<p>Dean J–</p>
<p>The part of your job that I REALLY don’t comprehend is how you are going to manage waitlist issues that arise from so many applicants applying to 10+ schools, and the “waitlist musical chairs” that must stretch on into June.</p>
<p>No doubt admissions officers are well trained, experienced, work very hard and do their jobs well. But so are mutual fund managers. Yet a very large percentage of mutual fund managers do not do better than (literally) blindfold monkeys throwing darts at a board.</p>
<p>I think admissions officers could spare themselves a lot of time and effort if they simply admitted that beyond a certain point, the selection process is arbitrary. It would be time better spent to fact check applications more thoroughly (to avoid admitting outright cheats like that guy who got into Harvard), rely more on “quick reads” for screening purposes, and then once there is a list of “entirely acceptable” applicants, to simply select the files at random.</p>
<p>Randomness is part of life. We need to embrace randomness more.</p>
<p>ETA: It is also much easier to measure the performance of mutual fund managers. It would be much harder to find the right metrics to assess exactly how much value admissions officers are adding to the process of selection. A good study design might be to choose 10% of the class at random and then to track the performance of the randomly selected students and compare them to the ‘carefully selected’ students. Not sure what metrics you’d use for performance. I am not aware if a study has been undertaken.</p>
<p>The one thing I will say, which is highly anectdotal, but seems to be a general experience, is that the process FEELS very arbitrary to the students as they are going through it, and also to the parents, as well, but that by the time high school graduation came around for my daughter in 09, and during the following summer months as it became clear who was going to which school, it really made sense. </p>
<p>I’d known a lot of these kids since kindergarten, and I can’t say there were more than one or two kids whose choice sounded like, “WHAT??? Seriously?” Everyone’s college made sense, either in light of academic ambitions, or EC’s, or general temperment, or future goals. By the time Christmas rolled around last year, with the exception of a few pretty troubled (for entirely OTHER reasons) kids, everyone was at thier “first choice” school.</p>
<p>As for dream schools? They are just that. They don’t actually exist the way the kid thinks they do, anyway. In fact, the most disappointed kids at Christmas were the ones whose dream schools had turned out to be merely schools. </p>
<p>YMMV</p>
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We continue to adjust to this. We cut back on our waitlist last year and while we had more unhappy students in the deny group, it was a little more manageable than in past years.</p>
<p>It was interesting, though, that after we cut the waitlist down a bit, we were criticized.</p>
<p>“What is true is that the flu shot will only defend against those flu strains that were included in the vaccine. So the wrong choice could mean the death of tens of thousands.”</p>
<p>No not exactly. There is no wrong choice per say, just educated choice to minimize death. It is not feasible to put all the strains into the vaccine. They literally pick certain strains and leave out other strains based on their analysis such that certain set of people will die and other set of people will live every year.</p>
<p>“I don’t think the analogy is a good one to college admissions.”</p>
<p>Not sure what you mean. It is true that this is an extreme analogy but the parallel is that admission office accept certain people and leave others out based on some criteria or methodology. They do it because it is their job and while nothing is perfect, they try to do the best from what they are given.</p>
<p>My feeling from our kids’ experience is that the process wasn’t really arbitrary. They both got into exactly the schools that they wanted, and I have educated reasons to believe that wasn’t an accident. Each guy wrote his essays specifically for those “target” schools – defined as their favorite schools where they were above the 75th %tile on SAT, heavy courseload, respectable but not stupendous GPAs, but the schools were very selective so they weren’t a gimme, either. Between the two of them, those targets were UChicago x 2, MIT, Tufts and Harvey Mudd, so it’s not like there were safeties in this group. I think they were both competitive in terms of numbers/GPA, and adcoms saw the goodness of fit as demonstrated in their essays. </p>
<p>In both cases, each of my guys were rejected at similar schools but where the vibe and feel were different. I have to believe that the adcoms recognized they’d be a better fit elsewhere. And they would have been absolutely correct.</p>
