Suicide Thursday Over – One More College to Go

Yesterday was being referred to by
Jessica and her friends as “Suicide Thursday” or “Ivy Thursday” because so
many of the major U.S. colleges released their admissions decisions then.
My High School Senior daughter has now heard back from
all but one of the nine colleges, universities, and music conservatories
to which she applied for admission as a member of the undergraduate class
of 2011. Jessica is pleased that she was accepted into five excellent
schools and we in her family feel lucky and happy that our girl has only
good options to choose from in the next month. We expect
to hear Rice’s decision by Monday.

Our friend Danek found this good idea with regard to improving the
college admissions process in the article

“Make college admissions a crapshoot – Top schools are already too selective, so why not draw names from a hat?”
(By Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College)
March 18, 2007, latimes.com.

The tragedy of all this selectivity and competition is that it is almost completely pointless. Students trying to get into the best college, and colleges trying to admit the best students, are both on a fool’s errand. They are assuming a level of precision of assessment that is unattainable. …

There is a simple way to dramatically reduce the pressure and competition that our most talented students now experience. When selective institutions get the students’ applications, the schools can scrutinize them using the same high standards they currently use and decide which of the applicants is good enough to be admitted. Then the names of all the “good enough” students could be placed in a metaphorical hat, with the “winners” drawn at random for admission. Though a high school student will still have to work hard to be “good enough” for Yale, she won’t have to distort her life in the way she would if she had to be the “best.” The only reason left for participating in all those enrichment programs would be interest, not competitive advantage.

When Jessica read Brown’s online rejection letter to me yesterday, it said
that 19,000 students had applied for next year’s Freshman class. You could
make up a complete university (or city) from the 19,000 students who
applied to Brown alone! A
Brown admissions web page says that last year they rejected 86%
of applicants. Regardless of the quality of their applications, records,
accomplishments and potential, all 19,000 of those students probably
(like my own daughter) spent days if not weeks writing essays, arranging for
recommendation letters and transcripts and paying fees. They then waited
three months for an answer. A lottery makes more sense and would
surely be more humane to the applicants, their parents, and the
admissions staff.

I am reminded
of a description of the U.S. national spelling bee in the book
Complete and Utter Failure – a Celebration of Also-Rans, Runner-Ups,
Never-Weres and Total Flops by Neil Steinberg (1994: Doubleday):

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The image of so many students being forced through that funnel, where
a solitary student emerges at the end, a victor, while the others slink
off in defeat, drew me to the bee, making it seem a paradigm for so
much that goes on in organized mass education….

Not only does just one child out of 9,000,000 win, but the 8,999,999 losers
lose in a public and humiliating fashion. As will be seen, it would be hard
to think up a way to make failure in the bee more demeaning, particularly
at the later stages, short of having a quartet of circus clowns drive
deficient spellers from the stage with selzer bottles and flappy paddles.

The colleges which are sending out their admissions decisions now
clearly take a great deal of trouble to write kind, hopeful, and supportive
rejection letters as well as gleeful personalized acceptance letters.
The decisions
are given privately on passworded web pages and in paper mail. However,
I suspect that many high schools are like Jessica’s where the Seniors have
been comparing college lists all year. This month, school hallways are
full of Seniors offering congratulations or commiserations to their
classmates as each school announces its decisions.
In the end, all is known.

Here is where we stand so far on Jessica’s admissions: