The Early-Decision Racket

About the Crossword Genius project. If less, then colleges could reduce the detailed information they release about admissions trends. Backup college admissions pool crossword clue. The Avery study's findings were the more striking because what admissions officers refer to as "hooked" applicants were excluded from the study. Then, in March of this year, Allen suffered a stroke while greeting a group of prospective USC students. So to end up with 2, 000 freshmen on registration day, a college relying purely on a regular admissions program would send "We are pleased to announce" letters to 6, 000 applicants and hope that the usual 33 percent decided to enroll.

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If they were to drastically reduce the percentage they take early, this would all change in a heartbeat. " If selectivity measures how frequently a college rejects students, yield measures how frequently students accept a college. Consider for a possible future acceptance: Hyph. - crossword puzzle clue. At Redlands High, the public high school I attended in southern California, each counselor is responsible for several hundred students. Here is how the game is played. Below this formal structure lies a crucial reality, which Penn is almost alone in forthrightly disclosing: students have a much better chance of being admitted if they apply early decision than if they wait to join the regular pool.

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I was the editor of U. The economists Robert Frank, of Cornell, and Philip Cook, of Duke, have called this the "winner take all" phenomenon, in that it multiplies the rewards for those at the top of the pyramid and puts new pressure on those at the bottom. "To say that kids should be ready a year ahead of time to make these decisions goes against everything we've learned in the past hundred years. " Fred Hargadon, formerly the dean of admissions at Stanford and now in the same position at Princeton, says, "A generation ago most students stayed within two hundred miles of their home town when looking at colleges. " Scarsdale's strong reputation means that it can afford not to be on lists of schools with the most Ivy League admissions. Backup college admissions pool crossword. Today's ED programs are relics of an entirely different era in academic history—actually, two eras. Today's students, who survived this distorted game, could do their younger brothers and sisters an enormous favor by pressuring those ten schools to do what they already know is right. These included Brandeis, Connecticut College, Emory, Tufts, Washington University in St. Louis, and Wesleyan.

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"College presidents see these U. All the counselors I spoke with said that if it were up to the parents alone, the overall total would be much higher. "If we need a quarterback for the football team and we've admitted two of them early, we don't need to take a third in the spring, " he says. "A hallmark of adolescence is its changeability, " says Cigus Vanni, formerly an assistant dean at Swarthmore. For us it's a blink of an eye. A student who applies under the regular system can compare loans, grants, and work-study offers from a variety of schools. But now it will have to send out only 5, 000 acceptance letters—500 earlies plus 4, 500 to bring in 1, 500 regular students. He takes great and eloquent offense at the idea that admissions policies should be described as a matter of power politics among colleges rather than as efforts to find the best match of student and school. The life you're going to be living for the next few years. Back in college crossword clue. One is that colleges voluntarily do what Stanford does now and hold early admissions to no more than 25 percent of the incoming class. College administrators dispute both the technical basis on which these rankings are compiled and the larger idea that institutions with very different purposes can be considered better or worse than one another. But under the unusually candid Lee Stetson, Penn has exposed some of the inner workings of the black box that is the admissions process. That statistical improvement can have significant consequences. Frank has used the example of the market for opera.

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The equivalent of a 100-point increase in SAT scores makes an enormous difference in an applicant's chances, especially for a mid-1400s candidate. There are related clues (shown below). Backup college admissions pool crossword puzzle crosswords. Isolating that impact has been difficult, because students who go to selective schools tend to have many other things working in their favor. "In general it's the smaller liberal-arts colleges that need to encourage applications, so that they'll remain 'selective, '" says John Katzman, the head of The Princeton Review. But even when that is the case, a student with only one offer on the table cannot know what might have been available elsewhere. If a school refuses to provide a breakdown, the magazine should omit selectivity and yield from the school's listing.

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The other dates on the college-prep calendar must also be moved up. A was a likely admission, B was possible, C was unlikely. If most of today's high school counselors are right, early plans would soon be clearly seen for what they have become: a crutch for college administrations, and an unfortunate strategy for lower-ranked schools to make themselves look better. The real question about the ED skew is whether the prospects for any given student differ depending on when he or she applies.

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Its selectivity will become an impressive 33 percent and its overall yield will be 50 percent. News compiled its list. Recent usage in crossword puzzles: - Daily Celebrity - May 27, 2017. It means that one has decided not to apply for the extraordinary full-tuition "merit" scholarships—including the Trustee Scholar program at the University of Southern California and the Morehead scholarships at the University of North Carolina—that are increasingly being used to attract talented students to less selective schools. In the regular decision process, which most students still follow, students spend the first semester of their senior year deciding on the group of colleges—four, six, thirty-three in one extreme case I heard about—to which they wish to apply.

