{"id":65536,"date":"2020-09-12T18:03:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-12T15:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/prestigious-colleges-reveal-the-secret-formula-for-deciding-who-gets-in\/"},"modified":"2020-09-12T18:03:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-12T15:03:00","slug":"prestigious-colleges-reveal-the-secret-formula-for-deciding-who-gets-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/prestigious-colleges-reveal-the-secret-formula-for-deciding-who-gets-in\/","title":{"rendered":"#Prestigious colleges reveal the secret formula for deciding who gets in"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Prestigious colleges reveal the secret formula for deciding who gets in<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n In this era of COVID-19, visiting a campus isn\u2019t always possible, but universities have other ways of finding out if a student is serious about attending \u2014 like whether a student opens an email from them, and how much time is spent reading it.<\/p>\n

Yes, how closely a student follows the college online may mean as much as test scores.<\/p>\n

As journalist Jeffrey Selingo found while researching his new book, \u201cWho Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admission\u201d (Scribner), out Tuesday, more than 50 public and private colleges, including the University of Toledo and Colby College, use software designed to track prospective students.<\/p>\n

This includes everything from what they search for on a university\u2019s website \u2014 which helps schools send them \u201cpersonalized communications based on their interests\u201d \u2014 to whether they actually open and read any of the emails sent from a college.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just a digital-age app<\/a>roach to targeting young people, who often ignore traditional marketing. It\u2019s also a way of measuring \u201cdemonstrated interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the latest annual survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, about one in six schools said that demonstrated interest is of \u201cconsiderable importance\u201d in their admissions decisions. That\u2019s more weight than they give to teacher and counselor recommendations, class rank, extracurricular activities and some SAT and AP Exam test scores.<\/p>\n

Many colleges don\u2019t want to admit students who have their eyes on a more selective school, because it could damage their \u201cyield rate\u201d \u2014 the number of admitted students who accept their offer \u2014 which affects universities\u2019 national rankings.<\/p>\n

\"High-school<\/img>
High-school students put so much effort into attaining high grades, but colleges are often looking at other metrics \u2014 like whether a child has overcome a difficult upbringing, or if they work with elephants.<\/span>NY Post photo composite<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Selingo spent the 2018-19 academic year behind the scenes at three very different institutions: Davidson College (with a 19.5 percent acceptance rate), Emory University (18.5 percent acceptance rate) and the University of Washington (48.7 percent acceptance rate), watching how new applicants were selected and, more often than not, denied.<\/p>\n

The process he witnessed is often shrouded in secrecy and an endless source of frustration and confusion for college-bound kids and their families.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want a formula,\u201d Selingo writes. \u201cWhy can\u2019t colleges just tell us the grades and test scores that will get my child admitted?\u201d<\/p>\n

To a high-school senior, it\u2019s easy to believe that the secret to getting into the college of their dreams is another 10 points on the SAT or one extra AP course.<\/p>\n

More than one thousand campuses have dropped the SAT\/ACT as an admission requirement.<\/p>\n

\u00a0–\u00a0author Jeffrey Selingo<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the reality, Selingo found, is much more ambiguous.<\/p>\n

The road map to getting into college used to be a straight line.<\/p>\n

During World War II, students typically applied to just one school, usually within a few hundred miles of their home, and colleges accepted anyone who graduated from high school. There were no campus tours or admission offices until at least the 1950s.<\/p>\n

It became competitive in the \u201960s partly because the baby boom generation more than doubled the number of undergraduates, ballooning to 8\u2009million incoming students in 1969. It\u2019s also when the College Board began publishing details on application numbers and acceptance rate, and \u201cthe term \u2018selectivity\u2019 entered the lexicon of college admissions,\u201d writes Selingo.<\/p>\n

To appear more selective, colleges needed more students to apply. To get those numbers, they began aggressively marketing to a wider talent pool, sending brochures that looked like L.L.Bean catalogs.<\/p>\n

When colleges broadened their scope, so did students. In 1975, 60\u2009percent of students applied to just one or two colleges. Today, one in three students apply to seven or more universities, and 80 percent apply to at least three colleges.<\/p>\n

