Ideally, this should happen. So it yields the most optimal choice for both the student and the school.
This has been suggested for many years, but it unfortunately doesnât take financial need into consideration.
It also doesnât take into account that they are kids who may change their minds throughout the year. Many people do not visit colleges until they get accepted because of the expense. My S21 was leaning heavily towards Bentley University until we visited. Donât get me wrong, itâs a great school and beautiful campus, but he realized that he wanted more to do within walking distance of the school. It was a factor he hadnât really thought about before.
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It works for residencies (and for things like kidney transplants) because of scarcity.
Despite what you read on CC, there are MORE than enough seats at colleges in the US for the number of HS graduates we have. Not a scarcity situation.
Except that if every kid gunning for CMU sees Pitt as a âloser outcomeâ, or every parent who wants their kid at JHU wonât accept that the kids stats mean Towson or Goucher- the system falls apart.
Everyone wants to take their shot. And itâs very hard to talk them out of it! How many threads do we have going now of kids who were rejected or deferred from their ED school and are panicking that they might end up at the dreaded safety (I applied because my GC made me but I hate it there).
Youâre going to sell an effective âmatch dayâ system to these folks? I donât think so!
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Iâd like to see a system where colleges publicly advertise their minimum floor for admissions. Harvard can set a floor of 1550 SAT and 4.0 UW GPA. Another school can set a minimum of 1200 SAT and a 3.5 UW GPA. If a school receives more qualified applicants than it has spaces, it chooses from the qualified by lottery. Form your orchestra and sports teams from the folks that are admitted. You can incentivize the oboe player in your admitted pool by offering a full oboe scholarship. Kids still participate in ECs, but in activities that actually interest them.
This wonât happen because:
a) The threshold for admissions is transparent and it will reduce the number of applications. Selectivity metrics drop.
b) It reduces the ability of families to brag about their kidâs college âYeah but your kid just happened to win the lottery, right?â
c) winning in sports brings in too much money
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The positions at the elite institutions are scarce. Every applicant can take their shot at the schools they want to, but will only get matched to the school that wants them before others. It would be a fair system. We will not have one individual matching into 5-6 of the most competitive schools, thereby leaving spots for others who may want to go there.
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We are experiencing this. My kid chose only 4 at first. A reach, easier reach, target, safety. Heâs gotten deferred, rejected, and accepted to his safety. While he will be fine going to his safety, he would prefer to go to a more rigorous school. Not comfortable putting all our hope in that one target school left, we added more schools. This is why high stat kids are applying to more schools. Adding a few more schools could mean the diff between going to a safety school or being somewhere thatâs a better fit.
I think a lot of people think that high stat kids are able to choose safety schools that are target schools for the rest of the population. So whatâs the big deal? But thatâs simply not the truth. The only true safety school nowadays is one that gives you guaranteed admission, and that usually happens with your state school. If you live in a state that doesnât have a top state college, there will be a large divide between a high stat kidâs OOS target schools and their safety.
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Iâm going to bet (and someone can see if they can find an analysis) that the number of kids who get into 5-6 of the most competitive schools is a rounding error compared to the number of kids who âshoot their shotâ and get into ZERO of not just the most competitive schools but the ones below that.
The kid who ranks Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Cornell (etc.) and matches with U Mass Lowell? Those are the parents whoâll be threatening a lawsuit. At least with the current system- a rejection is a true rejection.
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That would never work because the floor is different depending on what group you fall into. For an unhooked student it might be a 1550+ but for a recruited athlete in certain sports it could be as low as 1200 - and the same might apply to various other specialty groups (i.e. kids of big donors). The last thing schools want to do is publicize the fact that the academic criteria for admission is not the same for every student. Above all, instituting and publishing formal academic floors (which they probably have informally already) would limit their flexibility and they donât want that.
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The current system ( for private selective holistic ) has provided a remarkable incentive for applicants to highlight their ethnic heritage, to which they may or may not have actual ties. 9 out of 9 of my interviewees brought it up. Zero did pre-covid. Such a remarkable sudden commitment to ancestry among the young. I wonder if it extends beyond April 1.
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I agree itâs unlikely to happen, but Iâm saying donât have different floors. Set just one and live with the folks who qualify. This applies to everything including sports teams.
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Wouldnât meet the DEI targets.
It actually might. Raj Chettyâs work suggest that very selective schools would more than compensate for any losses due to the removal of affirmative action if they stopped giving preference to legacies, athletes, and kids who attend elite expensive private high schools.
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There is no preference anymore in elite college admissions for kids who attend âeliteâ expensive private high schools. There is for specific legacy applicants who may attend those schools, but not for non-legacies.
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Iâm not stating my opinion on the preference for private high schools. Iâm just citing Chettyâs findings. Admittedly, Iâm probably going too far because his research is looking at the advantage that families in the top 1% of income have in admission to Ivy+ universities.
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I dont think there is an explicit preference, but students at elite private schools are often better prepared and packaged than their large public school peers
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Not all states have auto-admit schools though. Itâs uncommon here in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic, for example. And those with popular flagships arenât safeties for all in-state kids.
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That is pretty much how it works for the vast majority of schools in the US today. Sometimes itâs explicit and sometimes itâs implicit but for most schools if your grades and tests where accepted meet an acceptable threshold you are in. Most schools are relatively non-selective and provide a fine education to their students. Those are not the schools that we are discussing here on CC for the most part. Here we are discussing admissions at the roughly 50 schools which have admissions rates of 20% or less.
We are back to academics and testing as the only means of defining who is deserving of gaining admission. It doesnât work that way and it doesnât work that way because that approach doesnât align with the priorities of the schools that are part of the conversation. They want brilliant minds but that is only one factor. They want great athletes because they have 150 year old traditions that are important to them and their alumni. They want musicians and artists because they add richness and beauty to society. In the whole they see themselves as molding leaders and society as well as making contributions to science. When they can get kids who are high performers across multiple vectors they grab them because they are rare and fit how the schools see themselves. Holistically these schools see themselves as more than âacademic training groundsâ and they craft their classes accordingly.
The challenges with testing in the US because of the functional issues in our K-12 system has been discussed many times here on CC. I am very much in favor of testing but it needs to be used in context. Grade inflation is making GPA a less useful measure every year. In the system that you imagine every kid from a âfeeder typeâ of private school would have a 4.0UW GPA because any private that didnât provide one would be quickly struggling with disgruntled parents who âwerenât getting what they paid for.â
The system that you are describing is broken the day it rolls out and is direct opposition to how these schools see themselves.
The system as it exists today is confusing, frustrating, and opaque but it is hard to say that it is broken because it really isnât letting unqualified or undeserving people in at the expense of others. Pretty much every admit is qualified and of those who arenât admitted most of them are qualified as well. They didnât get in because of the numbers, not because of their qualifications.
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So now we would want to bring standardized testing back into the requirements? That probably wont fly. And there are the recruited athlete exceptions to thisâŠ
Waitlists handle this scenario