You go around the school and see the kids look tired. But whatever the difference in details, everyone I spoke with seemed sure that some small group of elite colleges could change the system. "Oh, yeah, for us as sophomores, it's here, " he said. But for the great majority, no. Richard Shaw, the admissions dean at Yale, defends his institution's ED policy in similar terms. "We'd go back to the days when everyone could look at all their options over the senior year. This was part of Penn's strategy in pushing its binding ED plan. The natural tendency to esteem what is rare—a place in, say, an Ivy League freshman class—has been dramatically reinforced by the growth of journalistic rankings of colleges. "I tell the parents, 'You want your kid to go to Stanford? That school, he said, had just come up with an offer that was all grant, no loan.

Today's high school students and their parents have no choice but to adapt their applications strategies to the way early decision has changed the nature of college admissions. News should ask for, and separately report, early and regular totals for selectivity and yield. How early did students start worrying about college? Students who haven't heard of early decision are shouldered out. Six years ago Yale and Princeton switched from early action to binding early decision, and Stanford, which had previously resisted all early programs, instituted a binding ED plan. For years, he said, he had heard colleagues worry about the effects of early-decision programs. Over the next few years Allen brought up the idea whenever his colleagues began complaining about the effects of ED programs. By the end of the process most of them were battle-hardened and blasé, and not really interested in talking about what they had been through. Because of the new forms and other factors that made Tulane more attractive, applications went up by 30 percent. Obviously there were other considerations, but this saved the college millions in interest. " If certain letters are known already, you can provide them in the form of a pattern: "CA???? "If we did that, " Leifer-Sarullo says, "the school next door would be under that much more pressure about its graduates—and school results are what keep up real-estate prices. " You can narrow down the possible answers by specifying the number of letters it contains. The difference is that the EA agreement is not binding: even after getting a yes, the student can apply to other places in the regular way and wait until May to make a choice.

The most experienced counselors at private schools and strong public high schools can also turn ED programs to their advantage, he says, because they know how to exploit the opportunities the system has created. Great idea—good luck! These comparisons obviously count for something. "One thousand would say no. Today's professional-class madness about college involves the linked ideas that colleges are desirable to the extent that they are hard to get into; that high schools are valuable to the extent that they get students into those desirable colleges; and that being accepted or rejected from a "good" college is the most consequential fact about one's education. Selectivity measures how hard a school is to get into. Counselors at the Los Angeles public schools cannot—that is, if they even have a moment to think about which of their students should apply early. "We have had a policy in place for close to thirty years that legacy applications are given special consideration only during early decision, " Stetson told me last spring. Katzman says that it's unfair to name any schools that pursue this strategy, because "it's like naming people who jaywalk in New York. " At the schools I visited—strong suburban public schools and renowned private schools—half of all seniors, on average, applied under some early plan. For instance, colleges could agree to abandon the practice sometimes called sophomore search, whereby the Educational Testing Service sells mailing lists of high school sophomores to colleges so that the schools can begin their marketing mailings in the junior year. Early decision has helped not only Penn.

We add many new clues on a daily basis. Last year it sent a mailing to all students in Louisiana and to high-scoring students from across the country. It made sense, he added, for Penn to extend the policy to applicants in general: if they are extra serious about Penn, Penn will make an extra effort for them. No early decision, no early action. Other things being equal, a degree from a better-known college is a plus—as are good looks, white skin, athletic skill, being raised in an intact family, and other factors that skew the starting line in life. This, too, is a realistic figure for most top-tier schools. Not every college would agree to it, of course. News rankings, " Mark Davis, a college counselor at Phillips Exeter Academy, told me recently, "and they tell the deans of admission, 'Keep those SAT scores up!

The colleges tally the returns and adjust the size of their incoming classes by accepting students on their waiting lists. The longer a field is exposed to a continuing market test—of economic profit, of political approval, of performance or innovation—the less academic credentials of any sort seem to matter. Few colleges have an open-market yield of even 50 percent. They would chat with students, talk with counselors, and look at transcripts, and then issue advisory A, B, or C ratings to the students. "Most people are for that, to be perfectly honest. In the mid-1990s Baby Boomers' children began applying to college, and the long years of prosperity expanded the pool of people willing and able to pay tuition for prep schools and private colleges. How is this enforced? Philosophically and in every other way it would be so much better if we all could make the change. A student who is accepted early decision has to take whatever aid the college offers.
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