Here is my question for the educational institutions of this country: Why are you not accepting anyone? What is it about this current class of high-school seniors that you dislike so much? You can only use the "this is the largest pool of applicants ever" excuse so many times.
I can understand the fact that there are only so many spots available at any given institution, but why does its seem that there are none open at any university in the country? There are hundreds of applicants to each school every single year, but fewer and fewer kids are being admitted for the 2010-2011 year. Universities all have a very distinct build, one that has been constructed over a period of decades and is defined by the type of student that attends the establishment. But what happens when schools begin to turn away the very type of student that defines the institution? It it still the same school or has it become something different?
I firmly believe that this completely changes the university. I can sympathize with the fact that there is a need for there to be a drop in the number of admitted students, but do not turn away the kind of student that makes your institution what it has become. That is just not right. That is going against the fundamental foundation of what your institution has come to be, and therefore is not something that should be practiced.
So I will say it one more time: If you have to turn away students, you have to do it. But do not turn away a student that is exactly what your university has come to look for in its students. Because if you do this, what is the purpose of separate universities with distinct identities?
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I am so glad that you raise this problem, because it is changing the way our society looks at higher education, not to mention the way our generation will internalize the unprecedented admissions spikes... Sorry to repeat those statistics you're tired of, but it's true: there is was 3-year spike in applicants, largely due to birth rates in their respective birth years.
ReplyDeleteI fully support your argument that turning away students that embody a school's ideal students is detrimental to those schools; but what about those students? Sure, it's awful to hear that a university like Harvard might as well play "eenie-meenie-mine-y-moe" with a smaller stack of applications to select their Freshman class. BUT what about those students whose potentials may now never be reached thanks to the university's admissions office flipping coins rather than to actually compare the character of prospective students.
To be honest, I think the whole system has become a mess; no one is really winning here, are they?