The already crazed competition for admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges became even more intense this year, with many logging record low acceptance rates.
Harvard College, for example, offered admission to only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied ”” or, put another way, it rejected 93 of every 100 applicants, many with extraordinary achievements, like a perfect score on one of the SAT exams. Yale College accepted 8.3 percent of its 22,813 applicants. Both rates were records.
Columbia College admitted 8.7 percent of its applicants, Brown University and Dartmouth College 13 percent, and Bowdoin College and Georgetown University 18 percent ”” also records.
“We love the people we admitted, but we also love a very large number of the people who we were not able to admit,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College.
Pray for our young people going through this process – from BCP
God our Father, you see your children growing up in an
unsteady and confusing world: Show them that your ways
give more life than the ways of the world, and that following
you is better than chasing after selfish goals. Help them to
take failure, not as a measure of their worth, but as a chance
for a new start. Give them strength to hold their faith in you,
and to keep alive their joy in your creation; through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen.
Part of this is a simple demographic surge; there are more kids in high school these days.
There is, however, a decided shift in that more kids are dreaming of elite universities. The good news is that there are a lot of great schools. If you can’t get Harvard or Yale, you can probably get Northwestern or Boston University. And so on. And the truth is…you can be just as happy.
Randall
The sad truth is that there is no return on investment commensurate with the obscene costs and “selectivity” of these self-appointed elite schools. We’re dealing here with two factors: prestige branding: the inexplicable willingness of some people to pay many times the true cost and value of a commodity because it comes with a prestigious name attached and one that can elicit envy in the parents of other children; and simple, market-driven price inflation: a fixed supply of a certain good being chased by an increasing number of potential buyers willing to pay whatever they must. By the way, Dean Fitzsimmons’ description of this process as one of “love” is too ridiculous for parody.
What does academic “prestige” actually amount to, anyway? How many “A” students schooled at the most “prestigious” institutions have found themselves reporting for most of their lives to the “C” students – or dropouts! – who become the big-risk taking financiers, entrepreneurs, and CEO’s (of both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations) that make the world go around?
It’s not just the Ivy Leagues that are turning down more applicants. The University of Central Florida (now the 6th largest college in the US) is also turning down applicants in record numbers
The article does a good job laying out some of the causes – primarily I think it is becasue the web has made it so much easier to apply – I know kids who are applying to more that 50 schools – crazy. It is even a bit tougher for girls over guys since there are actually more women applicants now. For states with great public universities, starting out in community college and transferring is a great way around the system – of course you need to apply yourself and get A’s in those community college classes.
Here’s another article on the situation, from the Yale Daily News. I personally think a good part of this has to do with recently-created middle class financial aid programs that are leading mainstream middle class families to think maybe they could afford an Ivy or other prestigious college. Many of these institutions are largely now made up of the rich who can afford to pay full fare, and the poor and affirmative action admits who are enticed with substantial financial aid so the school looks good on its “diversity” statistics. The colleges are starting to wake up to the fact that in this process they have now largely shut out the middle class, which often can only look at public institutions and community colleges.
[blockquote] Ivy admissions prompt frenzy
Shift away from early-action programs may result in lower matriculation yield at Yale
Caitlin Roman
Staff Reporter
Published Thursday, April 3, 2008
Amid all the hype surrounding this year’s record-low acceptance rates in the Ivy League, two things are sure: This is a year unlike any other for college admissions, and no one can predict what is going to happen.
The absence of early programs at Harvard and Princeton universities, a series of financial-aid shake-ups throughout higher education and a record number of applicants have made for a perfect storm of uncertainty. High-school guidance counselors and admissions deans each have their own pet theories — low yield, high yield, high waitlist activity, low waitlist activity — but freely admit that, when it comes down to it, they, too, are in the dark.
“Nobody knows what’s going on,†Jon Reider, college counseling director at San Francisco’s private University High School, said Monday afternoon as high school seniors across the country were logging on to admissions Web sites to find out their decisions. “How could they? We don’t have any track record for this.â€
Hedging bets, applicants
All six Ivy League schools that have announced admissions statistics so far have reported record-low acceptance rates, which has fueled the frenzy surrounding this year’s admissions process.
Princeton announced Wednesday that it had offered admission to a record-low 9.25 percent, or 1,976 students, of the 21,369 applicants for the class of 2012. Yale and Harvard admitted 8.3 and 7.1 percent, respectively, of their applicant pools.
Most admissions experts speculate that Yale’s yield — the percentage of admitted students who matriculate, which has been slightly above 70 percent for the past three years — will drop this year because of the absence of Princeton and Harvard as options in the early admissions round.
Many students who would have applied early to one of those schools sent out more applications than they would have otherwise, Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzel said, meaning that there will be a larger-than-usual overlap in admissions offers.
