Some colleges have been playing chess with admissions to boost their reputations at the applicant’s expense. Being more selective increases a college’s ranking and reputation. As a result, some of them solicit applications from candidates below their admissions standards, just so they can reject them in the end, reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Jori Johnson was one of those students. After taking the practice SAT test in high school, she received brochures from Stanford, Northwestern, Vanderbilt and more. While strong, her test scores were not in line with the average scores of those school’s applicants. Of the 10 schools she applied to, only three accepted Johnson, who was the valedictorian of her class.
“A lot of the rejections came on the same day. … I just stared at my computer and cried,” Johnson told WSJ.
According to WSJ, “Colleges rise in national rankings and reputation when they show data suggesting they are more selective. They can do that by rejecting more applicants, whether or not those candidates ever stood a chance. Some applicants, in effect, become unknowing pawns.”
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To make matters worse, the College Board, which owns the SAT, is making a profit by “selling test-takers’ names and personal information to universities.” The practice is allowing colleges to achieve a level of higher exclusivity, while costing students more time and money to apply to schools that were likely going to reject them in the first place.
While College Board says selling student data has little impact on whether or not a student will apply to a specific school, said Terry Cowdrey, an enrollment consultant who served as Vanderbilt’s acting dean of undergraduate admissions from 1996 to 1997.
“The top 10% of universities don’t need to do this. They are buying some students’ names who don’t have a great chance of getting in,” Cowdrey said. “Then the kids say, ‘well why did you recruit me if you weren’t going to let me in?’ They do it to increase the number of applications; you’ve got to keep getting your denominator up for your admit rate.”
