Showing posts with label common application. Show all posts
Showing posts with label common application. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Applying for medical residencies: a consensus statement from Internal Medicine

 The Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine has released a "consensus statement" with many proposals about application and interview caps, and signaling.

Catalanotti, Jillian S., Reeni Abraham, John H. Choe, Kelli A. Corning, Laurel Fick, Kathleen M. Finn, Stacy Higgins et al. "Rethinking the Internal Medicine Residency Application Process to Prioritize the Public Good: A Consensus Statement of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine." The American Journal of Medicine (2023).

It also includes a call for data and analysis:

"AAIM proposes increasing internal medicine program preference signals to 15, using tiered signaling with three “gold” and 12 “silver” signals, and setting an interview cap of 15 in the 2024-2025 recruitment season, with participation by all internal medicine programs. The Alliance recommends that all internal medicine programs participate in ACI. AAIM recommends that programs transparently share information about their use of preference signals and other application screening methods and calls for real-time data analysis to explore impact, inform future iterations and identify potential harms.

"The Alliance calls upon ERAS and NRMP as well as Thalamus® and other interview scheduling platforms to transparently share data, to embrace change, and to perform analyses needed to inform this process. For example, recent modeling with eight years of retrospective NRMP data in OBGYN demonstrated that an early match round may increase the number of “mutually dissatisfied applicant-program pairs” and that a multiple-round match process could introduce potential rewards for gamesmanship, a prime factor addressed by the current process.35 AAIM applauds this analysis and hopes that the new collaboration between ERAS and Thalamus® may provide useful interview data to inform this proposal and further interventions."

And here is reference 35 in that last paragraph, about which I've blogged before.

I Ashlagi, E Love, JI Reminick, AE. Roth
Early vs Single Match in the Transition to Residency: Analysis Using NRMP Data From 2014 to 2021
J Grad Med Educ, 15 (2) (Apr 2023), pp. 219-227, 10.4300/JGME-D-22-00177.1

Friday, April 28, 2023

Interesting development in the transition from medical school to residency: connecting applications and interviews

 The market for new doctors has been suffering from congestion in applications and interviews, in the runup to the resident Match (see recent post with a diagram). The American Association of Medical Colleges runs the main application server, ERAS. A private company called Thalamus runs a growing interview scheduling service. Now they are looking to collaborate.

 Here's  yesterday's press release from Thalamus:

AAMC, Thalamus Announce New Collaboration to Improve Transition to Residency

Collaboration will increase transparency and make the residency process easier for applicants and programs  

Washington, D.C., April 27, 2023—Today the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) and Thalamus announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate innovation and ease the transition to residency for medical students, medical schools, and residency programs. The collaboration will combine the AAMC’s long-established leadership in innovation along the continuum from medical school to residency training and continuing medical education with Thalamus’ market-leading product and software development expertise. 

“The transition from undergraduate medical education to graduate medical education is a critical period in any learner’s journey to becoming a physician,” said David J. Skorton, MD, AAMC president and CEO. “We know the community is seeking enhanced tools and integrated services that better support application and recruitment processes. We listened, we have made improvements, and, with Thalamus, we are excited to make this vision a reality.” 

The organizations will collaborate to leverage their data, technology, and expertise to transform the medical residency and fellowship recruitment processes for applicants and programs. Their efforts will focus on increasing transparency, supporting equity through holistic review, and improving the learner experience by consolidating the fragmented interview management process. 

“We are thrilled to be collaborating with the AAMC to provide a comprehensive solution that will streamline graduate medical education recruitment processes,” said Jason Reminick, MD, MBA, MS, CEO and founder of Thalamus. “But even more, we are looking forward to building new and innovative tools that improve the experience, are cost-effective, and leverage data for the benefit of the medical education community and the advancement of our collective missions.” Dr. Reminick applied to residency in 2012 during an eventful recruitment season disrupted by Hurricane Sandy. “I’m particularly excited to provide applicants with a comprehensive platform to manage their interview season.” 

The collaboration between the AAMC and Thalamus will enable data-sharing and innovative research that will benefit the undergraduate to graduate medical education community and advance both organizations’ missions. The initiative also demonstrates the commitment of both organizations to addressing the concepts and themes outlined in the 2021 report from the Coalition for Physician Accountability’s Undergraduate Medical Education-Graduate Medical Education Review Committee.

In recent years, the AAMC has completed significant in-depth research and upgraded technology to enhance the Electronic Residency Application Service® (ERAS®) suite of application and selection tools, such as updating the MyERAS® application content, building analytics tools for institutions, and partnering on collaborative research initiatives. Thalamus has completed unique research related to the physician workforce, including how geography influences The Match® and specialty-specific interview practices. The Thalamus technology will continue the upgrade of the ERAS suite of application and selection tools. The AAMC and Thalamus remain committed to future innovations that will enable the ERAS program to continue to evolve faster and better. 

