Thoughts on how to reform the college application problem situation + an investment recommendation...

 This morning I read an article about a young woman who was accepted to a half a dozen Ivy League universities as well as to Stanford University. Well done her. However when I see that the 2021 acceptance rate at UCLA is going to have a 10% or less, and many of the public universities are going to admit a quarter or less of their applicants, it cannot be controversial to say that "something needs to change." 

I am the product of a selective university system, having attended 2 elite university and going through a competitive application process. However in the couple of decades since I applied, acceptance rates have plummeted from 25-50% range to the 5-15% range today without a decrease in the quality of applicant pool. I would argue that most students today are much more qualified than those in my day, yet more and more qualified students are being denied slots at selective universities and this need not be the case.

Here are my top 3 ideas to reform the system, alongside a cheeky stock recommendation.

1. Ranked choice voting has been talked about as a possible means to improve the US electoral system. This could also be adopted for the college application process. It becomes that much more feasible as a large number of colleges have joined forces via the Common App or the Coalition App system. In the case of the University of California school, all 9 schools utilize a common application portal. Utilizing a choice ranked system is a trivial improvement that would then allow colleges to obtain data and increase the number of qualified applicants that get accepted to the schools of choice, rather than having a small number of students garner the majority of slots while leaving a majority of students out in the cold.

2. Offer two learning tracks, the traditional four year on-campus experience, coupled with an online possibility. One of the positive learning outcomes from the pandemic/remote learning situation of the past year, colleges and universities have seen that it is possible to offer effect education, to a large number of students, using remote tools, (this is not the case necessarily at the elementary school level - but that discussion is for another blog-post). Using this simple tweak, a university could double/triple (or even more) its enrollment overnight . We would be able to kill two birds with one stone, as the online option should obviously be offered at a reduced tuition rate. This would help alleviate another one of the issues facing higher ed: sky high tuition costs/unmanageable student debt load.

3. Offer a yearlong (or two) service option post high school, which would help filter students into the school that is most appropriate for them. Countries such as Singapore and Israel have mandated national service programs. The US could and should follow that model. Universities can form partnerships with service institutions and high school students can apply to join them. Not only would this be good for the country, but also it would provide teenagers an additional year to find themselves and get a better understanding of where they might want to be at the conclusion of their collegiate years. Universities would get a first hand look at the students work ethic and it would help form the students a bit prior to them resuming formal classroom education. At the conclusion of the program, students would apply to universities and that would provide an additional data-point that would help in deciding which students to accept (rather than rely on possible grade inflated high school transcripts and relatively meaningless standardized test scores).

Obviously this list is not exhaustive and there are other possibilities. What do you think?

Now, I promised an investment recommendation, well here goes. Last week Coursera went public, under the stock code COUR. They are looking to disrupt the higher education model. As companies look to distance themselves from the traditional recruitment process centered around four year colleges and focus more on young men and women who have actually achieved something in the real world and/or have alternative certifications from Coursera, Google or other platforms, COUR is a stock that one should most certainly look to own for the long term.