538's "Shut Up About Harvard" Article - With Links!

College Search & Lists
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For your reading enjoyment - and discussion - here is a link to an article from 538.com:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/

HIGHER EDUCATION 6:30 AM MAR 30, 2016

Shut Up About Harvard
A focus on elite schools ignores the issues most college students face.

By BEN CASSELMAN

It’s college admissions season, which means it’s time once again for the annual flood of stories that badly misrepresent what higher education looks like for most American students — and skew the public debate over everything from student debt to the purpose of college in the process.

“How college admissions has turned into something akin to ‘The Hunger Games,’” screamed a Washington Post headline Monday. “What you need to remember about fate during college admission season,” wrote Elite Daily earlier this month. “Use rejection to prepare teens for college,” advised The Huffington Post.

Here’s how the national media usually depicts the admissions process: High school seniors spend months visiting colleges; writing essays; wrangling letters of recommendation; and practicing, taking and retaking an alphabet soup of ACTs, SATs and AP exams. Then the really hard part: months of nervously waiting to find out if they are among the lucky few (fewer every year, we’re told!) with the right blend of academic achievement, extracurricular involvement and an odds-defying personal story to gain admission to their favored university.

Here’s the reality: Most students never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a potential letter-writer. Nor are most, as The Atlantic put it Monday, “obsessively checking their mailboxes” awaiting acceptance decisions. (Never mind that for most schools, those decisions now arrive online.) According to data from the Department of Education,1 more than three-quarters of U.S. undergraduates2 attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants; just 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and hardly any — well under 1 percent — attend schools like Harvard and Yale that accept less than 10 percent.

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All true. (Of course CC isn’t representative of the bulk of America in this regard either.)

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Excellent article!

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I agree, great article. Too much of college discussion in the media just adds to the distortion, fans flames, and puts parents and students down an unhappy, unnecessary, impossible path.
When I read a CC post by a student who wants to go to an “Ivy League” I instantly know:

  1. That student is uninformed and is not conducting a serious college search.
  2. That student will never attend any of those 8 schools.
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Great article. Thank you for posting!

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Even non-Harvard college discussions around here tend to assume the “traditional” college undergraduate attending a selective residential college. That is in contrast to the slight majority of college undergraduates who attend non-residential (i.e. commuter) schools, and more than three quarters who attend schools that admit more than half of their applicants.

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But what is the audience for a site like this one?
If your objective is a college within 50 miles of home that admits most applicants, and certainly if you’re looking for a commuter school with open admissions, there really isn’t much reason to be on College Confidential. CC is appropriately focused on the niche market for selective, residential colleges.

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@snarlatron

You make me lose hope :(. Not everyone is blessed with all the knowledge you know :/.

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Even the Supreme Court is tied up in knots over a policy that affects, at best, 1% of all American college students.