Michele Hernandez is the president of Hernandez College Consulting and Application Boot Camp (TopTierAdmissions.com). She is the author of four books on college admissions based on her experience as an admissions officer at Dartmouth College.
Updated March 31, 2015, 6:46 AM
There’s a lot that could be done to improve the college admissions process. For starters, admissions officers could be more transparent about the process, and colleges could stop the ridiculous mail-marketing campaign based on PSAT scores. And a matching system would eliminate the huge overlap between top colleges (the same 20,000 kids applying to Harvard and Yale for example) and make the application pool much more manageable.
But here’s what I’d really like to see changed:
• Standardize the early admissions program within the Ivy League and top colleges. Instead of having three Ivies with single choice early action and five with early decision (binding), all the Ivies should have binding early decision. This would cut down the number of total applicants in the regular round in a significant way. The Ivies should then commit to greater need-based financial aid for those students in the early decision round so they don’t wonder what financial aid packages they would have received had they waited for regular admission.
Limit the total percentage of the class accepted early decision to no more than 25 percent.
Even more important, limit the total percentage of the class accepted early decision to no more than 25 percent so that 75 percent of the spaces in a class are still available to the vast majority of students who apply for regular admission. Right now, some schools like the University of Pennsylvania and Duke fill almost 50 percent of their classes in the early decision round, which drastically lowers the regular decision acceptance rate.
• Get rid of the SAT and ACT in favor of SAT subject tests and AP/IB tests. The SAT/ACT correlate to socio-economic status. The majority of students applying to elite colleges spend hundreds of hours doing SAT/ACT prep when they could be pursuing scholarly activities. Many New York City families will spend over $20,000 on SAT prep and top tutors charge over $600 an hour. At least SAT subject tests help colleges put grades at different high schools in perspectives, and AP/IB exams show ability to do college-level coursework. SAT/ACT are mostly used to turn away applicants from overrepresented backgrounds and as such are grossly unfair.
• Abolish all preferences, including legacy, V.I.P.-development, athletic – especially Ivy football, which is responsible for the largest number of slots – and minority priority admissions. To address affirmative action, colleges should rely on a socioeconomic flag for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, which would take race out of the equation.
