^^^ it would be interesting to control for standardized test prepping. Give an unreleased SAT with format and content that no one has prepped or studied for. That would probably be a meaningful test, and it might or might not correlate with income.
“Give an unreleased SAT with format and content that no one has prepped or studied for. That would probably be a meaningful test, and it might or might not correlate with income.”
If it really tested what students know across major subjects, I think the disparity would increase. They already dumb down the test a lot. The math test is almost entirely middle school math for top students.
@snarlatron Didn’t they just do that with the PSAT more or less? There were practice tests available to everyone on Khan Academy so the same prep was available to everyone. Not sure we’ll ever see the results because I am not sure they ask parental income on PSAT.
btw: for those of you who want to ban the Common App, I hope you realize that it will impact the poor, first-gen kids the most. (And that would not be well received by the NYT.)
Statistically, it doesn’t matter if all the top kids apply to all the same top schools, or are limited to 6-8. (Such a limit is in the self-interest of the GC at the top private high schools – think about why that would be.)
Since students can only accept one spot, why should we care how many they apply to?
“Since students can only accept one spot, why should we care how many they apply to?” REALLY?!
My D is as guilty as anyone but last year a number of people applied to a vast number of schools, which made those schools look good but caused wait list hell for a bunch of people as schools realized the person who applied to their school but got into 2 HYPS was not coming and they had to look further down the list. As even more people do that this year and next I can only imagine.
I like the idea of a match system as medical schools do.
Except, that is not really happening on a big scale. The Yield for HYPSM keeps increasing…Harvard and Stanford, for example, get 80% of the kids that they accept; only 20% go elsewhere. And since they know with near certainty, that they will yield 80%, they only have to accept 20% extra, which is a few hundred for each school. Obviously, not a big impact in comparison to the 3 million high school grads every year.
Thus, while they may have large wait lists, that is by choice, and in some cases, a soft rejection (of legacy applicants, for example).
Med school applications do not work on a match system. The med grads do match, but they get to visit and interview first, and that visit is paid.
How can you reveal something so un-PC!
Um… not.
Those interview trips/visits are NOT paid for by the residency programs. The grad bears the entire cost, though a few programs will throw in a free meal or two and maybe one night in a hotel. The residency interview process is horrendously expensive, often costing a med grad $10,000 or more in travel expenses.
People who claim standardized tests are useless because they correlate with income are missing the point entirely. Standardized testing in an ideal world would expose inequality of oppprtunity in lower income schools and districts. Redesigning the SAT to try to smooth over these often stark contrasts in achievement is not solving the problem. Those who claim that the SAT measures arcane skills are usually misguided. Have they taken an SAT recently? It mostly measures how well someone reads and how well they do basic algebra and geometry. Pretty valuable skills in my opinion.
The SAT refresher classes for top kids go over material they learned several years earlier, and many times are rusty with.
“College applications are expensive and Common App provides an excellent way to apply to multiple colleges for a low price”
I think applications shou;ld be free, as well. Hand written, high effort, high commitment, low cost. The entire idea of the common application feels backward to me-profit driven rather than student motivation driven.
My bad. I knew a couple of recent grads who did receive a small travel stipend for residency interviews. But perhaps they were special cases (grades? board scores?)
Just assumed it was commonplace…
Hey, my reader comment to the Times article cited by OP at the top was highlighted as a “Times Pick” and I have 500 Likes so far! Cool. (I’m Southern Hope there as well 
Your comment is THE highest ranked “reader pick” too, @SouthernHope. I wondered if that was “you” when I thumbed it up yesterday.
The whole college application process is totally out of control and will only get worse if this “coalition” thing gets off the ground; the insanity will start in 8th grade for students to set up their “data lockers” and build their resumes.
One possible solution: Limit the number of apps students can submit to perhaps a maximum of 6: 2 safeties, two matches, 2 reaches. In England, you apply to 5 universities and you can only apply to either Oxford OR Cambridge, but not both.
Statistically, that will not matter, as I noted upthread.
Not relevant. The vast majority of kids only apply to a handful of colleges, and usually their instate directional.
But even if we limit apps to either Harvard or Yale or Stanford, who cares? Those apps are such as minor, minor portion of the total, they don’t even elevate to a rounding error.
This “problem” of kids applying to a lot of schools does not, in my opinion, have anything to do with the vast majority of kids applying to colleges in the United States. It’s primarily relevant to those applying to the most selective schools, and it makes sense for those kids because admission to those schools is so unpredictable.
The “problem” of applying to too many colleges affects maybe 50,000, at most, of the ~3 million kids per year applying to colleges. It doesn’t need a general social solution.
As for HYPS, none of them is clamoring for a rule forcing kids to apply to only one. As long as they are willing to hire enough admissions staff to process the extra applications they get because people are allowed to apply to more than one, I can’t see how changing the rule helps students at all.
I just read through the whole thread, and was surprised that one solution (that’ll never happen, not least because it’d probably be illegal) to the madness wasn’t mentioned, except maybe very obliquely in one post: Get rid of USNWR-type college ranking lists.
As long as there are lists that signal to self-identified middle-class* families that some smallish set of schools is of a markedly high quality, and as long as there’s a cultural belief that a markedly high quality college education (at least nearly) invariably leads to upward class mobility, you will have the sort of craziness so many on this thread are (I think rightly) decrying.
- The self-identified middle class approaches 90% of the US population in some studies, which is of course insane, but that's important, because it means that prestige signaling is a big deal to a very large number of people.
Oh I agree that getting rid of the USNWR ranking and all the other ones would be great. Even forty years ago there were college guides that ranked colleges in more general categories. (Which would at least be better than pretending that Harvard is better than Brown, much less relegating LACs to separate lists which mean many think they are less good.)