As a result, many universities are getting far more applicants than they could ever accept. Perversely this trend is making grades increasingly unimportant. For example, among the 26,000 people in the United States who applied for Harvard in 2019, 8,200 of them had perfect GPAs, 3,500 had perfect SAT math scores and 2,700 had perfect verbal scores. But a mere 1,700 spots were available at Harvard.<\/p>\n

\"Emory<\/img>
Emory University does not factor in \u201cnonessential\u201d classes in a student\u2019s GPA.<\/span>Alamy<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To compensate, many colleges today have adapted \u201cholistic\u201d admissions, looking at students as something more than grades and test scores, and attempting to measure qualities that aren\u2019t always quantifiable. That could include anything from race to economic background to a candidate\u2019s \u201cquirky\u201d extracurricular interests.<\/p>\n

Grades are still important, just not in ways that most applicants expect. Some colleges, like Emory, recalculate grade-point averages for applicants. Their new GPA ignores freshman-year grades \u2014 ninth grade is considered a \u201ctransition year and a long time ago,\u201d according to Emory officials \u2014 and drops grades for classes considered nonessential, like physical education. Some colleges use the Latting Index, a formula that recalculates the revised GPA with an applicant\u2019s best test score to create a number on an 8-point scale.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a cutoff for admission,\u201d writes Selingo. \u201cRather, the number is a rough average used to quickly eyeball academic credentials and sort applicants within high schools or regions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Standardized test scores have become increasingly insignificant. \u201cMore than one thousand campuses have dropped the SAT\/ACT as an admission requirement,\u201d writes Selingo. The University of Chicago became the highest-ranked university to go test-optional in 2018. James Nondorf, Chicago\u2019s dean of admissions, says that with enough supplemental material, \u201cI didn\u2019t need to see the testing to know that this kid was going to come here and be a rockstar.\u201d<\/p>\n

What those \u201csupplemental\u201d materials might be is open to interpretation. In one review that Selingo observed, an Emory applicant on the cusp of being rejected was ultimately accepted because his after-school activities included both the football team and the botany club. The admission committee agreed that it was a \u201cquirky combination\u201d and accepted him despite less-than-impressive test scores.<\/p>\n

Selingo also witnessed another applicant come close to rejection \u2014 her 1.5 out of 2 \u201crigor\u201d score and 32 score on the ACT (out of 36) meant she \u201cdidn\u2019t check off all the boxes\u201d \u2014 but she caught the admissions directors\u2019 attention when they learned she was a certified mahout, a trained caretaker for elephants in Thailand.<\/p>\n

\"Colby<\/img>
Colby College is among schools that use software to track prospective students.<\/span>Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It made Selingo realize that \u201cdecisions aren\u2019t arbitrary or random \u2026 but they\u2019re also not formulaic. How can they be when a story about an elephant might make the difference?\u201d<\/p>\n

Many admissions officers have mixed emotions about the candidates they end up cutting. Will Segura, an associate dean of admissions at Emory University, says he wishes some students realized how close they came to being accepted. He wants to tell kids \u201cthey were an admit until like March 5th, which is huge \u2026 They don\u2019t even know how we loved them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost every college employs a system \u201canalogous to the one used in judging Olympic figure skaters,\u201d writes Selingo. \u201cIt gives an aura of precision to what is largely abstract.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only real difference between colleges, he says, is how many categories they assess and the intricacies of their numbering scale.<\/p>\n

Emory University uses four categories \u2014 high school curriculum, extracurricular activities, recommendations and intellectual curiosity \u2014 and a scale of 1 to 5 (five being highest). At the University of Washington, applications receive three scores \u2014 for academics, personal and an overall number \u2014 on a scale between 1 and 9 (with nine being highest). Although each rating system \u201chas the veneer of numerical precision,\u201d writes Selingo, the reality is mostly vague and subjective.<\/p>\n

