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My father (retired professor at Smith) told me once his dream admission scheme was for Smith to admit hugely more students--let's say 3x--with an explicit and well advertised cut after freshman year. Hugely more signal, just like internship vs interviews. Mildly cold-blooded viewed from normie lenses but if you phrase it as giving the other people a chance they'd not get at all I see it as compassionate.

It's obviously flatly impossible as a one off--no one would sign up for this where if you fail out your life is functionally over--but if this was a common top-100 school norm, we'd see some form of repechage develop for the stragglers, and I think this could work very well. Curious for your opinion.

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It actually seems like you could totally do it as a one-off, if you could support the extra classes and students? Again, you only need so many students to get excited for it, and there are various places those students could then fall back. But in practice, no one does things like this, alas.

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That’s exactly how European college admissions work. One of my classes at the Czech Technical University had a 75% fail rate.

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You'd need don't kind of safeguard from repeat applicants crowding out next year's.... Although if college admission becomes mostly impossible for fresh graduates system wide that can heavy interesting knock on effects

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