美本申請錄取標準到底是什麽？

《紐約時報》最近發布了一篇關(guan) 於(yu) 當前大學錄取亂(luan) 象的文章，通過詳細的案例和深入的分析，揭示了錄取過程中的不公平和不透明。這篇文章揭示了在2024年的申請季中，學生和家庭麵臨(lin) 的各種挑戰，從(cong) 錄取政策的變化到助學金係統的崩潰，再到“可選考試”政策的複雜性。

2023-24年的錄取季不僅(jin) 僅(jin) 是這種年度儀(yi) 式中瘋狂姿態和高壓猜測的逐步增加，使之看起來像是學術版的“饑餓遊戲”。這一年有所不同。一些廣泛討論的因素和一些鮮為(wei) 人知的因素結合在一起，將這個(ge) 過程推向了一個(ge) 新領域，在這個(ge) 領域中舊規則不再適用，甚至連把關(guan) 者也似乎不知道新的規則是什麽(me) 。

通過艾維和拉尼亞(ya) 的2個(ge) 申請故事案例能看到錄取過程的嚴(yan) 酷現實。艾維雖然擁有頂尖的學術背景和經濟支持，但在多所頂尖大學的申請中仍然遭遇拒絕。而拉尼亞(ya) 盡管克服了生活中的種種困難，卻因助學金申請的延遲和係統故障而不得不重新考慮自己的選擇。

在這些故事背後，我們(men) 看到了一個(ge) 更加廣泛的問題：當前的大學錄取係統越來越“飄忽不定”。作者呼籲大學和政策製定者采取更透明和公平的錄取標準，確保所有學生都能在公平的競爭(zheng) 環境中獲得應有的機會(hui) 。

在大學錄取的戰場上，每一年的錄取季都仿佛是一場豪賭，而2024年更是變成了一個(ge) 極端的賭局。在教育行業(ye) 裏每天都能感受到申請過程中那種無形的壓力、焦慮和不確定性。這些年來，我們(men) 見證了太多學生和家庭在這個(ge) 過程中經曆的酸甜苦辣。

文章中的艾維，這個(ge) 擁有頂尖學術背景的女孩，本應在頂尖大學中遊刃有餘(yu) ，但現實卻是她在多所夢校麵前碰壁。她的經曆反映了如今錄取過程的嚴(yan) 苛和殘酷，即使是那些學術成績拔尖、家境殷實的學生，也無法確保能夠進入心儀(yi) 的大學。這讓我們(men) 不得不反思：到底是什麽(me) 讓這些曾經相對確定的事情變得如此不可預測？

另一方麵，拉尼亞(ya) 的故事則充滿了勵誌與(yu) 遺憾。她在麵對生活困境的同時，依然堅持追求卓越。但即使是這樣一個(ge) 堅韌不拔的學生，也因助學金係統的混亂(luan) 而受到阻礙。FAFSA係統的崩潰和延遲，讓她無法及時獲得經濟支持，迫使她重新考慮自己的選擇。

近年來，大學錄取政策發生了諸多變革。Test-optional政策雖然初衷是好的，但在實際操作中卻帶來了新的問題。申請者往往隻提交高於(yu) 中位數的成績，導致中位數不斷上升，反而讓那些沒有提交成績的學生處於(yu) 劣勢。與(yu) 此同時，隨著越來越多的大學采用“可選考試”政策，學生和家庭在決(jue) 定是否提交考試成績時也麵臨(lin) 更多的困惑。

此外，提前決(jue) 定（Early Decision）策略雖然能夠提高學校的錄取率，但也讓很多學生在沒有足夠信息的情況下做出倉(cang) 促的決(jue) 定。這種策略在無形中加劇了教育資源的不公平分配，讓那些無法承擔全額學費的學生處於(yu) 不利地位。

