This article isn't about the fact that colleges are buying SAT scores. Yes, that has been done forever.
The article is about colleges using mass mailing to dramatically boost applicants and decrease the number of people admitted.
They have some interesting interviews with college admissions staff and information about Vanderbilt specifically using this tactic to decrease their admit rate (which makes them look better in ratings).
This certainly isn't the only thing driving the massive increase in applications. There are far more students taking the PSATs, more students sending out far more applications (out of paranoia? Pressure?), and more foreign applicants.
To some extent, I think it's a positive feedback loop that doesn't require advertising at all to drive it. If you know the admit rate is low (because of all the applications being sent), then it's in your best interest to send out lots of applications -- throwing spaghetti at the wall. Then the admit rate gets lower...
Personally, I'm not entirely against this trend. Growing up in a rural area with parents who didn't go to college, I had no idea what was out there. I figured I'd probably go to the state university (which was a good school!), but didn't think much about it. When I started getting mail from colleges, it was a huge help and broadened my horizons. I ended up going to a field-specific college across the country, and really loved it.
Not only that, but it was exciting and inspiring that these colleges I had only heard about in movies and books were reaching out to me. I just never thought that would happen. I'm sure I'm not the only kid from middle-of-nowhere West coast who was really inspired by that.
> more students sending out far more applications (out of paranoia? Pressure?)
No, it's actually a rational choice, because no one can accurately forecast what a given school will cost anymore.
At some point (I believe in the late ’00s, but could be wrong), elite schools started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from middle-class families. Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost: they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures. After this change, they would have no idea until after they were admitted. They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable.
In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They were a mix of “elite” private and flagship public universities. My parents were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them, and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have been heavily “discounted”, but the discount varied widely between schools, from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full ride). For the private universities the “discount” came from a mix of “need-based aid” and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was exclusively from merit scholarships.
In this system, you don’t know what the financial offer is until you get in, there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it’s difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost of their education have a strong incentive to “play the lottery” by applying to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that are known to provide generous financial packages.
It was really fun for me to receive tons of mail from colleges in 1997, but the catch was that I was living in Nigeria at the time. I had actually written letters to dozens of colleges requesting their brochures and even their entire course catalogs (I had barely heard of the World Wide Web but hadn't personally used it yet) and I was quite delighted that most of them actually mailed all this physical paper to me overseas! It probably didn't change my life to compare course descriptions from all those different institutions, but I enjoyed it in a nerdy kind of way. Still, I think the information I had to compare helped reinforce my choice, even though it was the only college I had been able to visit on a trip back to the USA.
Contrast that with now when so much more information is available immediately, and yet I'm still surprised by how often I have to sell relatives on Rice University, my alma mater. What surprises me the most is how they don't seem to realize how good financial aid can be and just assume a private school is expensive even though they know my parents didn't have much money. Perhaps it's a bit of a branding problem, but it might also be people not digging around the college websites enough to find out how financial aid works and just walking away after seeing the sticker price.
I think most people know how good financial aid can be, but they are realistic about how good financial aid is in practice.
Early 90's, I had just left the military and was thus able to apply for financial aid without recording my parents' income. So I was able to claim having made $15k the year before. I also accurately reported my savings. My total non-loan financial aid package consisted of $500/year of some state matching fund. I was also expected to contribute 100% of my savings in year one. I was told I had made too much money for a Pell grant. Something which remained true the next year when my income totaled $8k.
So in 2.5 years of college after the military, I managed to deplete my 4 years of aggressive savings and take on $15k in debt, over the GI Bill.
All of this is anecdotal, but as I prepare for my son to go to college next year, I have no realistic hope of him getting a cent. $200k for four years at Rice seems reckless.
If your son has good grades and test scores, there are lots of merit scholarships available if you're willing to look below the "top tier" of universities. I had multiple friends who chose to accept full-rides from regional state universities rather than pay full price at their flagship state university, and their career outcomes have been excellent. There are definitely trade-offs, but they benefited from being a "big fish in a small pond", and were always the first in line for research opportunities, internships, etc.
University of Alabama in particular has massively increased the amount of merit aid it awards to out-of-state students, and it now attracts a huge number of students from the Northeast and the Chicago area that would never have considered it before. There are other schools using similar strategies.