Beginning in June 2023, all ERAS residency and fellowship programs will receive complimentary access to Thalamus’ leading interview management platform, Thalamus Core and Itinerary Wizard, as well as Cerebellum, a novel data and analytics dashboard to assess recruitment outcomes, specifically from a diversity, equity, inclusion, and geographic perspective. Programs may also elect to purchase Thalamus’ video interview platform and Cortex, its technology-assisted holistic application review and screening platform. 

According to AAMC data, the U.S. is expected to experience a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034. Given the burnout and other challenges to the health care system caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the AAMC and Thalamus look to use their collective expertise to promote a diverse and representative workforce that will enhance health care and patient outcomes. 

The data and research the AAMC and Thalamus have amassed to identify resident, fellow, and physician recruitment trends can potentially have a major impact on diversity in medicine and begin to address several well-established and longstanding systemic challenges. These efforts will support not only the application and selection processes in graduate medical education but also aim to improve the experiences of the U.S. physician workforce over the long term. 

Related Resources 

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Note for editors: Leaders from the AAMC and Thalamus are available to speak with media about this new collaboration and what it means for residency programs and applicants. 

The AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) is a nonprofit association dedicated to improving the health of people everywhere through medical education, health care, medical research, and community collaborations. Its members are all 157 U.S. medical schools accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education; 13 accredited Canadian medical schools; approximately 400 teaching hospitals and health systems, including Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers; and more than 70 academic societies. Through these institutions and organizations, the AAMC leads and serves America’s medical schools and teaching hospitals and the millions of individuals across academic medicine, including more than 193,000 full-time faculty members, 96,000 medical students, 153,000 resident physicians, and 60,000 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the biomedical sciences. Following a 2022 merger, the Alliance of Academic Health Centers and the Alliance of Academic Health Centers International broadened the AAMC’s U.S. membership and expanded its reach to international academic health centers. Learn more at aamc.org

Thalamus is the premier, cloud-based interview management platform designed specifically for application to Graduate Medical Education (GME) training programs. The software streamlines communication by eliminating unnecessary phone calls/emails allowing applicants to book interviews in real-time, while acting as a comprehensive applicant tracking system for residency and fellowship programs. Thalamus provides comprehensive online interview scheduling and travel coordination via a real-time scheduling system, video interview platform, AI application screening/review tool (Cortex) providing technology-assisted holistic review, and first-in-class DEI-focused analytics dashboard (Cerebellum). Featured nationally at over 300+ institutions and used by >90% of applicants, Thalamus is the most comprehensive solution in GME interview management. For more information on Thalamus, please visit https://thalamusgme.com or connect with us on LinkedInFacebookInstagramTwitter, or YouTube

Sunday, November 6, 2022

Limiting congestion by limiting applications, or making them costly

 Here's a paper that investigates two alternatives to limiting congestion in college admissions: one is to limit applications, and the other is to add a small cost for each additional application. (This is a current topic of discussion in a number of other applications, including matching of new doctors to residencies.)

Application Costs and Congestion in Matching Markets by YingHua He and Thierry Magnac, The Economic Journal,  https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac038 (online early)

Abstract: "A matching market often requires recruiting agents, or ‘programmes’, to costly screen ‘applicants’, and congestion increases with the number of applicants to be screened. We investigate the role of application costs: higher costs reduce congestion by discouraging applicants from applying to certain programmes; however, they may harm match quality. In a multiple-elicitation experiment conducted in a real-life matching market, we implement variants of the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance mechanism with different application costs. Our experimental and structural estimates show that a (low) application cost effectively reduces congestion without harming match quality."

"Our empirical strategy is novel. It begins with a multiple-elicitation field experiment that enables us to directly evaluate the effects of application costs. The experiment involves the real-life matching of 129 applicants to the seven master’s programmes at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), and was conducted in May 2013 for admission in the 2013–4 academic year. The experimental market designs are three variants of the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance (DA) mechanism encountered in practice: the traditional DA mechanism, under which applicants can apply to all programmes without any cost; the DA mechanism with truncation (DA-T), under which applicants can apply to no more than four programmes (hence, DA-T-4); and the DA mechanism with cost (DA-C), under which applicants must write a motivation letter for each additional application beyond the first three applications. Under each mechanism, every applicant is required to submit a rank-ordered list of programmes (ROL). As applicants are informed that one of the mechanisms will be implemented, they have incentives to behave optimally under each mechanism.

