It looks like Covid is seriously affecting college applications this year.
Students admitted last year deferred their acceptance until now and will be starting this year. Can't really blame them, as who would want to pay thousands for online learning?
Unfortunately, this among other factors including, I suspect, Universities' progressive focus on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, is absolutely killing acceptance rates for graduating seniors this year.
For example Northeastern University, with a normal acceptance rate of 23% has dropped to 7%. Northwestern University went from a normal acceptance rate 9% to 4%. Other Universities are having a similar drop. It's gone from a shot at winning the lottery to a chance at being struck by lightning to get in.
Let's take, for example, a senior graduating this year with an above 4.0 GPA, high ACT score, and a pending IB diploma in addition to the standard high school diploma from one of the highest ranked and most rigorous high schools in the entire state. The student has years of volunteer work for a variety of issues; including being the volunteer chief of staff for a County Commissioner (a Democrat, sigh, as is she, on the very progressive wing, but still not a small thing. The student has state-level wins at forensics, and is named valedictorian. Rather impressive, I daresay. Oh, and she is getting rejected all over the damn place from top-level schools. She does have acceptances from lower-tier schools (including some very good ones) so fall-backs are in place, so that's something. But that's not what she's seeking as she wants to be among the best and learn from the best in a STEM field.
Others at the school, with similar stellar resumes or better, are also getting rejected and I suspect in their cases there's some anti-Asian selection bias going on, as some of these kids are seriously super-stars, and no, they don't have "personality" issues.
Are you a caring progressive at a university concerned about Asians being "over-represented" (which is complete BS) at University because they get good grades and do the work? Then tell the non-Asian kids to get their shit together and work half as hard as these kids do. Racial discrimination, even for lovely progressive reasons like DIE is still racial discrimination and it's still wrong - races don't go to university, individual students do.
Colleges also seem to be cutting down on their scholarship offerings as there's no need for them to induce students to apply, as there's a major surplus of applicants this year.
It's certainly an atypical year for college applications.
3 comments:
City College of New York became a high-end institution when the Depression era kids went there on the GI Bill and duked it out. NYC had very good schools in the 1930s.
If a significant portion of the high-end talent you are describing picked on second-tier school (be it SVSU or UMAA or some other back-water school) then it would raise the quality of that school. If enough high-end talent made that decision, pressure could be applied to bring in visiting scholars.
Frankly, the fact that Brand H has a brazillion books in their library isn't the draw it used to be. With the internet, any student with interest and an account can access the most up-to-date research in the world.
Maybe this will be a wake up call...
ERJ: Possibly, but that would take quite a lot of them to do it together and not have the students who are there to just party mess it up. The size of the library is indeed no longer a factor in anyone's application. Now its whether you have the lab facilities, access to professors doing the research you want to do, and opportunities to work with them and do real research even as an undergrad, at least per the kid that's the focus.
Old NFO: It might, but somehow I doubt it. Reality hasn't mugged quite hard enough yet and its hard to explicitly draw the connections lest one be labelled a conservative curmudgeon.
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