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The New York Times is running a Q&A with the admissions directors of Pomona, Yale, University of Texas, and Lawrence University.
If you want to consult the oracles, this is about as good as it gets.
Check it out – here are some excerpts:
How well do the criteria used in the admissions process predict future college success? Do colleges track their students’ four-year GPAs and such and look for correlations with admissions data? If so, what kinds of trends do you see?
—Jen
What procedures do you have in place to measure the fairness of your process? What kind of follow-up do you do on your decisions? In what circumstances would you consider one of your decisions to be a failure?
—Margaret Heisel
Mr. Syverson of Lawrence: Most colleges periodically conduct research to correlate the data they collect during the admissions process with the outcomes experienced by their students. The two “outcomes” typically assessed are GPAs at the college and graduation rates. Not surprisingly, in the majority of studies, high school grades have the strongest correlation with college grades. The SAT and ACT have the next strongest correlation, but this too is not surprising because they have a strong correlation with high school grades.
I believe that defining “success in college” as the college GPA is too limited a definition, as there are many students who have marginal college GPAs but have had very successful college experiences in terms of their personal growth and the things they go on to accomplish after college. Assessing those other types of success are much more difficult than just tracking GPAs and graduation rates, so studies traditionally focus on grades as the measure of success. Most of us can agree, though, that a student who flunks out of college did not have a successful experience, so we conduct studies to try to identify the characteristics of students who have been unsuccessful.
Our application review process is designed to ensure that we give every applicant a thoughtful review and the opportunity to “rise to the surface” of the applicant pool. Some candidates clearly demonstrate are insufficiently prepared academically to be successful in our program, so the rest of their application may receive a less thorough review. If a student fails here academically, due to lack of preparation or ability, we would question whether or not we made the best decision.
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