"To evaluate the performance of a matching procedure, we focus on two dimensions of a matching outcome: the congestion and match quality. The former is measured by screening costs and approximated by the number of applicants to screen; the latter is measured by the welfare of both sides, the number of unmatched applicants, as well as the number of blocking pairs. A pair comprising applicant and programme blocks a matching if both would be better off by being matched together after leaving their current matches. The stability of a matching, defined as the absence of any blocking pair, is the key to the success of matching markets (Roth, 1991). Importantly, stability implies Pareto efficiency when both sides are endowed with strict preferences (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez, 2013)."



Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Is applying to college too hard?

 While there are concerns that electronic application services like the common app have led to an explosion of applications, there are also concerns in the opposite direction, that applying to college remains a barrier particularly to students who don't automatically think of college as an option.

Here's a story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed about an initiative to ease the application process.

Rethinking the Act of Applying to College. A tedious process that puts the onus on students may need an overhaul.  By Eric Hoover

"On Thursday, the Coalition for College, a membership group of 162 institutions with a shared online application, announced a plan to ease the challenge of applying. As part of a new partnership, the organization will embed its application process into Scoir, an online college-advising platform used by students at more than 2,000 high schools nationwide.

"Instead of creating a Coalition application and typing information into a separate website, students with a Scoir account will soon be able to apply to any Coalition college by transmitting an admission form prepopulated with information — demographic data, grades, test scores, and so on — that would already reside under the same virtual roof.

...

"The more complex the application process, the less equitable it becomes."

"That was a key line from a report published in January by the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. The report, which imagined what the college-application process would look like if racial equity were the main objective, included findings and recommendations drawn from interviews with a panel of admissions and financial-aid experts, as well as students."

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Nervousness and confusion about residency applications

 Medpage Today has the story, which has been active on medical twitter for a while--some residency candidates are finding that their applications are incomplete, and blame the common application service ERAS, which in response reports that incomplete applications are the result of errors by the candidates.

Is ERAS Glitch Impeding Residency Interviews?  — Several students are missing letters of recommendation, but AAMC calls reports "unsubstantiated"

"MedPage Today spoke to several residency applicants who believe they experienced ERAS tech issues when submitting their applications. A majority of these applicants requested anonymity due to fear of retribution.

While many say a potential bug is not surprising, students are frustrated that they cannot pin down when "their documents went missing -- and whether or not it jeopardized their chances of matching with some programs.

"In each case, the glitch is almost identical: an applicant's letters of recommendation (or other documents) were uploaded to ERAS, and the applicant was certain they assigned the right materials to each program before they hit submit. But weeks later, applicants checked the platform to see that these documents had never been assigned nor delivered to the right programs -- rendering their applications incomplete."

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Related:

Med Students Filed Nearly 70 Residency Applications Each— "I don't think this is sustainable at all" by Amanda D'Ambrosio, MedPage Today October 27, 2021

"Across all medical specialties, this cycle MD applicants submitted an average of 68 applications, DO applicants submitted 92, and international medical graduates submitted 139, according to data provided to MedPage Today by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

"Medical graduates applying to orthopedic surgery in the 2022 cycle submitted an average of 88 applications -- the highest across all medical specialities. Candidates to urology, otolaryngology, and dermatology -- some of the most competitive specialties -- all applied to around 80 programs each.

"More than 46,000 medical graduates have applied for the 2022 residency match so far: approximately 23,000 MDs, 8,000 DOs, and 15,000 international graduates. The preliminary data from ERAS -- the centralized system that medical graduates use to apply to residency -- includes all applications submitted through the beginning of October."

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Congestion in applications and interviews, by Arnosti, Johari and Kanoria

 Here's a paper modeling the issue that some labor markets may face congestion related to large numbers of applications followed by costly interviews.

Nick Arnosti, Ramesh Johari, Yash Kanoria (2021) Managing Congestion in Matching Markets. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 23(3):620-636. https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2020.0927

Abstract. "Problem definition: Participants in matching markets face search and screening costs when seeking a match. We study how platform design can reduce the effort required to find a suitable partner. Practical/academic relevance: The success of matching platforms requires designs that minimize search effort and facilitate efficient market clearing.

"Methodology: We study a game-theoretic model in which “applicants” and “employers” pay costs to search and screen. An important feature of our model is that both sides may waste effort: Some applications are never screened, and employers screen applicants who may have already matched. We prove existence and uniqueness of equilibrium and characterize welfare for participants on both sides of the market. Results: We identify that the market operates in one of two regimes: It is either screening-limited or application-limited. In screening-limited markets, employer welfare is low, and some employers choose not to participate. This occurs when application costs are low and there are enough employers that most applicants match, implying that many screened applicants are unavailable. In application-limited markets, applicants face a “tragedy of the commons” and send many applications that are never read. The resulting inefficiency is worst when there is a shortage of employers. We show that simple interventions—such as limiting the number of applications that an individual can send, making it more costly to apply, or setting an appropriate market-wide wage—can significantly improve the welfare of agents on one or both sides of the market. 