As I mentioned in another comment, the cost of any given school is very unpredictable until you actually get accepted and get your financial package. The winning strategy is to research schools which are known for generous financial offers for similar students, and then apply to as many of them as is manageable to increase your odds of a winning "lottery ticket".
I had good grades and test scores. Very nearly straight 4.0. I applied to a wide variety of schools. I got zilch at every single one, save some strange merit scholarships that were basically 1/2 off after increasing the price by 2x, but everyone who had at least a B average got these. I was actually in the accelerated program in HS, but the schools didn't take in the different GPA scale, so taking the harder courses ended up screwing me out of money.
Now that I'm older I still get no money, but I don't even get the "merit scholarships."
> Early 90's, I had just left the military and was thus able to apply for financial aid without recording my parents' income. So I was able to claim having made $15k the year before. I also accurately reported my savings. My total non-loan financial aid package consisted of $500/year of some state matching fund. I was also expected to contribute 100% of my savings in year one. I was told I had made too much money for a Pell grant. Something which remained true the next year when my income totaled $8k.
My parents income was slightly above your income, yet I got Pell grants all four years.
Just gonna say that you can get some level of federal grants and loans going to foreign schools which cost far less. I’m obviously familiar with the UK which is very open to having US foreign students coming over (with a weak pound it’s worth considering). The application process is also much cheaper and easier in most European countries. Of course this doesn’t solve the problem of US university being so damn expensive, but it can help individuals who want to get a good education for cheaper.
That's unfortunate. I used to be a tour guide and raved about the awesome need-based aid at Rice. The maximum amount of loans I had to take out each year was maybe $2,500 and my parents didn't have to pay much more than that, and I had a friend whose parents' total annual income was only $7,000 and he didn't pay a dime (and he had a workstudy job in the student pub). However, I also knew someone who had 2 parents with engineer salaries and they didn't really qualify for any aid so his parents weren't excited about him going to Rice compared to a state school since they didn't really get any aid.
No one at Rice has asked for my opinion, and I'm not privy to all the numbers behind the scenes, but I'm surprised they can't be more generous with the middle class since we have such a large endowment. They recently announced a big new financial aid initiative, but I wish tuition could be free again like it was until 1965!
Back in 1999, I did really well on the PSATs. I was inundated with flyers. A dozen a day or more. I often just through them out.
One day, my dad glanced in the trash. It was a small box with a fighter jet on it. I had assumed it was an Air Force recruiting package (some of the flyers were... robust) and had tossed it.
Turns out, it was from Gillette. "Now you're a man. Use a man's razor." I laughed out loud. Gillette had bought PSAT scores just to get the birthday of males to advertise to them, which I thought was hilarious.
They made a loyal customer that day. (Loyalty of a 17 year old is pretty cheap to purchase but also worthless.)
Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) was the most persistent in my day. They sent a 45 rpm record extolling all of their fine programs. In a moment of weakness, I put it on the turntable and was serenaded by the chance to study mortuary science on their campus.
It was a great tension release for the rest of the college cycle. Anytime an over-curious relative asked me about my college outlook, the answer was: "I'm going to Southern Illinois to study mortuary science."
It's gotten kind of ridiculous. My daughters applied to 18 and 22 schools respectively. Why? Because the admit rates of the schools they wanted were so low. Hence, the cycle.
It would be slightly illuminating to also publish the statistics of how many applications aspiring freshmen are submitting. Not to mention, we paid $70-$100 per application.
How long before someone writes software that walks you through a series of questions (a la turbotax, but more in depth and less shit), and then spits out a series of applications. Of course you'd hand check each one, but until colleges collude on their into process, it seems possible.
Back when I applied to college many years ago, IIRC all the colleges I applied to used Common App as mentioned in a sibling comment (I only applied to five top universities, no idea about the less competitive ones which constitute the majority), but each one had a distinct set of extra questions and/or short-form essays, and no amount of software could save you time on those. I even had to carefully customize the “common” personal statement in order to play to each recipient’s (perceived) interests.
I guess cookie cutter bulk applications could be used for fallback options, but those are not the time consuming ones in the first place.