“Our sense is that yield will go down,†Brenzel said. “But we don’t know by how much, and we could be wrong.â€
So Yale’s admissions office, he said, is hedging its bets by accepting 1,892 students, a figure he said, that is higher than the number Yale initially accepted last year — 1,860 — but lower than the number Yale ultimately accepted last year after taking students of the waitlist, 1,911.
This way, Brenzel said, the office can absorb some drop in the yield but, at the same time, minimize the chance that too many students will accept offers of admission, resulting in overcrowding.
But some college guidance counselors dismissed the notion that Yale’s yield will drop this year.
Despite the impact of Harvard and Princeton’s new policies, Yale will be able to hold on to its admits, hypothesized Bruce Bailey, college-counseling director at Seattle’s Lakeside School.
Yale is “too good a school†for yield to drop by more than some statistically irrelevant amount, Bailey said.
Yale also has an advantage over Harvard and Princeton in that its early admits have been imagining themselves at Yale for several months now, said Sandy Bean, coordinator of the college bureau at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C. Harvard and Princeton will face an uphill battle convincing these students to drop Yale given that the admissions office has been actively courting them since December, Bean said.
While Yale’s early action program is non-binding, allowing admitted students to matriculate elsewhere, the other Ivies with early admissions options offer binding early decision programs. This means that Yale’s admissions office, unlike the five others with early decision programs, needs to woo its early admits to ensure that they do not sign up with another school.
‘A nice tip of the hat’?
Depending on Yale’s yield, the admissions office could pull many students off this year’s larger-than-usual waitlist of 1,052 students — or, none at all.
Brenzel said the admissions office chose to waitlist so many students in order to have “as wide a selection as possible of talent†to draw from, guarding against the possibility that Yale’s yield will dip. While he anticipates taking students off the waitlist, he said, he has no idea how many will eventually be accepted.
Yale took 50 and 56 students off the waitlist for the classes of 2011 and 2010, respectively. No students were accepted from the waitlist for the class of 2009, and eight were accepted for the class of 2008.
Some college guidance counselors said they think this year’s waitlisted students will most likely have to matriculate elsewhere.
“I think Yale has taken more than enough kids,†Bean said. “I think waitlists are always a nice tip of the hat, to say gee, if we could have accepted more kids, we would have taken you. But I’m telling students a waitlist is just that, and that they’re probably not going to come off it.â€
But the absence of Harvard and Princeton in the early pools could start a ripple effect across the rest of the college admissions system, if students accepted early elsewhere choose to attend Harvard or Princeton. These other schools would then turn to their waitlists, causing more schools down the line to lose admitted students, and so on.
Financial-aid packages could also play an enhanced role this year in determining which students matriculate at Yale and other Ivy League schools, said Wade Boggs, a college counselor at the private Westminster Schools in Atlanta. But for students choosing among Yale, Harvard and Princeton in particular, he said, aid will have a more limited effect.
The recent spate of financial-aid initiatives over the past few months has closed the gaps between most Ivy League schools, Boggs said. Now, given that the aid packages in most of the Ivy League are generous across the board, the small differences between them for most students will not be enough to influence a decision either way.
‘Love or backlash?’
Yale’s financial-aid offer made a difference for Daniel Olson, a high school senior at Cranston High School West in Rhode Island, who was accepted regular decision.
Olson, who said he is leaning toward Yale, said the financial-aid packages at Dartmouth College and Williams College “do not come close†to what Yale has offered him.
Besides, Olson said, he fell in love with the residential-college system when he came to visit.
“I was taken by the beauty of the campus, I was taken by the students, I was taken by the number of ways to get involved,†Olson said.
Although this year’s results are still up in the air, some guidance counselors are already projecting years into future — and, according to Reider, the continually decreasing admit rates could result in something of a backlash against the Ivy League.
Reider said he has begun to counsel virtually all of his students against applying to Yale and some of its peers, unless they are “hookedâ€: in other words, a legacy, a recruited athlete, a targeted minority student or a “development case†— admissions-speak for a student whose parents will donate significantly to the school.
Although Reider said he thinks the admissions office has been making the right calls on who they accept or reject, the enormous volume of applications means that anyone without a “hook†now barely stands a chance.
Some admissions experts have predicted that the numbers of applications to the Ivy League will start to drop as the number of graduating high-school seniors comes down from this year’s peak. But Reider dismissed this notion. The real driver for the rise in applications — the social pressures for students to apply to so many schools — will stay in place, he said, meaning that applications will not be going down any time soon.
Brenzel said students often do not listen to guidance counselors if they discourage them from applying to a place like Yale, perhaps because certain incentives, which have been enhanced by the University’s new financial-aid initiative, make applying worthwhile.
“Even if the odds are long, the outcome is very high-payoff relative to the alternatives,†he said.
Yale received 22,813 applications this year, up 18 percent from last year’s total of 19,323, and accepted 1,892 students.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24181%5B/blockquote%5D