Panic! Some More

Since the college admission panic story has already been beaten to death by Reuter's, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, the Washington Post obviously had no choice but to go above the fold with exactly the same story today. This is what happens when there's a big education story that (A) writes itself, and (B) everybody knows is coming months in advance.

Jay Mathews hits all the standard notes--lead with crestfallen high school senior, dreams crushed by a blizzard of rejection letters, quote the outraged parent, pivot to the big picture, throw in some statistics, use words like "frantic" a lot.

The article also makes the same mistake the rest of them make, noting that "many students apply to as many as a dozen schools, often the ones least likely to accept them," without making the connection that this contradicts the idea that the admissions rate race is getting harder to run. Once more, with feeling: the overall difficulty of getting into an elite college is a function of two things. (1) the number of slots in elite colleges; and (2) the number of qualified applicants to elite colleges. Not applications. Applicants. If the same number of well-qualified applicants submits more applications for the same number of slots, admission rates will decline, but the odds of getting into college will not. The same is true if more people apply to elite schools who have no chance of getting in.

Mathews also throws in the delicously ironic but almost surely bogus idea that retired baby boomers will, in an act of cliche-confirming selfishness, be "shoving aside some of their children and grandchildren to take up university spaces" once they're retired.

Then, in the last four grafs, Mathews goes all Columbo by saying "Just one more thing--none of this really matters." The average college admissions rate is stable at 70 percent, you can always transfer, and research says it doesn't really matter where you go to college anyway. Great--but then why are we reading this article again?