Part 5
. . . and the growing ‘nationalization’ of the collegiate landscape!
Along with reducing international barriers, the web has contributed to an even more dramatic breakdown of social and geographical barriers within the United States. Just a generation ago, meeting a fellow teenager who lived in a distant state meant that you might become “pen pals”. Did anyone ever remain pen pals for more than three letters? Today’s college bound students are the first inhabitants of communities such as My Space, Facebook and a dozen others. Keep in mind that if My Space were a country, it would be the 8th largest country on the planet. One study suggests that by the time today’s students graduate from college, they will have sent and received a quarter of a million email and text messages. These messages have no geographical boundary. The concept of a “long distance” call simply doesn’t exist for the current generation of college applicants. Until very recently, for the vast majority of high school students, the process of applying to college has been a distinctly local experience. That dynamic is changing. It’s changing quickly and it’s changing dramatically.
The applicant pool at America’s top colleges is increasingly national in nature and decreasingly local or regional. Exactly what does this mean in the real world? Let’s take an imaginary campus visit to Ithaca, New York. Basically this nationalization of the process means that more high school seniors in suburban San Antonio or Boise are applying to Cornell. Since there is no compensating decrease in the traditional applications arriving from New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut, the admissions officers at Cornell are going to face more and more applications. When discussing this trend with admissions officers there is usually a bit of protest that “our school has always enjoyed many qualified applications from across the country”. After the expected posturing is concluded, they acknowledge that their pool of applications from outside of their traditionally strongest region is growing in unanticipated and disproportionate percentages. Once again, this isn’t a problem in the system; this is a success! There is no educational value to be derived from geographically restricting admission to a top college.
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