Media madness

There was more panicky reporting on the subject of student debt last week in the New York Times article, A Generation Hobbled By the Soaring Cost of College, an installation in the newspaper’s Degrees of Debt series that purports to examine the implications of soaring college costs and the indebtedness of students and their families.

As Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson of the Chronicle of Higher Education report: The New York Times made a huge statistical error in their overwrought article about higher education borrowing on Sunday. They reported that 94 percent of bachelor’s graduates leave college with educational debt. The correct number is around two-thirds. Few people will see the correction tucked into Wednesday’s Times – certainly not nearly the number who saw the lead sentence on the web version “Nearly everyone pursuing a bachelor’s degree is borrowing money …”.

If you applied under an early decision, early action or restrictive early action plan, don't miss our series of posts on the next steps if you were accepted, deferred, or denied. And don't miss our advice on doing the right thing here.

And if you did not jump on the early bandwagon and opted for applying under a regular decision plan, don't miss our debunking of the media madness headlines that you're seeing lately. All the seats at the schools on your list have not been taken by early admits. No need to panic. We explain and do the math here.

Does Early Decision Fill Most of the Seats in the Freshman Class? Get ready for a slew of headlines trumpeting the arrival of decisions for those who applied under early action or early decision plans. Some students have already begun to receive their decisions for this admission season and more will hear in the coming week. For students who opted to take advantage of the additional time afforded by applying regular decision, this time may nevertheless be worrisome as the media trumpet stories about the record numbers of early applicants. One of the most persistent storylines is that early decision fills most of the seats in the freshman class. NOT! Read on in this excerpt from the book to understand the real story: “The college you’re applying to has filled half its freshman class with early decision applicants!” You may have heard things like this and worried there won’t be enough room left if you apply under regular decision. But this is a case where the numbers are deceiving. Let’s do the math. The question is not how many seats are being taken up in the class by applicants who applied under early decision. The question is, what percentage of the school’s total admission offers is already gone? It sounds incredible, but it’s true that even when half the seats are filled with ED applicants, fewer than half the acceptances have been given out. Here’s how it works.