Dave_Berry

If you've ever wondered about the arbitrary nature college admissions, this old article from The Daily Beast should bring you up to speed. One particularly apt confession comes from a former admissions officer at an elite Northeastern liberal arts college. He may have been served some bad chicken:

"One night, I got food poisoning at a restaurant in Buffalo. The next day, I rejected all the Buffalo applications."

Scary stuff.

Dirty Secrets of College Admissions - The Daily Beast

rmldad

The attitudes of adcoms expressed in the article really are appalling. 70% of applicants are qualified but only 10% get admitted. Thus, they become unserious about how to draw distinctions. Somehow the system needs to be reformed, or it will only get worse.

Adcoms are arbitrary because there are so many applicants. Students apply to more schools because adcoms are arbitrary. It is a vicious downward spiral.

sseamom

rmldad nails it. I've been calling it a Catch-22 but the reason it's gotten so out of control are pretty obvious, no matter what we call it.

ucbalumnus

Most colleges are open admission community colleges or state universities that admit by formula (of grades, rank, and/or test scores). So the arbitrariness or non-repeatability of the admissions process described above does not apply to most college applicants.

Even those state universities that use a somewhat holistic review process tend to design their process for consistency and scalability more than the super-selective private universities do.

magentaturtle

Well, that's scary.

-_-

ZombieDante

Wow...that's crazy. Sigh...

GolfFather

As I heard an admissions official once point out – there are 37,000 high schools in the United States. That means every year there are 37,000 valedictorians. Face it, there is no substantive difference among many, many college applications.

No matter what is said publically, decisions on admissions are very much arbitrary. They have to be. I would hope that is a secret to no one. Dirty or otherwise.

flower161

Well my dreams have been slightly crushed after reading this :-(

Now Im keeping my fingers crossed that whoever reads my application is in a good mood!!

ucbalumnus

Mainly in cases where the school is flooded with applicants of similar academic credentials (typically near the maximum possible using US academic measures), or where they have institutional priorities other than academic ability that they do not want to publicize (legacy, developmental admits, yield protection, etc.). But many students apply to schools that are not like this.

amarkov

That's funny, you think high schools only have one valedictorian? Mine had 23.

GolfFather

You had 23 different students each give a "farewell" speech at your HS commencement!?



That would have taken over a day to finish. Dubious.

amarkov

No, but 23 students from my school did have class rank 1 on their transcript, and the school backed us up if we said we were a valedictorian.

mamaduck

I'll back up amarkov. Our local high schools say anything over a 4.0 earns the valedictorian award - last year there were over 40 valedictorians. They compete for who gives the speech at graduation. Crazy!

njordaer

For contrast, my school doesn't "do" valedictorians. Interesting article by the way.

Seahawks506

I mean, some of this you ultimately have no control over, but you can hardly blame a human admissions officer at a highly selective school for being completely turned off by the umpteenth "just another Asian math genius with no personality" application they've read that day. In some ways, it's better not to know this and just have faith that what happens happens. Don't be discouraged by articles like this though, just understand and be prepared for the unexpected.

This was very interesting though, and goes against the "conventional wisdom" on CC: “Any admissions director who uses the line about needing an oboe player is lying. There’s no admissions person in the country with a clue what the student orchestra needs. More likely, Mommy and Daddy gave a $1 million donation. That oboe thing is just a PR ploy.”

this one is pretty hilarious:“After the letters came out, one father called me to complain his son hadn’t gotten in. He said he was an advisor on several TV shows and movies. So I asked him which ones, and he told me the show 90210. Well, that was my favorite show, so I asked him to give me some good gossip. Then the next day I got this huge package filled with stuff from the TV show: original scripts, autographs, etc. And I called him up and said, ‘Thanks for the cool package, but there’s still no way your kid is getting into this college.”