I find it ironic that so many on CC feel that the American Dream is dead while at the same time advising aspiring students on how they may be able to capture their own American Dream. Maye it’s just the optimist in me, but I still believe the dream lives on, and that opportunity is actually growing for those who actively seek it (regardless of SES) and not wait for it to be handed to them.
Personally, I don’t believe that college is the only way to “improve one’s life”, and it’s a disservice to say to kids “just get a degree and you’ll be set”. In our society, the only thing that’s required is a marketable skill - my blue-collar plumber and my white-collar air traffic controller friends will all testify to that as they earn more than most college graduates.
College may help with social mobility, but increasingly a college degree in itself is not enough. As we sit on the edge of the fourth industrial revolution, there is the potential for great opportunities for those that see them.
Oh, and I forgot to add how much all this costs! Application fees are just the beginning, there’s test score sending fees, CSS (financial aid profile) sending fees (mostly for the Ivy’s and some Ivy wanna-bees), portfolio submission fees, housing commit fees (just in case they go there, you don’t want them living on the street), and the costs that will be associated with visiting campus for your top picks… forget tuition and cost of attendance, I’m tapped out now.
Both of mine in college have received mail and email trying to get them to transfer. I hadn’t seen that before but I wasn’t sure if it was new or not. They were both from (different) schools turned down as seniors in HS.
“The dream is not “dead,” when more factors are considered, while trades are strong, and in an era where entrepreneurial skills are valued.”
Agree that it would be good to have vocational training be a bigger part of the post-hs plans like in some other countries, but right now the difference in income between those who have a college degree and those who don’t is large enough that people straight away want to attend college.
“and that opportunity is actually growing for those who actively seek it (regardless of SES) and not wait for it to be handed to them.”
Opportunity is not growing but actually reducing for many if not most in the middle class. The numbers are not there to support your assertion.
I think you have to ignore an awful lot of debt reports to assume ‘straight to college’ is some advantage for everyone out there. Throw in the number dropping out or later living at home, the many jokes about being a barista.
Just going is no guarantee you can make the most of it. We’d all benefit from better/broader info. That includes the earnings potential from vocations. Drives matter. As does follow through.
As usual I had to go and reread the OP, because somehow everything veers into Top20 or elite school talk, which is not the reality for the majority. @austinmshauri your summary of the issue is dead on.
Opportunity may be decreasing for some as we enter the forth industrial revolution but it’s opening for others. Workforce transitions are never painless, but I think that today’s youth will have opportunities that are quite different than what many remember. But then again, I’m a “glass is half full” kind of guy
Recruiting of transfers currently at community colleges is common among public universities, and community colleges often willingly try to help students prepare for transfer.
So would four year colleges that do not recruit or admit many transfers now start targeting community colleges for transfer recruiting, or other four year schools?
@ucbalumnus My guess would be full-pay students at four year schools (maybe who have expressed interest in the school in the past) given the economic landscape most schools are facing. It’s easy and cheap to reach them and perhaps some are less than happy with their current schools, for whatever reason.
Schools will admit the way they want to build the student body the way they want. There is no right or wrong in what they choose to do. Imo though, if it’s a private institute, they can do whatever they want. But when a public institute uses too much of tax dollars to support their doing, it is wrong imo. You serve the public but you should do it in the way to support tax payers, aka the ones that pay your salaries.
How do you define legit ways? I was looking at tamu’s data for last Fall. About 35% of the entering class are first gen. What do you think about this number? While it is not the applicant’s false that they are first gens (assuming they are) and some of these might be well qualified, using this as a factor is certainly not “legit” in my view.
What kind of disadvantages? It’s certainly a nice thing to do to help the less fortunate and I’m all for it. But why should they have the advantage over others? Why should family income be a burden for the applicant? Many worked their behinds off to be where they are. We paid, we borrowed to get the education needed and paid back. Why is it ok for these people to pay for others’ healthcare, food stamps, and now their kids’ education?
