Gen Y Struggling to Accepted by Colleges
In addition to the incredible student loan debt and other financial burdens being imposed upon older members of Gen Y by the rapidly escalating costs to attend college, now word is coming out that the younger members are struggling just to get into their colleges they most desire.
Students with perfect SAT scores and 4.0 grade point averages are being rejected:
- Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam;
- Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2,400 scores on the three-part SAT;
- Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with perfect 4.0 grade point averages.
These brutal admissions practices are due to three factors:
- The demographic bulge of the children of the baby boomers means that students are graduating from high school in record numbers. About 3.1 million will graduate from high school this year, up from 3.1 million last year and 2.4 million in 1993. The peak will be in 2008.
- More high school students are going to college right away. In the lost decade of the 1970's (nothing good came out of that decade), fewer than half went directly to college. Today it is more than 60 percent.
- The average college applicant applies to many more colleges than in past decades. In the 1960's, fewer than two percent applied to six or more colleges. In 2006, more than two percent report having applied to 11 or more.
Source: New York Times
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