"Managerial implications: Our results suggest that platforms cannot focus exclusively on attracting participants and making it easy to contact potential match partners. A good user experience requires that participants not waste effort considering possibilities that are unlikely to be available. The operational interventions we study alleviate congestion by ensuring that potential match partners are likely to be available.

And from the Conclusion:

"We also compare the effects of an application limit to those of other available levers: either raising application costs or lowering the wage paid to applicants. Although these interventions can lead to thesame aggregate welfare as an application limit, they differ in how they distribute this welfare. Charging fees and lowering wages both increase aggregate welfare at the expense of applicants. Although these interventions may be appropriate for a platform looking to monetize its services or attract more employers, an application limit can yield Pareto improvements in welfare and may be more suitable if the platform is primarily concerned with applicant welfare. These considerations might explain why the tutoring platform TutorZ charges tutors for each potential client that they contact, whereas the dating platforms Coffee Meets Bagel and Tinder limit the number of likes/right swipes permitted in a certain period."

Sunday, May 16, 2021

The common app and the growth of applications to selective colleges, by Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff

A pair of papers study the Common App, how it is used disproportionally by selective universities and liberal arts colleges, to which applications have increased over time.  The papers focus on how this has increased student choice. 

There's a parallel set of arguments made elsewhere, particularly in connection with application to medical residencies, that too many applications increase congestion in the admissions process. 

The Common Application and Student Choice, By Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, AEA Papers and Proceedings 2021, 111: 460–464, https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20211042



And here's a longer companion paper:

Reducing Frictions in College Admissions: Evidence from the Common Application by Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, April 17, 2020

Abstract: College admissions in the U.S. is decentralized, creating frictions that limit student choice. We study the Common Application (CA) platform, under which students submit a single application to member schools, potentially reducing frictions and increasing student choice. The CA increases the number of applications received by schools, reflecting a reduction in frictions, and reduces the yield on accepted students, reflecting increased choice. The CA increases out-of-state enrollment, especially from other CA states, consistent with network effects. CA entry changes the composition of students, with evidence of more racial diversity, more high-income students, and imprecise evidence of increases in SAT scores.




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For a look at applications through the other end of the telescope, see

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The surge in exam-optional applications for college admissions

 Covid forced lots of colleges to make standardized tests optional in admissions, and that seems to have jolted the growth in college applications to new highs.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story:

The Endless Sensation of Application Inflation  By Eric Hoover

"consider a big-deal development: the suspension of standardized-testing requirements. After most of the nation’s big-name colleges adopted test-optional policies for the 2020-21 cycle, they all but guaranteed a surge in applications from students who otherwise wouldn’t have applied. When that surge came, some admissions deans publicly expressed surprise that their testing requirements apparently had been suppressing applications from underrepresented students all along, just as critics of ACT and SAT requirements have been saying for decades.

...

"there are some drawbacks to having an overwhelming number of choices, Brennan says: “In admissions, you don’t get a 20-percent increase in staff to account for a 20-percent increase in applications.”

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Who Gets In, and Why--an inside look at college admissions

Here's an essay from the WSJ, adapted from a forthcoming book with an evocative title, “Who Gets In and Why, by Jeffrey Selingo. The subtitle is A Year Inside College Admissions

The Secrets of Elite College Admissions: In the final ‘shaping’ of an incoming class, academic standards give way to other, more ambiguous factors by By Jeffrey Selingo, Aug. 28, 2020

"The year I was inside Emory University’s admissions office, the school received a record 30,000 applications for fewer than 1,400 spots in its incoming class. In early March, just weeks before official notices were scheduled to go out, the statistical models used by Emory to predict enrollment indicated that too many applicants had been chosen to receive acceptances. In the span of days, teams of admissions officers covering five geographical areas had to shift 1,000 applications from the thin “admit” stack to the much larger “deny” or “wait list” piles.



Wednesday, July 22, 2020

More applications, from fewer applicants per position in Vascular Surgery residencies


Trends in the 10-year history of the vascular integrated residency match: More work, higher cost, same result
Katherine K.McMackin MD, Francis J.Caputo MD, Nicholas G.Hoell MD, JoseTrani MD, Jeffrey P.Carpenter MD, Joseph V.Lombardi MD
Journal of Vascular Surgery, Volume 72, Issue 1, July 2020, Pages 298-303


"During the last 10 years, the number of vascular surgery integrated residency spots rose from 9 to 60 per year. Most programs offer one spot per year; none offer more than two. The average number of applications received by programs rose from 17 applications in 2008 to 63.8 in 2017. The average rank list depth needed by programs to fill the spots has not increased (range, 2.5-5.1; standard deviation, 0.73). The proportional depth of the applicant pool decreased from 4.6 U.S. and Canadian applicants for every one residency spot in 2008 to 1.7 applicants for every one residency spot in 2017. Applicant quality metrics were available for 2 years (2014 and 2016). Step 1 scores (237/239), Step 2 scores (250/250), research experiences (3.7/4.2), and volunteer experiences (5.9/5.5) remained nearly unchanged. The number of contiguous ranks for matched applicants remained stable (12.3/12.8).

