Red Velvet Cake and Admissions Notification
Well I have been tossing and turning since 2:30 Amman time; it is now 5; might as well write an entry (I will be back to a zombie like state after today's school visits and the fair tonight...sigh).
It is hard to believe that it has been nearly 5 weeks since I was at the NACAC national conference in Austin, Texas. As PNACAC president-elect I also served as a delegate in the NACAC assembly, which consumed a fair amount of time and energy while I was there. It required me to miss the annual meeting of the nation's Jesuit admissions directors, and then admissions directors with school counselors from Jesuit high schools from around the nation; this was the first meeting I have missed in 13 years. Ironically, next year Seattle University will host both meetings, and the annual Jesuit banquet, but I won't be able to attend the business meetings for the same reason (the national NACAC conference will be in Seattle, a 1/2 mile from campus at the Convention Center; I suspect there will be a number of things keeping the admissions staff busy that week.)
Back to Austin. One of the most discouraging admissions developments in recent years was a measure that was passed by NACAC's assembly in Austin: allowing freshman admissions notifications to be mailed prior to September 15 for the subsequent fall. With all the sanctimonious rhetoric I continually hear about US News and World Report and other ratings exacerabating the frenzy over admission I found myself incredulous (but not surprised). This was pushed by a number of public universities asserting that they needed to mail notifications earlier because increased applications, and no further processing budgetary allocations, necessitate this in order to "serve" students. We are talking notifications 11 to 12 months before the start of the entry term. I also heard assertions that this would assure access to the underrepresented, and to the other disenfranchised students. However, my experience has been that as a rule those seeking admission in the beginning of the senior year are typically the most advantaged; those who have the greatest support, the greatest savy, the greatest resources and, perhaps, the most unhealthy obsession with the process at that point. I see no justification for students needing to receive admissions notification that early; as a "concession" the institutions that pushed this through (the vote was close, and the discussion in the assembly -- passionate and contentious -- was ultimately shut down, prematurely in my estimation for such a philosophically important decision.) was that students couldn't receive such notification prior to the posting of their final sixth semester grades. Part of the rationale was that community colleges want to get into notifying students earlier -- I think the community colleges were used as a beard in this case. Many community colleges are having students both only apply and register in the weeks immediately preceding the start of classes -- not a full year in advance.
I think the public institutions in question made a specious argument. Earlier in the summer I had read in the New York Times how some of these same institutions were increasing their recruitment and support of National Merit Finalists in an effort to burnish their images of selectivity -- hardly a disadvantaged group; hardly an assess related motive as typically National Merit Finalists are among the most advantaged. Perhaps if they redeployed some of the resources being used to give full rides to National Merit Finalists they could put more money into processsing application resources. However, the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley -- both awash in tsumami after tsunami of applications have devoted their scare resources in a time of increasing applications to the more cumbersome, and costly, process of holistic evaluation.
What I suspect is really driving this is the desire for institutions to lock in students early, and to blow the competition out of the water. This will play directly into the hands of the many commercial vendors advising admissions operations that have created much of the marketing and admissions frenzy. This doesn't even touch on the egregious undermining of the entire senior year of high school. The entire matter is terribly depressing. My sentiments are shared by many in NACAC, particularly school counselors.
A lovely treat at NACAC this year was getting to travel with Andrea to the conference. It was her first NACAC conference. As she now is on the PNACAC executive board overseeing regional college fairs she too had a number of meetings. We shared several meals together, and one was at a wonderful southwestern oriented cuisine restaurant in downtown Austin the name of which currently escapes me. One afternoon we shared a piece of red velvet cake there. If you haven't experienced this, it is the epitome of decadence -- it is largely butter and sugar and to add to the crime they use red food coloring to dye the cake red (the icing, however, is white -- probably the amount of sugar defies coloring). Maybe the color is intended as a warning. As we felt our arteries closing, we enjoyed every hedonistic bite. Of course it required a cup of coffee --- black, who needs cream when you are eating a stick of butter?