College Acceptance Scams: Part 2
OK, I’m going to say it. The College Board - the outfit that owns the SAT testing - ought to lose its non-profit status.
It probably ought to be the subject of a DOJ investigation, too. It appears this vaunted organization is wittingly or unwittingly part of a college application racket that results in a tsunami of cash for the College Board and universities, at the expense of high school students who are duped into applying to schools that will never accept them.
A stunning piece headlined, “For Sale: SAT-Takers’ Names. Colleges Buy Student Data and Boost Exclusivity” in The Wall Street Journal explains that the College Board sells student information to colleges and universities. In turn, some elite schools take that data and use it to invite students with sub-par test scores to apply for admission.
They later reject those students - keeping their application fees, of course - and gin up their rankings for competitiveness in the process.
Acceptance rates are lowest in the most prestigious schools. Harvard, for instance, accepts only 5.2 percent of the students who apply.
One way to keep those rates low is to convince more students to apply and then reject them.
According to the Journal, 80 percent of students taking the SATs agree to allow the College Board to share their scores. In fact, they pay an extra 12 bucks to see that it happens.
This, of course, is in hopes of schools taking notice of them.
Oh, they take notice, all right. What the kids don’t know is that some schools use that information to urge them to apply even though there is little chance they’ll be offered a slot in the next freshman class.
Smells like fraud to me.
Human nature being what it is, students feel flattered when their “reach” schools contact them. They quickly cough up the application fees and await admittance.
After all, why would a university recruit a student if that kid had no chance of being accepted?
The answer it seems, is to boost college rankings, bring in more money and lower acceptance rates.
What about the students? Well, the ones whose parents didn’t commit federal crimes to get them admitted where they didn’t belong are left confused and heartbroken when the rejections pour in.
Essentially, the non-profit College Board charges a fee to take the SAT, plus an additional fee to share the data. Then the College Board turns around and sells the names of test takers and their approximate scores to universities.
And just like that, College Board customers quickly become College Board products.
The arrangement is odious.
The WSJ has a paywall and I know some of you can’t access the piece. So I’ll quote liberally Here’s the opening salvo:
Jori Johnson took the practice SAT test as a high-school student outside Chicago. Brochures later arrived from Vanderbilt, Stanford, Northwestern and the University of Chicago.
The universities’ solicitations piqued her interest, and she eventually applied. A few months later, she was rejected by those and three other schools that had sought her application, she said. The high-school valedictorian’s test scores, while strong by most standards, were well below those of most students admitted to the several schools that had contacted her.
“A lot of the rejections came on the same day,” said Ms. Johnson, a 21-year-old senior film major at New York University, one of three schools that accepted her out of 10 applications. “I just stared at my computer and cried.”
It’s not the crying that gets me. Disappointments are part of life. It’s the deception.
Schools have no business pursuing kids who don’t meet their standards, taking their money and then turning them down.
Some schools buy a half-million names a year, admissions officers say. Tulane University said it bought about 300,000 names last year from College Board. Tulane’s applicant pool climbed 174% between 2002 and 2017 and its acceptance rate declined 62%, federal data show.
In fact, a chart in the WSJ story shows just how sharply acceptance rates have dropped at some of the nation’s top 100 schools. The figures come from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Vanderbilt, which is widely discussed in the piece, went from 46.3 percent acceptance rate in 2002 to 10.9 percent in 2017. Tulane also had a dramatic drop: 56.2 percent acceptance in 2002 to 21.5 percent in 2017.
Alarming.
I decided to check the acceptance rates of the four Virginia schools on the chart. There is no actual evidence that any of them are engaging in this scholastic chicanery because it’s devilishly difficult to figure out which schools are buying names and which are not.
The University of Virginia went from a 39 percent acceptance rating in 2002 to 27.3 percent in 2017.
University of Richmond went from a 41.2 percent acceptance rate to 33 percent in those same years. And Washington and Lee’s acceptance rate fell from 31.1 percent to 22 percent.
Then I stumbled on something interesting. According to the chart, the College of William and Mary became slightly less selective during that timeframe. In 2002, 34.6 percent of applicants were admitted. In 2017, it was 35.9.
What?
Clearly they’re doing something wrong in Williamsburg. Or something right.