今年的FAFSA表格改版雖然旨在簡化申請流程，但實際效果卻適得其反。係統故障和發布延遲讓許多家庭無法及時獲得助學金信息，進而影響了他們(men) 的大學選擇。對於(yu) 低收入和第一代大學生來說，這無疑是一個(ge) 巨大的打擊。

麵對這些挑戰，大學和政策製定者必須采取行動，改善現狀。文章作者也說明了以下是一些可能的改進措施：

1. 透明的錄取標準：

大學應公開明確的錄取標準，讓申請過程更加透明和公平。

2. 公平的助學金政策：

大學在提供錄取通知時，應該同時提供明確的助學金信息，避免學生在不了解實際費用的情況下做出決(jue) 定。

3. 多樣化的招生策略：

大學應該加強與(yu) 低收入和第一代大學生的聯係，通過各種途徑擴大招生的多樣性。

4. 合理使用AI技術：

在使用AI技術時，大學應確保其應用的公平性和透明性，避免對申請者造成不公平的影響。

最根本的解決(jue) 辦法還在於(yu) 係統的改革，推動整個(ge) 教育係統的公平和進步。在此期間，我們(men) 能做的隻有努力抓住可見的“確定性”。在麵對錄取過程中的種種不確定性時，我們(men) 可以專(zhuan) 注於(yu) 那些可以控製的因素：提升學術成績、參與(yu) 有意義(yi) 的課外活動、撰寫(xie) 出色的個(ge) 人陳述、爭(zheng) 取強有力的推薦信等。

通過這些具體(ti) 的努力，我們(men) 可以增加自身的競爭(zheng) 力，即使在充滿變數的環境中，也能為(wei) 自己爭(zheng) 取更多的機會(hui) 。同時，保持積極的心態和靈活的應變能力也是關(guan) 鍵。無論結果如何，重要的是我們(men) 在這一過程中學到的技能和獲得的成長。

紐約時報原文：

Selective college admissions have been a vortex of anxiety and stress for what seems like forever, inducing panic in more top high school seniors each year. But the 2023-24 admissions season was not just an incremental increase in the frantic posturing and high-pressure guesswork that make this annual ritual seem like academic Hunger Games. This year was different. A number of factors — some widely discussed, some little noticed — combined to push the process into a new realm in which the old rules didn’t apply and even the gatekeepers seemed not to know what the new rules were.

It happened, as these things often do, first gradually and then all at once.

It started with a precipitous rise in the number of people clamoring to get in. The so-called Ivy-Plus schools — the eight members of the Ivy League plus M.I.T., Duke, Chicago and Stanford — collectively received about 175,000 applications in 2002. In 2022, the most recent year for which totals are available, they got more than 590,000, with only a few thousand more available spots.

The quality of the applicants has risen also. In 2002, the nation produced134 perfect ACT scores; in2023 there were 2,542. Over the same period, the United States — and beyond it, the world — welcomed a great many more families into the ranks of the wealthy, who areby far the mostlikely to attend an elite college. Something had to give.

The first cracks appeared around the rules that had long governed the process and kept it civilized, obligating colleges to operate on the same calendar and to give students time to consider all offers before committing. A legal challenge swept the rules away, freeing the most powerful schools to do pretty much whatever they wanted.

One clear result was a drastic escalation in the formerly niche admissions practice known as early decision.

Then Covid swept through, forcing colleges to let students apply without standardized test scores — which, as the university consultant Ben Kennedy says, “tripled the number of kids who said to themselves, ‘Hey, I’ve got a shot at admission there.’” More applications, more market power for the schools and, for the students, an ever smaller chance of getting in.

Last year, the Supreme Court’s historic decision ending race-based affirmative action left colleges scrambling for new ways to preserve diversity and students groping in the dark to figure out what schools wanted.

Finally, this year the whole financial aid system exploded into spectacular disarray. Now, a month after most schools sent out the final round of acceptances, many students still don’t have the information they need to determine if they can afford college. Some will delay attending, and some will forgo it entirely, an outcome that will have lasting implications for them and, down the line, for the economy as a whole.

