The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/cornell-acceptance/)
In an effort to increase equity in admissions, Cornell will decrease the proportion of students admitted through the early decision track, beginning this upcoming admissions cycle.
Five months after my Cornell interview and three months after committing to my Big Red acceptance, I attended a local meet-and-greet for the incoming class. Hosted at an alum’s home and intended to be a mixer between incoming freshmen, current students and alumni, it was meant to be a laid-back social. But in the immediate aftermath of the crapshoot that are college applications, such socials are anything but laid back. Allow me to offer a snapshot of what I mean. After parking a block away from the event’s address, I walked down the street and arrived at the front door, only to run into a line of fellow Cornellians waiting to enter.
I recently stumbled upon a journal entry from my freshman colloquium class, an introductory course required for all incoming ILR freshmen. As I read the following excerpt from the journal dated Sept. 12, 2016, I was shocked to realize that I continued to face the same concerns and thoughts I had nearly three years ago. “At this point in time, I’m most concerned about what I would like to do with my life . .
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged fifty people in a plot to illegally buy admission to elite colleges like Stanford, Yale and University of Southern California for their children. The U.S. attorney for the district of Massachusetts, Andrew E. Lelling, deemed the case the “largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted.” Among those investigated by the FBI was a Cornell alumnus charged with fraud for paying $75,000 to rig his daughter’s ACT score. “There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy,” Lelling said, perhaps accidentally highlighting the fact that, legal or illegal, there effectively always has been. This investigation has put what most students already know onto the public’s collective radar: The college admissions process rests on a playing field that is almost vertically tilted in favor of rich applicants. To everyone who has been paying attention, this revelation is almost entirely unsurprising.