College Admissions by Lottery of Qualified Applicants? Part II

Today is the last day of March, which means it's time for the annual ritual of high school seniors learning which colleges they've been accepted to and for my jaw to drop at how insanely competitive the process has become. There's good news and bad news for this year's applicants to selective colleges.

First, the good news: applications to certain of the liberal arts colleges were down, allowing a larger percentage to win acceptance. More fat envelopes are going out this year from the following: Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Pomona, and Grinnell.

Unfortunately, many more of the top schools are reporting record low admissions rates:

Harvard 7% vs. 8% last year
Stanford 7.5% vs. 9.5%
Yale 7.5% vs. 8.3%
Columbia 9.8% vs. 10%
MIT 10.2% vs. 11.6%
Brown 11% vs. 13.4%
Dartmouth 12% vs. 13%
Duke 17% vs. 20%
Penn 17% (same as last year)
Cornell 19% vs. 20.4%
Wesleyan (CT) 22% vs. 27%

Chad Aldeman had an iteresting blog post a couple weeks ago over at "The Quick and the Ed" calling for selective colleges to hold lotteries of all applicants who meet the school's minimum academic qualifications:

"What this becomes, more or less, is a lottery. And if it's a lottery, and everyone treats it that way except the students who invest their time, money, and emotions, maybe we should just start treating it that way. No more pretending it's about student activities, their essay, recommendations, or their devotion to the school. We've all heard about the perfect 4.0 student with excellent extracurriculars who gets rejected from their dream school. Instead, let's just institute a lottery. Schools set their baseline, kids submit their numbers, and then we run a giant lottery for the spots. Poof, like magic. Such a system operates in other fields that we're perfectly comfortable with--medical residency programs or coveted charter schools, for example--so maybe it's time to give it a shot for college applicants."

As I blogged almost two years ago, holding lotteries would go a long way in reducing the pressure cooker atmosphere at many of today's high schools.

There's a girl in our 4H club who is the valedictorian of her class at one of the local government-run schools. She was telling me at one of the recent project meetings about her crazy workload. She's currently taking FIVE (!) Advanced Placement courses. I took one AP course my senior year and thought that by itself was a lot of work. I can't imagine multiplying the demands of that by five!

If students knew that they did not need to try to impress an admissions officer, maybe they could stop obsessing over external markers of achievement like grades and standardized test scores- and start focusing on learning for its own sake. The current system encourages kids to "play the game" of school and often penalizes those who stretch themselves intellectually by enrolling in courses where they won't receive a high grade. Shouldn't we be discouraging students from settling for the "easy A" and rewarding those who challenge themselves?

Pity the Poor Little Rich Kids of NYC's Prep Schools

Okay, I know it's not terribly Christian of me to gloat over this quote from an unnamed guidance counselor at one of Manhattan's chi-chi prep schools bemoaning this year's poor placement rate at Harvard and other top colleges (emphasis mine) but I just couldn't resist:

"The Ivies are reaching out for a diverse economic background—even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing."

The fact that there will be former homeschoolers like Chelsea Link attending Harvard next year but no graduates of $31,200/year Dalton just makes me feel a teeny bit better about not being able to afford the astronomical tuition private schools in our area charge!

College Admissions Insanity

My jaw hit the floor when I read in today's New York Times what the college admissions statistics are for the class of 2012. No wonder the atmosphere is so intense in many high schools these days!

Harvard: 7.1%
Yale: 8.3%
Columbia: 8.7%
Stanford: 9.5%
MIT: 11.6%
Dartmouth: 13%
Brown: 13%

Things have gotten absolutely out of hand- it's high time these sought-after schools increase the size of their freshman classes. Demand next year is likely to be even higher given the recent financial-aid changes announced by many of the universities. If Harvard received 27,462 applications even before the new program was publicized, how many more are going to apply next year given the more generous aid?

The sad thing is, this admissions frenzy at the college level has a trickle-down effect because it ups the ante for each preceding level. High schools with a good college placement track record become more desirable, then middle schools with a good high school placement record, and so on down the line. You wind up with yuppie parents absolutely freaking out about nursery school acceptances for their toddlers who are often not even out of Pull-Ups :-(

Top Universities Recruiting Wealthy Foreigners While Denying American Applicants

Last year, Harvard University received approximately $514 million in Federal research grant money. It receives tens of millions more annually in Federal financial aid for its students.

In the 2006-2007 admissions cycle, Harvard admitted a mere 9% of its applicants. While numbers are not in yet for this year, some of its peers have reported a significant increase in both the quality and quantity of applications. Newsweek has an article this week about how competitive college admissions have become in recent years.

Imagine my surprise, then, to read the following:

"The most selective institutions have begun to aggressively recruit applicants from China, Korea, India and South America."

There aren't enough qualified Chinese-Americans, Korean-Americans, Indian-Americans, etc. from which to select? I find that hard to believe given all the controversy surrounding alleged discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admissions. My youngest brother has a good friend who is Chinese-American and who got rejected from Harvard despite a stellar application.

I've heard of so many similar stories, including the case of Jian Li who filed a formal complaint with the Office of Civil Rights against Princeton University in 2006. Li scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT and 2390 out of a possible 2400 on the achievement tests in calculus, chemistry, and physics. He also had a near-perfect GPA including numerous Advanced Placement classes, and was president of his school's American Field Service chapter, served as a delegate at Boys' State, and completed a community service project in Costa Rica. In addition to his rejection by Princeton, he was also turned down by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Penn. How many other Asian-Americans are similarly shut out while these schools are admitting foreign nationals (many of whom will leave the U.S. upon graduation)?

Shouldn't universities heavily subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers give preference to U.S. citizens and legal residents in admissions? Why are they aggressively recruiting foreigners while at the same time rejecting so many hardworking American kids?

College Admissions by Lottery of Qualified Applicants?

The Los Angeles Times recently published a very interesting op-ed article by Professor Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore. In it, he makes the highly provocative suggestion that selective colleges that have far more qualified applicants than slots use a lottery to determine which to admit.

He discusses how the idea of the "flat maximum" applies to college admissions: "when comparing the qualifications of people who are bunched up at the very top of the curve, the amount of inherent uncertainty in evaluating their credentials is larger than the measurable differences among candidates. Applied to college admissions, this principle implies that it is impossible to know which excellent student (or school) will be better than which other excellent student (or school). Uncertainty of evaluation makes the hair-splitting to distinguish among excellent students a waste of time; the degree of precision required exceeds the inherent reliability of the data."

Professor Schwartz also talks about the negative impact of the current system on students and their families. Not just the financial drain but also "playing it safe" when it comes to classes & extracurriculars, and valuing demonstrable achievement over learning for its own sake. At worst, the pressure can contribute to substance abuse, anxiety disorders, and depression.

When the top colleges now admit 10% or fewer of their applicants, it seems likely that a random selection from among say the top third of the admissions pool would be just as successful as those chosen by the current method. Admissions officers are not psychics but right now they are attempting to predict which 1550 SAT varsity captain valedictorian among many is going to outperform the others. Why not recognize that they are *ALL* qualified and let a computer decide which gets the prized thick envelope? It would ease the disappointment of a rejection letter to make it obvious that it was just the luck of the draw. For the most part, that's the case already because of the "flat maximum" but the current system makes rejections feel like personal ones.

I'm not saying that it would be a good idea to remove all subjectivity from college admissions. Standardized test scores and grades are not everything and admitting students solely based on some arbitrary formula would be terrible. Admissions officers should use "holistic" methods determine whether or not an applicant is qualified. Does the applicant have the potential to succeed at the particular school? For a sizable percentage, the answer will be "yes", and those will go into the lottery for final selection.

Sounds a whole lot fairer to me than the current process and it would go a long way in easing the admissions hysteria plaguing so many communities!