I realize now that my comment seemed as though I wasn’t familiar with the process. I should have preferences with my D18 applied to 11 colleges -from reach and highly selective to rolling admissions - and she just felt like they all basically asked the same thing in different ways (‘Why us?’ or ‘Why you?’) She applied to: Vanderbilt, UVA, Wm & Mary, URichmond, Furman, Bham-Southern, Wake Forest, UNC-Chappel, UAlabama/Blount Scholars, Auburn, UAB. With the exception of Wake and the Blount Scholars at Alabama (which both have VERY unique applications) she didn’t find a great deal of variation among the schools. Questions may have been worded different but basically asked the same thing.
Now several of the additional scholarship applications were more specific, but general admissions didn’t seem too varied. She also applied to 25 outside scholarships (local, regional and national) in addition to several scholarships at the individual schools. I am guessing having been in the IB program made writing the essays second nature… I just do not remember it phasing her. They had to write on a variety of subjects throughout the program and their final diploma exams are actually papers they write timed with prompts unseen.
Also we are not wealthy people and she had no professional coaching, reading or editing her essays. I think I read like 2 but they basically sounded the same so… I think the personal essay is the one thing that any student, regardless of socioeconomic background, can write on their own and that can be used to set their application apart from others. And I also do believe (in fact I know first hand because we have friends who read essays for some universities) that most selective and highly selective schools do read the entire application.
Yet, if you look at the number of NMSFs in Chicago area, there is a distinct pattern of increased NMSFs as the income of the families whose kid attends the high school increases. I am also pretty sure that, compared to schools which are at the same level of achievement, but with lower income, more kids from your High School attend “Elite” private colleges. Also, compare the percent of students attending T-20 between your school and most Illinois magnet schools, like Northside Prep or Walter Payton. Compare the number of applicants to “elite” colleges, and especially look at the number of applicants to “elite” public colleges or other “elite” colleges which do not meet full need.
How many students graduating your school are attending a Community College for one or two years to get through the gen eds for less money than it would cost if they attended a 4 year college? In our pretty decent high school, in a district with a median income about 10% above the national median, it’s about 13%-15% of the graduating seniors. I would guess that it would be less for your school (though likely a good number). While I expect that the college acceptance list would be similar, I would also expect that a larger number of students from your school are applying to college like UC as OOS, which are affordable for all but the very wealthy OOS families.
However, New Trier High School likely serves the wealthiest community in Illinois (only 3% are low income. So it’s a better indicator of the power of wealth on admissions. They also shared a wealth of information on where many of their students of class of 2018 matriculated to colleges (at least those colleges to which at least 5 students matriculated), and the class rigor of these students.
New Trier’s HS Class of 2018 (about 1,000 students) had 24 students who matriculated to an Ivy, 10 to UChicago, 23 to NU, and an unknown number to Stanford and MIT (there were fewer than 5 at either). Other “elites” with a high number of students from New Trier attending were UMichicgan with 26, WashU with 11, Notre Dame with 6, USC with 8, and UT Austin OOS with 5. These are the colleges which the students attended, not the acceptances. They also did not include colleges with fewer than 5 students attending. It is pretty likely that more than 10% attend a T-20 college, and I would guess, that, based on these results, at least.
Since New Trier also shared the course rigor of the students who were accepted to these colleges.
While one would think that the students are accepted to very selective or extremely selective colleges are the students who took the most rigorous courses provided by the school - and the school provides a wealth of rigorous courses. However, this does not seem to be the case for many students from New Trier.
Many students were accepted to “very selective” colleges with relatively low rigor in their courses (fewer level 4 than level 3 courses or less rigorous): About 16 to Michigan, 6 to NU, 6 to WashU, 1 to Chicago, 3 to ND, 1 to Cornell, 3 to USC, and 3 to UT Austin.
