<p>You are correct on both points - high school students are led to believe that, and it simply isn’t true. But (unaccustomed as I am to defending the mostly overhyped “top tier” schools), I don’t think in most cases it’s the colleges themselves that promote that. Many of the most selective colleges make it clear on their websites that the admissions process is highly competitive and depends on factors other than just raw stats.</p>
<p>Three examples, all of which I found by Googling “[name of school] admissions criteria.”</p>
<p>Or to a U.S. school where his or her numbers are good enough to guarantee admission, of which there are for most students hundreds or thousands.</p>
<p>There are lots of schools in US that go strictly by numbers. One can get into UT Dallas with a single attribute - score 1200 in M + V or 1800 or above in total.</p>
<p>There’s been a clear message to “unhooked white girls” for several years - and that is that they have to jump higher and run faster than they counterparts to obtain the same offers and opportunities. With women are earning .78 on the dollar, where is the evidence to suggest that its OK to discriminate against “unhooked white girls” in the college admissions process?
Everyone isn’t a winner - and it truly doesn’t make sense to balance the class to the point that we are turning away the top performers.</p>
The unexplained portion of the wage gender difference is far closer to 5%, not 22%.
What is your evidence that schools are turning away top performers? Logically, the cuts would be made at the bottom, not the top.</p>
<p>And class balance is important. My DD wouldn’t even consider schools that were too far out of balance. If anything the top performers are self-selecting themselves out of schools due to gender imbalances.</p>
<p>If you look at the college profiles and look at the test ranges of who was accepted; then compare the percentages of male vs female applicants to acceptances, in many cases it is pretty clear cut.</p>
<p>^ They are not turning away top performers. There is so much depth to the applicant pool that they can craft a class that is balanced as a whole. Would the top tier college be doing a service if it took 40 first chair violinists but could not put together an orchestra because they were missing other instrumentalists that could play at the university level? Any college with gender imbalance pays a price with subsequent applicants. Those same unhooked white girls who are finding it harder to get into a LAC are favored in STEM focused schools so it works both ways.</p>
<p>notrichenough: That is only one part of the story. My D, a top performer, chose a women’s college because she didn’t like the “balancing” of a class based on gender. She had watched in previous years schools turn away girls who had much more impressive vitas to accept boys to “balance the class.” This proved especially egregious and obvious in several particular cases that involved Vassar, but I’m sure it’s true in many others as well.</p>
<p>She was determined not to be seen through this lens and had four very wonderful years at Barnard which had a 21% percent admit rate this year, probably very close to Vassar’s, though I haven’t checked.</p>
<p>I find her feminist thinking top drawer.</p>
<p>One caveat, I don’t think that women who elect Vassar are less stellar or admirable. I am just explaining one kind of thinking: it’s unfair that more qualified women are being passed over for less qualified men. I don’t want to participate.</p>
<p>Of course, New Yorkers are passed over for North Dakotans – we know there are many categories as a Long Island, unhooked, white girl in the Humanities she suffered from being admissions poison, but this was easiest to correct. She could also have applied to colleges in the midwest to address this issue, but she chose not to.</p>
<p>I think it is real that NE non-STEM women are facing this. That is why I think top women’s colleges continue to be very relevant.</p>
<p>*Quote:
We’re given to believe that by working hard we can get into our dream schools when this simply isn’t true.
*</p>
<p>Well, all of you hard-working super smart kids need to “do the math.” Figure out how many hard working kids are at your school, multiply that by how many schools there are in the US. That will clearly tell you that there aren’t enough seats at “dream schools” to accomodate even most of you. </p>
<p>Woody…I would guess that the unexplained wage difference is that women often “family track” themselves which ends up putting them into lower paying positions…even within the same field. </p>
<p>For instance, at my H’s job, the mom engineers do not want the long term travel assignments. They prefer the assignments that keep them mostly in town and maybe a few 2-3 night travel assignments a year. They don’t want the multi-week/month travel assignments that others will do, and NONE have volunteered for the Afghanistan trips. Those self-imposed restrictions do limit their worth to the company and also limits their ability (sometimes) to be promoted. </p>
<p>We’d like to believe that everything is so equal, but in real life it’s not. When H’s company moved from Calif to Alabama, NOT ONE married woman moved. NOT ONE.</p>
<ul>
<li>men work more hours</li>
<li>women choose jobs that pay less</li>
<li>women choose flexibility in work environment over higher pay</li>
<li>the mommy-track is real - single, childless women between 22-30 now earn more than men</li>
<li>it seems women are lousy negotiators</li>
<li>men work in more dangerous occupations (did you know 95% of workplace deaths are men?)</li>
</ul>
<p>This is not to say that there aren’t biases and outright discrimination against women in many fields. But it’s a lot more complicated than dividing the average woman’s pay by the average man’s pay and claiming discrimination.</p>
<p>The wikipedia article is pretty good, although long:</p>
<p>"No one likes it when they are on the losing end of affirmative-action-type programs. "</p>
<p>Of course, this is May and we will see a lot of the heated discussions rolling in anytime because most people who did not get into their favorite school goes with the assumption - if only this program did not exist in so and so school, I would have gotten in.</p>
<p>“No one likes it when they are on the losing end of affirmative-action-type programs.”</p>
<p>I find that people are just as unhappy when they are on the losing end of purely quantitative admissions programs. They are just as certain that those programs are unfair.</p>
<p>^ The .78 number that s77theresa quoted comes from dividing the median full time year-round earnings of a woman by those of a man, with no adjustments for anything.</p>
<p>
We can probably generalize to</p>
<p>“I’m unhappy I didn’t get in, but it’s not my fault, the process is unfair.”</p>
<p>So figure out how many kids graduate high school each year and take 10% of that and that will give you the number of kids in the top 10% of their school applying for colleges. Add to that every statistically smart person older than 17 - 30 that is heading for college for the first time. If you spread yourself out over all the really good colleges and universities in the country it all works out. If you all go like a herd mentality toward twenty colleges in a small region of the country there won’t be room for all of you which just supports the premise that there are smart kids everywhere.</p>
<p>Let’s not forget the universities that do acknowledge flat out they consider legacies first, and the colleges/universities that need the high contributors, children of celebrities, politicians or people who have buildings named after them. My d went to a private school where the siblings got into harvard and yale automatically. The older siblings might have been smart, but the kids in her grade, were in the bottom quartile, space cadets and were out drinking and partying on the weekends. Was it fair they got in? Probably not, but you have to look at it from the college’s perspective. If they get three fully paid tuitions from one family, that is less financial aid that needs to be doled out. Many of my d’s friends did not check the “need financial aid” box in fear of being rejected. Some will be carrying some pretty hefty student debt when they get out of college. In our house, my d will go with whoever offers the best fin aid/merit aid package. But people should not delude themselves about who the colleges take.</p>
Harvard and Yale probably could fill their class hundreds times over with full pay students if that’s what they were looking for. Siblings are not considered legacies, it needs to be their parents/grandparents who went there for UG.</p>