By ANTHONY GRAFTON [The Daily Princetonian] – Every year, the numbers rise. The pools of applicants for Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia and Penn regularly score massive increases, about which we duly boast on websites and in college dailies. Princeton boasts of having received over 27,000 applications this year, as if it’s an unquestioned good to be able to blight the hopes of 24,000 to 25,000 18-year-olds instead of 15,000 or 10,000. Meanwhile Harvard received 35,000, Brown 31,000 and Yale a mere 25,800.
Does anyone really know how to sift these masses of talented, intelligent 18-year-olds for the ones who will flourish at a particular school?…
In my ideal world, each great university would seek the student body best fitted to make use of its resources, its community life and its idiosyncratic ways of doing things. The admissions frenzy would die down, and we’d be able to worry about the big issues — the real-world ones that affect the vast majority of young Americans who don’t attend selective colleges.
The economist Nancy Folbre notes in a recent book that of every 100 9th graders, 69 will graduate from high school four years later. Only 39 will enter college, and only 27 of those will return for sophomore year. Of the original 100, no more than 18 will earn an associate degree within three years or a bachelor’s degree within six years. And many of those who succeed will do so without becoming engaged in their work or gaining substantial new skills. There’s a situation that really calls for some creative thinking.
Continued at The Daily Princetonian | And see: At top American colleges, it’s admission: impossible. | More Chronicle & Notices.
