5 ms·
"Many institutions boasted, in the admission season just ended, that they had received record numbers of applications. What most very carefully didn’t say was t
by larrik 8y ago
"Many institutions boasted, in the admission season just ended, that they had received record numbers of applications. What most very carefully didn’t say was that record numbers of applicants are lining up to be accepted."
I read this like 3 times, then the article, then again, but I can't parse it. What is it really saying here?
- lainga 8y agoI am guessing that total applications are up while total numbers of applicants are down (and thus there are more applications submitted per person)?
- barkingcat 8y agoProbably one student would apply to more schools? So even though they had a ton of applications (each school would have seen a rise in # of applications), these schools are chasing down a fewer number of actual people. When I was a student, I applied to 3 colleges (1 nearby, 2 far away), nowadays maybe students apply to 20 or 30?
- credit_guy 8y agoThis sounds like a reasonable explanation, but do colleges have transparency into who applied where nationwide? I would expect a college to know the absolute exact number of its own applicants/applications, but beyond that it should be only an educated guess, as long as the SAT is not in the business of selling everybody their data. But then, who knows, maybe the SAT is doing exactly that.
- jdeibele 8y agoYes. One of the things that's different is that there's now https://www.commonapp.org/ https://www.commonapp.org/ which says "you can apply to more than 700 colleges" using it. To some degree, application fees (paid per college) are still a deterrent but some people qualify for free application fees. There was an article about a young woman who was accepted at more than 100 colleges. http://www.ibtimes.com/teen-gets-accepted-more-100-colleges-2677734 http://www.ibtimes.com/teen-gets-accepted-more-100-colleges-... Applying to X more colleges at $50 or $75 each where one of them may offer 10% or 20% more in aid makes for an interesting decision.
- gowld 8y agoCommon App is at least 20 years old.
- pzh 8y agoIt says that a record number of applicants are applying to each institution but the number that are going to attend is lower.
- spike021 8y agoShotgun approach. Similar to how people apply for a bunch of software engineer positions at a plethora of companies, when they only would really want to work for maybe 1/5 of them. Back when I was a senior in high school there was a newer (at the time, I suppose) idea that college admission was a "crapshoot", so the common suggestion was to apply to a bunch of universities, even the ones you weren't very interested in as "backups" or whatever.
- killjoywashere 8y agoThis happened a long time ago in med school admissions. You can essentially calculate how many schools you need to apply to in order to get accepted. You will have to route d up or down given your demographics, but US News and World Reports will give you a really good guess.
- matte_black 8y agoLots of impressions, very few conversions.
- pg_bot 8y agoThe average person is applying to more colleges, but the total number of people attending college is decreasing. Therefore each college can promote that they received more applications than the previous year. People don't typically attend more than one college simultaneously. ex: 20 people applying to 3 colleges each, vs 10 people applying to 10 colleges each.
- robohoe 8y agoSo basically like a conversion rate of applicants to students.