<p>Dean J, does UVA use an algorithm that predicts yield and determines the number of offers you can make? I’ve always wondered how schools calculate this when many factors change from year to year (e.g. kids applying to more schools than ever).</p>
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<p>can someone expand on this waitlist dynamic?</p>
<p>also, to what extent do adcoms spend time and effort attempting to assess the probability that applicant X will enroll on their college’s extending an offer of admission? I wonder, therefore, if this probability assessment done by admission is like the 6th man (in basketball), or better, the ‘4th pillar’ in admissions factors next to the normal and expected ones, academics, std ized trest scores, and ECs.</p>
<p>On the applicant side, I KNOW that some colleges are applied to ‘just in case’ a set of contingencies occur. On the admissions side, do admissions officers ever engage in this kind of strategic thinking with applicant decisions, too? Is this where waitlist management comes in to play, also?</p>
<p>Several posters refer to the fact that at least in the very midst of living the college application process, the student (and the parent) feels that the process is arbitrary and/or random. </p>
<p>I have noticed the same thing on CC when it comes to the student/graduate getting employment after graduation. Some posters clearly reflect feelings of disbelief (anger?)that with numerous applications being made, employment offers have not been forthcoming. </p>
<p>I wonder if the feeling of being in an arbitrary situation is a (partial) byproduct of having a decision that directly, immediately and (at the time) critically impacts the applicant be in the hands of virtual and/or actual strangers?</p>
<p>Also, I note that many are ready to criticize the college placement office or the process of the potential employer in what seems to me to be an effort to place the feelings of disappointment at the feet of others.</p>
<p>On the issue of college applications, isn’t the most productive activity looking at the common data sets, chosing colleges with an eye to those ranges and making the best effort to make the non-objective components shine–and then letting the why and why nots go rather than dwell on what didn’t happen?</p>
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The Dean does a lot of number crunching and there’s a dash of instinct and a pinch of gut feeling mixed in there, too. </p>
<p>Amazingly, March Madness can be a last minute factor. It hasn’t been a factor at UVa in my memory, though. :)</p>
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Only some schools try to assess this by looking at “demonstrated interest”. UVa doesn’t. I have never felt pressured to drive the offer rates down or the yield rates up.</p>
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<p>Since this was my phrase, I will try to unpack it. It appears to me that the large number of applications that students are submitting must be making the ability to predict yield extremely difficult. Assume that every student only submits three applications, and they get in 2/3 of the time; that means that there is only one unaccepted admission. Now assume that every student applies to 12 places, and still gets into 2/3 of them; that means 8 admissions, only one can be accepted, and 7 go unused. That means that 7 other schools either have to have overadmitted or take someone off their waiting list.</p>
<p>So as the number of apps goes up, schools must simultaneously do a combination of lowering the % admitted, increasing the total number admitted, and/or putting people on the waitlist. And when Harvard takes a Duke admit off their waitlist, Duke loses the admit, and hits their waitlist for a Wake Forest admit, Wake Forest turns to their waitlist and Elon loses an admit. That is the “waitlist musical chairs” I was referring to.</p>
<p>There is a perverse incentive dynamic in the system: a low admission rate at schools encourages applicants to apply lots of places in order to increase their odds of at least one admission, but the increasing number of applications drives the admission rate down all the more.</p>
<p>"There was only so much money, and so much information we had on each candidate, and we had to decide. Sometimes large amounts of money swung on “she got a B+ in Bio202 and he only got a B-”.</p>
<p>The very example you used illustrates well that it was not arbitrary. You may have made a decision lacking information that you wished you had, so you went ahead and made decisions on the basis on information that you did have.</p>
<p>So arbitrary it definitely was not.</p>
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This makes a lot of sense, but I suspect the effect is unduly magnified by looking through the CC lens–how many students are there who are really applying to large numbers of schools? Certainly, there are more of them at the most selective schools, but I think there are still plenty of kids who only apply to a few schools where their chances of admission are much more predictable. I think the effects you are talking about might be significant at places like Wash U, Tufts, Vanderbilt, etc., but I bet it’ doesn’t have much impact on state flagships.</p>
