October 11, 2009
Britain's Central Planning Death Panels
October 11, 2009
Free Market M.D.
October 11, 2009
Economies of Scale in Compliance
October 11, 2009
Balan's Challenge
October 10, 2009
The Pleasure of Telling Others What to Do
October 10, 2009
Gonick the Great - and How He Could Have Been Greater
October 9, 2009
More Scott Sumner
October 9, 2009
Not From The Onion
October 9, 2009
Thoughts on a Second Stimulus
Arnold, are you aware of the "Tufts method" of gaming the rankings? It entails: rejecting students with very high SAT scores to look good (as you said, a school that rejects good applicants must therefore be good) with little worry about the loss of good students - they probably wouldn't land them anyway. At the same time, this increases their "yield": most of these students are going to Ivies and are only using Tufts (or other school applying strategy) as a safety school.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_protection
My college's dean of admissions once asked me how to reduce our acceptance rate without changing the size of the entering class. My five word answer:
Stop charging an application fee.
Sean is absolutely correct about colleges rejecting high-scoring SAT applicants.
In 1995 I was rejected by the University of Washington with 750 verbal/730 math SATs. The moral I drew -- and the story I told for several years -- was that an out-of-state white male didn't stand much of a chance at admission.
How wrong I was! I did not know until much later that my SATs would have gotten me into a number of top-tier schools. UW was the only one I appliead at, for personal reasons. Had I included an explanation along with my application, I might have gotten in.
Fortunately, in 1996 I got a job as a management consultant based on my work experience. Now I am semi-retired on a sailboat in the Bahamas. So things can turn out OK, even for a high-school dropout.