Posted on 05/08/2006 9:22:39 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
April 7th, 2006
“April is the cruelest month” – T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
It is rejection time for almost all the applicants to elite colleges and universities. America’s most prestigious schools, which pride themselves on their ever-lower acceptance rates, are basking in their record rejections of hopeful aspirants.
Harvard, Yale and Princeton rejected 91% of applicants, Stanford and Columbia 89%, Brown 86%, Dartmouth 85%, Penn 82%. MIT, Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore all rejected 80% or more of their applicants. Among the top state schools, Berkeley rejected 76%, and UCLA 73% of applicants. I suspect Duke, given recent events, may need to dig into their waiting list this year, but in normal years, they too are working to get on the right side of the 80% rejection bar.
And I am sure if I were off by a per cent listing one of these colleges rejection rates, I would hear about it from an indignant admissions officer at that school.
So why are the elite schools able to take so much pleasure in delivering unprecedented quantities of bad news? The rejection rates are this high for six major reasons:
1. Despite more and more evidence that graduates of the most selective schools do not earn much more over their lifetimes than their counterparts at other very good but less selective colleges, many students (and their parents, who pay the freight) still believe there is the kind of earnings premium for attending elite schools that might have existed a half century back. America’s largest companies are rarely run by Ivy League graduates today (just 10% are), but each year a higher percentage of students and their parents behave in a way suggesting they think they still are.
2. Having a son or daughter accepted at a selective college has become one more badge of honor and prestige for the very large group of Americans who can buy pretty much everything else they desire. If you have the large suburban home, fancy cars, a vacation home, and a few well-placed hedge fund investments, having a Yale and a Brown (I mean a son and a daughter on these campuses), is a nice way to pat yourself on the back one more time.
3. Since high rejection rates (low acceptance rates), and high yields (the percentage of the students a school accepts, who choose to go there), help a school in the US News & World Report rankings, schools game the system to accept a lower percentage of applicants, and only accept those likely to choose the school.
One well-known trick of the trade is filling a high percentage of each class with early decision applicants – kids who apply in October, and are told by December whether they have been admitted. When a college accepts early decision applicants, there is a one-to-one relation between admitted students and students who will enroll, since the student makes a commitment to attend (if accepted) in exchange for the privilege of being informed of the early decision.
When a college accepts kids in March or April, the student might also be accepted somewhere else, or at several other schools, and then choose to go elsewhere. So each acceptance does not guarantee one enrolled student. Admissions officers sometimes publicly try to downplay early decision as an option for students, but many elite schools fill a third to a half of their class each year with these applicants, even though they represent a far smaller percentage of the overall applicant pool at each school.
Students accepted under early decision programs are generally no more qualified than those accepted in the later cycle, and often their “stats” (their average grades and SATs) are a bit below the average for the pool of those accepted in the normal admissions cycle. But they have a far better chance of being admitted than students who are notified in the Spring, since they help the school in the admissions game by reducing the number of applicants the school needs to accept to fill its freshman class.
Harvard, still the prestige king, despite its rapid descent into a left wing faculty-run madhouse, typically achieves an 80% yield of its accepted students, despite the fact that it is one of the few ultra selective schools that does not use the strict early decision system of many of its peers, but rather allows students notified early to choose another school.
4. College admissions officers have also gotten very skilled at determining which students who apply in the regular cycle are likely to attend their school if admitted. How many contacts the student has with the college during the admissions process, whether an applicant visited the college, if he or she is legacy (i.e., a child of an alum), are all related to the chances of enrolling an accepted applicant. Colleges are not interested in wasting acceptances on students who will not attend, or are just collecting them (students who revel in the number of acceptances they receive are often described as “pigs”).
5. Schools get to reject more kids because students are applying to many more schools. The obsession with college admissions produces behavior by both colleges and students that lead to greater collective psychoses each year (and lower acceptance rates). When I was a senior at the Bronx High School of Science in New York (this was in ancient times, when it was not much more than half a century since the Chicago Cubs had won a World Series), seniors were limited to three applications each plus City College of New York, which was mandatory.
Today, in an era, when the wealthiest and most obsessed parents hire individual college counselors for their children at $30,000 per admissions cycle, about 5% of college seniors apply to 20 or more colleges. More than a quarter of all college-bound seniors apply to six or more schools. Many students apply to a group of schools with similar admissions standards – which means they might get rejected by all of them. One friend of mine has a son who went zero-for-eight his senior year, getting the thin envelope from each of the Ivy League schools. He went on to a state school, and his life was not ruined by not acquiring an Ivy League sheepskin, though one wonders how the high school admissions counselor justified her salary advising this student.
