Why 80 percent of top students get into elite colleges

Wonkblog
By Max Ehrenfreund December 1 at 8:10 AM

It isn't just high school seniors who try to make themselves look good in college admissions. So do the schools, and they waste everyone's time and money in the process.

Comparing the number of people who apply to the number who are accepted is the most obvious way to measure how selective a college is. As a result, colleges have been doing everything they can to make themselves seem more popular by encouraging even unqualified applicants to apply. "The marketing is unbelievable, just unbelievable," one counselor said. "There are places like Tulane that will send everyone a 'V.I.P.' application."

The results are artificially depressed acceptance rates, and an increasingly frenzied admissions process. Data suggest that controlling for students' standardized test scores, qualified applicants can still expect to get into elite schools, as Kevin Carey reports for The New York Times. Eighty percent of well-qualified applicants are accepted into at least one elite school -- they just have to send out more applications to be sure of receiving an acceptance letter somewhere. According to one survey, the number of high school students applying to at least seven colleges has more than tripled since 1990, to 29 percent.

This shell game in college admissions is just one example of a much large problem: There's no handy way of ranking schools. In order to maintain their place on lists like that of U.S. News and World Report, colleges do all kinds of things that are at best a distraction from teaching. Sometimes, these shenanigans are costly. Witness George Washington University's monumental spending on new dormitories and recreational facilities for students, which transformed the campus from an affordable commuter school that could serve working people to an exclusive and expensive but highly ranked university.
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@MaxEhrenfreund