“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?” asked Princeton Prof. Anthony Grafton a few weeks ago, just before rejection letters were sent out to more than 90 percent of applicants to top American universities. The answer: Of course not. Assuming most of those applicants sought admission to Harvard, Princeton and Yale in good faith and with a reasonable chance of success (else why pay the steep application fees at all?), the very low rate of acceptance to those schools is not a cause for celebration by academic bureaucrats. It’s an admission of a different sort – one of failure. Grafton’s column from the Daily Princetonian was excerpted here. Today, we augment it with this batch of reports.

By EMILY WANGER [Yale Daily News] – In line with its peer institutions, Yale’s admission rate dropped this year — from 7.5 percent in the last admissions cycle to 7.35 percent this year.

Yale is making a total of 2,006 offers of admission to the record 27,282 students who applied this year, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel said…

The University joins Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and MIT in recording small decreases in admissions rate this year.

Four college counselors interviewed said they were not surprised by Yale’s ever-lower admissions rate, which has fallen from 9.9 percent since 2007. Nancy Beane, a college counselor at the Westminster Schools, a private Christian day school in Atlanta, Ga., said decreasing admissions rates are causing more students to apply to more schools.

“Every school seems to be getting incrementally harder to get into,” she said. “It worries me, especially with the number of applications out there. It’s gotten crazy.”

Continued at the Yale Daily News |

…and if you can get in, you can’t get out – of debt.

By PROFESSOR X [The Atlantic] – “Some Say Bypassing a Higher Education Is Smarter Than Paying for a Degree,” reads a recent headline in The Washington Post. (The article, which addresses everything from higher education’s outsize price tag to its questionable correlation with career success, garnered more than 4,000 Facebook recommendations on the Post’s web site.) And just last month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a study suggesting that (gasp!) four-year college is perhaps not for everyone. Rather, for a growing proportion of students, the report contends, internships, apprenticeships, and vocational training would be far more beneficial.

Even for the academically inclined, the value of college in this economic climate is increasingly subject to question. “Is Going to an Elite College Worth The Cost?,” asked New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg in December. He surveyed economic studies, perused labor reports, and interviewed economists and sociologists to ascertain whether there’s really a significant payoff for choosing a swanky private college over someplace less glamorous. The answer?  Inconclusive. Parents, of course, obsess over the Ivy League admissions game, carefully studying up on how to give their kids an edge. And U.S. News & World Report’s annual college breakdown gets as much publicity these days as the Oscar nominations. But are those students fortunate enough to gain admission really getting an education worthy of the fuss? Reports of rampant grade inflation at many of these schools throws even a straight-A transcript from a prestigious university into question. (Some colleges, including Princeton, have taken to imposing limits on how many A’s instructors can award in any course, while the University of North Carolina has resorted to including median class grades on students’ transcripts so as to make it more readily apparent which A’s were earned in easy courses.) And a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, makes the case that students at elite colleges are being left to fend for themselves while their impressively credentialed professors take constant sabbaticals and leave the actual teaching to inexperienced assistants.

Yet despite the mounting skepticism about the value of a college degree, and in the face of the economic downturn, colleges continue to demand ever higher fees, saddling graduates with crushing debt along with their diplomas. In June of last year the Federal Reserve released new figures showing that the nation’s total student loan debt now sits at about $830 billion – for the first time surpassing the nation’s credit card debt.

Continued at The Atlantic |

No wonder alums don’t want to do admissions interviews.

By JANET LORIN [Bloomberg] – Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University began interviewing applicants in-person in the 1920s as a tool to identify Jews, according to Jerome Karabel, author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

“To ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment, and physical appearance, a personal interview was required, a final screening device usually conducted by the Director of Admissions or a trusted alumnus,” wrote Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

“That a number of the Ivies tried to limit Jewish enrollment in the 20’s and 30’s seems clear,” Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, said in an e-mail about Karabel’s research.

Yale doesn’t have an “independent basis for evaluating what role alumni interviewing might or might not have played in that process,” Brenzel said. “Certainly alumni interviewing does not have such a role today.”

No official records at Princeton support Karabel’s conclusion, said Emily Aronson, a spokeswoman for the university. Harvard has “no information to provide” about Karabel’s research while present-day alumni interviews “have helped ensure that Harvard College is more diverse now — ethnically, religiously, geographically and in terms of financial means — than any time in history,” Jeff Neal, a Harvard spokesman, said in an e-mail.

Continued at Bloomberg | And see: College admissions: Why blight the hopes of 10,000 kids when you can blight the hopes of 25,000? | More Chronicle & Notices.