<p>Journalism about this season’s admissions phenomena has elicited the confession from admissions officers that they are using mass marketing tools to drive up the denominator.
See, e.g., their statements in the reporting of Janet Frankston Lorin of Bloomberg News here:
[Princeton</a> Surge Beats Harvard as Applications Soar (Update2) - BusinessWeek](<a href=“Businessweek - Bloomberg”>Businessweek - Bloomberg)
and here:
[Chicago?s</a> 42% Applicant Jump to Aid Harvard Rivalry (Update1) - BusinessWeek](<a href=“Businessweek - Bloomberg”>Businessweek - Bloomberg)
This is, of course, the marketing model of Eric Furda at Columbia in the 1990s: If you lower the admit rate it creates a buzz and draws a constitutionally “competitive” type of applicant. After a couple of admission cycles, quantity transmogrifies into quality.
The Furda model worked brilliantly for Columbia, ending a 30-year “slump” that had ensued from the “Strawbery Statement” years. The strategy was discussed publicly by Columbia officials at the time and most publicly by Columbia president George Rupp.
From the Chicago article of January 14, 2010:
Eric Furda himself is now at his alma mater Penn, and on January 22 he proudly announced that Penn’s denominator had jumped 17 percent. That should give Penn a buzz-worthy acceptance rate of 14.6 percent.
(Furda will be slightly peeved that Brown has maintained the gap of its lead with an anticipated 9.3 percent.)
One’s opinion of the new-old college marketing racket will depend on one’s opinion of the new demographic it is soliciting.
I’m a reactionary old ■■■■■■■ to the extent that I’m not entirely persuaded that Brownsville, Texas is as fecund of genius as is, say, New Canaan, Connecticut. Or that the offspring of a Pulitzer-winner (in New Canaan) might not be more talented than an applicant who is talented in comparison to his impoverished neighborhood.
(I am also not a communicant of the Diversity Is Good religion. The “discoveries” of Harvard’s Robert Putnam have always seemed to me to be an obvious fact of human society.)<br>
And to underline my bastardness, I’m a proponent of taking more, not fewer, prep school students, and more rich international students – in short, the old Brown marketing model of Jim Rogers and Vartan Gregorian.
So shoot me.</p>
Hello, Modest.
Well, as John Huston said to Jack Nicholson, “I am an old man.” (Or is your tagline a modern reference that eludes me?)
I started the thread to elicit opinion about those “nefarious purposes” that, I take it, you have “first-hand knowledge about.”
Pease elaborate.
And I agree. It’s nefarious, but entirely consistent with the way college valuation was bound to go in the American culture. And may I quote Paul Fussell’s fun little book “Class” on the subject (Chapter 6: “The Life of the Mind”):
<p>You are a snob. Do you wear green plaid pants with your pink Lacoste shirt when you play golf? The idea that the only worthy people live in the Northeast makes my stomach turn.</p>
Someone in CC once called you humorless. That was accurate. I wish you weren’t an alumnus interviewer. I wonder how many bright kids your tedious literalness drives away.
That’s a dim bit of writing. Were you trying to be socially acute?<br>
Incidentally (and it does place you socially), neither golf nor Lacoste are prep. You’ve watched too many Chevy Chase movies.
Your writing is also Non-U. If you ever do read that Fussell book I quoted (unlikely), try to learn from its irony.
But if you missed the cues of my “reactionary old ■■■■■■■” and “bastardness” in the OP, then there’s not a whole lot to be done with you.</p>
<p>“Old man yells at cloud!” is a reference to The Simpsons. It is a satire-- people who have been around a while have a tendency to see problems in everything, and those of us who have been around less long seem to view these things as newsworthy events. It’s my way of calling attention to te fact that you’re curmudgeon-y and everything you say is conjecture based only on yor desired reading of reality.</p>
Not my conjecture.
The subject of articles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg.com. Each has published in recent weeks on the special egregiousness of mass marketing in this admissions cycle.
Modestmelody – helpfully, as I had thought at the time – advertised his “first-hand knowledge,” but nothing has ensued.
Ian Maxtone-Graham (Brown '83), of whom I am a nodding acquaintance, wrote the Lisa-hates-Brown script satirically, of course, but also ironically, because Brown at the time was popular enough to poke fun at itself.
Ian has since said that he would not write that script today because Brown is now “beneath the doormat of the Ivy League.”<br>
Not everything.
When you solicit 30000 applications with a skeleton crew staff of 19 of varying ability (viz the Michele Hernandez testimony) and sundry press-ganged readers of varying ability (viz the cipher Fireandrain), I do see it as a “problem,” yes.
Around since the mid-1990s.
My original post revisited the Columbia model as conceived by George Rupp (another nodding acquaintance) and executed by Eric Furda. Its ethics were examined at the time by, e.g., James Fallows and Michael Kinsley. Social historians weighed in, including Paul Fussell, whose earlier work I quoted.
Proud of it.
You go to Brown so you’ll have encountered Baudrillard and the like in the syllabus.
Unless you’re prepared to call any invitation to revisit past controversy “curmudgeon-y” you’d better allow this instance.
Modestmelody was eight years old in the mid-1990s, and Wolfmanjack was perhaps on the plains of Kansas, where the dinosaurs roamed contemporarily with Jesus. (I have visited West Kansas and love the landscape and architecture.)
It’s hypocritical of any CC “regular” (defined as multiple-thousand poster) to chide anyone else for revisiting anything.
Internet compulsion is worse than curmudgeon.</p>
<p>Actually I think Jesus rode the dinosaurs, at least according to the certain people on the school board. If you have been anywhere off of I-70 I’d be impressed, but hey you’re an expert!! collegeconfident I would be careful about bringing posts into this, as you obviously spend as much time reading them. I don’t know you at all and internet forums are not a place to judge how well you like someone, but online at least you come off as a bit of a *********, as they say in Kansas. So I guess if that’s you’re role here that’s great, there are always a few on any forum, but it was better when you were just reading.</p>
<p>Actually, if the yield remains the same (and it should, if not grow), the acceptance rate will be nigh-on 14.0%, and if it grows to past peaks, around 13.4%. We’ll see what happens.</p>
<p>Are you some kind of member of the cabal that governs elite institutions who forgot to take his anti-psychotics? If so, while I have your ear: What is the future of the Ivy League? Will Princeton ever cede its position to Columbia, Brown, Penn or Dartmouth? Will Harvard buy all of Boston?</p>