In interesting college admissions news here, admission off the waitlist is becoming more of a reality than ever this year. I’m kind of proud because I called this one earlier this year. Although this year saw more kids than ever applying to college, it was also the biggest year ever for applications. That is, more and more kids are applying to 10 to 15 schools rather than the 3 to 5 that were standard just a few years ago. It would all work out just fine if the number of applicants had increased as quickly as the number of applications; that’s how colleges have always calculated their yield numbers in the past, and that’s how they’re mostly doing so now. Instead, though, that number has increased only slightly. This totally screws up the colleges’ admit numbers for one simple reason: even though each kid can now fill out more than 10 applications, that kid can still only attend one school. Without exact figures on how many applicants out there followed the hyper-applicant trend, you get surprisingly low yields and surprisingly high admits off the waitlist. And that makes this year get EXACTLY as crazy as I thought it would get.
In other words, the 10-to-15 college strategy is destructive in the following ways:
- it’s STASTISTICALLY BAFFLING, because all colleges base their admission and yield figures on past years in which the application process and applicant pool were very different. In past years, there were certainly fewer applicants: 1989-1990 was the largest year for births in the US on record, from what I’ve read. So it’s true that there are more kids than ever applying to college, which should make the admissions numbers jump at a fairly predictable rate. However, the factor that’s changed exponentially is the number of applications per student.
Colleges make their admissions offers usually with a predicted yield rate of 60-80%. The year I got into Harvard, they had a yield of about 80%, one of the highest years on record. This year, according to the NYT article, they admitted 1,948 for a target class of 1,650. That’s a predicted yield of 84.7%. That’s not a bad bet for them, because, hey, they’re HARVARD. People are going to pick them over a lot of other people. However, if they’re admitting 150-175 people off the waitlist, that means that target was off somehow. I’m not sure exactly how high the yield is off the waitlist (probably messed up this year, just like the regular admission yield), but if it means they admit enough to fill a class that isn’t filled, that might mean a yield of only 1,475 of those 1,948 admits. That’s a 75.7% yield—and it’s off by 9%. Say what you will about the quality of Harvard’s undergraduate education (you know where I stand; I turned it down and went to Plan II and it was the best decision I’ve ever made), but these guys are at the very top of their game when it comes to college admissions. Dean Fitzsimmons and his staff are leaders in what it means to make college admissions equitable and realistic in a changing world, like their initiatives to change financial aid structure and their abolition of early decision at the College. If THESE GUYS got the numbers wrong by that much this year, I’m REALLY anxious to know how things turned out elsewhere.
- it’s BAD FAITH, because your application is ostensibly a pledge that you’ll attend if admitted. If that isn’t the case, then why the hell did you fill out the thing to begin with?
- it’s a WASTE OF MONEY, because high application volume is driving up application fees to near $100 a pop.
- it’s IMMATURE, which is exactly counter-productive to the point of the college admissions process and the transition to adulthood that entering college implies. One of the things my students have struggled with most this year is the difficulty of choosing among lots of good chocies and the fact that some doors have to close. They’re very uncomfortable with the idea that they can’t hedge their bets and just say no to everyone. This makes sense, in a way: they’ve never made any decisions of this magnitude and aren’t always confident that they have the skills to make the right choice, so they fight hard to not have to make a decisions that irrevocably removes their other options. By letting them apply to so many schools, you’re setting up the system to feed into that anxiety. By making them choose early on that they’ll only apply to a few schools THAT THEY’D ACTUALLY ATTEND, you start the learning process of what it means to make these decisions. I’m adament that this learning process can’t happen all at once; you’ve got to build on the whole idea of what it means to apply to college. You present the process in a fundamentally skewed light when you let them apply to a zillion schools.