Indiana officials who wanted to encourage high school students to apply for college came up with what they thought was a good incentive: a week called College Go! during which application fees would be waived. But there were some unintended consequences from what is now called a "well-intentioned but misguided" effort:
Enrollment officials across the state said their staffs wasted hundreds of hours sorting through applications, many of them incomplete, and trying to follow up with students who had no intention of attending college, The Herald-Times of Bloomington reported today.
Indiana University officials said the free week cost the school more than $300,000.
[. . .]
Students at many Indiana high schools were simply instructed to fill out college admission applications as a class project. So it was difficult for universities to predict who was serious about attending college.
“It's very difficult to judge a student's interest in Indiana if they were in a high school class that said 'apply to five schools by the end of the class period,”' Thompson said.
And the waived fees weren't that much -- $50 at many schools, the story said. An entry on the experiment at the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that “Whenever anything's free, there's a kind of a blue-light special mentality.” An economist would say the state unwisely increased demand too much for a fixed supply. But what if some capable students got admitted who wouldn't have otherwise applied -- what's that worth? Could there be better filtering at the high school level to prevent some of the more frivolous applications? I'm inclined to the more elitist view that even a modest fee is useful in weeding out those who are just fooling around. Maybe a good incentive, thoug
