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A review by mburnamfink
Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey J. Selingo
informative
5.0
There's a lot of pressure on the college years. It's the best four years of your life, where you meet valuable friends and partners and make the relationships that'll impact the rest of your life. You'll learn ancient wisdom, postmodern theory, difficult math, and the latest scientific break-throughs. We expect a lot from colleges, especially elite ones. They should admit the best students, without compromising the diversity that is America's strength. The system should be fair, but also allow for human imperfection and holistic assessment. Oh, but what we really want is the assurance that our Precious Child Will Go To The College of Their Dreams, and all those other loud, ugly, stupid teenagers won't knock them out of a slot at Harvard.
The decision about where to go to college is one of the most consequential in a person's life. And that admission decision will be made in less than eight minutes by two poorly paid bureaucrats.
Excuse me. This is the part where if I were closer to the admission process than a decade in any direction I would start laughing until I became the JONKLER.
Selingo is a journalist and editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education (my source for all the news fit for a Vice-Chancellor of Innovation Practices), and he combines his deep knowledge of the field with an insider's study at three schools: University of Washington, Davidson, and Emory. Admissions is a fraught topic, with the Varsity Blues cheating scandal where wealthy B-list celebrities hired a con artist to gin up athletic admits for their fail children, and the ongoing saga of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which argues that Harvard is discriminating against highly qualified Asian-American applicants in favor of white legacies (something like a third of Harvard is a legacy admit).
Selingo categorizes colleges into sellers, the big name-brand schools that you've heard of, and buyers, which are everybody else. Sellers get too many applicants and have to be incredibly selective, while buyers get too few and have to figure out to fill their classes. There's a similar divide in applicants, with drivers applying to over ten schools, having high parental involvement, and a whole industry of college counseling against passengers, who don't understand the unspoken rules of the game and apply to just a few schools, often with mediocre grades and test scores.
Most of the anxiety is on the part of drivers trying to get into seller schools, and the simply fact that there are too many straight-A students with perfect SATs for all the spaces at Harvard and Stanford. What is mixed good news is that colleges attempt to weigh students against the opportunities available to them at high school, and also that all that high school CV building pays off. The kid from an inner city or rural high school with minimal extracurriculars and APs has a chance to catch the eye of an admissions officer where that exact same file from a wealthy suburban school district would get an instant rejection. Conversely, while you can't buy a seat at an Ivy League school, all that prep does work, and something like just 20% of high schools supply most of the students to elite colleges.
The most important part of the application is the college transcript. The good news is that 9th grade doesn't really matter, but colleges want to see students taking a hard course load and doing well at it. Take as much calculus as you can, and don't neglect physics and chemistry if you're pre-med. Poor grades or an easy cruising course load can sink an application. Doing well at school, as far as your school allows, is something which is not as easy to grade.
There are a few side doors. Athletics can be one, since coaches have limited discretion to offer slots to otherwise qualified candidates. Amherst (1,855 students) has more college athletes than University of Alabama (31,670 undergraduates, and football as religion). Contrary to what March Madness and Bowl Season would have you believe, student athletes are overwhelming rich white kids in sports that no one watches. The impact of student athletics is mixed, some studies say that they have lower grades and are otherwise uninvolved with campus life, while others say athletics is valuable. As a chubby nerd myself, I'd say cancel them all and let god sort it out, but they jocks may disagree.
For the data driven, college rankings like those produced by US News and World Reports are key, but the rankings have introduced their own perverse incentives. Selectivity, the percentage of students who apply that are admitted, and yield, the percentage admitted that say yes, are key parts of most metrics. So colleges attempt to lock in students with early decision, which requires a student to agree to attend a college in December before most applications close. This boosts yields, and helps the college increase selectivity for the general admissions. While admissions officers interviewed talk an idealistic game about shaping the class and holistic diversity, at the end of the day a college is a business, and the goal is to figure out who can pay increasingly steep tuition. One secret that Selingo reveals is that for the typical upper-middle class student, merit financial aid is available, but likely only a "buyer" school, and not the "sellers" that they've applied to.
But the part that makes me want to start injecting Joker venom into random passerbys and taunting the dark knight is that college is likely the most expensive purchase that a person will make, with the exception of buying a home, and it's done on no information! We check reviews when we buy a phone or car, we get houses inspected, but 18 year-olds sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive education based on gut feeling and reputation. It is essentially impossible to figure out what college costs, until you're well into April. Bad ideas driven by college marketing and teenage emotions, like a desire for distance from family or a classic red brick campus experience, may blind family to better and cheaper schools.
The dirty secret is that most colleges will be just fine for most students. Systematic surveys show that while grades and SATs are a decent predictor of life-time earnings, where you go to college has no effect. The true elite, Fortune 500 CEOs, bankable talent, national politicians, have their own networks of privilege and influence which overlap with elite universities, but which can't be cracked simply by going to Yale. And as much as these schools compete on US News and World Reports rankings, undergraduate education is a tertiary concern, after the endowment, research, and the professional schools. What you do, an attitude of flexible exploration while also committing to a mastering a distinct field of knowledge, matters far more than where you do.