This may have changed in the last decade but I remember while the Common App had mostly the same basic fields the College's using it could still attach several custom supplement applications to it (eg essays). So it's not a truly common system.
In talking to the parents of some students applying this year to colleges, the common application is truly one common app, including the same essay.
The consequences of this is now it is truly much easier to apply to a bunch of schools for undergrad.
Note, this is not the same for grad schools. I have been applying to graduate schools, and they seem to have their own systems (but there seems to be a common platform called "Applyweb").
I've written between three and ten custom answers for each college to which I have applied. For the schools with more, there are usually three extra essays plus a bunch of short-answer questions. I've also applied to a good few honors programs, which have about three additional essays apiece.
The only thing the common app does is standardize the name/dob/address form that's two pages of paper anyway. The essays, which are by far most of the work, are mostly different. Oh, and the schools all still charge full application fees.
There is one shared essay, but back when I was applying (which wasn’t all that long ago) I had to write additional essays per-college in their college-specific question sections.
There already is something kind of like that: It's called the Common Application. You fill out a single application and choose which schools you want to receive it. A little under 1,000 schools use it, so if one of the school you're interested in accepts it then you can easily click a few boxes to send it to a bunch more with no extra work.
As for paying the application fee, it's not too hard to get a waiver. All you have to do is get your guidance counselor to sign off on a waiver form. (That is actually not just for the Common App either: nearly every school will accept that sort of affirmation of need and waive the fee)
The primary reason fees exist is to make them high enough that students who aren't all that interested in attending don't bother to apply. Believe it or not, for most schools the application fee really doesn't impact their budget much. Take a mid-size
school with 20,000 students and a freshman class of 3,000. They might get 12,000 applications that progress far enough that the student submits a fee. Take away 3,000 for fee waivers, and average a $60 fee, and it adds up to $540,000. Seems like a fair bit of money, Given a staff 20, marketing budget, etc., it's a very minor consideration.
Sure, it's not nothing, but having lots of not-very-interested applicants makes it extremely hard to make a target enrollment goal because you end up accepting so many students that won't attend. So you either come under your goal because you accepted uninterested students, or you accept too many to make up for it, making it look like your less competitive at the same time you risk enrolling more students that the school can handle on such short notice (I've seen that happen, it's not good for the school or the students).
For sure, but I more wonder if there is a false advertising claim if they are specifically sending these brochures to students who’s scores are too low for them to be admitted.
The anecdote the article featured mentioned Vanderbilt sending her an application even though her SAT scores were lower than "most" of the admitted class, but it wasn't lower than everyone in the admitted class.
The SATs give college admissions a lot of information, but that information is still only part of the picture. I agree, it would be silly if they were sending out brochures to students with SAT scores lower than anyone they've ever admitted before, but it's conceivable that some of the lower scorers might have otherwise great applications and be admitted.
As a kid in a single-income home whose father only started making middle-class money at about my junior year of high school, I got mail from all of those schools. Given my family's financial situation, I felt it would be irresponsible to apply to schools for which there was little to no hope that I would receive adequate financial aid. My folks weren't going to contribute to my education financially, so I limited myself to a few state schools. I know that admissions cost time and money, but I would have to imagine that there are plenty of kids in similar situations who self-select below their talent / intelligence / skill level.
>more students sending out far more applications (out of paranoia? Pressure?)
Many college systems (e.g. UC) have a common application. Applying to more colleges is just checking more boxes. There's another common application I just found on google that advertises "Explore nearly 900 colleges and universities using Common App." If it were me, and it were just another check box, or even checkbox + $50 or something, I'd hit a ton of them. Back in the day, I think I applied to every single UC for that reason.
As it is, it's not quite that simple (different essay questions, etc.), but the barrier to more applications has absolutely gone down.
I don't think we're disagreeing? For the UC's it was that simple, but for the gigantic common app, it's not. Hence my comment "As it is, it's not quite that simple (different essay questions, etc.)..."
> To some extent, I think it's a positive feedback loop that doesn't require advertising at all to drive it. If you know the admit rate is low (because of all the applications being sent), then it's in your best interest to send out lots of applications -- throwing spaghetti at the wall. Then the admit rate gets lower...
Don't colleges charge around $100 per application? Seems pretty expensive for poorer students to have to apply to increasingly more places.
