<p>I have a feeling that the current trend of increasing application numbers and decreasing admission rates will/has already led to more superficial and hasty evaluations of applications.</p>
<p>Consider somewhere like Harvard with 30,000 applications. Assuming a good through evaluation of one application, including multiple reads, will take 30 minutes, Harvard would have needed 7,500 man hours to complete that many applications. Assuming the size of an admissions committee is around 20 people, each person in the committee will need to spend 1,500 hours of reading applications in the period of ~2.5 months after the processing of applications and before decisions are prepared. That is 8.35 hours per day with no holidays, which is ludicrous.</p>
<p>Of course, I am making many assumptions, but it seems to me colleges are starting to have way too much work on their hands and if this trend continues they may not be able to properly evaluate applicants at all, having less time to read the essays, recs etc properly and might as well be throwing dice,</p>
<p>Yes but arent considering the fact that students not in the top 5 or 10% of the class and with sat scores less than harvards median, probably in the 2200s, are almost immediately rejected. That cuts the applicant pool considerably.</p>
<p>That is a very dangerous approach to make. There would probably be some correlation between top 5% of class and 2200+ SAT scores and good applicants, but you miss out all the hidden gems below that threshold. I read some of the Harvard results threads and actually saw one person get in with 1800something, which is quite remarkable and must have had very important elements in his/her application outside SAT scores that pushed her forward.</p>
<p>I really think this absurd trend should stop, though I admit I don’t know how will it happen. With that many applications, I highly suspect most of the applicants colleges reject are not actually inferior applicants, but ones just as good as the admitted students but the class was too small. I mean, it’s not like the Harvard class of 1990 is any weaker than the class of 2016 despite the higher admit rate. If college applicants applied to fewer places but with a higher chance of admission, this massive waste of labor would stop and the time spent on evaluating applications would increase.</p>
<p>NOTE: I made a mistake in the original post. Harvard would need 15,000 man hours to read 30,000 thirty minute applications, not 7,500. The 8.35 hours per day per person calculation is still correct tough.</p>
<p>They have plenty of staff and bring in extra readers.</p>
<p>The quality of admissions decisions is not going down. They know what they’re looking for. A quick read eliminates over half of Polk ants and they spend the time on the viable ones.</p>
<p>Quoting myself (…) from another thread about a good applicant who wondered why she got waitilsted in so many schools:</p>
<p>The general answer is that the more schools a single applicant applies to, the more waitlists will come into play. Universities have an increasing challenge of gaging the yield, and this has gotten worse and will continue to, in proportion to how-many-schools-to-apply-to become the ‘new average’ for HS seniors. We are making our own bed…
Another casualty of applying to so many schools is that no one can give the sort of attention that clearly says there’s no place they’d rather be to all of them. Back in pre-historic times, when I went through this, applying to FOUR schools was a lot, and you could do a lot to show how much you know and want to go there. You could mention specific faculty members and their research, and show that you’ve read their academic papers. How do you do anything like that with sixteen universities?</p>
<p>The “gems” you are referring to are almost always URMS, legacies, athletes, and development admits and that number is very small relative to the general applicant pool and even those admitted.</p>