Diversification and the Market for College Admissions
19th November 2010
Isn’t that just the most awesome title for a PhD dissertation ever? Seems a pity to waste it on a blog post.
Assume that you are a student applying to college. Assume also that your high school has a declared policy limiting the number of schools to which you can apply. It says it does so in order that you will “take applying seriously.”
You rather suspect that the school does so in order to be able to push particular students it favors for particular colleges, so that too many students do not create too much “noise” and competition for a place that the high school counselor thinks is most competitively filled by a particular student. The high school’s incentive, in other words, is first to maximize its ability to get students into particular colleges as an institution seeing the students as a school cohort, not to simply support each student in his or her efforts on an individual basis. One effect of this is to favor students who come from wealthy, powerful, or highly connected legacy families, since those students are most likely in the first place to be able to get into the most competitive schools. But although you suspect this, it is rather difficult to prove without something like discovery in a lawsuit to find out exactly on whose behalf the counselors call certain colleges and discourage other students from applying at all.
But it’s a very interesting blog post….