Enrolling a class is a big and complex task, but it’s fun to pretend otherwise. Maybe that’s what you’ll think after playing the College Scholarship Tycoon game over at Vox. Then again, you might hate it.
In this provocative exercise, you assume the role of an admissions czar who must accept and deny applicants with a range of family incomes and test scores. Your task: Improve your college’s ranking. Along the way, “you’ll discover just how the incentives are set up for colleges to discriminate against poor students.”
Well timed for the height of application season, the game offers a peek at the trade-offs selective colleges make, and an accompanying article summarizes how the competition for wealth and prestige in admissions can skew institutional priorities. The interactive game doesn’t attempt to capture all the intricacies of the selection process (admissions officers would tell you that’s impossible to do), but it might expose a larger audience to some of the inner workings of a misunderstood trade. Still, some enrollment realities do get lost in the shuffle.
For one thing, the game suggests that a college drains a fixed pot of financial-aid funds by giving money to either wealthy students or poor ones. In fact, attracting more students who can pay all or some of the freight brings in revenue that helps colleges pay for needier students. Sure, the use of so-called merit aid is controversial, but without offering that enticing “coupon” discount, many tuition-dependent colleges would struggle to land affluent students and meet financial goals.
Moreover, enrollment management, widely vilified for many ills, isn’t as simple as giving thumbs up or down to applicants based solely on test scores and family income. Who are those applicants? Where do they come from? What do they want to major in? Answering a college’s many wants and needs is a much more complex pursuit than this rendering suggests. As any enrollment manager could tell you, for example, the yield rates for different kinds of applicants vary, a nuance that any critique of the process should acknowledge.
On Wednesday The Chronicle asked a handful of admissions experts to take a quick spin through College Scholarship Tycoon. They all panned it, describing it as “way too simplistic,” “superficial,” and “dopey.” Yet some agreed with one underlying premise of a question Vox posed.
“The answer is no,” one private-college enrollment official said. “You cannot move up the rankings without disadvantaging poor kids, unless you have several billion dollars in your endowment.” And that’s a mighty exclusive club.
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
