UC San Diego had a huge fiasco the other day in terms of its acceptance letters. Instead of sending the "We're thrilled that you've been admitted to UC San Diego" email to the 18,000 individuals who actually got in, the email was sent to the entire applicant pool - all 46,000 students. Although students were notified a few hours after the original email was sent, it still got people's hopes up (and down) rather quickly. This article (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ucsd-reject1-2009apr01,0,7943711.story), for example, tells of one student who, upon getting his "acceptance" letter, managed to book a flight and hotel room only to find out that he had been rejected a few hours later. The article says that the boy was "crushed", and I don't blame him. When it comes to college acceptance letters, it isn't really a laughing matter; students are pretty serious about them.
Apparently, the email was a result of an "administrative error;" the UCSD staff "accessed the wrong database." But why would it take a couple hours for the staff to figure out this mistake? In the age of Internet and technology, that error should have been addressed much faster! Either way, this is not the first time that an error of this sort was committed. Cornell and Northwestern had a similar situation, but neither school made the mistake with so many students.
Although I feel sympathetic for those individuals who were accepted/denied, I kind of understand why such a mistake occured in the first place. So many more students are applying to colleges this year that the institutions are just being overwhelmed with paperwork. However, despite the increase in the applicant pool, the number of individuals who are actually accepted has decreased. Here are some stats that I got from http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2009/03/31/top-colleges-see-record-low-acceptance-rates.html.
Harvard: accepted 7% of applicants, a decrease from the 7.9% it accepted last year.
Columbia: accepted 9.8% of applicants
Dartmouth: accepted 12% of applicants
It seems like getting into college will only be tougher for next year's seniors!
3 comments:
Here's some more stats from three of the schools I was denied to:
Stanford -- 7.6%, their lowest ever (they had a record of over 30,000 applicants)
Brown and Yale -- Around 5.5% each
It is enough to make someone a bit worried about the future of colleges in our country. With privates getting a lot tighter on admissions as the competition increases, more pressure falls on the UC/CSU systems, and then they have to get more selective at the same time that they're seeing money pulled away from them due to the state budget crisis. The class of 2009 is facing by far the most brutal competition ever, and it's likely going to get worse for future classes.
And it's not much more fun for the schools either. With the changing economy, many students are becoming ever more dependent on financial aid, and many are applying to ever-increasing number of schools. As a result, not only is the level of competition changing, but the patterns of students making their final decision of which school they will attend is changing as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from a number of colleges who have surprising results in terms of how many of their accepted students did/didn't decide to enroll this year.
Just don't get me started on how much I despise the FAFSA and we'll be okay...
The real problem is going to lie in the cost of college, now more than ever. Colleges are becoming more and more ridiculously expensive as parents earn less and less due to the inelastic property of college education demand. Will this eventually lead to a greater divide between the rich and the poor? Will this lead to an even greater stress on students to take on more of an academic load on top of extra-curricular activities till they can't bear the burden anymore? As colleges become more and more competitive, more and more parents are pressuring their children earlier and earlier leading to children who never really have a chance to experience childhood and grow up to be cynical and impersonal and they are raised to be competitive machines and less like social individuals without an agenda. Even more so with the internet and TV corrupting children with superficial images and violence, it's sad and frightening when you see eleven-year old girls walking around in layers of make-up and an outfit fit for someone twice their age. Needless to say I'm happy I'm getting out now and that I'm worried what kind of environment I'll have to raise my kids in when the time comes.
That's horrible how some people thought they were admitted when they really were not. Although, I think the majority of the people who got the email knew that the university had made a mistake, since they must have checked the website earlier to see if they were accepted or not. Hopefully, in the future universities will be more careful.
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