You should suggest they consider schools like University of Alabama which have auto merit…
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Data? I find it hard to believe that “the majority” of students out there are recruited athletes. You are now posting wild claims. And a high percentage of college students in America go to school close to home, commute, go part time while they work to pay their tuition, or work fulltime and take one class at a time until they finish with their employer paying for much of their education.
You are posting about a minority-- American athletes looking for a great “deal” by leveraging their sport. This is by no means the situation for the majority “out there”.
You are breathing in very rarified air if you think that every student has the option of playing a team sport in college. Some don’t have the talent or physique… but some are at work at 7 am, not at practice or a conditioning session. And if they aren’t at work, they can’t pay that semester’s tuition… so it’s not really a choice.
I hope your venting is bringing you relief. I’m not prepared to declare that the “system sucks” because some HS athletes are disappointed in their results.
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There is an entirely separate forum dealing exclusively with athletic recruits. Let’s not get led further astray in this thread
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Have you been on the Northeastern campus in the past 10 years?
There are majors offered in computer science and health science that I never heard of and don’t even understand.
Northeastern’s transformation has been underway for over 25 years, not just the past ten.
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My post was all about empathy for kids that got blindsided by this whole FAFSA fiasco (some athletes, some others). FAFSA is part of the system. When you are in late April and don’t know if you will have the money for college yet, is a big deal.
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The Fs in FAFSA stand for Free and Federal. What could possibly go wrong. 
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The college admissions process is not broken. What occurs a lot, though, is that there is a gap between the following:
- where the parents and/or student WANT to attend
- what the parents & student can afford to pay
- where the student actually can get accepted
- scholarships & financial aid that the student receives from the college(s) that he/she/they get accepted to
What I do think is very broken is that too many parents & students fall into a mindset of “if it’s not in the top 25 on the US News & World Report rankings, it’s a bad school.”
A lot of parents’ and students’ expectations are also broken with regards to how unique/special the student is. Sorry, but your 4.0 GPA and 1580 SAT score really isn’t special enough to get you into an Ivy League college.
then when you combine that with an attitude of “If he/she/they/I don’t go to a top 25 school, then the student is totally doomed,” then yeah…you could see how a question of “Is the college admissions process broken” comes up.
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I’ll add one more item to this very fine post-
- When parents and /or student consider only one or two or three majors acceptable. If the only “validating” outcome is getting accepted to Berkeley for EE or Michigan for ME or UIUC in CS, then even the kid’s public options soften. Then the entire system looks broken even when the kid really wants to major in math or history or K-12 education or philosophy.
Rutgers is “just like High School”. UMD is “too big and too far from DC”. Delaware has only two acceptable majors- chemistry or Chem Eng, otherwise it’s a party school. Vermont is for stoners, Penn State is too far from a real city (also a party school), U Conn doesn’t have anything going on except for basketball, the Cals are too expensive for out of state and the housing costs are too high, etc.
One parents and kids narrow the aperture to a handful of public U’s which are NOT their own, AND the number of acceptable majors, the system starts to look broken.
Yogi Berra was right- “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”. I heard a version of this last week when I suggested Binghamton and Stonybrook for a HS junior starting to look at schools, for whom Rutgers (the state flagship) was deemed “HS 2.0”. Apparently the sweet spot is:
Great reputation
Not too close to home but driving distance
Everyone in town has heard of it but nobody else is going there
Everyone in town knows someone who graduated from there who is making a zillion dollars at a FAANG company, DE Shaw/Citadel, or got into med school at NYU for free on their first application round.
Anything else is Yogi Berra territory. Or maybe Groucho Marx?
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Totally agree with everything you just said. 
In the general community out there of adults asking you where you (or your kid, if you’re a parent) are going to college/applying to college, there’s also a general uninformed attitude of “If I haven’t heard of the school, then it must be a garbage school.”
