This article isn't about the fact that colleges are buying SAT scores. Yes, that has been done forever.
The article is about colleges using mass mailing to dramatically boost applicants and decrease the number of people admitted.<p>They have some interesting interviews with college admissions staff and information about Vanderbilt specifically using this tactic to decrease their admit rate (which makes them look better in ratings).<p>This certainly isn't the only thing driving the massive increase in applications. There are far more students taking the PSATs, more students sending out far more applications (out of paranoia? Pressure?), and more foreign applicants.<p>To some extent, I think it's a positive feedback loop that doesn't require advertising at all to drive it. If you know the admit rate is low (because of all the applications being sent), then it's in your best interest to send out lots of applications -- throwing spaghetti at the wall. Then the admit rate gets lower...<p>Personally, I'm not entirely against this trend. Growing up in a rural area with parents who didn't go to college, I had no idea what was out there. I figured I'd probably go to the state university (which was a good school!), but didn't think much about it. When I started getting mail from colleges, it was a huge help and broadened my horizons. I ended up going to a field-specific college across the country, and really loved it.<p>Not only that, but it was exciting and inspiring that these colleges I had only heard about in movies and books were reaching out to <i>me.</i> I just never thought that would happen. I'm sure I'm not the only kid from middle-of-nowhere West coast who was really inspired by that.
Throwaway account. I'm currently working on college applications, and found pretty annoying. I've been getting well over a dozen e-mails a day as well as two or three items of physical mail every day, all on colleges, all for the past three months. I've been getting a lower level of the same thing since early high school when I first took the SAT. I made national merit scholar and did well on the SAT; that's when it really picked up. None of them have really convinced me to apply (except for Vanderbilt; they put their financial aid stuff right up front). However , I did get a few useful ones. Most of them were notifying me about info sessions for the colleges. There's also a box on the SAT where you check whether or not you want this or not, though I don't remember if it's opt-in or opt-out.<p>Most of what I get is useless (though as national merit results get processed, I've started getting serious scholarship offers). What I don't like is that most of them are just send stuff to drive up application numbers and drive down acceptance rates, because yes, that's a thing (even though it sounds horrible, and every rejection makes a kid feel like garbage). Mail is cheap, I guess, but I wish colleges would relegate their communications to those they actually wanted.
I wish university rankings didn't exist, or at least were never taken seriously by anyone. Failing that, I wish the people making the rankings would just outright admit they're making a subjective list, so at least universities wouldn't waste resources and make these sorts of bizarre decisions trying to game the metrics.
Hint to test-takers and their parents: Opt out of all the contact options when you sign up for the test. Otherwise you'll be receiving 10 kilos of glossy school junk mail a month, hundreds of emails, and a slew of cold calls.
As is pointed out, there's a box you check if you want to opt in to this. It's called the Student Search Service. It's not a secret and they tell you exactly what is disclosed.<p><a href="https://studentsearch.collegeboard.org/about-your-data" rel="nofollow">https://studentsearch.collegeboard.org/about-your-data</a><p>If you previously opted-in and change your mind opting back out is simple.<p><a href="https://studentsearch.collegeboard.org/opt-out" rel="nofollow">https://studentsearch.collegeboard.org/opt-out</a>
Harvard has been specifically encouraging unqualified black students to apply to lower their acceptance rate for black applicants to show that they don't discriminate in favor of blacks. I am <i>not</i> saying all of their black applicants are unqualified.<p><a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-harvard-leading-on-black-applicants/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-harvard-leading-on-...</a>
Is Harvard Leading On Black Applicants?
By ROBERT VERBRUGGEN
National Review
November 5, 2019 10:39 AM
It's not just the SAT, either. I took the GRE in order to go back for my Master's. I got a veritable deluge of emails telling me all about wonderful programs all across the country.<p>MBA programs were disproportionately common in the advertisements I received. I can guess a few possible reasons. I fit a demographic profile (returning to school after 8+ years in industry). MBAs are profit centers for universities. Business programs ought to be able to optimize business things like advertising reach and market segmentation.<p>Most email blasts were short-lived, but a few schools still email me on the regular, a year after I finished the program I originally took the test for.
The company I work for is trying to make this process a bit better - it's called RaiseMe: <a href="https://raise.me" rel="nofollow">https://raise.me</a>. These name buys are pretty untargeted, and often include only superficial demographic information.<p>The application and admission process is difficult to navigate and not transparent, and ends up disproportionately impacting the chances for immigrants, minorities, and first-generation college students of finding a good match.<p>Our hypothesis is that by surfacing available aid earlier, in smaller amounts ("microscholarships"), and allowing students to explore less-well-known colleges, and opt-in to having their information shared, engages students throughout their HS career, pushes them to achieve academically, and nets them a college better suited for them. We found this to be the case over the last 5 years, given our 300+ college partners and usage in 3 of 4 US high-schools.<p>Our college partners find spending their acquisition budget with us to access (opted-in) rich student data to find interested students that match their profile results in a greater ROI than spending their budget on spamming students and parents with glossy brochures.<p>(We've also found there to be opportunities to help transfer students navigate the transfer process, and help enrolled undergraduate students from dropping out.)<p>By the way, we're hiring.
Can we buy a list of colleges who are buying these names? Only seems fair. It'd be an interesting data point to know which schools aren't so desperate.
This is a very clever externality attack. The benefit to the institution is described in the article.<p>But it costs the institution nothing: the recruited, unqualified applicant pays an application fee which presumably completely, or more than completely defrays the cost of dealing with the application (a significantly under qualified applicant can be removed from the pool very quickly, at low cost).<p>The applicant not only pays the cash fee but invests some actual time (and emotional energy)*<p>Really little different from popular contemporary business models such as Amazon not paying for the time spent in loss prevention queueing, Macdonalds and Walmart paying "wages" so low that their employees need government financial support, not paying drivers wait time or door dash et all stealing their employees' tips. Now these colleges are shifting the externality onto people they <i>don't</i> plan to do business with!<p>* Perhaps the new common application reduces or eliminates the wall clock time?
Is this not opt-in on the part of the students? When I took the LSAT, it was <i>definitely</i> an opt-in (possibly default opt-in, don't remember specifically), and it was pretty clear to me that the reason to opt-in was that schools might offer application fee waivers. I did well enough on the LSAT that I was able to apply to only schools that waived the application fee, plus two others that I really wanted to attend.<p>While I think this practice should definitely have an opt-out, I'm not really sure if I think it's a problem that colleges market themselves aggressively. This is probably hard to rigorously study, but my hypothesis is that application rates (particularly to better schools) are going up because applicants are realizing that there is <i>extremely</i> little financial cost to being rejected from a "stretch" school relative to the total cost of a degree and substantial upside, should one get in.
At least when I took the SAT, there was a checkbox giving permission to spam you with emails. The wording is of course nondirect and the exact type of thing you would need good reading comprehension to detect.
It is an amusing paradox that the same set of colleges, sharing the same set of applicants, can become more "exclusive" by the simple mechanism of having applicants submit applications to more schools.<p>Conversely, if each applicant simply applied to a single school (the final accepting school), it could produce the same attendance result, but with a 100% acceptance rate for every school.<p>This makes me think that acceptance rates are fairly meaningless.
What's new here? I took the SAT in 2001 and checked a box saying it was ok to be contacted. Got tons and tons of junk mail from overpriced colleges I'd never heard of.