(2018-05-04) The Real Cruelty Of College Admissions

The Real Cruelty of College Admissions

last month Brown University admitted 2,566 applicants and “offered spots on its waiting list” to 2,724.

The more elite the school, the less likely it is that a waitlist is anything other than a powerful branding tool, demonstrating the university’s strong appeal to thousands of expectant families each year (Signaling)

At most, 5% of Penn’s waitlist can expect an offer of admission;

The real cruelty of College Admissions is its impact on the wasteland that is much of America’s system of K-12 education.

the fundamental challenge is that the majority of students attend a “high-poverty school,” and our schools aren’t doing nearly enough to lift students who need the most help.

College admissions is reified at high-poverty schools

This is why respected charter school organizations like KIPP, which focus exclusively on lifting underprivileged kids, have historically measured themselves solely on the college success of their students.

There are two problems with K-12’s obsession with college admissions. The first is that if we’re actually interested in student success, college admissions is a metric that is exceptionally short term.

Of young Americans who begin at a four-year college, about half graduate in a reasonable time frame (DropOut). Of those, about half get a good job (UnderEmployment).

The second problem is that college admissions is the wrong short-term metric. With only 200 selective colleges and universities, that leaves about thousands of effectively open-enrollment four-year institutions, where college admissions is less a measure of college readiness than family wealth and support and/or willingness to take on potentially punishing levels of student loan debt.

Dintersmith writes that college admissions is the “elephant in the room” blocking high school innovation.

I do think there’s reason for hope. Last-mile training models like bootcamps, income share programs, and especially employer-pay models like staffing and outsourced apprenticeships that lead directly to good first (often digital) jobs are beginning to scale rapidly and have the potential to provide K-12 education with new and different feedback.

Progressive states, school districts, and charter school organizations will want to partner with last-mile providers, not only to provide students with faster + cheaper pathways to good first jobs, but also to get valuable data for as to what’s working, and what’s not.