And heaven forbid if your (or your kid’s) #1 top pick school has a general reputation of being a ‘party school.’ Every Gaucho alumnus from UCSB has been fighting that forever and a day. These days, I just consider those sorts of folks to be uninformed and temporarily ignorant. And they probably don’t intend anything mean-spirited about their comments. One can usually get the peanut gallery to shut up if one has a quick fun fact or 2 about the “college that has a negative reputation.” You know…something to get the person to stop and say, “Huh…I didn’t know that!”
The “college spotlight” segments on the Your College Bound Kid podcast are a really great way to quickly learn some interesting stuff about a wide range of colleges that one otherwise wouldn’t know anything about. Colleges that aren’t always super mega selective/hard to get admitted to. But they’re colleges that have great programs, great opportunities, etc.
If one looks a little outside one’s own little microcosm, parents & students could see that they actually have a much bigger range of choices than they realize.
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That I agree with it. It is insane that so much depends on it.
Yes, your 4.0/1580 didn’t get you in…your admissions consultant did. 
What percent of Ivy admits used admissions consultants again?
The rise of admissions consultants, the backlash against legacies and admissions scandals that literally put people in jail provide all of the evidence that you need to know that this is a broken process. It is just a question of how broken.
I see the system as producing an “acceptable” outcome 90% of the time, but it still subject to gaming and the use of insider information. Thus broken.
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I don’t think it’s broken. It’s complicated, especially given financial limitations, but the information is available for those who look. If I can navigate the system as an unremarkable 17 year old, then it is clearly far from impossible for most people. The majority of people that I know who complain are people who made assumptions (that they would be admitted, that they would be showered with scholarships, that they would get extensive financial aid at every college) not based in any fact or who felt entitled to a particular result.
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Point taken, but I am guessing that you actually are a more remarkable 17 year old than you think.
The fact that you are here shows that you are smart and probably have lots of good advisors (parents, teachers, friends) who have a good to sophisticated understanding of the college admissions process.
A kid (like I was) who had a janitor for a dad (no college education) and a secretary for a mom (no college education) and went to a crappy public school isn’t going to immediately get this.
If you had told 17 year old me that some universities have colleges (e.g., a College of Public Health) that was easier to get into than the rest of the university…I would have given you a blank look.
I see two possibilities for the most highly selective schools: One, yes the admissions process is broken; or two, the faculty at some of these schools improperly influence the students once they are admitted. The reason I say this is the leftwing political monoculture that exists at these places, where something like 70% of students say they are liberal and only 10% say they are conservative. If they enter that way, then it’s the admissions process; if they enter more balanced and shift over time, it’s the faculty and administration that are the problems.
I don’t know, but with any other purchase costing a lot of money, or if I was hoping someone would give me a lot of money, having to do a fair amount of research isn’t too much to ask, in my opinion.
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As you may know, this data is surprisingly hard to find and interpret.
This is OECD data on the share of adults between 25 and 34 who have completed tertiary education. Germany just under 40 percent, the US just over 50 percent, around the OECD average.
There’s been lots of movement across the OECD and in Germany in particular within the last decades though.
This is aggregated data for all ages. US share remains just above 50 percent. Germany drops to 32 percent.
So clearly lots of room to catch up, but meanwhile, Germany is not a nation of unqualified paupers - what’s going on here?
Some of the difference is explained by the following statistic:
Put in 19 yos, and you’ll find that 60 percent of them are enrolled in school in the US, but 70 percent on Germany.
But who’s in secondary school, and who’s in college?
The difference is that in the US, the level is largely age and grade referenced, whereas in Germany it’s content referenced. So in the US, the vast majority of students graduate secondary school after 12th grade, at the age of 18. If they continue their education after 12th grade, it’s called college, whether it’s community college or a 4 year university, whether they study algebra or discrete maths.
In Germany, the levels are determined by content - it’s secondary education until you’ve gained a university level entrance qualification, and tertiary education when you need one to enter it. If you’re still doing algebra, it’s secondary school, no matter your age, for university entrance, you need calculus. Lots of 11th grade to 13th grade programs for students 19 and older who enter with a 10th grade level education after completing vocationtracks and/or trade school, with a combination of vocational and academic subjects and a university entrance qualification, as good as any from college prep schools, and highly desired by employers, at the end of it. Half of all university students have taken this route, specifically designed for the late starters and slower learners. As I keep repeating to @blossom like a broken record whenever she trots out this tired old trope of those poor ten year olds shut out forever from academia.
