Thread: This got a little crazy, and it's only been 18 hours. It's still going strong. Some observations:
I stopped trying to ❤️or reply to responses. It's impossible to keep up. So this will have to do: A mass reply-to-all, if you will.
Beyond that, there are a dozen side conversations happening, and I'm not going to get involved in the arguments, no matter how right one side is
I'm glad this touched a nerve with a lot of people. It was intended to (just maybe not so many?)
We in admissions never used to be the subject of much academic scrutiny; now the research appears to be non-stop. That's both good and bad, of course.
What's good is sunshine.
What's bad is that so many researchers have never worked in admissions, and often times don't even talk to admissions professionals, or if they do, they stop at the offices of @Stanvard which isn't exactly reality.
What's worse is that a lot of people with a lot of self-image or self-worth wrapped up in a decades-old test score like tests. Not surprising, of course.
Here's what I know from almost 40 years of doing this, AND from reading the research:
Test scores are not worthless. They measure some intellectual skill, but whether that skill is important in college is debatable.
They also don't measure things almost all of us would consider important for people to be successful.
They vary strongly with ethnicity and income
The chart I included showed what message gets sent when one university admissions officer says--publicly--we like a 33, but we LOVE a 34.
It says, "that's who's welcomed here." Look at who is included in those scores. Not a lot of low-income students.
The tests were designed to help high rejective colleges find the worthiest of the unwashed masses.
Does that sound familiar? "We need the SAT to find out who in these poorly-resourced high schools is actually smart."
I suppose it's their right to use it that way (if they're private." If they're public? This is what UC Regent Lark Park said during the hearings about the SAT requirements. It's profoundly good:
Are we just here to take the best and turn them into graduates? Or are we here to change lives?
If you use the SAT to allocate admissions slots, you should consider what you're saying:
You're saying that the only ones who deserve a college degree of the type you're awarding are the students who've already been advantaged most of their lives.
Or the lucky ones who hit the SAT lottery despite the odds.
Read that again.
So, to new followers (lots of them) welcome.
You might want to read about my Twitter approach. Especially the second-to-last bullet point.
To everyone (mostly law professors today, for some odd reason) who love the SAT, keep on lovin' it. It's like the McRib, so enjoy it while you can.
That's it for today. Only people I follow can reply to this thread, because I'm going to cook dinner and check out PBS Masterpiece, as is our habit on Sunday night.
Sigh. We know what this means: College admissions offices do not--because they cannot--visit every high school.
We do not have the staff or the time to visit every high school in our state each year, and we're a public university. hechingerreport.org/a-big-reason-r…
The problem of having people cover admissions who do not know--or haven't taken the time to learn--the business is that you get headlines like this based on faulty assumptions, namely, that "recruiting = visiting a high school."
Our job and our profession looks simple, as witnessed by anyone who's heard a trustee say, "we'll call on our alumni volunteers to help with recruiting." As if they'd do that when they need help with accounting or architecture or athletic coaching. Admissions is a profession.
Thread: Here is a headline that's been making the rounds. Stop me if you've heard this from @DanRosensweig or any handful of others before:
Thing is, as I've tweeted before, he might be right. And it wouldn't matter too much.
Here's why.
Let's assume our focus is on the effects on undergraduates only. That makes sense, of course, as they are the biggest segment of the post-secondary market. As you can see, full-time undergrads (purple, FT UG) make up over half of all enrollment.
Thread: I bet you're wondering what's going on in the mind of your friendly local EM or admissions/FA professional.
So follow along.
There are no reliable trends. We have anecdotes. Harvard up 57%. Colgate up 102%.
Princeton ended up 15% ahead of last year, probably because they dropped all early options in response to COVID-19.
Refer to this tweet if you ever ask why colleges keep early plans.
Big public universities with panache in their state are up. UCLA and UCB blew 100K apps out of the water. We're up about 35%, but our in-state rival is also having a record year.
Cal States appear to be down. Most unis with a direction in their name are seeing similar trends.
This is of interest to me for a few reasons: First, we've had a few announcements about well-known colleges closing in the last two years (some later rescinded or modified); second, colleges always close; and third, we've been hearing pundits predict this trend for 20 years.
So, how to do this? There is no perfect way, of course. But I downloaded the data of all US institutions in 2009 and 2019 from IPEDS and did a bit of analysis. It's not perfect.
Some of these places have changed names and gotten a new ID (Jefferson Davis CC in Alabama), e.g.
We're one of those curious points in history when being way up in applications could be a bad thing, and being way down could be a good thing.
Get ready for another year of "we really can't tell" in Enrollment Management and admissions:
Let's say you're a solid, mid-market college in a large city. Increasing apps could be a hedge for students who think they may have to stay closer to home.
If, by next March, we've contained COVID-19 or developed a vaccine, you become last choice.
Let's say you're a flagship or land grant, and you see apps up at this point. This could be those students normally headed out-of-state or to private colleges. You're a hedge against high tuition.