[ssttoo]

There’s the weird incentive for schools to appear selective. That’s why UCSD would rather reject great candidates because chances are they’ll go to the likes of Harvard. Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere? Better to be the dumper than the dumpee and improve your rankings. It’s awful.

[Aurornis]

It’s not about dumpee or dumper or rankings games.

Admissions has to target a fixed number of students each year, plus or minus. Students have to decide where to attend in a narrow window. If you accept a lot of students who are unlikely to attend then you would undershoot your admissions target and have to try to convince students to attend in later rounds of admission, but that’s too late because they’ve already decided to go somewhere else.

[nerdsniper]

If the acceptance rate wasn’t being gamed, they could accept a lot more of the top candidates - they would have years of statistical data knowing that only x% of those top students will commit.

It’s not really a risk to overaccept if you know what % will commit.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere?

Idea: When you apply for a college, you have to prepay for the first semester. If you get admitted, you have already paid for the first semester. If you get rejected, you get this advance payment back. On the other hand, if you get admitted, but decide to go somewhere else, you loose money.

This should give the university a strong incentive not to reject strong candidates that will go somewhere else - quite the opposite: if you admit such a candidate, but the candidate goes somewhere else, the university earns even more (the semester fee without having to provide any service for this money).

[just-ok]

Interesting idea, but look at it from the applicant’s perspective: you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.

[aleph_minus_one]

> you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.

Perhaps insurance companies could create an insurance product to insurance the applicant against the case that he gets admitted at many colleges and thus has to pay many, many times the semester fee (or application fee).

[tzs]

Even getting admitted to two colleges would be financial crippling to a majority of applicants.

Insurance premiums would be a significant fraction of the average tuition, which would be beyond the reach of many.

The effect of the proposed system would be that most people would just apply to one school. If rejected they would try another next year, if they haven’t given up on college, and so on.

[apparent]

This would result in lots of schools moving to a rolling admission process with monthly (or even weekly) notification cycles. Students would then apply serially to several schools.

Of course, there's no way to get schools to all require a deposit, and even if there were schools would give fee-waivers to low-income students (giving them an advantage over middle-class kids).