"Conclusions:
The current system promotes multiple inefficiencies, resulting in application glut. Fewer applicants are flooding programs with an increasing number of applications. More money is being spent on Electronic Residency Application Service applications without changes in the number needed to rank by applicants or programs to achieve a match. There is no improvement in the quality of the applicant. Should these trends continue, they represent an unsustainable model for resident selection."

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Battle over college admission application platforms

CollegeNET, a software vendor to colleges, is suing the Common App., and also providing software support for it's newer competitor, the  Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success.

 The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the (gated) story:

How Admissions Competition Brought New Rivalries, Strange Bedfellows, and ‘An Us-Versus-Us Lawsuit’  By Eric Hoover JUNE 03, 2018

"CollegeNET’s complaint claims that the Common Application used unfair tactics to stomp competitors and monopolize the market. It also claims that participating colleges (though not named as defendants) colluded to limit spending on application-processing services, harming other companies as well as applicants. How? By homogenizing the application process and causing "application churn," in which students apply to more and more colleges."


See earlier post:

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Colleges that get a lot of applications read each one quickly (WSJ)

How to deal with congestion?  Move fast...  Here's the story from the WSJ:

Some Elite Colleges Review an Application in 8 Minutes (or Less)
With so many applying, fewer schools have one person read a whole application; plowing through 500 files in a day

"As application numbers surge, admissions officers at some elite colleges say they don’t have time to read an entire file.

"Instead, staffers from more schools—including the Georgia Institute of Technology, Rice University and Bucknell University in Pennsylvania—now divvy up individual applications. One person might review transcripts, test scores and counselor recommendations, while the other handles extracurricular activities and essays.

"They read through their portions simultaneously, discuss their impressions about a candidate’s qualifications, flag some for admission or rejection, and move on. While their decision isn’t always final, in many cases theirs are the last eyes to look at the application itself.

"The entire process can take less than eight minutes.
...
"Efficiency is crucial, since more students are using the Common Application, which allows them to submit material to multiple schools. Nearly 902,000 students used it last year. As of Jan. 15 this year, the number was already 898,000 students submitting to an average of 4.8 schools.

"Applications to Georgia Tech jumped by 13% for the coming academic year, to 35,600. The current freshman class has roughly 2,800 students."


Sunday, January 14, 2018

Applications and interviews for medical residencies

The computerized clearinghouse for the NRMP medical match solves the congestion problem for new doctors when it comes time to make offers, acceptances and rejections. But electronic applications make it easier to apply for lots of places, and this is coming to seem like a problem in both the resident match and in the later-career fellowship matches.

Residency Placement Fever: Is It Time for a Reevaluation?
Gruppuso, Philip A. MD; Adashi, Eli Y. MD, MS
Academic Medicine
Issue: Volume 92(7), July 2017, p 923–926

Abstract: The transition from undergraduate medical education to graduate medical education (GME) involves a process rooted in the final year of medical school. Students file applications through the Electronic Residency Application Service platform, interview with residency training (i.e., GME) programs from which they have received invitations, and generate a rank-ordered preference list. The National Resident Matching Program reconciles applicant and program rank lists with an eye towards matching students and GME programs. This process has effectively served generations of graduating medical students. However, the past several decades have seen an intensification of the residency placement process that is exemplified by an inexorable increase in the number of applications filed and number of interviews accepted and attended by each student. The authors contend that this trend has untoward effects on both applicants and departments that are home to GME programs. Relevant information in the peer-reviewed literature on the consequences and benefits of the intensification of the residency placement process is scant. The authors address factors that may contribute to the intensity of the residency placement process and the relative paucity of data. They propose approaches to reverse current trends, and conclude that any reevaluation of the process will have to include the generation of outcome data to afford medical educators the opportunity to explore changes in an evidence-based manner.
..............

