STEM and beyond). And this type of reviews takes more time and often faculty involvement, and is incompatible with the goal of chasing after more applications.
Isn’t this the more traditional way many colleges evaluated students (before Common App, USNWR rankings, etc.)?
Not for the private elites, which had much stronger preferences for the SES elite prep school students (when those prep schools did not emphasize academic eliteness as much as now) decades ago. These were the students who got “gentleman C” grades.
They did, of course, admit some academically elite students from anywhere to maintain a veneer of academic eliteness, but they did not make up most of the class.
These private elites you mentioned have always reserved spots for hooked applicants, even though the definition of these “hooks” may have undergone some changes over the years. The question is more related to what they did with the other “unhooked” applicants.
One VP at one college complained? I don’t see that as a problem. Applications increased at the elite college where I work too. After the financial losses incurred due to the pandemic and the switch to remote learning the administration is doing a happy dance. The employees who took pay cuts to help reduce the financial impact to the school aren’t sad about it either. Why on earth would colleges look for ways to decrease the number of applications they get? It’s not that difficult to hire extra readers. The only people increased applications +/or test optional policies hurt are the families with high stats kids who don’t want the extra competition. I think smart colleges will look for ways to handle the increased volume, not find ways to reduce it.
Colleges struggling to deal with the increase in applications has been a common theme on “enrollment management twitter”. I just posted the example above to start a discussion.
From what I understand the problem is their current system and methods aren’t scaling very well to the large number of apps. It’s hard to sift through 100K apps and feel like you didn’t miss a few good ones.
My guess is they will move to new/better software to make it manageable.
Lack of scalability probably means that there is a centralized human processed step in the admission process. The common belief of how highly selective holistic admissions reading works is that each application is pre-read and scored (either a single score, or several scores for various attributes), and then the scored applications are sent to a centralized step to determine the final admit class. At the highly selective private colleges, this is usually believed to be a human process, where a committee decides each application that has been pre-read and scored. Obviously, this is difficult to scale for very large numbers of applications, although if the added applications are mostly weaker ones, some computer-based auto-rejection of applications with worse pre-read scores can be done to reduce the load on the centralized human processing step.
Where the centralized step can be done mostly be computer (e.g. UCs which just rank applicants by pre-read scores) there is not really a scaling problem.
It’s hard to sift through 100K apps and feel like you didn’t miss a few good ones.
At some point it becomes akin to credit scoring. No big bank worries about the couple of high potentials who get screened out of the process as long as the number of risky applicants continues to stay at the estimated default level.
They should be able to handle more apps by hiring additional external readers.
Maybe more schools will go to putting each app through their yield management formula, which can calculate predicted yield at the individual application level, before they are read. Then, schools decile all the apps by predicted yield. Applications in the lower predicted yield deciles receive a relatively less detailed read.
There are many many ways for schools to use data to evaluate apps, while still saying they have holistic admissions.
I don’t think any schools had a real problem handling the increase in apps this year…taking an extra week or two to get thru them is insignificant.
Credit scoring is mostly done by machines these days.
This will reduce the attention given to the strongest non-ED applicants, which (if admitted) will have the lowest predicted yields.
That was my point!
Not necessarily…it depends on what variables each school puts in it’s model…for example they might have found that a high test score is not important when students are deciding to attend a given school.
In general, stronger non-ED admits will have lower yield, because they will have more other attractive admission and scholarship offers. Admits who were reaching for the college will have higher yield, because they are unlikely to have (as many) other attractive admission and scholarship offers.
Higher application fees or limits to the number of common applications are not appropriate responses to increases in the number of applications. If colleges don’t want to slog through so many applications they can post minimum requirements to discourage unqualified applicants.
I don’t see how it is to the advantage of an individual student to limit their number of applications while many other students are applying to more and more schools. Applying to more match schools should increase your number of acceptances and give you more options to choose from come April.
Granted, most who think students should limit their number of applications are suggesting that applicants choose the colleges they apply to more carefully and up their chance of acceptance by applying to schools where they have a better chance of acceptance. This would be a targeted approach rather than a blanket approach. However, applying to more schools where you have a better chance of acceptance should net you more acceptances.
It is a classic “tragedy of the commons” situation. It is to the advantage of individual students to apply to as many colleges as they are able (taking into consideration issues such the ability to produce high quality applications). On the other hand, the glut of applications overall is disadvantageous for all students.
Neither colleges nor students are going to disadvantage themselves on their own. The solution has to lie elsewhere. In most countries around the world, some limits are placed on the number of applications. We could, for example, limit the number of applications per student to 3 of the most selective group of colleges (based on the average acceptance rates in the past 3 years being less than 10%), 3 more of the second-most selective group of colleges (based on the average acceptance rates in the past 3 years being less than 20%), and so on (and perhaps no limit on colleges whose average acceptance rates exceed 30%).
Who is “we”? I don’t see how the government could legislate to restrict the admissions policies of private schools, it would be a heavy lift to justify such restrictions on anti-discrimination grounds. The government can’t even ban single sex private schools and colleges. A legal route might be to restrict the tax exemptions of private colleges but even that would be difficult.
Common App? It currently limits the overall number of applications per student.
Colleges may have their own applications in addition to accepting The Common Application.
The Common Application is also not the only college application accepted by multiple colleges.