If we start looking at all colleges with acceptance rates below 30%, we can see that the numbers of student accepted despite having relatively low rigor in their course set are: Tulane with 11 (of the 13 they accepted), BU with 9, Denison with 11 (all the accepted students), BC with 3, U Miami with 5, CWRU with 2, Colgate with 4, and Villanova with 3.
On CC everybody keeps telling students that to be accepted to reaches, they need to take the most rigorous courses provided by the school. Here we have a long list of students being accepted to very selective to super selective schools without doing that. Almost 1/2 of all the 181 students who are reported as attending a highly selective or extremely selective college, all of the acceptance rate range which is considered on CC to be a Reach for anybody, have been accepted to those colleges with a far from rigorous courses.
The most rigorous course set would be all 4s, and the next level, more 4s than 3s. On average, the students who took more 3 level courses than 4 level courses only took 2 AP classes on average.
Only 25 of the 159 students who matriculated to a very selective college actually took the most rigorous set of courses the high school provided.
So not only does it seem that wealth help with getting the right stats to be accepted, it helps one be accepted without the right stats.
PS. These included only students who attended New Trier for all four years. They do not provide the data on another 130 or so students who transferred to New Trier. So the actual number who are attending “elite” colleges is likely much higher, especially when considering that they did not count colleges to which fewer than 5 students matriculated.
New Trier is an outlier among large (4K students), public, non-test in schools. It has a long history of success in many areas…academics, sports, music, and theater. There aren’t many similar schools in the country with a more recognizable name.
Certainly part of the reason for the success of the school is the affluence of the community. Parents are highly educated, have high average incomes, and hold powerful positions in corporations, philanthropic organizations, and government. Their success leads them to have high expectations of their kids, invest high levels of resources in them, and consequently leads to relatively high achievement of the kids. There are relatively high rates of anxiety and depression among the students, and the community experienced two student suicides in 2019.
A few points to put @MWolf ’s comments in more context:
-4.2% of the school is low income/qualifies for free lunch, so roughly 42 students/class
-A significant proportion of the Ivy and elite LAC matriculants are hooked…generally athletic recruits and/or legacies
-Students can’t take AP courses until junior year.
-AP courses and level 4 courses (high honors) are weighted the same. The profile linked above shows less than 5% of students take all level 4 weighted courses over the 4 years.
-Level 3 courses are honors, so still high rigor.
-NT does not have grade inflation
-Average ACT is typically around 28. For 1,000 students in a public, must-take-all comers-school.
-Admissions officers tend to be familiar with NT, and know that a kid who took all level 3 courses (again, all honors), and did well in said courses, can succeed at any college. I would not refer to a kid who has taken all 3s, or a mix of 3/4s with a 30+ ACT as ‘without the right stats’ as mwolf does. That’s just misinformed.
-The long history and experience with past NT students having success at a given college gives AOs a valuable perspective…which translates to relatively good admissions outcomes…for good reason.
-But even these outcomes, which seem so good to someone overlooking much of the nuance, aren’t even close to those at the elite boarding schools!
“You serve the public”. Is that ALL of the public, or just the swatch of public who can afford to remove the obstacles to access? Because, those “other people” pay taxes too…
One of the founding premises of not only higher education, but of this country, where public schooling is concerned, is that a more educated society is beneficial and desired. We also know that poverty is cyclical. Society, as a whole, has a vested interest in breaking that cycle. It begins with ensuring at least the potential of a different future. Not to mention, Texas is one of the least educated states, and TAMU is a public university in Texas. If the university is serving the interests of the taxpayers equally and fairly, you should see a higher percentage of first generation students.
