CSUN University News Clippings

Added Work for Applicants to Public Colleges

(November 2, 2009)

By Jack Kadden
Published: 10/30/09

Applying to public colleges is getting more complicated, my colleague, Lisa Foderaro, reports in the new issue of Education Life.

Instead of reyling strictly on grade-point averages and SAT scores, as they have in the past, more and more public colleges are requesting essays and recommendations.

Across the country, selective public colleges and universities are taking a page from their private counterparts and implementing what is commonly called a holistic or comprehensive admissions process.

The trend is partly a function of rising application numbers at sought-after publics, which is a result, in turn, of the climbing cost of private higher education and a peaking population of high school seniors. Many applicants, it seems, easily meet academic requirements. Merely pushing average grades and test scores ever higher won’t necessarily yield the most vibrant student body.

One advantage of the holistic approach, experts say, is that it is an antidote to “the wave of grade inflation in American high schools that makes ranking applicants by a numerical index” less reliable.

The change is more labor intensive and more costly for universities, Ms. Foderaro reports. But it also means more uncertainty for students.

Colleges find themselves scrambling to explain the process to parents and high school guidance counselors who are newly anxious about a star student’s chances. “We try to be transparent, but still, the very nature of holistic review is not transparent,” says Christine N. Van Gieson, director of admissions at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “No one thing is going to get you in, and no one thing is going to get you out. The really top students don’t have a concern, but the middle group tends to worry.”

Publication: The New York Times