Anonymous wrote:Is this one of those threads where a bunch of people with no industry experience Monday Morning Quarterback and claim they know better than the colleges who have been doing this forever and their staffs who have been doing it professionally?

Cool, I am in. I say make bowling average 35% of the admissions criteria. And yes, my kid bowls his ass off but that is just coincidence.

No, this is one of those threads where people brag about their “industry experience”, sort of like Billy Crystal’s character in that famous movie scene how he can always tell when women fake orgasms. I bet you can always tell when the essays were “helped” too.

Anonymous wrote:Love these suggestions. I would remove questions pertaining to parents - like where they went to school, occupation etc. Make it all about the applicant and less about reading tea leaves.

I would never endorse this. I fully support schools' attempts to pull in first gen college students.

1. Standardized the applications. Whether that's by the Common Application or something else, I don't know. But just managing all the different ways schools ask the same question adds to the time needed to manage all this.

2. Streamling the deadlines and ways to apply. Maybe just have rolling for the less selective schools, one form of early, and then regular. This ED1 and ED2 and priority this, etc. make the application period longer than it needs to be.

3. Limit the activity space (something already mentioned this and I think MIT does it). Have people list their top three activities. Let them write a couple sentences about each. It'll stop the people who think the longest resume wins.

4. Make high schools calculate GPA the same way so kids know where they stand and so the average admitted GPA statistic is reliable.

5. Love the one essay idea mentioned above. I don't think it needs to be academic, but I don't think any college should be allowed to ask "why us" because it forces a kid to write a special essay just for that school. I like how the Common Application has one essay with 4-5 choices on it.




Those ask for an end to test optional know that just because you send something doesn't mean admissions has to use it, right?

Regardless of what you think about the SAT, test optional is admissions' way of telling you that they don't find test scores valuable in their processes.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Another thing, for the top schools to do something like a medical residency matching algorithm. You rank schools in advance, and if you ranked Harvard over Princeton and both admit you, you only get an offer from Harvard. Princeton is automatically rejected.

And who does that help? Does that magically make more seats at Princeton? Do you think the subset of "kids accepted at both H&P" is statistically significant enough to have any effect?

And when you get tot he merit aid schools you are now doing real damage. But you don't care about those, do you?

I do. In my plan, in order to participate in the matching, the school has to commit to meet full need and provide no merit aid, which what the top schools pretty much are. We only need to standardize the “full need” and let the applicants know before they go in. BTW, this is how Ivies once operated, but then got hit with antitrust lawsuit. So, they are not discussing financial aid together anymore, but they don’t do merit either.

The subset of kids accepted to H&P is probably small, but the subset of kids admitted to more than one school with single digits admission rates is huge. If you remove the impact of ED, it will be even bigger. Most of those schools want the same people.

How does that help? Princeton will be told right away to admit one more person because a student was taken by Harvard. They wouldn’t have to guess on how many of their 2000 offers they are competing with peers. The merit aid schools will be dipping in their pool, not Harvard and Yale. BTW, in UK you can apply to either Oxford or Cambridge, not both.

The people with “industry experience” seem to have only the institution in mind. I think it’s perfectly legit for parents and students who have been through this insane process to suggest how it could be less stressful.

1. Get rid of test optional at every school in the country.

2. Make it truly race-blind. No box to check ethnicity, and admission reps see only a student ID number and not a name so they can't deduce your race.

Anonymous wrote:Is this one of those threads where a bunch of people with no industry experience Monday Morning Quarterback and claim they know better than the colleges who have been doing this forever and their staffs who have been doing it professionally?

Cool, I am in. I say make bowling average 35% of the admissions criteria. And yes, my kid bowls his ass off but that is just coincidence.

Are you a college insider? Because I would love for you to explain this insane process to me as someone whose kid will go through it in a few years.

Anonymous wrote:Another thing, for the top schools to do something like a medical residency matching algorithm. You rank schools in advance, and if you ranked Harvard over Princeton and both admit you, you only get an offer from Harvard. Princeton is automatically rejected.

And who does that help? Does that magically make more seats at Princeton? Do you think the subset of "kids accepted at both H&P" is statistically significant enough to have any effect?

And when you get tot he merit aid schools you are now doing real damage. But you don't care about those, do you?

Is this one of those threads where a bunch of people with no industry experience Monday Morning Quarterback and claim they know better than the colleges who have been doing this forever and their staffs who have been doing it professionally?

Cool, I am in. I say make bowling average 35% of the admissions criteria. And yes, my kid bowls his ass off but that is just coincidence.

Anonymous wrote:Love these suggestions. I would remove questions pertaining to parents - like where they went to school, occupation etc. Make it all about the applicant and less about reading tea leaves.

I think that the Coalition App allowed my DD to leave parents' schools blank. Otherwise, I hate the Coalition App.

Another thing, for the top schools to do something like a medical residency matching algorithm. You rank schools in advance, and if you ranked Harvard over Princeton and both admit you, you only get an offer from Harvard. Princeton is automatically rejected.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That is exactly what I would do, for starters. Pick your five schools, and get on with it. This applying to 20 schools ridiculous.

Who benefits from this? How would this improve anything?

Schools don’t need to manage yield and will be making their decisions solely on whether they want this student. If they know they are one of five, they know you are serious.

And yet they will still have to manage yield and will have a harder time of it with a smaller pool.

The mythical problem you invent is already handled quite nicely with ED. Schools that want to mitigate it use ED.

Anonymous wrote:I personally think kids should apply to as many schools as they want. It is a money maker for the university, and if they can make money another way besides raising tuition, I am happy. Also choosing a university is like choosing a life partner or a forever house. Good to have options.

Except one is for life and the other is forever, so I don't see it as the same as your four year college experience at all

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That is exactly what I would do, for starters. Pick your five schools, and get on with it. This applying to 20 schools ridiculous.

Who benefits from this? How would this improve anything?

Because when so many kids apply to a gazillion schools and schools have to wade through so many applications, the numbers make is more like a lottery. Way more stressful for the applicants, because there is less assurance that certain qualifications correlate with admission.

So your solution is to have FEWER chances at the lottery? Which gives the colleges fewer kids to choose from and gives the kids fewer options and much MORE stress because they have to choose before they apply and have a significantly greater chance of not getting an admission anywhere?

I don't think you have thought your cunning plan all the way through.

Anonymous wrote:So basically, you all mostly just want to make it easier for the students. Got it. That's what it should be all about.

Um, no, we want to make it easier for colleges too.