Admissions

Suppose that in presenting the annual salary report, members of the Finance Committee opened with a cheery "this year, faculty salaries once again reached an all-time high, averaging 2.5% more than last year." Your reaction, I hope, would be to pelt the speaker with ripe fruit. Don't you want to control for inflation? Don't we really want to know how we compare to other institutions now, not how we compare with ourselves last year?

Yet every year we get announcements from the Admissions Office to the effect that this year we have a record number of applicants, or a record low acceptance rate, etc. (I just saw one on the College homepage, but it disappeared and I can't get it back). Now in the back of my head I'm constructing a little model whereby improvements in technology induce high school seniors to apply to a larger number of colleges. Since the total number of applications increases while the total number of slots stays the same, the fraction of applicants who ultimately enroll in a given institution must fall. The enrollment percentage falls by some combination of two processes: an increase in selectivity (fewer applicants accepted) or a decrease in enrollment percentage by those accepted. Wouldn't it be nice if the Faculty Enrollment and Retention Committee put together some supplementary data for Gail Sweezy's annual admissions presentation that would interpret the enrollment numbers in light of overall trends and in comparison to similar figures from our peer institutions?

It's not that I really want to get involved in the admissions process. It's just that when people give me statistics, I want to know that they're interpreting them correctly.