They don’t have the “advantage over others”. They are at a DISADVANTAGE to begin with. Leveling the playing field sort of feels like, to those who are used to being in an advantageous position over others, like they’ve lost something. Maybe they have, but it wasn’t something that they had a right to. It means that they now have to compete on more equal footing, and that can be scary, and frustrating, when what really has been ‘unfair/unequal advantage’ over time came to be seen as ‘normal and owed to me’. Lower SEC families worked their butts off too. Lower SEC families followed the rules too. Lower SEC families worked within considerable constraints, didn’t get even a smidgen of the right information, didn’t have access to all of the relevant resources, and paid into the same supporting tax system where higher SEC kids got what their kids didn’t in a public education.
In my kids (very) high SEC public school, he was spoon fed success, so it really would have been a lot of nerve for him to not take advantage of it. I don’t pretend, however, that every school, or even every district offered the opportunities that allowed my student to have, as a matter of standard practice, advantages that far exceed what is even typical at your average “Super-Uber-Very-Most-Maximized-Supercharged Competitive School”. And, my kid is an URM, from the minority group that, historically, is second to last or dead last in every “American Dream” KPI, including education, income, and upward mobility. My kid looks like a unicorn, not because he’s smarter than the average black kid (though, he is very bright). It’s because his parent (me) has far more income than the average black family, and I can take that advantageous position, and procure more, and better resources to pave his way. But, I know what it is, and what it isn’t. If my bright young man would have lived and been educated in a poor rural or inner city school, I can tell you this-- He likely would have still been a high performer academically, within the environment. That’s in his nature. What he wouldn’t likely have is an SAT score in the 98th percentile. He wouldn’t be well-traveled. He wouldn’t have had the time, opportunity, or luxury to have built his resume with strong and unique ECs and experiences. He wouldn’t have had the best or most motivated teachers, because the teacher pay at his school, and in our district is much higher than is even typical. He’s not distracted by hunger. He doesn’t work to help support our family. He isn’t responsible for raising siblings, while trying to do homework and chores that might typically be reserved for adults. He’s never had to worry about eviction. Our utilities have never been disconnected. He doesn’t navigate a world that has gangs, or rampant crime, or desolate poverty-- that’s “TV stuff” to him. He has a car (that I purchased, maintain, and pay the insurance on), so he isn’t limited on what beneficial activities he can participate in. Before he could drive, I (parent) have always had the flexibility to ‘get him there’. My kid got to go to camps, have private coaches (for sports), etc… There is literally no comparison, to his experience, and to what might be more typical. Money transcends even race. And, I’m not “wealthy” or rich", I’m on the upper echelons of “middle class”. ← Game changer to college access.
Advantage does not mean “equal to”. It’s an “over and above”. My kid was advantaged. Even public universities should consider that it is, what it is, and level the playing field of opportunity for those applicants who achieved without those advantageous boosts that my kid got.
As do the educational/income/opportunity gaps for minorities. Surprise, surprise…
@theloniusmonk I think your ealier point is a good one … the gap between upper class and middle class has grown more than the gap between middle and lower. And, in the college arena, middle class are likely the ones with a trickier landscape. Given that many (most?) schools are increasingly relying on ED, that erases the middle class. Only the very wealthy, who know they can afford full pay or those who will undoubtedly qualify for need-based $$ can safely apply ED.
As to the orginial post, a suggestion was made to make the process more uniform. That may be true, I don’t know. But I would also argue that the Common App (one move toward a more uniform process) has contributed to the huge upswing in competitiveness of many schools. It is very easy for students to apply to more schools. Simple supply and demand tells us what will happen as a result.
The easiest ways to level the playing field while still allowing room for applicants to differentiate themselves would be to change the Common App.
First I’d make the kids flag their top three or four schools. Not all apps are equal, and schools in the top rank should both know it and be granted extra privileges.
Then I’d standardizing the essays, require three from seven or eight options. But I’d let the schools in the student’s top tier require a specific one from the list. The difference would be that the same essay result goes to every school, so it would only work for “If you could be any kind of tree…” questions, not “Why us?” questions.
(Honestly I don’t think the “Why us?” essays are very good anyway, as the only thing that they add is a place to write down legacy information. How much value is in “Beautiful campus” or “Benedictine values” answers? It only serves to separate those who know nothing from those who paused to whip up a somewhat crafted response.)
