Panic! At the Rich Suburban High School

Q: When does a tiny statistical change in a number that affects a miniscule number of people merit breathless coverage in the New York Times?

A: When the number has something--anything--to do with Harvard and the status anxieties the suburban upper-middle class.

In an uncharacteristic display of restraint, the Times ran it's annual exercise in college admissions scaremongering on Page A14 yesterday, but it remains the most-emailed article on this site as of 2PM today. Due to the "frantic" and "ferocious" competition for admission and an "avalanche of applications to top schools," this was "the most selective spring in modern memory at America's elite schools," resulting in "brutally low acceptance rates" at schools like Harvard, which accepted 9 percent of applicants, the "lowest admit rate in Harvard's history."

Nine percent! Man! Why, just last year, the admit rate at Harvard was....

Actually, it was nine percent then too.

Technically, 9.3 percent, as compared to this year's rate of 9.0 percent. Funny how that didn't make it into the article; I guess there just wasn't room with all those adjectives and adverbs. The Wall Street Journal made the same omission when it ran exactly the same story($) two days ago, although on the whole the WSJ piece had better data and did include previous-year data for other schools. Only Reuters provided the helpful context of how much Harvard's admission rate has changed when it ran exactly the same story a week ago.

These stories, which appear every year at the same time and with about the same degree of predictability as cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, are based on the premise that it is much, much harder than it used to be for smart kids to get into a top-flight college. But is that what the numbers actually say? It's true, as the Times article notes, that the number of high school graduates increased from 2.4 million in 1993 to 3.1 million last year. But that's a very selective timeline; 1993 and 1994 were--not coincidentally--the years with the fewest graduates since the early 1960s. One could just as easily note that the number of high school graduates today is almost exactly the same as it was 30 years ago.

Since the number of slots in elite schools is basically a constant, the real culprit is the denominator, the number of applications. An increase in applications isn't the same thing as an increase in applicants--if the same number of qualified applicants doubled the number of applications they submitted for the same number of slots, institutional admit rates would drop even though the odds of a given student being admitted would not. The article notes that students are filling out "ever more" applications, but seems not to notice, or care, that this undermines the logic of the piece.

Similarly, not all of the people who apply to Harvard have a realistic chance to get in. If the marginal increase in applications is disproportionately comprised of people who are treating the Harvard application like a $65.00 Powerball ticket, then falling admit rates are a mirage.

But there's no room for these kind of uncertainties when you're focused on scaring the bejeezus out of striving parents who wrongly believe that elite colleges are the alpha and omega of opportunity for their children.