<p>What are your opinions on this issue? I can sort of see both sides of the argument.</p>
<p>One side might argue that a large amount of the applicants who get accepted to one ivy get accepted to one or more others. Since a person can only attend one school, these applicants take spots away from others. Therefore, communication would entail discussing an applicant’s merit and deciding at which school (or 2) he or she would fit best. This would eliminate cases like the kid who got accepted into every Ivy, who, while he certainly deserved it, inadvertently took spots away from seven other qualified students.</p>
<p>The other side could say that everyone has the right to apply to as many schools as he/she wants, and it shouldn’t be up to the colleges to choose who fits where, because a student’s dream school might not match the schools’ interests. Also, it adds a whole other level of randomness to the whole process, and would be far too time-consuming.</p>
<p>The “taking away the spot” argument doesn’t work because colleges accept according to their matriculation rate. So even if colleges “discussed” and only accepted kids to one place, that would most likely mean their yield would go up, which in that case the acceptance rate would go down, so in the end the “seven other qualified students” don’t get in regardless.</p>
<p>Yes, a student can only enroll at one college at a time, and every college knows this, and thus EVERY college (yep, Harvard too) admits more students than it expects to enroll, knowing that some students have more than one offer of admission and may prefer some other college.</p>
<p>Though I guess the discussion can continue with the problem that some very well-qualified students don’t get accepted to any ivies even if their credentials and personal qualities may soar over others due to yield protection and various other causes. There’s a few very very outstanding students every year who get shut out from the ivies, who although do end up either attending another wonderful school or spending a productive gap year, may have deserved to have matriculated.</p>
<p>Why should the sporting conference start communicating with each other for admissions???</p>
<p>There is a long, long history of bitter rivalry between many of these schools for acceptance, yield, etc. You should read up on it. They are not going to communicate. The umbrella of the Ivy League doesn’t mean squat. They are independent institutions and there are many, many other good universities that Ivies lose their yield to. </p>
<p>Saying Ivy Leagues schools should accept students in a form of a matching process is like saying companies should hire people after checking they didn’t receive offers from anywhere else, regardless of merit.</p>
<p>I don’t believe its true that a person can only be in one college at a time. Ive been a full time student at university and been enrolled part time at another school before.</p>