You need a way to separate the kids from the numbers, because the top numbers can be bought. (Not directly, but test prep courses do work and are typically not free. SES to scores correlations are real.) Top essays can be bought as well (via admissions consultants) but average essays can still be useful to Admissions in ways that average GPA or test scores are not by telling backstories and showing voice and individuality.
Presenting an assumption as a statement does not make it a fact. We do not know how many of the matriculants were legacies or athletes. However, that just proves my point about the advantages of wealth.
Many other high schools, including my kid’s high school, also can also only take AP classes in Junior and Senior years, but students take about 8-10 APs, and only honors for the rest, if they want any good college, not to mention “elite” college, to consider them.
Creating a new “high honors” level doesn’t make them any more rigorous than the honors classes at other schools. It is difficult to consider that their “high honors” are so much more rigorous than “honors” at other schools, when you see what they consider to be “honors” class.
For example, in art electives, they consider drawing, painting, graphic design, etc to be level 3, meaning “honors”. At my kid’s high school, none of these is considered honors. The only course in art which was considered “honors” was AP Art. BTW, our high school has an amazing art department, and has the awards to prove it, so I am pretty sure that our HS’s non-honors art classes are AT LEAST as rigorous as NT’s “honors” art classes.
It seems that what they consider to be an “honors” elective class is equivalent to a “college prep” class at my kid’s HS, so I would not put them in “high rigor” categories,
Looking at their core course descriptions, I see nothing in their “high honors” courses which would suggest that it is any more rigorous than classes that are considered “honors” in other high schools. Moreover, their “honors” core courses also look suspiciously like the “college prep” courses offer at my kid’s high school.
Finally, what they call “college prep” courses (level 2) look very much like the courses which my kid’s high school have as their least rigorous level of core courses.
The fact that they only have three levels, and call their lowest level “college prep” doesn’t convince me that their highest level is any better than the highest level at 200 other high schools in Illinois. According to them, even the 2.3% who only took level 2 courses are on a “college prep” pathway.
With a weighted median grade of 3.44 out of 4, that looks like grade inflation to me. The GPA distribution at NT is left skewed, since with grades between 0 and 4 would have a median of 2. In this distribution, 75% of the GPAs are above 3.19. Since the average is higher than the median in a left-skewed distribution, their average GPA is likely closer to 3.5, which, again, demonstrates a fairly extreme level of grade inflation.
See above, about their definitions of what is considered a"college prep, “honors” and “high honors” course."
Again, you cannot present an assumption as a fact. What actual proof do you have that NT graduates are any more successful at “elite” colleges than other students? It is no more than your assumption.
New Trier only has the advantages of being an affluent high school. The boarding schools have a long list of other advantages, including being part of the “elite college pipeline”.
Not disagreeing with your claim that there may be grade inflation*, but schools where the great majority of students graduate have median GPA higher than 2.0. The GPAs of students who graduate range from 1.0-4.0 or 2.0-4.0, not 0.0-4.0. Those below 1.0 or 2.0 drop out, causing them to be weighted less (fewer semesters attended).
A median of 2.0 would be at a school with half of the students barely passing (D grades) or failing (F grades) but still enrolled.
*Indeed, some studies found that, for similar state subject achievement scores, students in affluent schools tended to have higher grades.
I didn’t say, or infer, that NT grads are more successful at ‘elite’ colleges.
ETA: In fact you referenced NT and elite colleges in your post here:
Where is this data from? Weighted GPAs go as high as 5.33, and only include core courses. Perhaps take a look at the School Profile.
Lastly, you have made many assumptions regarding the rigor by level, and trying to cross compare between schools…I’m not sure why? Is it to build the case that having 3 levels is somehow a sham, or unnecessary? I’m just not sure the point. I’m confident that AOs can generally sort thru these things.