Most colleges waive the application fee for anyone needing financial aid, so I don't know anyone who didn't apply to a college specifically because of the application fee.
It may work for some, but is it really wise for our 18 year old young minds to travel across the country for a 4 year vacation if they DON'T know what field-specific school they want? Maybe it'd be better if our youth stuck close to home with better financials, family, and social supports, until they figure out a solid plan to head across the country?
I would maybe agree with you if the admissions process was quietly subsidized. At the moment it's about $80 dollars to apply to a college, and the fee waiver process is annoying and opaque.
Throwaway account. I'm currently working on college applications, and found pretty annoying. I've been getting well over a dozen e-mails a day as well as two or three items of physical mail every day, all on colleges, all for the past three months. I've been getting a lower level of the same thing since early high school when I first took the SAT. I made national merit scholar and did well on the SAT; that's when it really picked up. None of them have really convinced me to apply (except for Vanderbilt; they put their financial aid stuff right up front). However , I did get a few useful ones. Most of them were notifying me about info sessions for the colleges. There's also a box on the SAT where you check whether or not you want this or not, though I don't remember if it's opt-in or opt-out.
Most of what I get is useless (though as national merit results get processed, I've started getting serious scholarship offers). What I don't like is that most of them are just send stuff to drive up application numbers and drive down acceptance rates, because yes, that's a thing (even though it sounds horrible, and every rejection makes a kid feel like garbage). Mail is cheap, I guess, but I wish colleges would relegate their communications to those they actually wanted.
(Throwaway because I don't like talking about college application process).
If it's any consolidation, it's been like this for at least 20 years. I'm 33, and when I did well enough on PSAT to become National Merit Finalist, I got similar amount of inbound mail from colleges. By the end of the process I had 4 banker boxes full of the stuff. It's very similar to what happened last year when I went for a car quote...
I ended up taking a full ride at a state school. While the school wasn't the best experience and I've gotten some "why didn't you go to an ivy league school?" comments, not having any college debt has been worth it. I don't regret the decision at all.
This is consistent with my experience, tons and tons of identically formated mail from random universities I'd never talked to. I've really come to hate university administration.
The administrations are only partly to blame. It's something of an arms race, and anyone who doesn't participate gets left behind. When one school starts something, it's initially a competitive advantage. After a few years, other schools pick up on it and it becomes less valuable. After that it becomes almost compulsory because what used to be a competitive advantage is now status quo, creating a sort of negative Nash equilibrium.
The identically formatted materials are because there are a dozen or so higher ed marketing companies that serve most of the market, and they are themselves competing with each other in a similar way, converging on a handful of templates they've tested to be the most successful. Once one of them comes up with something more innovative, the very next marketing cycle will see their competitors mirror it.
Whether or not you checked that box to opt-in/out, you can still get lots of these marketing materials. The SAT is not the only source that colleges and universities use, many or most purchase lists from other sources as well. For example, if you ever sign in to Peterson's or any of a dozen other "help me search for a college" services, you're probably on lists being sold for this purpose.
(Throwaway account to respond to your throwaway account) If you’re interested in CS, Engineering, Entrepreneurship, with National Merit, check out UT Dallas. They have a full ride for National Merit, and especially if you’re interested in computer science, there’s a honors program just for CS. Its not a top school or anything, but if money is at all a concern, definitely look into it.
I went to UT Dallas, and I got a full-ride scholarship without even having to apply for it. I had no extracurriculars to speak of, and my grades were good but not the best (I was in the top 10% of my class, but nowhere near the top of that).
IIRC, it was the third-highest scholarship tier they offered at the time (started Fall 2003). Tuition + mandatory fees + a few hundred a month (forgot the exact number) credit for Waterview rent. No stipend, though, that's only in the two highest tiers.
I unfortunately just saw this, but need to tell you: please don't post regional flamebait to HN. It leads to flamewars like this one, which we emphatically don't want here.
We've already had to warn you before about not breaking the site guidelines, and unfortunately it seems like you've been breaking them a lot. That leads to getting banned here, and I don't want to ban you, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on? The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
the hot thing is true but as someone who was born and raised in Texas and spent 28 years there I do think that you're somewhat exaggerating with that other bit
I think a lot of people will find Texas (and many other states, with a few exceptions) to be very American, for lack of a better word.