"In part, the intensification phenomenon is borne out by the aforementioned growth in ERAS-associated traffic. In the eyes of many, this “new normal” draws on the widespread perception that a successful match in highly competitive disciplines is contingent on the filing of applications with a large proportion of the relevant GME programs. For example, in 2015, senior U.S. medical students applied, on average, to 73 of the 163 orthopedic surgery programs and 47 of the 105 neurological surgery programs (based on data extracted from the AAMC 8 and the NRMP 9,10). What is more surprising is that even less competitive disciplines may now be seeing an ever-growing flood of applications. This contention is supported in part by recent observations according to which GME programs in nearly all disciplines have seen a marked increase in their application traffic. For example, the percentage of pediatric GME programs to which graduating U.S. medical students have applied on average increased from 9.8% to 13.7% during the five-year interval from 2010 to 2015.10 For internal medicine GME programs, the corresponding figures are 4.9% to 6.0%.8–10 In making these decisions, students appear to be keeping their own counsel against the advice of medical school advisers and mentors advocating moderation."
...
"First, consideration should be given to the possibility of coordinating the timing of the interviews and of the Match across all disciplines and GME programs, including the “early match” disciplines of ophthalmology and plastic surgery.32 Consolidation along these lines would address the disruption of fourth-year scheduling, thereby offering educators greater flexibility in designing the fourth-year curriculum. Implementing such changes will not be easy given the longevity, familiarity, and comfort associated with the extant construct. Voluntary action on the part of the relevant professional associations will be required should a realignment of current schedules ever come to pass. Second, reducing if not capping the number of interviews per student would go a long way towards stemming the time and resource drain on both applicants and GME programs. This, too, is not going to be easy given the near-universal presumption that “more is better” and the notion that the times in effect demand such. In this context, consideration might be given to a tiered “screen and schedule” system wherein initial online interviews with many or all eligible applicants would be followed by a limited set of on-site interviews with a select group of “finalists.” As envisioned, this approach, widely used in both the public and the private sectors, stands to rationalize the current residency placement process while maintaining its fundamental premises of excellence and compatibility. Limiting the final on-site interviews to a select number of candidates will also give rise to palpable economies of scale that are likely to be welcomed by applicants, GME programs, and medical schools alike."

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

School choice in Indianapolis, and elsewhere

The Indy Star has the story on the imminent rollout of centralized school choice in Indianapolis:
Major changes await those wanting to enroll at IPS and charters, but no wait lists

"Wait lists for a spot in Indianapolis' most-desired schools are about to be a thing of the past.

Nearly all of the city's charter schools and all Indianapolis Public Schools programs will have a common application through the a new unified enrollment system called Enroll Indy. Starting next month, families can apply for a spot in up to 10 schools for the 2018-19 school year with just one application. "
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Earlier posts on school choice in Indianapolis here. Indianapolis has a full school choice system that elicits a rank order preference list of schools from each family and assigns each student to the single most preferred available.  This is the kind of school choice system that has been promoted by  IIPSC.

This is not to be confused with school systems that offer a common application, without centralized admissions. These remove the congestion involved in making multiple applications, but don't do anything about the congestion involved in some students receiving multiple offers which must be resolved before other students can be assigned to a school. (This raises a number of potential problems.)

For a school district that has just adopted a common application without a centralized school assignment, see e.g. Houston:
50 Houston Charter Schools Accept New Common Application, whose common app is here: Welcome to ApplyHouston!, organized by Schoolmint

Saturday, April 8, 2017

School choice: the difference between common application and unified enrollment

 Joe Siedlecki of the Dell Foundation writes about school choice, with an emphasis on unified enrollment. (All of the unified enrollment systems mentioned below were designed with the help of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, IIPSC.)

All enrollment reforms are not created equal
Apr 04, 2017 ·

Common application ≠ unified enrollment

More specifically, a common application used across schools is not a unified enrollment system.  While both reforms may be an improvement on the existing “wild west” of school choice, they have different characteristics and they attempt to solve different problems.  The table below lays out some key characteristics of these different enrollment reforms, both of which are being pursued inn different places across the country.
Source: Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
Source: Michael & Susan Dell Foundation

Monday, May 9, 2016

Los Angeles starts to discuss common enrollment school choice

The LA Times has the story:
How realistic is L.A. Unified's common enrollment application plan?

"According to a report that district employees prepared for the board of education in October and obtained by The Times in April, the district would favor a website like that of Boston Unified School District, in which parents can come to one website, enter their preferences for their child and receive suggestions on schools that fit the criteria. The information technology department recommended hiring a vendor to create this "search engine," according to the report.

The paper also suggests moving the application timeline to the fall semester, and creating one common application for all L.A. Unified schools. This would allow the district to compete with charter schools that have their lotteries early in the school year.

Unlike some other districts that have adopted this kind of process, L.A. Unified would not include independent charters. During a budget meeting in March, superintendent Michelle King told board members this single enrollment system would be a way to keep students, and the revenues they bring, in traditional public schools.

The discussions come as more students abandon district schools in favor of charter schools.

Right now there are about 10 kinds of public school options for families, including neighborhood schools, magnets, open enrollment, and zones of choice. Even if parents know that they have options and figure out what the alphabet soup of words means, the enrollment and application dates are at different times of the year, from October through March."