<p>I don’t think yield is that difficult to predict at all. Sure applications have gone up, but it hasn’t happened overnight. By and large the yields don’t change that much from year to year. The only case I know of where the numbers changed a lot was the year RPI was named one of the “25 New Ivies” in Newsweek. They got a lot more applications that year. I don’t know what it did to their yield, but the acceptance rate went from something like 75% to 40% overnight. I assume the other schools on that list also got a bump in numbers - though perhaps not to the same extent.</p>
<p>I don’t really think the system is that arbitrary. They have good reasons to accept every student they do. Many rejected students seem to feel they earned their place with good grades and scores, but if they were rejected it’s because they didn’t make a good enough case for themselves. I saw this to some extant with both my kids. My older son basically put together an application that said “I’m a computer nerd, take me or leave me.” He got into three techie schools and Harvard. I think Harvard liked his moxie, and it didn’t hurt that he was a legacy and that he applied the year they announced they were expanding their engineering offerings and making it a separate school. My younger son got rejected by every school that he didn’t target essays for or didn’t produce the sort of essay he knew they wanted.</p>
<p>I agree with mathmom, yield probably does not change so much year to year and a simple way to handle the increase apps is to be conservative, not to offer too many acceptances and have a bigger waitlist. This sounds like it might favor the kids with lower stat but from wealthy zipcode. Kids with lower stat than the general population are probably more likely to keep staying on the waiting list of their reachy schools. On the wealthy factor, I keep hearing that schools would sometime look to take students with ability to pay off the waiting list. Of course, this is all speculation on my part.</p>
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<p>There are two definitions of arbitrary in the dictionary, one is ‘based on judgment and discretion’ and the other is ‘random and capricious.’ I have been using more the first definition, and therefore agree with the people who have been using the latter–I do not think it random.</p>
<p>There is another cool way to think about it, and that is the notion of “swarm intelligence” that is coming out of neuro/eco/biological research. The concept is that a swarm of insects has a collective intelligence that emerges from the individual decisions and knowledge of each of its members, but is more than merely that sum. There is an emergent intelligent at the level of the collective.</p>
<p>Perhaps a million kids, each deciding whether to go to college, or where to apply, and 20,000 ad com members, each using their hard number formulas and/or best judgment and intuition, collectively come up with the best possible outcome. Maybe kids do end up where they were supposed to be.</p>
<p><a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1066265822-post7.html]#7[/url]”>quote</a> Can someone walk us through the admissions process …
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<p>Lehigh University had a good write-up on their process here: [The</a> Lucky 13’s](<a href=“http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/lehigh/alumni_2009fall/index.php?startid=39#/24]The”>http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/lehigh/alumni_2009fall/index.php?startid=39#/24).</p>
<p>I’d just like to say as a general comment, the fit concept is mostly wrong. Some of you rationalize the decisions in your head as being right but that’s psychology playing tricks on you. I didn’t see myself as a perfect fit for Princeton based on the stereotypical image of what Princeton was going to be like but Princeton admitted unconventional types like me probably to CHANGE its image according to its vision. Collectively, we unconventional types have RECREATED a new Princeton. Harvard is made up of eclectic types as well. As long as you have a type A personality, you will fit in. I guess what I’m trying to say is, unless you stick out like a sore thumb and there are no other sore thumbs sticking out along with you to help in recreating the community, you will probably fit in. Also, there are many many many “excellent fits” applying to the top schools who are denied admission in favor of those who are worse fits by conventional standards.</p>
<p>Don’t flatter yourself, nychomie! You didn’t just singlehandedly diversify Princeton.</p>
<p>Well obviously not single-handedly. Nobody can do that. That’s why I said “collectively.”</p>