These disparate changes had one crucial thing in common: Almost all of them strengthened the hand of highly selective colleges, allowing them to push applicants into more constricted choices with less information and less leverage. The result is that elite admissions offices, which have always tried to reduce the uncertainty in each new year’s decisions, are now using their market power to all but eliminate it. This means taking no chances in pursuit of a high yield, the status-bestowing percentage of admitted students who enroll. But low uncertainty for elite colleges means the opposite for applicants — especially if they can’t pay the full tuition rate.

Canh Oxelson, the executive director of college counseling at the Horace Mann School in New York, says: “This is as much uncertainty as we’ve ever seen. Affirmative action, the FAFSA debacle, test-optionality — it has shown itself in this one particular year. Colleges want certainty, and they are getting more. Families want certainty and they are getting less.”

In 2024, the only applicants who could be certain of an advantage were those whose parents had taken the wise precaution of being rich.

The Early Bird Gets the Dorm

For Ivy Wydler, an elite college seemed like an obvious destination, and many of her classmates at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, D.C., were headed along the same trajectory. After her sophomore year of high school, she took the ACT and got a perfect score — on her first try, a true rarity. Her grades were stellar. So she set her sights high, favoring “medium to big schools, and not too cold.”

Touring campuses, she was dazzled by how great and exciting it all seemed. Then she visited Duke, and something clicked. She applied in the binding early decision round.

It’s a consequential choice. Students can do so at only one college, and they have to promise to attend if accepted, before knowing what the school’s financial aid offer will be. That means there is at least a chance an applicant will be on the hook for the full cost, which at Duke is $86,886 for the 2024-25 year. Students couldn’t be legally compelled to attend if they couldn’t afford it, but by the time they got the news, they would have already had to withdraw their other applications.

If full tuition isn’t a deal killer, as it wouldn’t be for Ivy’s family, the rewards are considerable. This year,just over 54,000high school seniors vied to be one of only 1,750 members of Duke’s incoming class. The 6,000 who applied in the early decision round were three times as likely to get in as the 48,000 who applied later.

Until recently, early decision was a narrow pathway — an outlier governed, like the rest of this annual academic mating season, by a set of mandatory practices laid out by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which is made up of college admissions officers and high school counselors. Those rules said, for example, that colleges couldn’t recruit a student who was already committed to another school or actively encourage someone to transfer. Crucially, the rules said that colleges needed to give students until May 1 to decide among offers (noting early decision, which begins and ends in the fall, as a “recognized exception”).

The Justice Department thought those rules ran afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which bars powerful industries from colluding to restrain competition. At the end of 2019, NACACagreedto a settlement mandating that the organization “promptly abolish” several of the rules and downgrade the rest to voluntary guidelines. Now, if they chose to, colleges had license to lure students with special offers or benefits, to aggressively poach students at other schools and to tear up the traditional admissions calendar.

At that point, nothing restrained colleges from going all in on early decision, a strategy that allows them to lock in students early without making any particular commitments about financial aid. Of the 735 first-year students thatMiddlebury Collegeenrolled last year, for example,516were admitted via binding early decision. Some schools have a second round of early decision, and even what amounts to an unofficial third round — along with an array of other application pathways, each with its own terms and conditions.

With the rules now abandoned, colleges got a whole new bag of tricks. For example, a school might call — at any time in the process — with a one-time offer of admission if you can commit on the spot to attend and let go of all other prospects. Hesitate and it’s gone, along with your chances in subsequent rounds. “We hear about colleges that are putting pressure on high school seniors to send in a deposit sooner to get better courses or housing options,” says Sara Harberson, the founder of Application Nation, a college advising service.

To inform these maneuvers, colleges lean on consultants who analyze applicant demographics, qualifications, financial status and more, using econometric models. High school seniors think this is checkers, but the schools know it’s chess. This has all become terrifying for students, who are first-time players in a game their opponents invented.

