"Sometimes you've got to say, "What the f---'"
Posted on 04/11/2014 7:59:30 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Enrollment at American colleges is sliding, but competition for spots at top universities is more cutthroat and anxiety-inducing than ever. In the just-completed admissions season, Stanford University accepted only 5 percent of applicants, a new low among the most prestigious schools, with the odds nearly as bad at its elite rivals.
Deluged by more applications than ever, the most selective colleges are, inevitably, rejecting a vast majority, including legions of students they once would have accepted. Admissions directors at these institutions say that most of the students they turn down are such strong candidates that many are indistinguishable from those who get in.
Isaac Madrid applied to 11 colleges, a scattershot approach that he said is fairly typical at his private high school, Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, Calif. Students there are all too aware of the long odds against getting into any particular elite university. “It was a crazy amount of work and stress doing all those essays by the deadline and keeping up my schoolwork, and waiting on the responses, and we had more than $800 in application fees,” he said.
Mr. Madrid, 18, got a taste of how random the results can seem. He was among the 95 percent turned away by Stanford, but he got into Yale, which he plans to attend, and he admitted having no real insight into the reasons for either decision.
Bruce Poch, a former admissions dean at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., said he saw “the opposite of a virtuous cycle at work” in admissions. “Kids see that the admit rates are brutal and dropping, and it looks more like a crapshoot,” he said. “So they send more apps, which forces the colleges to lower their admit rates, which spurs the kids next year to send even more apps.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Everyone is in "shock" at the number of apps they receive, but DO THE MATH!!!
11,549 x $100 = $1,115,490
That That's a lot of scratch.So, they have to hire a few grad students at $10/hour to stack,and arrange the files..print the rejection letters, and pay the postage..90% of apps received don't survive the first cut...for whatever criteria....maybe that costs $15,000, MAX..they CLEAR well over a million...they have NO incentive to try and reduce the number they receve.
-PJ
What's the problem here?
"Selective" colleges aren't cutting back on the number of students they except.
There of course isn't a problem.
I sense the feds want to be more involved with admissions selection process and this NY Time non story is just the start.
It depends on what career you want. Law, politics, investment banking-—it’s darn near impossible to get with the top firms or to make the necessary connections to run for a major office without that Ivy League degree. Charles Murray has done an exceptional job of showing that the “superzips” that surround Washington and NYC are almost EXCLUSIVELY dominated by Ivy League degrees!
Yup, online classes for free or at low cost that deliver real college credits....it’s coming. I remember taking my Graduate Record Exams at Washington University(St Louis) and there is no reason why people who learn online should not be able take such exams for actual credit. Why does it matter where you learned something? What difference does it make?
We need a really good setup on the net and via satellite for home schoolers also.
College has become a racket in many ways.
It's the way I went through. My daughter got the full boat scholarship, only had to pay for books and food. What I saved stayed in her account made a nice down payment on her house.
The exclusivity of that ruling class is part of the problem. An incestuous orthodoxy pervades that rarefied environment, and has little resemblance to, recognition of, or use for outsiders, who ironically, make up most of the country.
Yes. Absolutely. We would be better off if even these private schools were required to take applicants selected at random.
Or better yet, if the cachet of those elitist establishments were eliminated entirely, and the "country club" more democratized.
Transfering as a junior, if you have a good CC record, is easier than trying to transfer as a sophomore. My oldest son is going to UNC-Charlotte as a junior this fall. He even expects to get a dorm room, in a “less-desirable residence hall,” even though he and his friend are both local students.
"Sometimes you've got to say, "What the f---'"
Big whoop. Go to State U instead - you’ll pay a lot less and get a generally better “education”.
“Harvard, Yale and Princeton fund 100% of financial need with grants. The other Ivies, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT provide grants for the large majority of need, with modest amount of loans and work study making up the difference.....A student from a family with an income under $150,000 will pay less out of pocket or by loans than at virtually any public or less-well-endowed private school.”
This is why. These schools are a better net value compared to overpriced public universities.
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