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 ...
America’s next legion of elites.
Bow down and offer worship you serfs....
The answer is online learning.
They need to make room for all those chinese and muslim foreign students.
The more elite, maybe the more liberal.
Hence, these colleges may well be very discriminating.
-PJ
I see a six-figure student loan debt in this young man's future.
When one looks at the accomplishments of the graduates of these institutions, especially in government, one has difficulty regarding these schools as elite institutions.
My daughter applied to Pomona. Straight-A student, church group leader, blah blah blah. Denied.
I don’t know what these diploma factories are looking for but I’ll guarantee that if I were college-aged, I’d tell them to stuff it. A prestigious degree might open a few more doors at the beginning of your career, but it dwindles in importance as times goes on.
Do you have any idea what colleges your workmates attended? Do you care?
I think if you are going into six figure debt an Ivy League is worth it. The problem is the six figure debt for attending some generic liberal arts college.
NY Slimes wants more affirmative action at all levels.
The son of a friend was just accepted at Stanford and was turned down by Yale and Georgetown.
A brilliant female jock, daughter of another couple was turned down at Stanford last year and accepted at an Ivy league school.
Both of these young people have never seen a grade below an A. They are well rounded young people, who know how to communicate with adults on an adult to adult level.
Both had a parent who was graduated from Stanford.
Some of the universities start recruiting when the potential students are still in junior high/intermediate levels. A younger female relative, a freshman this year has had several invited trips to a major and very selective university out here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this guy won the lottery by getting into Yale and NOT getting into Stanford.
A budget strategy is to get two years of community college, then go to State University, blow the GRE out of the water and enroll in
a namebrand graduate school for your final degree.
Income on endowments over $5 Billion should be taxed, so these wealthy institutions can "pay their fair share."
“...Stanford University accepted only 5 percent of applicants, a new low among the most prestigious schools...”
And if you’re a white male you have a better chance of starting for the Miami Heat than getting into Stanford or any Ivy League college.
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. Moreover, all of them use an exceptionally generous formula for calculating need. 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.
The white American students admitted are also HIGHLY unrepresentative of the white population in general, in ways that work against conservatives. There is evidence that the admissions offices look for clues in applications about political/cultural orientation and discriminate against students who are likely to be conservative.
It’s not easy to get in to Stanford or an Ivy if you’re white, but that’s despite affirmative action, not because of it. The typical mix at those schools is 50-60% white, 20-25% underrepresented minorities, 20-25% Asians. Without affirmative action the mix would be 75%+ Asian, 25% or less white, and 1% or less underrepresented minorities. (And of those whites, half of them would be the kids of former Soviet Union immigrants.) Just because white guys get a less dramatic preference doesn’t mean they aren’t getting a preference.
Well, there are at least 20 tops schools if not more and if they each take 5% of the “best and brightest,” 100% of the “best and brightest” get into great, world class schools.
That’s a great idea for all kids except those who get full scholarships!
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