alt Hacker News> The opaqueness of the whole process is what I find most objectionable.
I also find that objectionable. However, recalling my own college admission process, I think we have collectively determined that this opaqueness is basically working as intended. We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected.
I applied to 6 colleges (not counting those outside the United States), which would be considered an extremely low number today. I have colleagues who have kids applying to colleges right now so I know. Everyone is applying to more colleges just to counteract these seemingly random rejections.
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> We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected.
How could it realistically work any other way? Each year, Harvard gets nearly 50K applications for 2K acceptances and 1.6K enrollments.
It’s not hard to see that tens of thousands of qualified high school students will unavoidably be rejected from just this one university.
It’s an arms race. Now that students are encourage to apply to huge numbers of universities for safety, the universities are forced to accept a smaller percentage of applicants to avoid overcommitting.
So student, parents, and counselors see this and tell everyone to apply to even more colleges and the cycle continues.
Every school has increased tuition without substantially increasing the number of students. What you are seeing is that schools are getting thousands of students that are exactly the same which is why admissions is turning into a lottery system. It's basically like a CPU maxed out at 100%. There's nothing you can do except build more schools and increase the number of students otherwise it will continue to be a lottery.
The opaqueness is unique to USA and is thanks to "holistic reviews", which is a highly questionable practice.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...
The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...
Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...