Again, my comments are tied to the elite colleges.
Not the “less selective colleges” I specifically wrote that I was not talking about.
Here are the words in my above post (#58) that say that:
“these schools: Penn, Brown, Northwestern and Stanford”
" I find it very difficult to believe that these schools are taking in any students at all who are poorly qualified or unready for the experience"
" I can’t believe that any admissions staffer at Brown or Stanford or any of the other schools listed is going to admit a student if they have any doubt whatsoever "
“Now if we were talking about a public university or a less selective private … I can see the point. … But that’s a different conversation for a different thread.”
Do they even test reading comprehension on the ACT or SAT anymore?
Or have we entered a new era of twitter-reading where no one is ever able to see beyond the 140 character bit of text their eyes have fixated on?
Maybe that’s why my daughter didn’t score so well on the ACT’s. Perhaps she spent so much time carefully reading and considering the text that was printed in front of her that she ran out of time to fill in all the bubbles on the answer sheet. Fortunately in real life her employers have seemed to appreciate her thoroughness and her eye for detail.
“If a college accepts kids with ACT 24, then that’s because the college ad coms have decided that ACT 24 is good enough to do reasonably well at their school. If it weren’t, they wouldn’t admit those students.”
Admissions officers do admit students they know could or will struggle, but will do it because of a hook, in this case it’s not athletic, so urm, legacy, development, first-gen. Second adcoms make mistakes, they’re human, thinking they’re perfect and get every decision right is an untenable position for anyone to take. Third and maybe the most concerning is the amount of resources dedicated to helping students cope with academics (among other things) at these colleges and the success-failure and resilience projects at all the ivies, Stanford et al. Now we don’t know if these programs are being used by the 24 or 36 kid, I agree there. Now if admissions was doing such a great job as you argue, why would these schools (the four mentioned as well others) need all these tutors and academic advisors and counselors and new programs to deal with students struggling with, guess what, academic failure?
The OP has said the kids graduate, so that’s good, but how does that happen, do they take advantage of all these resources, do they switch majors (happens a lot btw), does an advisor intervene to help them out, do they take a few courses pass/fail.
I think these days that the elites have enough apps from very strong URM’s and first generation students that they don’t have to make concessions on the quality of the candidate-- outside of any special programs they have specifically geared to those candidates. It may very well be that some of those candidates have test scores below the school’s median, but the standardized tests themselves have an inbuilt bias that and I think the admissions people understand that. A first generation hispanic kid from a public high school with a 28 ACT may very well be a significantly stronger (and smarter) candidate than a wealthy kid from a top prep school who shows up with a 33 ACT. One kid may be a product of their upbringing and environment, another kid might be one who has consistently risen beyond their upbringing and environment.
I don’t know what sort of programs the schools mentioned have to deal with students who are struggling. I’m sure they have some, but I’m puzzled by the reference to “all these tutors and academic advisors and counselors and new programs.” My daughter’s alma mater had wonderful academic advisors, but their job was mostly to help guide capable and sometimes amazing students in their choices. I mean… my daughter had one advisor who helped her with grad school & fellowship applications, and another advisor who helped with her senior thesis. They were serving in a supportive function, not remedial. The tutors were there to assist students who had specific areas of difficulty, not broad based academic difficulties – such as a writing center, math tutors, etc. Some students want to or need to take courses out of their comfort zone – I’ve known a lot of super-smart math/engineering people who struggle with writing, and plenty of students whose strengths trend toward arts & humanities who need help with math. And some students end up with majors that are something of a stretch for them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t smart and capable. It’s just that sometimes that path toward a goal (for example, pre-med) requires completion of coursework that presents some challenges. And keep in mind that students on that path aren’t necessarily worried about passing the courses - they may feel it is very important for them to earn top grades as well…
Here’s one example from someone who went to Duke. She thinks Duke admitted her because she was from a rural town in fly-over country, was a superstar in her HS and had a couple of interesting ECs. She didn’t say what she got on her ACT/SAT. But she said that she was definitely in the bottom of her class coming into Duke because her HS didn’t offer the level of classes that other kids came into Duke with, and the quality of her HS classes had not been there. She said she had to start at the bottom with the science and math classes and needed extensive tutoring in these subjects as well as English. She said that Duke allowed her to drop a class each semester of her Freshman year so she’d have more time to take advantage of the extensive tutoring programs, and very importantly, provided significant financial aid over the summer term. She ended up taking 2 summer terms, one to make up the credits she needed and another to take additional courses needed for her major since she started at a level below everyone else and needed to add more intermediate level classes. She might have been able to take extra classes in her major without doing the second summer, but then that would have prevented her from taking other classes she was interested in, and there may have also been a sequencing issue.
So that’s an example of a kid who caught up and stayed with her intended major. Her energy and drive were extraordinary. There are tons of examples of kids who didn’t have the time (such as the athletes), or the money for summer school or extra semesters, or the drive to do what this kid at Duke did.
