September 29, 2015

In case you missed it, 80 of this country's more prestigious institutions announced this week that they were partnering to create a website to make it easier for students to apply to any of them.  They ostensibly promote this website especially for "minority and low-income students."  The Huffington Post article linked directly above gives you a nice list of these well-known institutions, representing a range from places less known, such as Connecticut College, Colorado College, and Grinnell College to the literal ivy-covered institutions almost all of us associate with the Ivory Tower, such as Harvard University, Northwestern University, University of Michigan, and Stanford University. 

The corresponding article in Inside Higher Ed goes into much more detail about the strategy of this initiative, clearly meant to support President Obama's generic initiative to get more kids into college and to complete their degrees.  In fact, the most salient point from Inside Higher Ed is that "the idea is to encourage ninth graders begin thinking more deeply about what they are learning or accomplishing in high school, to create new ways for college admissions officers, community organizations and others to coach them, and to help them emerge in their senior years with a body of work that can be used to help identify appropriate colleges and apply to them."  The article goes on to suggest that "organizers of the new effort hope it will minimize some of the disadvantages faced by high school students without access to well-staffed guidance offices or private counselors."

And this is all very noble work, but what will be the result of this initiative to make it easier for kids to apply? I can best show one consequence through the admissions' data from 10 of these institutions, randomly chosen by me, using data most of them have on a "facts"-type page at their websites:

Amherst College (Fall 2014): 8,478 applications; 1,186 admitted students; 469 enrolled.

Bates College (Fall 2015): 5,636 applications; 1,208 admitted students; unknown number enrolled.

Brown University (Fall 2014): 30,431 applications; 2,660 admitted students; unknown number enrolled.

Davidson College (Fall 2015): 5,382 applications; 1,195 admitted students; 513 enrolled.

Emory University (Fall 2015): 20,462 applications; 4,830 admitted students; 1,392 enrolled.

James Madison University (Fall 2014): 22,231 applications; 14,450 admitted students; 4,350 enrolled.

Tufts University (Fall 2015): 19,062 applications; 3,069 admitted students; unknown number enrolled.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Fall 2014): 31,331 applications; 8,930 admitted students; 3,974 enrolled.

University of Pennsylvania (Fall 2014): 35,866 applications; 3,718 admitted students; 2,425 enrolled.

Yale University (Fall 2014): 30,932 applications; 1,855 admitted students; 1,360 enrolled.

(Trust me, these 10 are very indicative of the trends at the other 70.) For those keeping score, here are the totals:

Applications -- 209,811

Admitted Students -- 43,101 (20% of all applicants)

Enrolled Students -- Unknown, but optimistically hypothesized as around 21,000 (10% yield of admitted students, higher than the more selective of these institutions, but not too much lower than that for the bigger schools).

I have noted before in a previous blog that the numbers of applications to these institutions can be misleading.  There are not 209,811 unique students applying to these institutions. Many apply to multiple ones, which explains why all of them end up with so many fewer actually enrolled students than admitted.  However, it does make you wonder why 495 students turned down the chance to go to Yale, about as premier of a premier school as you can get.

As you look at these numbers, you realize there is a capacity issue.  If Yale University gets another 2000 applications, even if from kids with "disadvantaged" backgrounds, is the overall freshmen enrollment at Yale going to increase by 2000?  Of course not; in fact, there is a very good chance that with every "new found" student enrolled, someone else will be lost. 

In a wonderfully cogent article in The New York Times earlier this month, Adam Davidson challenged the prevailing belief that "college tuition is too high," explaining the nuances of a multi-tiered system of higher education that makes the perception of the tuition clearly different.  In writing about the elite institutions, Davidson points out the flexible ways these colleges can "price" their product: "To the public, one number is released," writes Davidson,"the cost of tuition. But internally the school likely has dozens of price points, each set for a different group of potential students. The tools can determine how valuable a potential student is to the school’s overall reputation: more points for sports and scholarly accomplishment, fewer for the telltale signs of a likely dropout."

Given this point, it is easy to promote the new college admissions' website as a vehicle for more disadvantaged students to go to an institution that can adjust its "price" to help them afford college.  Indeed, as Davidson concludes, "as a group, students who attend more-selective schools are among the luckiest in our society. In effect, they live in a different economy than the rest of the nation, one with a rich array of career opportunities, steadily rising wages and far less unemployment."

This is a giant shell game being played across the landscape of the nation's most elite colleges and universities, but there are only so many peas and only so many shells, and the country perpetuates its confidence in the game.  Eventually, thousands of peas are under none of these 80 shells.  Capacity is much more likely at the other 4620 (or so) colleges and universities across the country (based upon Dept. of Education data).  Throw out the 1200 or so for-profit institutions (using even the most unfair bias) and there are still 3400 or so institutions of higher education that stand to be the more reasonable option for the majority of the millions of students going to college.  Somehow, though, we can't seem to be defined any clearer than the in comparison with the best or the worst of our industry. 

And yet in the end, there is a bit of fraud at both ends of the spectrum.