Reply to I can’t say this to my kid’s face, of course, but...

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Demonstrating commitment" is total BS. Even a job does not require this and it provides a livelihood. The college admission is racketeering.[/quote]

Guys, you are all understandably frustrated and embittered, but using hyperbole like "racketeering" is not helpful and also untrue.  The colleges are doing their best in a difficult situation.  And let's face it, for the most part we are speaking of 50-100 of the 3,000 colleges in the US, so maybe that is the issue?

I will simply ask this: what could the colleges do that would make it better for everyone?[/quote]

Use their funding streams to massively increase capacity instead of installing gold-plated swimming pools?[/quote]

See, this is exactly what I am talking about.  Pejorative hyperbole without any facts.  “Massively increase capacity” like all that takes is diverting the cost of a “gold-plated swimming pool” to a different budget line.  Total nonsense.

How about a practical, adult conversation, with practical, adult suggestions?[/quote]

Ok.  Practically, adultly massively increase capacity?  Seriously - there is no reason why "elite" institutions should accept so few candidates.  They clearly get more applicants who meet their standards than they can accept.  There's no reason to assume that accepting more students would drive down the quality of education they can provide, and the cost per student would go down.[/quote]

[b]Pick a college and describe me the steps for increasing capacity.  Be specific.
[/b]
Please note plenty of selected colleges have done this recently, most notably Yale.  It’s not easy to do.  Any time you increase a giant infrastructure it puts pressure on every aspect of it. Dorms, dining halls, classrooms, network capacity, parking, ...it ain’t just “let another 5,000 kids attend!”

And also, fort the record, many of these colleges have increased limitlessly by putting courseware online for free.  But you don’t want that.  You want the elite sheepskin and you want them to expand just enough to let in your kid then stop so the elite ness is not diluted any further.  It’s total hypocrisy.[/quote]

No.  That's not my job, nor is it germane to my argument, because we already know it can be done.  The University of Toronto has over 61,000 students, and a 43% acceptance rate.  The average GPA for admitted students is 3.8 (compare with Harvard's 3.9).  They have similarly strict SAT/ACT averages.  But when it became clear over the past decade that many students who would exceed all those requirements were being turned away for lack of space, UoT INCREASED their student capacity by 20,000, and they're STILL one of the top universities worldwide, even though some of the "great unwashed masses" who meet those requirements can study there.

Just because a program isn't artificially restricted to a tiny number of students doesn't make it elite.  If you actually care about the quality of the education, then that won't change even if more students have access to it.  But if you actually care about making sure that the "elite sheepskin" (ew) is reserved for a few students based primarily on money and access to opportunity, then you and I have a fundamentally different idea of the purpose of higher education.  [/quote]

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