Application season can be particularly intimidating for students who, unlike Ivy, did not grow up on the elite college conveyor belt. When Rania Khan, a senior in Gorton High School in Yonkers, N.Y., was in middle school, she and her mother spent two years in a shelter near Times Square. Since then she and her younger brother have been in the foster system.

Despite these challenges, she has been a superb student. In ninth grade, Rania got an internship at Google and joined a research team at Regeneron, a biotechnology company. She won a national award for herstudyof how sewage treatment chemicals affect river ecosystems. Looking at colleges, she saw that her scores and credentials matched with those of students at the very top schools in the country.

One of the schools she was most drawn to was Barnard. “I like that it’s both a small college and” — because it’s part of Columbia — “a big university. There are a lot of resources, and it’s a positive environment for women,” she said. And it would keep her close to her little brother.

Barnard now fills around 60 percent of its incoming class in the early decision round, giving those students a massive admissions advantage. It would have been an obvious option for Rania, but she can’t take any chances financially. She applied via the general decision pool, when instead of having a one in three chance, her odds were one in 20.

Officially, anyone can apply for early decision. In practice it’s priority boarding for first-class passengers.

Unstandardized Testing

When selective colleges suspended the requirement for standardized testing, it didn’t really seem like a choice; because of the pandemic, a great many students simply couldn’t take the tests. The implications, however, went far beyond mere plague-year logistics.

The SAT was rolled out in 1926 as an objective measure of students’ ability, absent the cultural biases that had so strongly informed college admissions before then. It’s been the subject of debate almost ever since. In 1980, Ralph Naderpublished a studyalleging that the standardized testing regimen actually reinforcedracial and gender biasand favored people who could afford expensive test prep. Many educators have come back around toregarding the testsas a good predictor of academic success, but the matter is far from settled.

Remarkably, students still take the exams in the same numbers as before the pandemic, but far fewer disclose what they got. Cindy Zarzuela, an adviser with the nonprofit Yonkers Partners in Education who works with Rania and about 90 other students, said all her students took the SAT this year. None of them sent their scores to colleges.

These days, Cornell, for example, admits roughly 40 percent of its incoming class without a test score. At schools like theUniversity of Wisconsinor theUniversity of Connecticut, the percentage is even higher. In California, schools rarely accept scores at all, being in many cases not only test-optional, but also “test-blind.”

The high-water mark of test-optionality, however, was also its undoing.

Applicants tended to submit their scores only if they were above the school’s reported median, a pattern that causes that median to be recalibrated higher and higher each year. WhenCornellwent test-optional, its 25th percentile score on the math SAT jumped from 720 to 750. Then it went to 760. The ceiling is 800, so standardized tests had begun to morph from a system of gradients into a yes/no question: Did you get a perfect score? If not, don’t mention it.

The irony, however, was that in the search for a diverse student body, many elite colleges view strong-but-not-stellar test scores as proof that a student from an underprivileged background could do well despite lacking the advantages of the kids from big suburban high schools and fancy prep schools. Without those scores, it might beharder to make the case.

Multiply that across the board, and the result was that test-optional policies made admission to an elite school less likely for some diverse or disadvantaged applicants. Georgetown and M.I.T. were first to reinstate test score requirements, and so far this year Harvard, Yale, Brown, Caltech, Dartmouth and Cornell have announced that they will follow. There may be more to come.

The Power of No

On Dec. 14, Ivy got an answer from Duke: She was rejected.

She was in extremely good company. It’s been a while since top students could assume they’d get into top schools, but today they get rejected more often than not. It even happens at places like Northeastern, a school nowranked 53rd in the nation by U.S. News& World Report — and not long ago, more than100 slots lowerthan that. It spends less per student on instruction than theBoston public schools.

“There’s no target school anymore and no safety school,” saysStef Mauler, a private admissions coach in Texas. “You have to have a strategy for every school you apply to.”