The elite schools aren’t solely admitting based on academic strength. They could admit a world class violinist who wants to be a biology major and needs help to catch up in the sciences. Or a world class artist who wants to be an architect and needs tutoring in math. Or the brightest kid in a low performing high school, and they want to give that kid a chance. Or a world class athlete. Each kid who is at that school has a role in the school’s community. But that doesn’t mean that the elite school is a good fit for the kid. As an example, look at the threads for kids who want to be pre-med. You will see a lot of advice on CC that you might be better off going to your state flagship and being at the top of your class coming in and getting top grades than going to an elite school where you won’t stand out and are competing against the very best and you might not get top grades.
So even though OP’s original question was about Penn, Brown, Northwestern and Stanford. I think the answer will be that all of these schools have terrific tutoring and other supports. Whether this will work for OP’s student will depend on the student themselves, what they want, and what the financial aid package for the school will be.
Although my data is old I think some of it is still relevant. A kid who is at the bottom academically ( or just in terms of preparation due to a poor public school) is going to have a difficult time academically. Yes, there are many resources available. But would you want to be the only Freshman you know getting remedial help all the time? This can also create issues for the student in terms of confidence and fitting into the class ( many projects are group based these days). That said, some kids just don’t have access to all of the AP courses and skill sets that others do have. Hard work never hurt anyone.
As a parent, I would check data carefully. Many of these kids do not graduate or if they do aren’t as well served as going to an easier school. Some will go into easier majors then they originally intended or modify career goals ( this can be good/bad). If a kid is truly a natural scholar and hasn’t had access to a good education, that is one thing. If the kid got into the school for another reason and will never be able to hold his own academically even with hard work, that’s another thing.
Also, one has to consider that all students need to maintain good grades especially if they wish to attend graduate school. Only 50% of the class will graduate in the top half ( the rest never talk about how they graduated at the bottom half, though some might mention the name of the school).
At my school there’s a really big advising program dedicated to first-generation and lower-achieving students. And there are ethnic clubs where it seems a lot of those same students concentrate for peer support. I think it’s natural for academic advisors for push lower-achieving students into easier soft sciences and humanities instead of hard subjects like pre-med and engineering. At a certain point it’s just unrealistic to make up much ground. College moves so freakin’ fast, it’s not impossible, but it’s unlikely these students can make up 10 years of achievement gap. Earning any degree is better than telling students to try and try for chemical engineering, ya know. That could just frustrate those students, also takes a seat away from other students if they take extra years to graduate, while also using more and more scarce financial aid.
As far as I can tell there aren’t any studies that quite answer the OP’s question - but the test optional schools come close to having done the experiment. The fact is that students whose scores are lower are generally doing just about as well as those with high scores: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/education/edlife/the-test-optional-surge.html
Years ago Harvard said that they though anyone with 600 or so so SAT scores was perfectly capable of doing the work there. I don’t know what ACT that would have been back then, but it’s about 25 now.
I think I have some experience with this. While we do not have elite schools and we do not write standardized tests, we do have elite programs scattered across the country. Both of mine were accepted into a business program with a 6.5% admission rate. Admission was based on GPA and Ec. There were no hooks and no attempt at yield management. Classes were curved so an A was given to no more than 25% of the class in the first two years of the program.
My first entered the program with grades that were average for the class, and graduated in the average range (3.2x). My second came into the program with grades that were below average for the class and graduated in the low average to low range (3.0x). In both cases, they were holding their own in the softer subjects such as organizational behaviour and in their minors, but were having trouble keeping up in the more quantitative subjects such as mathematical finance and accounting.
Although we do not do SATs, the program uses compulsory math courses to separate students for consideration. My first had a 97% in senior calculus and only managed Cs and Bs in finance. My second had her only B in high school calculus and managed to survive finance by the skin of her teeth. (Now, a B in calculus means an automatic rejection letter).
Once they entered the workplace, they became the strong employees that their high school transcripts predicted. Their experience in college is now just a bad memory.
High test scores and high GPA tend to go to great all-rounders. A more lopsided kid, who chooses the right course of study for their strengths will be fine --even better than fine --, especially at a school with few distribution requirements. I can imagine that there are kids who are knocking it out of the park in comparative lit or journalism who were math disasters. And I have met a number of non native speakers who are brilliant at STEM subjects. So my guess is that when these lower stats kids are admitted, they are also clearER abut what they want from the experience.
It seemed to me OP isn’t talking about lopsided students but hooked development students in a pre-college feeder program. Pretending there’s no diff in outcomes between those kids and like perfect everything top of the class kids from competitive high schools is silly. Those top kids run circles around the former. I’m witness to it right now.