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

College applications and college apps

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the story: Elite Colleges Explore Alternative to Common App

"Admissions officials at some of the nation’s most-selective colleges seek to create a new online application system, according to documents obtained by The Chronicle. Although the platform would rival the Common Application, its members apparently would include only private colleges with robust financial-aid budgets, and public institutions with high graduation rates.
Earlier this year, an "exploratory committee" comprising representatives of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, among several other institutions, sent out a request for proposals describing their interest in "an application solution to ensure that students can apply when another application mode experiences difficulties or system failure," according to a May 12 draft of the RFP. "There is also interest," the document says, "in establishing a new collaborative option for individual higher-education institutions as they work in their own ways to enroll the very best and most diverse freshman classes they can." If built, the system could go live as early as next year.
The plans mark the latest chapter in the unfolding saga of the Common App, which was plagued by various technical difficulties at the height of last year’s admissions cycle. Following months of glitches, admissions leaders at colleges that had used the Common App exclusively said they worried about placing all of their eggs in one basket."

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Competitive college admissions gets yet more competitive, as students apply to more schools

The NY Times has the story: Led by Stanford’s 5%, Top Colleges’ Acceptance Rates Hit New Low

"Enrollment at American colleges is sliding, but competition for spots at top universities is more cutthroat and anxiety-inducing than ever. In the just-completed admissions season, Stanford University accepted only 5 percent of applicants, a new low among the most prestigious schools, with the odds nearly as bad at its elite rivals.

"Deluged by more applications than ever, the most selective colleges are, inevitably, rejecting a vast majority, including legions of students they once would have accepted. Admissions directors at these institutions say that most of the students they turn down are such strong candidates that many are indistinguishable from those who get in.
...
"Bruce Poch, a former admissions dean at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., said he saw “the opposite of a virtuous cycle at work” in admissions. “Kids see that the admit rates are brutal and dropping, and it looks more like a crapshoot,” he said. “So they send more apps, which forces the colleges to lower their admit rates, which spurs the kids next year to send even more apps.”

"For most of the past six decades, overall enrollment boomed, while the number of seats at elite colleges and universities grew much more slowly, making them steadily more selective. Enrollment peaked in 2011, and it has dropped a bit each year since then, prompting speculation that entry to competitive colleges would become marginally easier. Instead, counselors and admissions officers say, the pool of high-achieving applicants continues to grow, fed partly by a rising number from overseas.

"At the same time, students send more applications than they once did, abetted by the electronic forms that have become nearly universal, and uniform applications that can make adding one more college to the list just a matter of a mouse click. Seven years ago, 315 colleges and universities accepted the most widely used form, the Common Application; this year, 517 did.

"Students applying to seven or more colleges made up just 9 percent of the applicant pool in 1990, but accounted for 29 percent in 2011, according to surveys by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and counselors and admissions officers say they think the figure has gone higher still.
...
"A generation ago, it was rare for even highly competitive colleges to offer places to fewer than 20 percent of their applicants. In 2003, Harvard and Princeton drew exclamations of dismay (from prospective applicants), envy (from other colleges) and satisfaction (from those they accepted) when they became the first top universities to have their admission rates dip below 10 percent. Since then, at least a dozen have gone below that threshold.

"This was the second year in a row that Stanford had the worst odds of admission among top colleges, a title that in previous years was usually claimed by Harvard. This year, by the April 1 deadline for most colleges to send admission notices, Harvard and Yale had accepted about 6 percent of applicants, Columbia and Princeton about 7 percent, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago about 8 percent. (Some rates will increase by a few tenths of a percentage point as colleges accept small numbers of applicants from waiting lists.)

"Several universities, including Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, had admission rates this year that were less than half of those from a decade ago. The University of Chicago’s rate plummeted to a little over 8 percent, from more than 40 percent."

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Some history of the Common App

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a long, informative article on the Common App and the recent troubles with its computer systems, from which I excerpt below:

The Uncommon Rise of the Common App


Although the Common Application is now a vast, bustling highway, it was once just a shortcut. Its founding purpose: to make applying to college easier.
Back before the computer, applicants and counselors had to write or type answers to the same questions on every college's application. Each year the nation's hands cramped up. Then, in 1975, Colgate University, Vassar College, and a handful of other private institutions with similar admissions requirements created a common form that students could photocopy and mail in.
This modest stand against redundancy was infused with a high-minded mission: increasing access by going beyond grades and test scores to conduct robust evaluations of each applicant. "It was a time for reaffirming what was important in admissions," says Mary F. Hill, a former dean of admissions at Colgate who served on the Common Application's board of directors from 1996 to 2005.
...
By the mid-1990s, more than 150 colleges—all private, all relatively selective—were using the Common Application, run by a network of volunteers. In 1996 the National Association of Secondary School Principals dedicated a staff member to handle logistics and the increasing volume of paperwork. The application then was a booklet of perforated forms with maroon type; the masthead listed participating colleges in small print. Each year, as more names were added, the letters shrank.
The Common App first went online in 1998. To keep up with growth, the board hired a staff and incorporated as a nonprofit organization. It also agreed to admit public universities, the first six of which joined in 2001.
...
At least until this fall, ease of use has made the Common App a success by any measure. According to its tax return for 2011, the organization, based in Arlington, Va., generated $13-million in revenue. Of the group's 517 members, 178 offer no other way to apply. The fee structure rewards exclusivity. Nonexclusive members pay $4.75 per application; exclusive members pay $4. Colleges that further "streamline" their policies—by having no more than two early-admission plans, for instance—pay only $3.75. All nine admissions officials on the organization's board represent exclusive users.
The Common Application now has nine employees, but it expects to grow to 65. Next summer, as part of a long-term acquisition plan, the organization will hire about 30 employees who now work for a company called Hobsons, which designed and developed the new online system. (Hobsons also owns Naviance, which high schools use to send documents to colleges, and the website College Confidential.)
In the admissions profession, the Common App is ubiquitous. This year it was the lone platinum sponsor of the National Association for College Admission Counseling's annual conference, for which it paid $50,000. (The Chronicle was also a sponsor of the event.) Recently the Common App gave the association $80,000 to send 80 college counselors to a professional-development workshop. Each year it mails a poster to every high school in the nation, listing its ever longer roster of colleges.
With visibility comes cachet. Joining the Common Application in 1990 was an important move for Ursinus College, says Richard G. DiFeliciantonio, vice president for enrollment. "There was status associated with that membership," he says. "It confirmed our position in the marketplace."
Now he believes the benefits have less to do with prestige than with scale. The wider a college's recruitment net, the more applicants of every kind it can attract. He credits the Common App with helping Ursinus double its enrollment of both nonwhite students and those eligible for federal Pell Grants.
Mr. DiFeliciantonio also sees trade-offs. With more applications, "yield"—the percentage of accepted students who enroll—declines and becomes harder to predict. (A law of recruitment: More applicants doesn't necessarily mean more serious applicants.) And member colleges must relinquish some authority over the questions they can and cannot ask. "We were willing to put up with a loss of control," he says, "to get with the herd."
...
The Common Application is not without competitors. College­NET, an Oregon-based technology company, builds customized application-processing systems for some 500 colleges worldwide. After creating an account through, say, Washington State University, a student can automatically transfer basic information to another member college that has signed on to that service.
...
Joshua J. Reiter, who helped build the Common Application's first online system, went on to start the Universal College Application in 2007. The for-profit company is a small rival, for sure: Membership peaked at about 80 colleges a few years ago, then dwindled to 32, in part because those that also belonged to the Common App decided it was simpler to manage just one system. But since problems with the Common Application arose, Princeton University and seven other colleges have joined or rejoined the Universal College Application, which admissions deans say charges $1,000 annually, plus $4.50 per application.
...
Timeline: The Common Application, 1975-2013
1975: The Common Application begins a pilot program with 15 member institutions, primarily selective liberal-arts colleges.
1980: Passes 100 members.
1994: Harvard U. becomes the first Ivy League member; Dartmouth College follows the next year.
1998: First online application system launches.
2000: The Common Application incorporates as a nonprofit; passes 200 members.
2001: The Universities of Delaware, Vermont, and Maine are among the first public institutions to join.
2004: Binghamton University becomes the first State University of New York campus to join; by 2011, 18 other SUNY campuses will have joined.
2007: Passes 300 members.
2010: First international institutions join; passes 400 members; number of unique applicants exceeds 500,000.
2013: Paper application is retired; passes 500 member institutions; fourth generation of the online application faces technical difficulties and criticism.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Is the Common App still doing what it was designed to do?

The letters to the editor of the NY Times, following a recent article on the Common App and its troubles, include one (the second letter) from one of the founders of the Common App. It says in part:

"The unavoidable standardization of the Common Application, not to mention the online debacle for students trying to use it this year, causes serious questions regarding its service to both the candidate and the college.

As co-founder of the Common Application some 40 years ago (with Jack Osander of Princeton and Fred Jewett of Harvard), I sense that the Common App’s time is up. The sole original goal of the Common Application was to make applying to highly selective colleges easier for nontraditional, less advantaged but deserving students. Clearly, it worked early on.

Now it seems that the ease of applying via the Common App has transferred from the poorest to the most affluent students, whose families have no problem paying a dozen or more application fees — the more apps, the better the chance of admission somewhere special. This phenomenon also creates thousands more “ghost applications” (from students unlikely to enroll) for the colleges."

HT: Eric Budish

Earlier posts on the common app.