6. At the same time as acceptance rates decline (and rejection rates rise), elite schools use this calculus to help obtain larger and larger gifts from alumni who seek to insure places at their alma mater for their offspring. While much is made of the unfairness of racially-motivated admissions policies which favor African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, there are other affirmative action programs that colleges and universities routinely use to get the students they want. These include recruitment of desired athletes (at Amherst over 15% of the spots are reserved for coaches’ designees; at Princeton, it may be even higher) and legacy preferences for alumni.
If an applicant is not a member of one of these three favored groups and applies to a prestige college in the regular admissions cycle, his or her chances of admission may be no better than one in twenty at some schools.
Legacy preferences have always been around, but they are perceived as more valuable in today’s very competitive admissions climate. But simply being an alum does not get one the necessary lift in the admissions process it once did. Now one has to be an alum who is very generous to the old school, or at least could be. Given the way many of the very affluent shower their kids with material goods, and with the promise of a trust fund in the wings, one might wonder why bribing a prestige school with a gift to get a son or daughter in is all that important to insure the future economic prospects of the child.
From the schools’ perspective, one might wonder why they think they even need the money from the eager alums. Harvard has a $26 billion endowment, and a total of 17,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students. Yale (the school of choice for Taliban legacies) has over $15 billion, Princeton over $10 billion. All of these schools also have more than a million dollars of endowment per student.
These investment funds with educational subsidiaries earn very high returns, employing some of the top investment professionals in the country, some of whom earn even more than South Eastern Conference football coaches.
Last year Harvard added $5 billion to its endowment through portfolio gains. Do they really need to undertake a new campaign to shake another $5 billion in change from alumni pockets over the next five years? These wealthy colleges and universities are building huge endowments seemingly without purpose. They could abandon charging tuition and give a free ride to every student, and still pay all their annual expenses with just their endowment income.
But colleges compete with each other on their financial resources, as they do on admissions rates. The endowment per student is not only a mark of pride, but also a factor in the US News rankings. The rankings game is the metric by which they judge their own success.
It is prestige which drives the admissions game and the gift business for colleges and universities. But each year, it become more difficult to describe the behavior of parents of prospective students, applicants and alumni as rational. The financial return on a prestige degree is declining. The academic climate at prestige universities has, in many cases, become more like a Stalinist Gulag than a place where open inquiry and free thinking are encouraged.
With a decaying, and ever more expensive product, there are better and far more deserving places for alumni to give their money than the wealthy Ivy League schools and their competitors in the prestige game. And there are a lot more options for qualified high school seniors than the twelve to fifteen schools which are the unfortunate barometer of success in the college admissions process. A rational student might ask, why apply to these schools? And a presumably older, wiser alum, might ask, why give to them?
If you like thin envelopes, be my guest.
Richard Baehr is the Chief Political Correspondent of The American Thinker
Which schools did your children attend? My eldest daughter will be entering a Catholic university this fall,
"The wealthy kids often lack motivation to earn money."
Not according to the BELL CURVE book by Murray.
Colgate was, and is, a good school.
Whan I went there, though, it was still a pretty decent party school, and was striving to become what it is now academically.
The upper 1/3 of the class was, in general, made up of Ivy rejects.
My 2 daughters went to St Marys in Notre Dame, Ind, and my 2 sons went to Notre Dame, and my 3rd son went to Loyola New Orleans with a 10000 scholarship for every year. My daughters LOVED St Marys, both RNs. All girl colleges are great expecially if located near a large college. The Notre Dame guys date them and my daughter just married a Notre Dame graduate and my other is dating one. St Marys was a great choice for my daughters. They get well educated, become independent, are well protected, become assertive, don't hate men when they come out, and the guys across the street at Notre Dame just love these girls. Great way for a catholic girl to meet a catholic guy. Sounds old fashion but I am,plus I wanted to give our money to catholic institutions as part of tithing. Our money does support the nuns and priests that live at all 3 of these schools and it helps to maintaine the churches there.
Boy, are you dead on correct. When I worked in Manhattan, I lost track of the number of substandard people I met that had entire careers handed to them on silver platters for no other reason than that they were Harvard undergrads. And the vast majority of them simply were not that good at what they did.
I think so too.
My daughter is headed to Santa Clara U. I hope she enjoys as much as your daughters enjoyed St. Mary's.
I've heard that the only thing difficult about the Ivy League schools these days is getting into them. Once you're in, you can pretty much goof off and party all the time and show up for class every once in a while, and still get all A's and B's.
My nephew was recently accepted to the Fisher program at Wharton.
Word is there is no comparison anywhere.
