'Recruit to deny'

This is what happens when we blindly use badly-thought out metrics:

[M]any of our [ie, the US'] greatest universities have lately adopted an even more egregious new practice—“recruit to deny,” a policy in which schools actively encourage students whom they know will be turned down to apply anyway, despite the waste of time and money and effort and the disappointment that such a process must entail. This seems to be done mostly in order to increase each school’s rejection rate, a figure that plays a key role in where they end up in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of American colleges and universities. What we do in the shadows, Kevin Baker, 'Harper's Magazine', 27 June

I write quite a bit about metrics here, but how are the blog's own metrics doing? Not very well, is the answer. The number of readers looking at this blog daily has dwindled into the single figures. Not many more look at my home page, or access any of the essays, papers, book chapters, linked to thereon. That's according to the (free) analytic tools that I use.

Nevertheless, the non-tradeable version of Social Policy Bonds, about which I've expressed ambivalence, is in the policy mainstream and, largely because of that, I'm hopeful that, in time, the much greater possibilities that the tradeable bonds offer will be discussed and implemented. Until that hope is realised, mainly for my own edification and as a discipline, I will continue to post here and to maintain the SocialGoals.com site.