Numbers game

Entering the house for lunch today, I found the most recent Reed magazine sitting in the pile of mail below the letterbox.  I’ve browsed some of it already, but read through the article on the admissions process.  Given that I worked in admissions for three years while at Reed, in my final year as an intern, responsible for weighing in on the applicants, the article was of interest to me.

I was disappointed.  The article explains the process well enough.  But there is a strong theme, almost sensationalist in its tone, of worry about the dwindling acceptance rate.  Repeated emphasis is placed on percentage of students accepted, both historically and nowadays.  The author worries, or repeats others’ worries, that the decreasing acceptance rate signals a shift in Reed culture from the fringe to the center.  Yes, there are quotes from people like good old Ed Segel and Peter Steinberger about how everything is just fine, but the overarching impression, emphasized by the final quote from an alumna admissions counselor about how she wonders whether she would get in nowadays, is that things are changing for the worse.

The one thing that bothered me in particular about the article is that, although the author mentions - repeatedly - the rising number of applicants, and even mentions - once - the desired entering class size, the rather obvious leap from inflating-applications-and-steady-state-class-size to dwindling acceptance rate is never made.  And small class size, with all its ramifications, seems to me to be much more crucial to the preservation of Reed culture than a resulting loss in acceptance rate.  Can you imagine if every class at Reed was like Hum 110 lecture?  Hundreds of students gently dozing in motionless air.  The prof an unreachable entity at the front, passing on knowledge without being able to actually interact with his or her students.  What would distinguish Reed from a stereotypical state school, were that the case?

The author states that, “Since 2001, applications to Reed have doubled, and the acceptance rate has plummeted - from 74 percent to an all-time low of 32 percent this year.” This year, there were 3,485 applicants.  So in 2001, there were roughly 1,750 applicants.  That means that back in 2001, about 1,300 were accepted.  This year, about 1,100 students were accepted.  That’s not a huge difference in output for a massive difference in acceptance rates.  Even I can see that, and as we all know, my math sucks.  So why not spend some time in the article debating about whether small class sizes are critical to the preservation of Reed culture, rather than hand-wringing about a percentage? 

In the end, it seems to me that the conflict is deciding which is more crucial: Reed’s tradition of broad admissions acceptance, or Reed’s tradition of small class sizes.  I know which one I would vote for.