Trends in college admissions are a little bit like trends in an OC-based high school drama. Everybody wants to do what the cool kids are doing. Sometimes these trends are reckless and idiotic, like drinking before prom or wearing Ugg boots; other trends are virtuous, like Pismo Beach disaster relief or abstinence.
Either way, the elite Ivies ““ notably Harvard and Princeton ““ have become trendsetters in the world of admissions policy, with deep discounting of tuition costs for low and even middle-income families, and with the abolition of early admissions policies.
As UCLA prepares to enroll what will likely be the most competitive class in its history, it’s important to take note of the admissions trends that have affected the decisions of our talented and diverse applicant pool.
While deep discounting is a great trend for any institution rich enough to participate, working for two years in undergraduate admissions has convinced me that it would be an absolute disaster if all 384 four-year institutions in the nation with early admissions policies ended them, exacerbating admissions hysteria.
Let me explain. Thanks in part to U.S. News rankings and competitiveness, every institution wants to be both more selective (by minimizing admissions offers) and more desirable (by maximizing the number of admitted students who accept, the yield).
When students get admitted early to Ivies and liberal arts colleges, they are required to withdraw their applications from every other institution they applied to. Even an institution like UCLA without early admissions has a very limited number of spots for admitted students, and it is a huge help to see dozens (sometimes hundreds) of likely admits take themselves out of the running months before final decisions are made.
Last year, UCLA received a staggering and nation-leading 50,755 freshmen applications. Only 23.6 percent were admitted and of those, 38.2 percent enrolled.
To emphasize the importance of hitting enrollment targets, consider the consequences of missing. Over-enroll and you’ll have to answer to an angry chancellor about overpopulated residence halls and classrooms; under-enroll and you’ve failed to maximize the university’s revenue earning potential through tuition.
To recap, you want to maximize selectivity (which you control), minimize yield (which you don’t), and hit specific targets for every academic major while also retaining the most talented students, with a bonus for diversity, only you can’t look at ethnicity ““ that’s illegal. Not so easy, huh?
In order to help meet these demands, every admissions office has a secret target number of students whom they want to admit based on a statistical formula derived from institutional history and national trends.
If early admissions policies were suddenly absent, yield formulas would be thrown completely out of whack and admissions offices across the country would have a much more difficult time predicting who would end up where. The result would be very few students getting in everywhere, and more students getting in nowhere.
Some elite institutions use early admissions to help this guesswork, sometimes admitting 40 to 50 percent of their incoming classes early. The considerable criticism and downside of early admissions programs is that they are unfair to students and maintain social privilege ““ the early admissions pools at elite schools are 50 percent more likely to be wealthy and three times as white.
This is partly why in 2006, Harvard and Princeton made headlines for abolishing binding early-admissions policies, reasoning that they were disadvantageous to lower-income students, who were obligated to attend their first choice regardless of better financial aid offers from other schools.
Ultra-selective, wealthy schools don’t need early admissions programs, since their yield is phenomenal; few get offers, and those who do, go. But it makes perfect sense for private regional schools, mid-majors and lesser-known colleges to adopt these policies, especially when the policies are coupled with substantial financial aid and targeted to lower-income and underrepresented student populations.
Every affluent institution that can afford to participate in deep discounting should be applauded for its financial-aid benevolence.
But therein lies the danger of abandoning early admissions: anyone can do it. If nobody has early admissions, however, it will have a terrible impact the admissions landscape.
E-mail Aikins at raikins@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.