Northeastern was one of the 18 other schools Ivy applied to, carefully sifting through various deadlines and conditions, mapping out her strategy. With Duke out of the picture, her thoughts kept returning to one of them in particular: Dartmouth, her father’s alma mater. “My mom said, ‘Ivy, you love New Hampshire. Look at Dartmouth.’ She was right.” She had wanted to go someplace warm, but the idea of cold weather seemed to be bothering her less and less.

Meanwhile Rania watched as early decision day came and went, and thousands of high school seniors across the country got the best news of their lives. For Rania, it was just another Friday.

A Free Market in Financial Aid

In 2003, a consortium of about 20 elite colleges agreed to follow a shared formula for financial aid, to ensure that they were competing for students on the merits, not on mere dollars and cents. It sounds civilized, but pricing agreements are generally illegal for commercial ventures. (Imagine if car companies agreed not to underbid each other.) The colleges believed they were exempt from that prohibition, however, because they practiced “need-blind” admissions, meaning they don’t discriminate based on a student’s ability to pay.

In 2022, nine current and former students from an array of prestigious collegesfiled a class-action antitrust lawsuit— laterbacked bythe Justice Department — arguing that the consortium’s gentlemanly agreement was depriving applicants of the benefits of a free market. And to defang the defense, they produced a brilliant argument: No, these wealthy colleges didn’t discriminate against students who were poor, but they sure did discriminate in favor of students who were rich. They favored thechildren of alumniand devoted whole development offices to luring the kinds of ultrarich families that affix their names to shiny new buildings. It worked: Early this year, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and Yale joined the University of Chicago inconceding, and paying out a nine-figure settlement. (They deny any wrongdoing.) Several other schools are playing on, but the consortium and its rules have evaporated.

This set schools free to undercut one another on price in order to get their preferred students. It also gave the schools a further incentive to push for early decision, when students don’t have the ability to compare offers.

For almost anyone seeking financial aid, from the most sought-after first-round pick to the kid who just slid under the wire, the first step remained the same: They had to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, or FAFSA.

As anyone knows who’s been through it — or looked into the glassy eyes of someone else who has — applying for financial aid can be torture at the best of times. This year was the worst of times, because FAFSA was broken. The form, used by the government to determine who qualifies for federal grants or student loans, and by many colleges to determine their in-house financial aid, had gotten a much-needed overhaul. But the new versiondidn’t work, causing endless frustration for many families, and convincing many others not even to bother. At mid-April, finished FAFSA applications were down29 percentcompared with last year.

“The FAFSA catastrophe is bigger than people realize,” saysCasey Sacks, a former U.S. Department of Education official and now the president of BridgeValley Community and Technical College in West Virginia, where 70 percent of students receive federal funds.

Abigail Garcia, Rania’s classmate and the 2024 valedictorian of their school, applied to in-state public colleges as well as Ivies. She couldn’t complete the FAFSA, however, because it rejected her parents’ information, the most common glitch. She has financial aid offers from elite schools, all of which use a private alternative to the government form, but she can’t weigh them against the public institutions, because they are so severely delayed.

For most students, 2024’s FAFSA crisis looks set to take the uncertainty that began last fall and drag it into the summer or beyond. “That’s going to reduce the work force in two to four years.” Ms. Sacks says. “FAFSA completions are a pretty good leading indicator of how many people will be able to start doing the kinds of jobs that are in highest demand — registered nurses, manufacturing engineers, those kinds of jobs.”

As the FAFSA problem rolls on, it could be that for the system as a whole, the worst is still to come.

Can Any of This Be Fixed?

On the numbers, elite college applicants’ problems are a footnote to the story of college access. The Ivy-Plus schools enroll less than 1 percent of America’s roughly15 million undergraduates. If you expand the pool to include all colleges that are selective enough to accept less than a quarter of applicants, we’re still talking about only6 percentof undergraduates. The easiest way to alleviate the traffic jam at the top is to shift our cultural focus toward the hundreds of schools that offer an excellent education but are not luxury brands.