"I've heard that the only thing difficult about the Ivy League schools these days is getting into them. Once you're in, you can pretty much goof off and party all the time and show up for class every once in a while, and still get all A's and B's."
Probably true of Brown, but all the ivies are different.
Is there any links/citations associated with this statement? I have heard this cited several times and would like to read this steadily accumulating research myself!
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Despite more and more evidence that graduates of the most selective schools do not earn much more over their lifetimes than their counterparts at other very good but less selective colleges
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I answered my own question by searching a bit more.
For those who are interested, here is one good article I found which addresses the relative merits of elite private colleges:
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Departments/elearning/?article=elitecollege
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Although I understand the bitterness towards "elite" colleges, it is difficult to deny that wages are higher for those who go to the most prestigious colleges... the only question is whether those higher wages are the result of the education, or the individual privelege and potential of the student.
Either way, I found it interesting that although it cannot be reasonably determined whether it is worthwhile to spend the money on an ivy league education, the only conclusive result is that going to a mediocre private college was a demonstrable waste of cash!
I actually will be a sophomore at Princeton next year and would like to respond to this and, really, all of these comments. I'm studying engineering and I had a really hard first year. I worked my ass off the whole year and ended up with a few C's, a lot of B's and no A's. I worked hard to get in and I'm working hard to stay in. I feel as if I get a really good education. And with all of the things I have learned from my professors and all of the intelligent people around me, I admit that networking also makes the experience worth it (I'm interning at NASA as we speak and guess where my boss went to school). Of course people are successful that go to less prestigious schools. Hell, people that don't even go to college are successful. I'm confident that I will be able to pay off this massive debt that comes with my education and that I will never feel as if my education was a waste. After all, I've already learned so much.
It comes accross as ignorant to talk about people wasting their money going to Ivy League schools and claiming that they "goof off". We work hard and deserve just as much respect as anyone else.
I am hampered by not having Ivy League credentials. Employers and professional schools kiss the butts of the never had a job Ivy graduates whose summers consisted of European travel or riding around with friends in their Jeeps.
I had to WORK while at a STATE university. I had to attend an INFERIOR state dental school, also while WORKING. My father would NOT fill out an FAF because it cost $15. TRUST FUNDS ARE GOD to the admissions officers.
I have to disagree with a majority of the points made in this article. Firstly, the fact that you suggest that “only 10%” of major business leaders in America are Ivy League graduates is impressive simply because 10% is high in relation to the percentage of college graduates who come from an Ivy League university.
Secondly, schools don’t “game to accept a lower percentage of applicants”; schools (from Ivy to state school to community college) all have set limits on how many students they may accept per year in order for their school. It is ridiculous that you suggest one school might tweak numbers so that they don’t take as many kids from one year to another, simply because they want better “stats”. Schools might accept fewer students (especially now, during a time rampant with budget cuts), but that has no correlation with trying to be “prestigious”.
Thirdly, when you talk about parents who drop 30 grand on their kids for a college counselor, you’re talking about a very small exception to the average American college applicant. What high school, private or public, do you know where the majority of students have a 30,000-dollar college tutor? None that I know of, for sure. And furthermore, you have just generalized every Ivy kid as being a rich, pompous, self-conceited brat who takes advantage of such resources. I am a student at Yale University (before you get caught up in the bias, remember that you yourself went to the humble college of MIT) and the majority of kids I have met do not have enough money to afford such extravagant counseling for applications, nor are they spoiled brats.
For years, I was set on attending my favorite state school in Colorado (go Buffs), and I still love CU Boulder to death. In fact, some of my best friends in the world go there; I am a firm believer that the education is practically equal at every school regardless of prestige. The DIFFERENCE is in the PEOPLE you meet. And I found that the diversity of faces, although still similar had more draw for me PERSONALLY. Does that mean I look down on them? NO. You assume so much, and yet make generalizations about everyone in the Ivy League based on the most extreme exceptions to the average.
Finally, we come to your last comment about affirmative action. I have met COUNTLESS kids who are African-American, Hispanic, or Native who, simply because of people like you saying that they “only got in because they fit under those three groups”, feel that they have been judged for their race and not their grades. Why do they feel that way? Again, because people such as yourself pointed it out and harped on it. Schools do not pull the quota card like it’s 20 years ago; get with the present.
In conclusion, I did not mean any disrespect in this post, but I thought I should clear things up because I very strongly disagree with so many of your points. Having had the most difficult time of my life in deciding between Yale and CU Boulder, I feel that it is my right to defend both state and Ivy schools.
Stop making generalizations, please, and then reassess just how “over-rated” your alma mater and every other so-called prestigious institution is.
(P.S. Thank you for your time.)
In conclusion,
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