[ed. Overview of the typical college admissions process and a proposal for a new algorithmic selection model.]
by Kevin Carey
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The existing admissions system is also remarkably archaic. To a large extent, it still involves students submitting pieces of paper (or electronic copies of pieces of paper) containing information about grades, test scores, high-school profiles, essays, and personal recommendations. Colleges then apply a few crude filters, like a minimum SAT threshold or whether the student's parents are rich, and consider the remaining applicants via a "holistic" process of decision-by-committee. Because the information isn't stored in a database, it's hard to perform post hoc analyses to see if the "yea" and "nay" decisions were good ones. The fact that most students drop out of or transfer from the first college they choose suggests that many are not.
A Match.com for college admissions
The solution lies with information technology. At the moment, college admissions is stuck in the well-recognized first stage of technology adoption, where the same people keep doing the same things in the same ways, but faster and for less money. So college applications and transcripts are increasingly sent electronically instead of via the U.S Postal Service, and read by admissions officers on laptop computers instead of paper files. But there are still applications and transcripts, and decisions are still made by people sitting around a table.
The second stage of technology adoption involves people outside of the current system rethinking the logic of the process from the ground up, given the full possibilities of what technology can do. This tends to upset existing power structures and put people out of comfortable jobs, but it's inevitable, and the buyers and sellers in the market are ultimately better off. We may lament the loss of our friendly neighborhood travel agent and CD stores for a little while, but middlemen are rarely missed for long.
This is where college admissions needs to go. One analogue is marriage--millions of people trying to make a complicated, life-altering decision based on limited up-front information. As Nick Paumgarten described in The New Yorker earlier this year, online dating services like eHarmony and Match.com have compiled vast databases that can be mined for insight into what kind of matches are likely to create fruitful long-term relationships--and which are not. In the same way, Amazon makes book recommendations and iTunes Genius auto-compiles the perfect playlist.
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This kind of specialization points toward an even more radical higher-education future, one where the basic unit of consumer choice is not the institution but the course. Students currently pick colleges based on a general sense of quality, and trust the college to apply it throughout its programs. As everyone who's been to college knows, even the best colleges have terrible courses, and vice versa. Since students have a hard time knowing which is which ahead of time, there's not much they can do to protect themselves, and in any case they can't simply pick and choose among the best courses from Michigan, Yale, Berkeley, and Vanderbilt--yet.
Read more:
...
The existing admissions system is also remarkably archaic. To a large extent, it still involves students submitting pieces of paper (or electronic copies of pieces of paper) containing information about grades, test scores, high-school profiles, essays, and personal recommendations. Colleges then apply a few crude filters, like a minimum SAT threshold or whether the student's parents are rich, and consider the remaining applicants via a "holistic" process of decision-by-committee. Because the information isn't stored in a database, it's hard to perform post hoc analyses to see if the "yea" and "nay" decisions were good ones. The fact that most students drop out of or transfer from the first college they choose suggests that many are not.
A Match.com for college admissions
The solution lies with information technology. At the moment, college admissions is stuck in the well-recognized first stage of technology adoption, where the same people keep doing the same things in the same ways, but faster and for less money. So college applications and transcripts are increasingly sent electronically instead of via the U.S Postal Service, and read by admissions officers on laptop computers instead of paper files. But there are still applications and transcripts, and decisions are still made by people sitting around a table.
The second stage of technology adoption involves people outside of the current system rethinking the logic of the process from the ground up, given the full possibilities of what technology can do. This tends to upset existing power structures and put people out of comfortable jobs, but it's inevitable, and the buyers and sellers in the market are ultimately better off. We may lament the loss of our friendly neighborhood travel agent and CD stores for a little while, but middlemen are rarely missed for long.
This is where college admissions needs to go. One analogue is marriage--millions of people trying to make a complicated, life-altering decision based on limited up-front information. As Nick Paumgarten described in The New Yorker earlier this year, online dating services like eHarmony and Match.com have compiled vast databases that can be mined for insight into what kind of matches are likely to create fruitful long-term relationships--and which are not. In the same way, Amazon makes book recommendations and iTunes Genius auto-compiles the perfect playlist.
_____
This kind of specialization points toward an even more radical higher-education future, one where the basic unit of consumer choice is not the institution but the course. Students currently pick colleges based on a general sense of quality, and trust the college to apply it throughout its programs. As everyone who's been to college knows, even the best colleges have terrible courses, and vice versa. Since students have a hard time knowing which is which ahead of time, there's not much they can do to protect themselves, and in any case they can't simply pick and choose among the best courses from Michigan, Yale, Berkeley, and Vanderbilt--yet.
Read more:
