A Great Year for Ivy League Schools, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them

What a tragic irony -- our top universities are drowning in highly qualified applicants, but almost none of them are from disadvantaged backgrounds, leading the schools to engage in furious competition for the handful of exceptionally qualified disadvantaged high school seniors.  Check out the slides I've posted at http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Colleges.pdf, which show the horrifying gap in college graduation rates by household income quartile (another study shows that only THREE PERCENT of students at top universities are from the bottom 25% of households by income) -- and there has been almost no improvement for the bottom HALF of all U.S. households over the past 35 YEARS!  Cost is a major issue, but as slide #5 shows, the REAL issue is the number of students who are prepared for college (e.g., the failure of our K-12 public schools to properly education low-income and minority students).  Yet as a nation, we continue to fiddle while Rome burns, thanks to enormously powerful entrenched interests, for whom the status quo is working just fine...

It was the most selective spring in modern memory at America’s elite schools, according to college admissions officers. More applications poured into top schools this admissions cycle than in any previous year on record. Schools have been sending decision letters to student applicants in recent days, and rejection letters have overwhelmingly outnumbered the acceptances...

The brutally low acceptance rates this year were a result of an avalanche of applications to top schools, which college admissions officials attributed to three factors. First, a demographic bulge is working through the nation’s population — the children of the baby boomers are graduating from high school in record numbers. The federal Department of Education projects that 3.2 million students will graduate from high school this spring, compared with 3.1 million last year and 2.4 million in 1993. (The statistics project that the number of high school graduates will peak in 2008.) Another factor is that more high school students are enrolling in college immediately after high school. In the 1970s, less than half of all high school graduates went directly to college, compared with more than 60 percent today, said David Hawkins, a director at the National Association of College Admission Counseling.

The third trend driving the frantic competition is that the average college applicant applies to many more colleges than in past decades. In the 1960s, fewer than 2 percent of college freshmen had applied to six or more colleges, whereas in 2006 more than 2 percent reported having applied to 11 or more, according to The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 2006, an annual report on a continuing long-term study published by the University of California, Los Angeles.

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A Great Year for Ivy League Schools, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them

By SAM DILLON

Published: April 4, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/education/04colleges.html

Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages. Needless to say, high school valedictorians were a dime a dozen.