My direct college experience was that there was a difference in results with kids in the bottom vs the top of the entering class (T30 USNWR FWIW), but that was so long ago that it’s not necessarily relevant now.
My kids both attend and I graduated from a magnet HS where students have to have a certain level IQ and grades to be accepted, so every single kid there has the raw brainpower to handle the academics. With every student at 130+ IQ, you’d think there wouldn’t be meaningful differences in performance, but there still are. Even among that pre-selected group, there are kids who shine and kids who can’t keep up; some who can’t do geometry and some who have already completed Multivar Calc by 10th grade. No idea if the school has ever made an attempt to build a model to explain that - is it tied to IQ (my guess is no)? What would be the best way to predict that in advance and are there any accurate tools available?
My guess is at top selective colleges, the result is similar to what is found at the magnet school who preselects only certain kids. Even with that prescreening process, they don’t always know which ones will do well and which will struggle, but there will be some of each.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you all mean by development students? As to why there are pre-college feeder programs, there are federal and locally funded programs that exist to give underrepresented kids a chance to shrink achievement gap and an opportunity to attend top ranked colleges. Colleges give them a chance because these students add more ethnic and/or socio economic diversity to the campus. It seems a lot of people in this thread want to make believe everyone is on an equal playing field if they get into a top college. That’s just not true in the slightest.
“Development admissions” commonly refers to those admitted due to relation to a large donor or other very important (to the college) person. It is commonly believed that colleges will be very flexible in admissions standards for such applicants (much more so than for any other “hook” students like recruited athletes, etc.).
I.e. pretty much the opposite of giving students from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance.
One of my dad’s friends started a program back in the 1970s (something he really couldn’t do now) where he would go to the poorest neighborhoods in NYC and ask around to find the smartest kids as judged by their peers. They tended not to be good students in HS nor to have taken standardized tests. He would offer those kids full ride and support if they wanted to go to college upstate.
They spent the summer before freshman year doing remedial work, then jumped right in to normal freshman classes. Their graduation rate and average GPA were both higher than average.
So what’s my point? There are many kids (my D is one) where the metrics do not match the potential to do well in college. There are also kids from advantaged backgrounds with propped up numbers. A 31ACT from Stillwater could well be a better bet than the 33 from Exeter. The Machiavellian race for ideal academic measurements fits some better than others.
To add, both Stanford and Harvard grads have told me “the hardest part is getting in.” That would not be true of University of Washington Comp Sci majors where a 3.8 is needed to continue past sophomore year. Coming in at the bottom of the class means your major will be closed to you. It certainly wasn’t true when I was going through EE either. We knew who was not getting past sophomore year.
One of the aims of Admissions is to find kids who will add something to the college life while being happy with mediocre grades. I would be interested to know how they identify these students
Way back when we used to call those kids the happy bottom quarter. They got C’s belonged to finals clubs and had assured jobs with Daddy. They meant that you could have a curve that didn’t center on a B+. I didn’t know very many of them, but I don’t think they brought down the academic level in any appreciable way.
A relative of mine has tutored a wide variety of students at an elite college. The athletes and students admitted via an outreach program were painfully aware that they could not compete academically with the students who weren’t admitted under special circumstances. For this reason, they tended not to mix with the other students socially. They tended to work hard, get lots of tutoring, & take easier classes, so they usually graduated–but they still thought of themselves as second-class.
I’d point out that by definition, the only students your relative would meet through tutoring would be those students who felt that they needed extra help that they were not getting from other available resources.
Interesting conversation. I think that there are many kids with GREAT potential in K, who are not served by the public schools. They fall so far behind their peers who are fortunate enough to be in a school system that is based on high achievement. Sadly, at some point, they can never keep up. My oldest recently spoke to me about this. My kiddo said, “at some point, there is no way a kid who has not attended the after school programs, camps, music and art lessons and all the rest can catch up. You can see it in the classes”. Even with very smart kids in a highly selective boarding school with great resources ( and that is high school) they just cannot work at the elite level. It made me pause.
So the achievement gap is real even if the basic intelligence gap is not. That means that kids without a proper background will be in the same selective college class as someone who has been groomed for this environment basically since birth.
Some folks talk about it being possible to close the gap. I would like to believe this was true. Sadly, even several decades ago when I attended an Ivy league college this was not the case. Some who came from some great inner city schools could do it ( again because they had the proper background). Others never closed the gap. They remained socially and to some degree economically disenfranchised from the college. They graduated but they were never able to fully take advantage of the resources the school provided, since, they were focused on catching up all four years.
We need to think of ways to address achievement gaps in primary school. One way is to reintroduce gifted programs. Another is to have specialized after school instruction at low, no cost. By the time a kid gets to high school it’s already pretty late. By college, it’s almost impossible to bridge this gap. Tutoring isn’t enough. Easy majors aren’t enough. So the student in this position is at a real disadvantage.