<p>QM, here’s the question I have: do you have ANY evidence, other than a couple of really good math students who didn’t get into MIT, that elite colleges don’t value extraordinary academic achievement? Because it seems to me that would be the equivalent of saying “I know a really qualified Jewish kid who didn’t get into Brandeis, and Brandeis has said that they are trying to increase diversity. So I guess Brandeis doesn’t like smart Jewish kids from Long Island who were active in their synagogue youth group.”</p>
<p>Obviously, that would be silly: yes, on most metrics it might be harder to get into Brandeis as a Jewish girl from Long Island than as a Lutheran from Minnesota. But that isn’t, obviously, because Brandeis has a bias against Jewish girls from Long Island, it is because they already have a lot of them - i.e, they DO value them, but don’t want a whole class of them. I also suspect that if they had a list like the Wellsley list, they probably wouldn’t highlight a student who had been on the national board of the United Synagogue Youth, not because that kid isn’t worthy and fascinating, but because in the context of that school, there are other achievements that are more unusual and therefore more noteworthy for the purposes of a promotional statement. </p>
<p>Now, as you know I theoretically agree with you that the bar for getting in based primarily on extraordinary academic achievements may be too high. It does seem to suggest misplaced priorities to me that a school might say “He did USAMO? Nice, but we’ve already got a bunch of those kids. Now let’s make room for the lacrosse player with a 1350 - that’s a high enough score to succeed here.” Because yeah, I do think that an academic institution should be valuing academic achievement of a certain level more than whether or not they have kids from all fifty states or just thirty-five of them - or, yes, training fox hunting dogs.</p>
<p>But the point is, saying “school x reserves, say, 100 spots for academic superstars. I think it should maybe be 200” is a really far cry from saying “I think someone with a major math award is at a disadvantage in admissions.” I just see no evidence of that. </p>
<p>In fact, it is possible that the Wellsley list indicates the reverse - W is a fantastic school, but it isn’t necessarily the obvious first choice for the tippy- top students, who are more likely to dream of Yale or Amherst. So, if there’s a fox-hunter at W but not a USAMO competitor, maybe it is because Harvard snapped up the mathematician and passed on the fox-hunter.</p>
<p>As for the dollhouse thing - are you serious, or was that a joke? Do you honestly think anyone in admissions has either the expertise or the inclination to parse the intricacies of dollhouse design, if an applicant happened to have that particular interest? Sure, if the applicant were also doing something nice with the dollhouses, that would be a bonus, but why is this a problem? If two kids both build intricate dollhouses, why wouldn’t one prefer the kid who was donating some of them to low-income children to the kid for whom it was purely a hobby? </p>