Shane Wade
Columnist
Stanford, 32,022. Brown, 30,135. UCLA, 57,670.
These are high numbers, but they aren’t college tuition rates – they are the number of applications received. And it’s not just the Ivy Leagues that are leading the pack. As the number of students in the country increase, so does the number of applications sent out. However, colleges eager to increase their selection pool and popularity are inflating that number making the increase of college applications over the last year misleading to aspiring students.
The implications behind the trend revive the tired cliché that “bigger is better.” The logic follows that colleges that receive a high amount of applications must be better because they’re more popular, but in actuality, high-end colleges are reaching out to new applicant pools, such as minorities, out-of-state students, and international students in order to market themselves to a larger base.
It’s an economically-savvy move, seeing as the cost of tuition is rising in many colleges and federal and state governments are keeping tighter budgets. Fortunately for colleges, the increase in applications also means an increase in the number of rejections, further boosting the college’s prestige, which will in turn help increase the amount of students that apply. Since students know that colleges will be selective about the number of applicants accepted, they’ll be forced to send out applications to more schools.
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, and a demoralizing one at that.
Even with the aid of the standardized Common Application, students are being overworked and misled about their own intelligence by colleges that send out brochures en masse to students they have no intention of accepting. Naïve students will apply nevertheless, only to be rejected en masse by those same colleges.
But there’s a slightly sinister aspect to the issue as well – those applications aren’t being sent for free. If a college receives 25,000 applications and the average college application fee is about $50, the admission office can make an easy $1,250,000. Even adjusted for processing cost, that’s a significant amount of money being made, especially considering that only a small fraction of those applicants will be accepted.
It’s a numbers game. Rather than student achievement, sports, clubs or campus attractiveness, colleges are looking to boost their numbers with an artificial popularity. Even if a college’s acceptance rate only accounts for less than 2 percent of its score in the “U.S. News and World Report” ratings, high school students are unlikely to subscribe to the Report, and more apt to check other websites.
The college admissions process echoes the profiteering found on Wall Street, preying on those that seek the American dream while assuming little risk. It’s unlikely large numbers of students will stop seeking college degrees especially in these economic times, but they do so at their own peril.
Students will gradually accept the brochures and e-mails as junk and apply to schools that seem less desperate for applicants. Colleges also face the possibility of losing their unique identities if they start trying to appeal to masses of students.
While it’s commendable that colleges are trying to be more inclusive, their ulterior motives and methods of doing so are suspect and questionable. The students that colleges should be attracting are motivated not by rejection rates and statistics, but by the academic quality and community.