The Allegedly Ever-Tightening College Admissions Rat Race, Part MCMDLXVII

The New York Times has an article today with a pile of anecdotes and a small amount of data suggesting that many high school students are now applying to as many 20 elite colleges, in some cases just for fun. Predictably, it's already up on their list of most emailed articles. Why? Because this is a bread-and-butter education piece that neatly feeds the status anxieties of upper middle class parents (that is, Times readers) convinced that getting their daughters and sons into a good college is getting tougher by the day.

But the fact of the matter is that the admissions rat race covered so extensively here and elsewhere in the media is largely irrelevant to the experiences of the vast majority of college students. Consider: Of this year's class of college-bound high school seniors, only one out nine will enroll at a college or university with an acceptance rate of less than 50 percent. Of the remaining eight, three will enroll at an open admissions institution. Two more will go to a school with an acceptance rate of 80 percent or higher. Joe College goes to Local State University, not Stanford or MIT.

Moreover, the statistics used to back up this trend analysis are pretty shaky. Consider this graf:

"An annual survey of college freshmen indicates that students bound for all kinds of institutions are filing more applications these days. In 1967, only 1.8 percent of freshman surveyed had applied to seven or more colleges, while in 2005, 17.4 percent had done so, according to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at U.C.L.A., which conducts the survey. The survey began asking recently
if the students had applied to 12 or more colleges; that proportion increased by 50 percent from 2001 to 2005"

If this is such an up-and-coming trend, why go all the way back to 1967 to examine it? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to tell the reader how the percent of freshmen applying to seven or more colleges changed from 2001 to 2005, since CIRP has that data too?

The graf also conspicuously omits the single most important piece of data in the entire piece--the actual percent of students who filed 12 or more applications. Instead, it just says "that proportion increased by 50 percent"? What proportion? Did it go from 10 to 15 percent? 4 to 6? 2 to 3? 0.1 to 0.15? I wasn't able to find it after a quick look through the CIRP Web site. Worldwide recognition to the first Quick+ED reader who tracks down the answer.

UPDATE: Ace Education Sector researcher Ethan Gray wins the prize by looking up the CIRP phone number and asking. The answer: the percent of freshmen who applied to 12 or more institutions increased from 1.4 percent in 2001 to 2.1 percent in 2005.

In other words, five years ago a tiny fraction of high school students applied to a large number of colleges. Four years later, a slightly larger but still tiny fraction of students applied to a large number of colleges. Hopefully, future articles on the other 98 percent of the student body are forthcoming.