Where, for instance, does \u201cdemonstrated interest\u201d get included in the rating scale? Admissions directors don\u2019t offer clear answers, but the mother of a Massachusetts teenager told Selingo that she believes opening every single one of her son\u2019s email messages from Tulane University, a school with a 17.3 percent acceptance rate, while he was away at camp during the summer before his senior year, played at least some part in his acceptance to Tulane.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/img>
At the University of Washington, applications receive three scores \u2014 for academics, personal and an overall number \u2014 on a scale between 1 and 9 (with nine being highest).<\/span>Alamy<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then there\u2019s the \u201cpersonal\u201d rating, which has \u201cmorphed into a catch-all category,\u201d says Selingo. UW\u2019s official admissions handbook, which offers guidelines for those evaluating new applicants, defines the \u201cpersonal\u201d category this way: \u201cOvercoming a significant educational disadvantage, tenacity, insight, originality, concern for others, or coming from a high school that has sent few students to UW.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ambiguities of holistic admissions can benefit wealthier students, especially those who\u2019ve been prepped to bring up things like cultural awareness. As Selingo witnessed in an evaluation of two Emory applications, a well-off student from a top high school received a personal score of 5 after writing an essay about living in Indonesia and how she learned to understand cultural differences. But another applicant, an immigrant who worked at her family\u2019s restaurant, never mentioned diversity or the sacrifices she made to help her family. She clearly hadn\u2019t been coached on the \u201cright\u201d things to say, and her personal score was just a 3.<\/p>\n

Even so, sometimes coming from a privileged background can be a disadvantage. Applicants who attend the best public or private schools, for example, are held to a higher standard. \u201cThey\u2019re expected to take an array of advanced classes,\u201d says Selingo. \u201cIt\u2019s assumed they have earned good grades and received high test scores.\u201d<\/p>\n

The starting line is different for students who attend schools \u201cthat offer few advanced courses and send only a small number of graduates to college.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to standing out among the thousands of students applying to elite universities, Selingo says it\u2019s probably better to be a big fish in a small pond.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/img>
The University of Chicago eschews test scores in lieu of \u201csupplemental material.\u201d<\/span>Alamy <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cAccording to the research, applicants from the best high schools with legions of smart students clustered near the top of the class and a vast menu of rigorous courses available to them face tougher odds,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

The most important thing for college hopefuls to remember, says Selingo, is that it\u2019s almost never about individual merit. \u201cA rejection is not about you,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s about what a college needs the year you apply.\u201d<\/p>\n

The final round of sorting, in which teams of admissions officers whittle down their chosen class, is a process called \u201cshaping.\u201d Here, it\u2019s no longer about evaluating individual students, but how they fit into the larger vision for an incoming class.<\/p>\n

Admissions officers ask questions like, \u201cDo we have enough African-American students or Latino students? Enough students who can pay the bulk of the tuition bill? Too many women in the class? Too many students from the Southwest or Northeast? Enough humanities majors?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a dangerous tightrope for colleges, especially in 2020. Yale University was recently accused by the Department of Justice of violating federal civil-rights law by discriminating against Asian Americans and white applicants, giving them one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African-American applicants with similar academic backgrounds.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/img><\/p>\n

It\u2019s another reason that colleges like to avoid being too specific about the rules of \u201cshaping.\u201d Selingo compares it to finalizing the invite list for a wedding. \u201cGuests are moved on and off the list based on whether you think they\u2019ll show up or the groom\u2019s family has too many invites compared to the bride\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Selingo suggests that trying to play a system as vague and enigmatic as college admissions is a fruitless endeavor. Instead, students should be changing the way they think about higher education.<\/p>\n

The best way for students to gain leverage, Selingo says, is to broaden their search beyond the super-selective schools that reject more than 80 percent of applicants. Instead of focusing on where they want to go to college, he suggests considering what they want to do at college. It\u2019s only then that you look at colleges for what they actually offer rather than their supposed prestige.<\/p>\n

After all, going to a college with a brand name is no guarantee of success. A study from Princeton University found that students from both selective and nonselective schools made essentially the same income decades later. And last year, recruitment firm Kittleman looked at the educational backgrounds of Fortune 500 company leaders and found that colleges like the University of Wisconsin \u2014 with an acceptance rate of 51.7 percent \u2014 were responsible for more CEOs than Ivy Leagues.<\/p>\n

The false perception that prestige matters won\u2019t change until families start to look beyond the hype, Selingo argues.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are plenty of good schools that take a majority of students who apply,\u201d he says. \u201cParents and counselors need to do better to show seniors that there are more colleges out there than just those listed on the first page of the US News<\/a> rankings.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

\n

If you want to read more Living News articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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