Luxury brand schools, however, have real power. In 2023, 15 of 32 Rhodes scholars came from the Ivies, nine from Harvard alone. Twenty of this year’s 38 Supreme Court clerks came from Harvard or Yale. If elite colleges’ selection process is broken, what should we do to fix it?

Here’s what we can’t do: Let them go off and agree on their own solution. Antitrust law exists to prevent dominant players from setting their own rules to the detriment of consumers and competitors.

Here’s what we won’t do: Legislate national rules that govern admissions. Our systems are decentralized and it would take a miracle for Congress not to make things worse.

But here’s what we can do: Hold the schools accountable for their processes and their decisions.

Institutions that receive federal funds — which include all elite colleges — should be required to clearly state their admissions criteria. Admissions as currently practiced are designed to let schools whose budgets run on billions of taxpayers dollars do whatever they want. Consider Stanford’s guidance to applicants: “In a holistic review, we seek to understand how you, as a whole person, would grow, contribute and thrive at Stanford, and how Stanford would, in turn, be changed by you.” This perfectly encapsulates the current system, because it is meaningless.

Colleges should also not be allowed to make anyone decide whether to attend without knowing what it will actually cost, and they should not be allowed to offer better odds to those who forgo that information. They should not offer admissions pathways tilted to favor the rich, any more than they should offer pathways favoring people who are white.

It just shouldn’t be this hard. Really.

The Envelope Please …

Ivy has the highest academic qualifications available inside the conventional system, and her family can pay full tuition. Once upon a time, she would have had her pick of top colleges. Not this year.

Over the course of the whole crazy admissions season, the school she had come to care about most was Dartmouth.

Along with the other seven Ivies, Dartmouth released this year’s admissions decisions online on March 28, at 7 p.m. Eastern. Ivy was traveling that day, and as the moment approached, she said, “I was on the bed in my hotel room, just repeating, ‘People love me for who I am, not what I do. People love me for who I am, not what I do.’”

She was rejected by Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Columbia and the University of Southern California, where Operation Varsity Blues shenanigans could once guarantee acceptance but, as Ivy discovered, a perfect score on the ACT will not. She landed on the wait list at Northeastern. She was accepted by Michigan and Johns Hopkins. And Ivy was accepted at both her parents’ alma maters: the University of Virginia and Dartmouth, where she will start in September.

For Rania, the star student with an extraordinary story of personal resilience, the news was not so good. At Barnard, she was remanded to the wait list. Last year only 4 percent of students in that position were eventually let in. N.Y.U. and the City University of New York’s medical college put her on the wait list, too.

A spot on a wait list tells applicants that they were good enough to get in. By the time Rania applied to these schools, there just wasn’t any room. “It was definitely a shock,” she said. “What was I missing? They just ran out of space — there are so many people trying to get into these places. It took two weeks to adjust to it.”

She did get lots of other good news, a sheaf of acceptances from schools like Fordham and the University at Albany. But then came the hardest question of all: How to pay for them? Some offered her a financial aid package that would leave her on the hook for more money than undergraduates are allowed to take out in federal student loans. Even now, some colleges haven’t been able to provide her with financial aid information at all.

Rania had all but settled on Hunter College, part of the City University system. It’s an excellent school, but a world away from the elite colleges she was thinking about when she started her search. Then at almost the last moment, Wesleyan came through with a full ride and even threw in some extra for expenses. Rania accepted, gratefully.

For Rania, the whole painful roller coaster of a year was over. For so many other high school seniors, the year of broken college admissions continues.

最後，希望每一個(ge) 追求夢想的學生都能夠在公平的競爭(zheng) 中實現他們(men) 的目標，而不再被卷入這場殘酷的“學術版饑餓遊戲”。