Mountaineer Buc wrote:Zarni, as the sole guy in higher ed here maybe you should explain to us what goes on at the admissions office.
My understanding is that most of the students who meet the qualifications that don't get in are the ones who are trying to cram into the more popular programs and that is where they have to make these decisions.
10,000 kids apply for 5,000 seats in the school of business so half get rejected for one reason or another but 300 students apply for 500 seats at the school of fine arts so they all get in.
Every school is different on several levels. Let's start at the elite level -- schools like Harvard accept about 5% of their applicants. The vast majority of these students are qualified to go to almost any school in America. A good state school like U of Michigan accepts about 25% of their students. Good private schools (not Ivy league level) like Notre Dame can be around 20% to 25% as well. Small private schools and regional state schools will have acceptance rates over 50% - sometimes as high as 80%. If you are a small private school all you really care about is whether someone can pay and has a good chance at graduating. If they can, you have every incentive to take their money.
My particular school doesn't consider race at all and yet we still score in the 80th percentile or higher every year for diversity (mainly because of large Hispanic and Asian segments in Dallas).
As for balancing out programs - again it all depends on the school. Small private schools and regional state schools don't really care about that. They just want students. Most large state schools are like that too. For the most part the % of students who major in a field is relatively stable across time. Most schools are built around those long run averages. You might get relatively minor fields like Diversity Ethics or Gender Studies something like that that experience large percentage shifts from one year to the next depending on what is the flavor of the month in culture, but most of the traditional programs (sciences, business, engineering, etc) change very slowly over time.
Many schools in fact, don't even let you apply to a college until your sophomore year -- you just get into the general University. At Ohio State, which is a good, but not great, state school, when they accept a student it is just to the university. As a sophomore that student will apply to the College of Business, College of Engineering, etc. The lower GPA students who want to study those fields will get turned away because of semi-fixed capacity. If they want to stay at OSU they have to find another major or improve their GPA. But those students aren't turned away at the acceptance level when applying in high school.
The balancing that you are talking about only occurs at the very elite schools. Harvard will absolutely turn away a 3.9 GPA who wants to study Business for a 3.6 GPA who wants to study Mathematics if there aren't enough 3.9 GPA Math majors. But again, those schools are pretty few and far between.