Just for the love of all that is holy turn you assignments in.
The decision about where to go to college is one of the most consequential in a person's life. And that admission decision will be made in less than eight minutes by two poorly paid bureaucrats.
Excuse me. This is the part where if I were closer to the admission process than a decade in any direction I would start laughing until I became the JONKLER.
Selingo is a journalist and editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education (my source for all the news fit for a Vice-Chancellor of Innovation Practices), and he combines his deep knowledge of the field with an insider's study at three schools: University of Washington, Davidson, and Emory. Admissions is a fraught topic, with the Varsity Blues cheating scandal where wealthy B-list celebrities hired a con artist to gin up athletic admits for their fail children, and the ongoing saga of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which argues that Harvard is discriminating against highly qualified Asian-American applicants in favor of white legacies (something like a third of Harvard is a legacy admit).
Selingo categorizes colleges into sellers, the big name-brand schools that you've heard of, and buyers, which are everybody else. Sellers get too many applicants and have to be incredibly selective, while buyers get too few and have to figure out to fill their classes. There's a similar divide in applicants, with drivers applying to over ten schools, having high parental involvement, and a whole industry of college counseling against passengers, who don't understand the unspoken rules of the game and apply to just a few schools, often with mediocre grades and test scores.
Most of the anxiety is on the part of drivers trying to get into seller schools, and the simply fact that there are too many straight-A students with perfect SATs for all the spaces at Harvard and Stanford. What is mixed good news is that colleges attempt to weigh students against the opportunities available to them at high school, and also that all that high school CV building pays off. The kid from an inner city or rural high school with minimal extracurriculars and APs has a chance to catch the eye of an admissions officer where that exact same file from a wealthy suburban school district would get an instant rejection. Conversely, while you can't buy a seat at an Ivy League school, all that prep does work, and something like just 20% of high schools supply most of the students to elite colleges.
The most important part of the application is the college transcript. The good news is that 9th grade doesn't really matter, but colleges want to see students taking a hard course load and doing well at it. Take as much calculus as you can, and don't neglect physics and chemistry if you're pre-med. Poor grades or an easy cruising course load can sink an application. Doing well at school, as far as your school allows, is something which is not as easy to grade.
There are a few side doors. Athletics can be one, since coaches have limited discretion to offer slots to otherwise qualified candidates. Amherst (1,855 students) has more college athletes than University of Alabama (31,670 undergraduates, and football as religion). Contrary to what March Madness and Bowl Season would have you believe, student athletes are overwhelming rich white kids in sports that no one watches. The impact of student athletics is mixed, some studies say that they have lower grades and are otherwise uninvolved with campus life, while others say athletics is valuable. As a chubby nerd myself, I'd say cancel them all and let god sort it out, but they jocks may disagree.
For the data driven, college rankings like those produced by US News and World Reports are key, but the rankings have introduced their own perverse incentives. Selectivity, the percentage of students who apply that are admitted, and yield, the percentage admitted that say yes, are key parts of most metrics. So colleges attempt to lock in students with early decision, which requires a student to agree to attend a college in December before most applications close. This boosts yields, and helps the college increase selectivity for the general admissions. While admissions officers interviewed talk an idealistic game about shaping the class and holistic diversity, at the end of the day a college is a business, and the goal is to figure out who can pay increasingly steep tuition. One secret that Selingo reveals is that for the typical upper-middle class student, merit financial aid is available, but likely only a "buyer" school, and not the "sellers" that they've applied to.
But the part that makes me want to start injecting Joker venom into random passerbys and taunting the dark knight is that college is likely the most expensive purchase that a person will make, with the exception of buying a home, and it's done on no information! We check reviews when we buy a phone or car, we get houses inspected, but 18 year-olds sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive education based on gut feeling and reputation. It is essentially impossible to figure out what college costs, until you're well into April. Bad ideas driven by college marketing and teenage emotions, like a desire for distance from family or a classic red brick campus experience, may blind family to better and cheaper schools.
The dirty secret is that most colleges will be just fine for most students. Systematic surveys show that while grades and SATs are a decent predictor of life-time earnings, where you go to college has no effect. The true elite, Fortune 500 CEOs, bankable talent, national politicians, have their own networks of privilege and influence which overlap with elite universities, but which can't be cracked simply by going to Yale. And as much as these schools compete on US News and World Reports rankings, undergraduate education is a tertiary concern, after the endowment, research, and the professional schools. What you do, an attitude of flexible exploration while also committing to a mastering a distinct field of knowledge, matters far more than where you do.
Just for the love of all that is holy turn you assignments in.