This globalized world seems to give many an international perspective on things, and it's hard not to want to live in a place with cultural diversity and influences. Places like New York, Seattle, LA and SF feel way more international and diverse, and once you're there, you don't imagine yourself going back to, say, a place like Dallas. Nothing intrinsically wrong with it, but different strokes for different folks. I'd personally feel like I had traveled back to the 20th century if I had to move there.
Dallas is one of the most diverse parts of the US. The sheer amount of different ethnic food I regularly eat here is mind-boggling, and it actually made it very hard to pick a place when I was considering moving a few years ago (I wanted a place that was both just as diverse and just as suburban as Dallas; I ended up deciding I'd pick Vegas in case circumstances drove me to leave), and I've interacted with so many people from so many different countries and cultures.
There was a tweet going around about the recent ALCS to the effect of “The Yankees are losing to Houston because it’s the most diverse food city in the country and New York has 23 chains named Sweetgreens”
NYC is an unbelievably diverse food city though. You can get anything here. So that tweet doesn't really land. I'm not saying Houston isn't good either (haven't been), but NYC is great by that metric.
What a shortsighted, useless comment. I live in Austin, life here is wonderful and predominantly liberal with no income tax and high salaries for a software engineer. I wouldn't live anywhere else.
People are leaving California and NY to live in Texas for a reason.
My girlfriends parents are hyper liberal beach bums from California who moved to Dallas and said they will never move back.
Austin is an exception to the rule. Would you live in any other cities in Texas? I wouldn't. It's so freaking hot, and it's mostly an ugly state to look at.
Not trying to be mean to Texas :) I just like green trees and plants, and sub 100 degree summers! Only my personal preference, I get others preference differs. I don't fault people who enjoy Texas :)
Yes, Dallas and Houston are both pretty decent and diverse cities for tech. Dallas still has some old country money people, but has become much more liberal these past few years as people from out of state are moving there.
I agree austin is an exception, but dallas will be soon as well. I can't count the number of insanely liberal people I know who moved from California to Dallas.
Austin is cool... enjoyed the time I spent there. Anywhere that has a great live music scene I think I can be happy!
Was only in Dallas briefly but I wasn't very impressed. I didn't get a great feeling there.
Never been to Huston, but a friend of mine grew up there and always spoke highly of it. I just have a hard time with super hot climates, I enjoy a more moderate temp :)
I live in Texas and am quite happy here. I don't appreciate your needlessly-disparaging remarks. Why wouldn't I want to live here? Lots of jobs, low taxes.
The interesting thing I'm experiencing now after having a similar experience to you is that now the same colleges have begun emailing me with graduate school offers. I've begun to identify which schools use which contracting company to send emails and mail by the style of these messages.
FWIW, I'm not sure national merit made any difference to the amount of mail. I made it, my sister didn't (late 00's) and the amount of college advertising spam we got was indistinguishable.
> I've been getting well over a dozen e-mails a day as well as two or three items of physical mail every day, all on colleges, all for the past three months.
> Most of what I get is useless
That’s basically a fact of life these days. Better get used to and learn to cope with it.
I wonder if there is any trick for old people (30s) to get into college for free for a Bachelor's or a Masters. I am guessing they don't care about SATs at that point.
What are you looking for to pursue? While not free, community college is a great resource to look at to get a lot of the core requirements out of the way, and they try to hold a lot of evening classes for working individuals.
In addition, it wouldn't surprise me if there are some sort of merit and/or other type scholarships for folks wanting to go back to schools. You just have to look.
Why would there be? It tends to be the opposite; if you're coming back to school in your 30s, you're presumed to have some savings, and likely interested in school to increase your earnings.
That said, SF residents can get a Associates from City College for free. Elsewhere I know less about it, but there community colleges are still very cheap in some places.
I wish university rankings didn't exist, or at least were never taken seriously by anyone. Failing that, I wish the people making the rankings would just outright admit they're making a subjective list, so at least universities wouldn't waste resources and make these sorts of bizarre decisions trying to game the metrics.
