<p>Check out this article in the Inquirer - <a href=“http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/10140684.htm?1c[/url]”>http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/10140684.htm?1c</a></p>
<p>The academic version of hazing</p>
<p>College application is rough enough without binding early-decision practices.</p>
<p>By Mark Franek</p>
<p>What do Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Gardner all have in common (besides about $23 billion)? That’s right - they all attended state-run universities.</p>
<p>I dig this fact out of my dean of students file every year around this time when our high school seniors are putting the finishing touches on their college applications, particularly those one-shot deals at early-decision schools.</p>
<p>In early-decision programs, students start their senior year ready to choose the one college they would most like to attend. They are allowed to make only one application, and it is usually due to the college in mid-November. College admissions officers then have about a month to deliberate and respond.</p>
<p>“April is the cruelest month,” according to poet T. S. Eliot - but then, Eliot didn’t teach high school seniors. For a fortunate few, thick envelopes arrive in the mail in mid-December, rolling out the red carpet to the college of their choice (complete with a binding contract so that students and their families can’t wait for more suitable - or cheaper - offers); for everyone else, it’s the thin letter and back into the pot with the rest of the regular applications, or worse, outright rejection.</p>
<p>I can’t tell you how many times I’ve witnessed tears of joy and jubilation, or real grief, in the halls during my 12 years as an educator. I’ve seen student-couples break up, students break down, friendships on the rocks. You’d think that getting into a preferred university was a life-or-death situation.</p>
<p>For those who get in early, an acceptance letter seems to confirm what they already know about themselves - that they are bright, motivated students, with lots of promise. (Usually, this confirmation is followed almost immediately by a marked decline in the amount of homework being performed, which continues to decline over the next six months.) For those who don’t get in, it’s back to the grindstone and the waiting game, which is new this time because the wait is accompanied by the vague sense that they weren’t quite good enough the first time around.</p>
<p>Who is responsible for this ludicrous situation may surprise you: The University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University - and you.</p>
<p>Schools such as Penn and Princeton - including a long list of less selective schools that take their cue from the Ivies - use early-decision programs to improve their overall yield (accepted students who ultimately matriculate in the fall), the average SAT score of their accepted students, and their selectivity rating. These all are variables that have dramatic and immediate positive effects in any popular ranking system, such as the pervasive and powerful one that appears each fall in U.S. News and World Report magazine. Any college president who says he or she doesn’t read or care about this report might have a degree from Princeton but also is lying.</p>
<p>Students, of course, don’t know that they are being manipulated and dramatically affected by a system that is all about marketing, money and power, which have little to do with getting a good education.</p>
<p>Students don’t really put much stock in the college rankings, to be honest, but their parents do. By the time the senior year rolls around, increasingly more parents have whipped up such a frenzy over the college admissions process that many kids think that the rest of their lives - indeed, their present self-worth - hinges on where they plan to attend college.</p>
<p>Early decision fans the flames of an already intense fire. The college admissions process, wrote psychologist Michael G. Thompson in a popular 1990 essay, “College Admissions as a Failed Rite of Passage,” “can make normal [parents] act nutty, and nutty [parents] act quite crazy.” I’ve heard outrageous stories of admissions officers being offered fruit baskets and stock options - all to gain entry to an attractive middle school. I can only imagine what is being proffered at the college level.</p>
<p>Where are high school teachers on the issue of college admissions? We’re on the sidelines, of course, watching a game that has changed dramatically over the years. College used to be about a few wonderful professors, a whole lot of books, and great friends. Since when did a few very selective schools develop a monopoly on those things, or on anyone’s future?</p>
<p>It’s time for colleges and universities to end their binding early-decision programs, for publications to stop listing colleges with numerals next to them, and for parents to reduce their anxiety about the whole college-decision process.</p>
<p>Any teacher worth his or her shiny apple knows that a student can get all A’s, go to the highest-ranked schools, and still fail life. Every child knows that it never mattered where his mother went to college. Why do parents, who were once children and always are teachers, forget this wisdom when they need it most?</p>
<p>Though I think it’s a bit hard on Ivy admission officers, I agree with some of his points. What do you think?</p>