For anyone who is still reading this, check out table B4.2 on page page 197 of this OECD publication: share of tertiary education entrants entering short cycle tertiary programs (ie community college): in the US, 48 percent. In Germany, 1 percent. Because community college doesn’t exist. But the education is happening.
I’m not quite sure what the last columns mean:
First time tertiary entry rate for students under 25 Is that the share of the whole cohort? Statisticians, speak up! Because the rate in the US appears to have dropped to 43 percent (vs Germanys 56 percent, also the OECD average), among men 39 percent. I read that more and more young people in the US skip college altogether, but are trends in the US diverging this starkly? That would be extremely concerning because I don’t think education for these kids is happening anywhere else.
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Yes, see this article (one of many): Fewer young men are in college than in 2011, especially at 4-year schools | Pew Research Center
Today, only 39% of young men who have completed high school are enrolled in college, down from 47% in 2011. The rate at which young female high school graduates enroll has also fallen, but not by nearly as much (from 52% to 48%).
There are many reasons that may explain a decline in US college going percentages, especially among males.
-Some companies have dropped the requirement that entry level employees have a bachelor’s degree.
-Availability of (relatively short term) certificate type programs that can lead to jobs that pay well (sometimes as well as what bachelor’s degree grads make and/or access to same jobs)
-Inability to afford college and/or other college accessibility issues. Increased lack of willingness to take on student debt
-Labor shortages in many trades (can be geography dependent, but in some areas there are plenty of trade jobs available to HS grads, of course some require apprenticeship/training/schooling)
-Males perform less well than females in K-12 school. K-12 school structure is not optimal for the learning style of many young males.
-Increase in minimum wage in certain geographies. For some, if they can make $20 per hr/$40K per year in an unskilled/low skill job, it’s an easy decision to choose that route post high school.
So if there’s no artificial gate keeping of the alleged kind to keep student numbers low, why are universities in Germany, and most of Europe, so cheap?
Because there is a political commitment across the board to keep them that way! As in, affordable for the qualified, and much less of a commitment to make them accessible for those who struggle with attaining the entrance qualification. See calculus as a requirement for universal entrance qualification. (Requirements for restricted entrance, ie for a subject you’ve gotten a qualification in in trade school, are much easier). Access to secondary programs that do end with an entrance qualification has been eased, but it means there’s a lot of attrition too.
So how do they keep universities cheap?
Universities treat their students as working age adults, they don’t educate them, they just teach them. They don’t take care of them, feed them, house them, medicate them, train them in sports. All of this is happening through the community or offered by charities at cost.
Frankly, in some subjects they barely teach. They support students in studying, teaching themselves, one another. They run labs , libraries and lectures, but mostly they set exams and research papers, which they mark and give feedback on. If you pass enough of those, you get the degree. In essence, they credential.
In many ways, you get what you pay for and it’s certainly not ideal. I don’t tout it as such. It can be isolating, even alienating, especially for the highly capable and motivated, but not thick skinned.There is a reason why students love the idea of US colleges. They sound so cozy, so fun! The question is, how sustainable is that model in the long run?
What the German model’s got going for it: It’s affordable, and transparent (which is precisely where the US model struggles, particularly in admissions) and good enough to keep a large cohort of the population sufficiently qualified. I’m not sure how sustainable it is in the long term either, IMO there is not enough emphasis on fit, on supporting the highly capable and on offering support and ensuring flexibility for those who struggle to keep attrition down and graduation rates up.
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Don’t forget the higher tax rate, and different college funding model (federal vs. state based in the US).
Many US students are not having a ‘cozy’ college experience, as most do not have the privilege of getting a four year residential college experience.
US definitely has too many colleges/too many college seats, for which the market is currently adjusting and will continue to do so.
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Nope, there’s no federal universities in Germany. It’s all state based, too.
It’s a cultural difference.
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