August 20, 2007--Snap-Apps
Dog are not eating dogs on just Wall Street these days. The competition is as fierce in college and university admissions offices. And the ethics that rule behavior in both settings are not all that different.
The veil that obscures what really goes on on campuses around the country is lifted each year at this time when U.S. News & World Report issues its annual rankings of America’s top colleges. Though no one reads U.S. News anymore, this issue is a best seller and very influential among upwardly-aspiring high school seniors and their families who shortly after the rankings are published will be firing off applications to their dream schools.
The reason why so much cheating goes on in the process of establishing the rankings is because of the methodology employed by U.S. News. Much of it is peer-based, which means that college officials themselves, who have a big stake in the findings, are asked to judge their competition. What can one expect a surveyed college president to say and do if his contact guarantees him a $10,000 bonus if he can raise his college’s standing, which is the case at Arizona State University (see NY Times report linked below)? Do you think he will say good things about his closet competitors?
Worse, in order to give the ultimate rankings the appearance of quantifiable validity, a basic metric U.S. News uses to compare institutions is the percentage of applicants who are accepted. This so-called “selectivity index” rates an institution highly if they reject the vast majority of their applicants. If they accept 80 percent they wind up on the bottom of the list; if they reject 90 percent their college enters the charmed circle.
If the institutions played by free market rules, where the Blind Hand of supply and demand prevailed, this might not be such a bad way to compare colleges. But with so much at stake, the vast majority of colleges that allowed these “natural” forces to operate would find themselves struggling to compete with the big boys. The Amhersts and Harvards would continue to get more than a thousand applications for every hundred they accept while the bottom-feeders would have to take virtually everyone who applies; and to get them to actually show up, enroll, they would have to lure them with no-need scholarships—in other words, using the term colleges and universities employ, they would have to “buy students.”
So what do these struggling institutions do to boost the number of applicants so they can have a competitive rejection rate—and understand, the name of the admissions game is all about rejecting people. It is through rejections that they prosper.
Here are a sampling of scams that they employ:
To boost their applicant pool, to build the denominator in the application/admit/reject equation, many colleges strive to make it quick and easy for students to apply. More and more colleges thus buy mailing lists of high school seniors (the not-for-profit College Board is only too happy to hustle their lists) and email to them applications that are already half-filled out. Basically, all a senior needs to do to officially apply is click Reply on her computer. There is no requirement to write any essays or personal statements (very few colleges that ask for them read these anyway). They can get it all done in a few minutes.
These e-mail applications are called “snap-apps” or “fast-apps.” The colleges that use them frequently waive application fees (which is a rich source of cash for many selective colleges) so as not to get in the way of an indifferent student applying. Since it takes only five minutes to apply and doesn’t cost anything, what the hay, I might as well zap it in.
Another measure of institutional “quality” is the number of alums who send contributions. It is felt that the higher the percentage of contributors, the greater the evidence that graduates felt they had a good experience while enrolled. By this calculus, a $5 gift equals one for $1.0 million. Thus, St. Mary’s College of California sent its graduates a five dollar bill and asked them to return it so that it could be considered a donation. To inflate the percentage of annual giving, they could even claim that it was to be banked a dollar a year for each of the next five years. Now this is something the fellas on Wall Street can understand.
The veil that obscures what really goes on on campuses around the country is lifted each year at this time when U.S. News & World Report issues its annual rankings of America’s top colleges. Though no one reads U.S. News anymore, this issue is a best seller and very influential among upwardly-aspiring high school seniors and their families who shortly after the rankings are published will be firing off applications to their dream schools.
The reason why so much cheating goes on in the process of establishing the rankings is because of the methodology employed by U.S. News. Much of it is peer-based, which means that college officials themselves, who have a big stake in the findings, are asked to judge their competition. What can one expect a surveyed college president to say and do if his contact guarantees him a $10,000 bonus if he can raise his college’s standing, which is the case at Arizona State University (see NY Times report linked below)? Do you think he will say good things about his closet competitors?
Worse, in order to give the ultimate rankings the appearance of quantifiable validity, a basic metric U.S. News uses to compare institutions is the percentage of applicants who are accepted. This so-called “selectivity index” rates an institution highly if they reject the vast majority of their applicants. If they accept 80 percent they wind up on the bottom of the list; if they reject 90 percent their college enters the charmed circle.
If the institutions played by free market rules, where the Blind Hand of supply and demand prevailed, this might not be such a bad way to compare colleges. But with so much at stake, the vast majority of colleges that allowed these “natural” forces to operate would find themselves struggling to compete with the big boys. The Amhersts and Harvards would continue to get more than a thousand applications for every hundred they accept while the bottom-feeders would have to take virtually everyone who applies; and to get them to actually show up, enroll, they would have to lure them with no-need scholarships—in other words, using the term colleges and universities employ, they would have to “buy students.”
So what do these struggling institutions do to boost the number of applicants so they can have a competitive rejection rate—and understand, the name of the admissions game is all about rejecting people. It is through rejections that they prosper.
Here are a sampling of scams that they employ:
To boost their applicant pool, to build the denominator in the application/admit/reject equation, many colleges strive to make it quick and easy for students to apply. More and more colleges thus buy mailing lists of high school seniors (the not-for-profit College Board is only too happy to hustle their lists) and email to them applications that are already half-filled out. Basically, all a senior needs to do to officially apply is click Reply on her computer. There is no requirement to write any essays or personal statements (very few colleges that ask for them read these anyway). They can get it all done in a few minutes.
These e-mail applications are called “snap-apps” or “fast-apps.” The colleges that use them frequently waive application fees (which is a rich source of cash for many selective colleges) so as not to get in the way of an indifferent student applying. Since it takes only five minutes to apply and doesn’t cost anything, what the hay, I might as well zap it in.
Another measure of institutional “quality” is the number of alums who send contributions. It is felt that the higher the percentage of contributors, the greater the evidence that graduates felt they had a good experience while enrolled. By this calculus, a $5 gift equals one for $1.0 million. Thus, St. Mary’s College of California sent its graduates a five dollar bill and asked them to return it so that it could be considered a donation. To inflate the percentage of annual giving, they could even claim that it was to be banked a dollar a year for each of the next five years. Now this is something the fellas on Wall Street can understand.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
8:47 AM
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