Rankings are awful. They give the impression of constant distance between the ordinal values, e.g., #10 is as far below #1 as #310 is below #300. In reality, things are much more tightly clustered. There are about 20 truly superior schools, and they are much closer to each other than a 1 through 20 ranking would imply. There's not much difference between a 20 and a 10 or even 1.
Then there's about 100 second-tier very, very good schools that are similarly clustered. After that, something like 1000 schools are good, solid schools with little tangible difference between number 900 and number 300.
Ordinal rankings throw all of this out the window, and students & families end up worrying about choosing between a school in the top 25% or top 27% etc.
Non-ordinal ratings instead of rankings would be better, and better show this sort of clustering, but it would still ignore extremely important differences. For example, there may be a school that's fairly middle-of-the-road, okay but not great on an all-around basis, but their proximity to New York City makes their performing arts programs a stand-out top 5 program in the region. But all you get from a US News ranking is that they're rated #768.
"They give the impression of constant distance between the ordinal values, e.g., #10 is as far below #1 as #310 is below #300."
I don't think most people interpret rankings like this. It's generally understood that the distribution of large ranked lists is not linear, and that there's more room between the entries at the top than in the middle.
No, with respect, you're incorrect. They do interpret rankings like this. My job is in higher Ed analytics. I have quite some years in it, and before that was my primary job I spent a decade of working in college admissions offices. My first role was in a 50/50 position handling technology and analytics needs, and the other half in customer-facing operations. My comment here is base on many hundreds of conversations with families going through the college selection and application process. This is indeed how most of them look at rankings. "Why should we choose your school when school X half an hour away is ranked 10 positions higher?" This is often the thinking.
Yep: In US News global rankings, Cambridge is #9 and UIUC is #59. Is Cambridge really 6x better? Is Cambridge as far above UIUC as UIUC is above Brown, at about #100?
This is often a problem with Ordinal variables, they don't convey the true distance between the "observations". Think of class rankings in High School: The Valedictorian and Salutatorian (2nd place) almost always have practically identical academic records: 4.0 GPA, challenging courses, etc. The difference can come down to hundredths of a point, or the fact that #1 took 8 AP courses while #7 took 7 AP courses and 1 Honors course. There isn't much meaningful distance between them.
University educations are one of the most expensive, time-consuming, and meaningful purchase the average American will ever consider purchasing, comparable to a house. People will shape their whole lives around attending them, potentially choosing to move far away from their families. If there's a market for rating average purchases like headphones, it stands to reason that there would be a much larger market for rating purchases like colleges.
The problem isn't that ratings exist. It's that relative rankings are hyped so much among perfectly good schools. I don't care if the University of Washington is five schools above or below Georgia Tech. I just need to see that both are "great," and a little breakdown of their pros and cons.
Then how would you consider which university was worth going to and which not? When my university offered the exchange program they said that I could apply to over 100 different universities from around the world. I wasn't about to start emailing and calling over 100 places to see what research, lectures and seminars that they offered. I took the list of 100+ universities, removed the ones from countries that I didn't want to visit and then checked their rankings. If they were ranked more that 100th in my major then I removed those universities as well. Then I had a much smaller list of universities that I could look into.
of course everyone mostly knows this but for some reason the people making the rankings want a fig leaf of objectivity, so they come up with a weird formula. and then the formula can always be gamed.
Hint to test-takers and their parents: Opt out of all the contact options when you sign up for the test. Otherwise you'll be receiving 10 kilos of glossy school junk mail a month, hundreds of emails, and a slew of cold calls.
As is pointed out, there's a box you check if you want to opt in to this. It's called the Student Search Service. It's not a secret and they tell you exactly what is disclosed.
Harvard has been specifically encouraging unqualified black students to apply to lower their acceptance rate for black applicants to show that they don't discriminate in favor of blacks. I am not saying all of their black applicants are unqualified.
It's not just the SAT, either. I took the GRE in order to go back for my Master's. I got a veritable deluge of emails telling me all about wonderful programs all across the country.
MBA programs were disproportionately common in the advertisements I received. I can guess a few possible reasons. I fit a demographic profile (returning to school after 8+ years in industry). MBAs are profit centers for universities. Business programs ought to be able to optimize business things like advertising reach and market segmentation.
Most email blasts were short-lived, but a few schools still email me on the regular, a year after I finished the program I originally took the test for.
