What do elite colleges look for

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What do I need most from a campus and from a classroom? The four years of college are as important socially as they are educationally — the right fit is far more important than getting into the highest-ranked school you can. Spend a month identifying what you want from a college and researching the schools in step with your ideals. The truth is, at least half the incoming class at one elite college is utterly interchangeable with half the class at colleges ranked several slots above and below.

Even less clear is who deserves a spot in the class, and how anyone could comfortably determine such a thing. The bulk of those credentialed enough for serious consideration are in that position because of circumstance and wealth. I spoke to Doron Taussig, a visiting assistant professor of media and communication studies at Ursinus College, who is writing a book about perceptions of meritocracy.

This means that when people tell stories about how they got to where they are and what merit had to do with it, most of us can conclude whatever we want. I was at an information session once where a colleague told the visiting parents and students that many rejected applicants are as deserving as those we accept.

A mother lingered afterward to share a story about her daughter, who was extremely distressed about her own college rejections and killed herself. Where you are accepted into college is no reflection of your worth as a student, and certainly not as a person. There are duds attending Ivies and gems attending public universities. For the underprivileged, though, some educational brands are perceived strongly enough to open doors.

In my opinion, the most compelling argument for affirmative action is access to resources and to social and economic networks. Attending an elite college has allowed me to develop a network that includes doctors, lawyers, people with multiple advanced degrees and experience in academic administration, etc.

Ideally, college would function as a counterbalance to the rigged games of American capitalism and meritocracy. When I worked in admissions, there seemed a nobility to the work, helping curate the ranks of future difference-makers. Reading applications felt honorable. But it quickly became clear that few people understood the process — even those making the decisions. The goal was to evaluate each student in her individual context.

If that sounds absurdly vague, I sympathize. All while trying to maintain a personal life and some sanity. In my experience, the bulk of the admissions deans and directors I encountered were decent, empathetic, and forward-thinking.

When I first wrote critically about elite college admissions, the dean and director of admissions at Carnegie Mellon took me out to lunch to pick my brain. Later, they invited me to address their staff, then brought me to a conference to speak with admissions folk from across the country.

There, I met many people who want to fix the system. To foist the task of remedying societal inequity on relatively underpaid, unappreciated admissions officers is mostly unfair. I had a huge office, a fancy title, and a lot of frequent flyer mileage. But the salary is peanuts — another reason, other than progressivism, the field has a disproportionate number of women and minorities in high-ranking positions.

Rather than using the essay to talk up your accomplishments, focus on showing who you truly are and what makes you interesting. Stick with the given prompt as you write and remember to include the reason why you want to attend a particular school. Contacting your top school choices will give you a more specific picture of what they all expect, allowing you to target your applications for each and increase the chances of acceptance. A master's degree in healthcare administration can lead to new and exciting career opportunities.

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According to the , 7,, students enrolled in at least one distance education course at degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall The result is that at Trinity, as at many other Division III schools in the Northeast, the recruited athletes are actually more likely to be white and wealthy than the rest of the freshman class. When colleges send out acceptance notices to students each spring, they know that a significant number of those students will turn down the offer and enroll somewhere else.

The average yield rate among four-year, nonprofit colleges now stands at 27 percent, nationwide. By contrast, students admitted early, who are bound by the rules of early decision to enroll, have essentially a percent yield rate.

The teams considered the tentative admits from each high school in their region, debated their comparative merits and rejected the least qualified. The first cuts were relatively easy, reducing the tentative admit pool to 2, — but there were still about 1, students to cut. The first number was the size of the class, which had to be as close as possible to students.

The second number, even more pressing, was the combined tuition revenue those students needed to bring in. The modern practice of enrollment management was invented in the mids by a man named Jack Maguire, who was then the dean of admissions at Boston College, and one of his most important innovations was to deploy financial aid strategically, as a way to attract the students he most wanted to admit, whether they genuinely needed financial assistance or not.

It turned out that offering grants — even relatively small ones — to students with high family incomes made it significantly more likely that those students would enroll in your college. Over the last 30 years, as list-price tuitions have climbed rapidly, this strategy has spread to almost every private college in the nation, and many public ones, as well.

And as merit aid has expanded, it has created two big problems. The first, and most obvious, is that if you give more aid to rich kids, you have less to offer to poor kids. Beginning in the early s, the practice of giving out merit aid evolved first into an arms race and then, more recently, into what is beginning to look like a death spiral. Colleges still publish official tuition rates, just as they used to, and those published rates are often astoundingly high.

But the official numbers have become almost entirely divorced from reality. In the average tuition-discount rate for freshmen at private, nonprofit universities hit 50 percent for the first time , meaning that colleges were charging students, on average, less than half of their posted tuition rates. Rising tuition rates may still dominate the headlines, but the truth is that discount rates are rising just as quickly, and at some colleges, more quickly.

That meant that he was aiming for a 42 percent discount rate. But the discount would not be the same for each student. But he knew he would need to balance each full-need student he admitted with enough full-paying students to hit his revenue target.

But the discounts they offer vary widely from student to student. In fact, if you pick any two freshmen at the same college, they are very likely to be paying completely different tuition rates. Instead, they are based on a complex calculation, using sophisticated predictive algorithms, of what the student is worth to the college and what the college is worth to the student.

Outside the ranks of enrollment management, the work done by the companies that employ these back-room prodigies is almost entirely unknown. But collectively, they play as big a role as anyone in shaping American college admissions today. The company he worked with, the year I was following his progress, was Hardwick Day, a firm based in Bloomington, Minn.

A white student from Danbury with, say, a 3. One day, the tentative admit pile had too many men from the Northeast who needed financial aid, so they spent the day slicing away at that demographic. The next day, they needed to cut women from the Northeast. And on it went. The rise of predictive analytics in admissions and financial aid has had the effect of automating and turbocharging the pressures that enrollment managers have always felt.

Counselors often made passionate defenses for certain students — only to learn, a few hours later, that the latest report from Hardwick Day had ruled them out. Staff morale was low.

Early in the process, they had done what they could to protect highly qualified low-income and first-generation students. Fifteen percent were first-generation, 14 percent were eligible for Pell grants and 16 percent were black or Latino.

Those categories significantly overlap at Trinity. It was another important step, he said, but Trinity remained a work in progress. The dictates of financial-aid optimization and the algorithms of modern enrollment management have made the process of college admissions more opaque and unbalanced than ever. They have empowered affluent students, allowing them to be more choosy about where they go and how much they pay to go there.

Paul Tough is a contributing writer for the magazine.