I consistently LOVE your Newsletter Stephanie. Each time you do a story like this -- quite unexpected -- you demonstrate some neat concept where risk or system thinking applies! I must admit this is not a topic I have given much thought as my children are done with schooling. At first blush, it would seem that the Universities love it because it ARTIFICIALLY lowers perceived acceptance rates having little do to with school quality! In general, the very best innovations for consumers are those that provide them more options so they can ferret out quality and costs. It seems the relationship between prospective students and institutions is HIGHLY ASYMMETRIC. Almost any business with asymmetric access to information (pre-Google and pre-Amazon) abuse the relationship and price excessively.
Thanks, Mark! I wrote this one ages ago and as I was at a conference last week, it was already mostly drafted except for a couple of quick add-ons. But yeah, as numbers of applications go up and acceptance rates go down, it creates a feedback loop where more pressure arises to apply to more places to ensure a good acceptance (since every person who applies needs a slot; it's not like a contest where most people don't get a prize). Like I wrote, I think more applications would be *good* if students could attend more than one college simultaneously, but since they usually can't, it mostly adds noise to the system.
I would imagine the current system is good for schools -- they get to claim inflated rejection rates giving the illusion of selectivity :) -- I think the MOOCs and soon AI Tutors will allow students to "attend" a lot of schools very soon :)
The selectivity metrics may look good, but school admissions committees don't have ESP and probably aren't choosing all (or even most of) the students who would have put that school in their top five. I suspect student-school matches are less optimal than they used to be - students will take what they get given low acceptance rates, and schools take their best guess at who might attend, but it would be much better if students could indicate, "This school is in my top five," and if schools could take that into consideration. It does matter. Early action is one way to do this without a binding commitment, but not all schools offer it (whereas early decision is a binding commitment-if-accepted to a student's top-choice school).
I consistently LOVE your Newsletter Stephanie. Each time you do a story like this -- quite unexpected -- you demonstrate some neat concept where risk or system thinking applies! I must admit this is not a topic I have given much thought as my children are done with schooling. At first blush, it would seem that the Universities love it because it ARTIFICIALLY lowers perceived acceptance rates having little do to with school quality! In general, the very best innovations for consumers are those that provide them more options so they can ferret out quality and costs. It seems the relationship between prospective students and institutions is HIGHLY ASYMMETRIC. Almost any business with asymmetric access to information (pre-Google and pre-Amazon) abuse the relationship and price excessively.
Thanks, Mark! I wrote this one ages ago and as I was at a conference last week, it was already mostly drafted except for a couple of quick add-ons. But yeah, as numbers of applications go up and acceptance rates go down, it creates a feedback loop where more pressure arises to apply to more places to ensure a good acceptance (since every person who applies needs a slot; it's not like a contest where most people don't get a prize). Like I wrote, I think more applications would be *good* if students could attend more than one college simultaneously, but since they usually can't, it mostly adds noise to the system.
I would imagine the current system is good for schools -- they get to claim inflated rejection rates giving the illusion of selectivity :) -- I think the MOOCs and soon AI Tutors will allow students to "attend" a lot of schools very soon :)
The selectivity metrics may look good, but school admissions committees don't have ESP and probably aren't choosing all (or even most of) the students who would have put that school in their top five. I suspect student-school matches are less optimal than they used to be - students will take what they get given low acceptance rates, and schools take their best guess at who might attend, but it would be much better if students could indicate, "This school is in my top five," and if schools could take that into consideration. It does matter. Early action is one way to do this without a binding commitment, but not all schools offer it (whereas early decision is a binding commitment-if-accepted to a student's top-choice school).