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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There are two ways to fix the current college application crisis and let students really shine:

1. For each top private college, among all the applicants, have a cutoff of SAT at 1400 or something, then randomly select whatever number of students they want to admit. They can also put those students on the dean's list, donor's kids, etc in the same selection pool.  I am pretty confident, that those randomly selected students will perform as well as those selected based on the current admissions standards in college as well as after college graduation.

2. For each top 10 private colleges, instead of admitting only 1000 students per year, admit 7,000 to 10,000 students per year.

Those 2 methods will immediately reduce the corruption in the college admission process. Kids also do not need to fake their ECs to go to colleges which reduces all those wasteful spendings in EC activities.  As a result, kids can really work on things they really want to do.

Still, top colleges will lose their signaling effect a bit, however, they are still able to get the best students they can get.

[/quote]

So your kid is a top scorer?  I assume so if you think scores should play such a heavy role as in #1[/quote]

Not really.  I would prefer the 2nd method, expanding the number of seats.  However, we are a unique country in which top schools are private colleges and have a lot of wealth and clouts.  They don't want to expand the seats.

Think about it, in 1910, the number of high school graduates is 100,000, the ivies admitted roughly the same number of students then, say 20,000 as of today which has roughly 3,000,000 high school graduates. It was 20% selectivity then vs.  0.67% now.  They can't keep up with students' demands and society's demands. They basically failed their basic educational function even though they have accumulated so much wealth.

They certainly can claim their enrolled students today are much much much better than their students in 1910.  But I doubt it improves from 20% to top 0.67%.  After a certain threshold, say top 5%, it would be extremely difficult to predict how two 18-year olders perform against each other in the future when they are 40 or 50 years old.  If they can do it, then every single US President, SCOTUS justice, and Fortune 500 CEO would be from Harvard.  In reality, it does not happen. They can't differentiate once students reach a certain level.  For a society, the good strategy would be to expand the seats, and let those 18 year olders compete in colleges.[/quote]

NP
This is a word salad of societal aspirations that are just pie in the sky. 
You want US colleges to operate solely to ‘benefit society’ but you are failing to recognize and accept reality. The top colleges are Hedge Funds.[/quote]

Nope, they are family offices, they could expand client base and asset sizes, but choose not to.[/quote]

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