The company I work for is trying to make this process a bit better - it's called RaiseMe: https://raise.me. These name buys are pretty untargeted, and often include only superficial demographic information.
The application and admission process is difficult to navigate and not transparent, and ends up disproportionately impacting the chances for immigrants, minorities, and first-generation college students of finding a good match.
Our hypothesis is that by surfacing available aid earlier, in smaller amounts ("microscholarships"), and allowing students to explore less-well-known colleges, and opt-in to having their information shared, engages students throughout their HS career, pushes them to achieve academically, and nets them a college better suited for them. We found this to be the case over the last 5 years, given our 300+ college partners and usage in 3 of 4 US high-schools.
Our college partners find spending their acquisition budget with us to access (opted-in) rich student data to find interested students that match their profile results in a greater ROI than spending their budget on spamming students and parents with glossy brochures.
(We've also found there to be opportunities to help transfer students navigate the transfer process, and help enrolled undergraduate students from dropping out.)
Can we buy a list of colleges who are buying these names? Only seems fair. It'd be an interesting data point to know which schools aren't so desperate.
This is a very clever externality attack. The benefit to the institution is described in the article.
But it costs the institution nothing: the recruited, unqualified applicant pays an application fee which presumably completely, or more than completely defrays the cost of dealing with the application (a significantly under qualified applicant can be removed from the pool very quickly, at low cost).
The applicant not only pays the cash fee but invests some actual time (and emotional energy)*
Really little different from popular contemporary business models such as Amazon not paying for the time spent in loss prevention queueing, Macdonalds and Walmart paying "wages" so low that their employees need government financial support, not paying drivers wait time or door dash et all stealing their employees' tips. Now these colleges are shifting the externality onto people they don't plan to do business with!
* Perhaps the new common application reduces or eliminates the wall clock time?
Is this not opt-in on the part of the students? When I took the LSAT, it was definitely an opt-in (possibly default opt-in, don't remember specifically), and it was pretty clear to me that the reason to opt-in was that schools might offer application fee waivers. I did well enough on the LSAT that I was able to apply to only schools that waived the application fee, plus two others that I really wanted to attend.
While I think this practice should definitely have an opt-out, I'm not really sure if I think it's a problem that colleges market themselves aggressively. This is probably hard to rigorously study, but my hypothesis is that application rates (particularly to better schools) are going up because applicants are realizing that there is extremely little financial cost to being rejected from a "stretch" school relative to the total cost of a degree and substantial upside, should one get in.
At least when I took the SAT, there was a checkbox giving permission to spam you with emails. The wording is of course nondirect and the exact type of thing you would need good reading comprehension to detect.
It is an amusing paradox that the same set of colleges, sharing the same set of applicants, can become more "exclusive" by the simple mechanism of having applicants submit applications to more schools.
Conversely, if each applicant simply applied to a single school (the final accepting school), it could produce the same attendance result, but with a 100% acceptance rate for every school.
This makes me think that acceptance rates are fairly meaningless.
What's new here? I took the SAT in 2001 and checked a box saying it was ok to be contacted. Got tons and tons of junk mail from overpriced colleges I'd never heard of.
They have some interesting interviews with college admissions staff and information about Vanderbilt specifically using this tactic to decrease their admit rate (which makes them look better in ratings).
This certainly isn't the only thing driving the massive increase in applications. There are far more students taking the PSATs, more students sending out far more applications (out of paranoia? Pressure?), and more foreign applicants.
To some extent, I think it's a positive feedback loop that doesn't require advertising at all to drive it. If you know the admit rate is low (because of all the applications being sent), then it's in your best interest to send out lots of applications -- throwing spaghetti at the wall. Then the admit rate gets lower...
Personally, I'm not entirely against this trend. Growing up in a rural area with parents who didn't go to college, I had no idea what was out there. I figured I'd probably go to the state university (which was a good school!), but didn't think much about it. When I started getting mail from colleges, it was a huge help and broadened my horizons. I ended up going to a field-specific college across the country, and really loved it.
Not only that, but it was exciting and inspiring that these colleges I had only heard about in movies and books were reaching out to me. I just never thought that would happen. I'm sure I'm not the only kid from middle-of-nowhere West coast who was really inspired by that.