Or how about admitting on academics? That would build a class of students with something baseline in common - a love of academics. Then they could bond over homework and projects as well as playing whatever games come to mind. Wow - a real college.
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Agreed, but academics is the ugly stepchild of highly selective universities. They hate āboring, academic dronesā as is constantly written on this site. A underprivileged kid with 1400ās SATās or even a bit lower can still have a love of academics on par or above a privileged kid with a 1550. So academics isnāt really the enemy of diversity.
But instead, we need violists, squash players and the bassoon. And those bassoonists have to fit an arbitrary archetype of racial and socioeconomic quotas.
I think weāre agreeing on this point.
That is the type of college @fiftyfifty1 has in mind I believe (although, she would like it nationalized).
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Michael Sandelās book āThe Tyranny of Merit: Whatās Become of the Common Good?ā explain well. Deeper issue, not just education.
Sooner or later perhaps we will also see the same in the workplace.
I donāt think so. Time will tell, and I believe the tide is turning (woo, a two-fer) Iād advise any student to excel at academics and the rest will take care of itself. If, instead, a student wants to takes their chances with football, or water polo, or claiming membership in a handful of sought after demographics - best wishes in the future.
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I note there is ample evidence that in order to be admitted to the most selective holistic review colleges as an unhooked applicant (and most successful applicants are unhooked), you first have to pass a very high academic screen. And many applicants do not get past that initial academic screen.
And of course many, many more unhooked applicants who will get into some pretty selective colleges do not bother applying to the most selective colleges, thinking (usually quite rightly) they would not have a chance. So in that sense, the academic screen is doing by far the most work in terms of cutting down the potential admit pool from the greater field of selective-college-bound kids.
The complaint is apparently that after that point, admits are not just selected by who has the highEST academic qualifications, but instead based on a mix of criteria including non-academic criteria.
But it sometimes seems lost in these conversations that FIRST you have to get past the academic screen. Which means virtually all unhooked admits are high academic achievers PLUS other stuff, not other stuff INSTEAD of being high academic achievers.
And actually, a lot hooked admits are not far off these days. Like, it seems at most of these colleges these days, legacies have to pass the same high academic bar to even be considered. They then have a somewhat higher admit rate, but by no means are guaranteed admissions even if they pass the initial academic screen.
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as a mixed race student in a town thatās 80% white (our school is 75% white only because of the METCO program being composed of primarily Black students), this 100%. it is EXHAUSTING to have to explain why something makes you uncomfortable over and over, and field defensiveness from white peers, or stay quiet in order to not rock the boat. it eats away at you.
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Iām not sure that any āinitial screenā is completely academic or that the bar for the academics is sufficiently high.
Dartmouth and others have said it is just academic.
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The very high graduation rates at these schools indicates that they set the initial bar high enough to ensure that the vast majority of students passing the screen are able to succeed academically.
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Depends on what you mean by āsucceed academically.ā Non-science courses at Ivies are not difficult, generally speaking, for example. And if they are still too difficult for some students, the schools likely lower the standards or encourage undemanding majors so virtually everyone can graduate.
53% of Harvard students graduating in 2023 graduated with with Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences degrees. Are you saying that they are academically inferior to those who graduated with Engineering and Science degrees?
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Well, I didnāt put it like that. And I donāt know about the current state of undergraduate science rigor at Harvard specifically. But I suppose I think itās true generally across Ivy-plus, and beyond, with exceptions, of course.
When I was in college, the number of students who came in wanting to major in something pre-med or otherwise scientific shrunk dramatically when faced with the realization that the āDā they were getting in first-year chemistry after six weeks was a bad omen for their success in a scientific discipline. So, they switched to something in the humanities or social sciences and did fine. But nobody ever took, say, first-year humanities or economics and said, āThis is too hard, Iām going to switch to physics!ā
Another way of putting it is that I think every hard science major I knew would have done fine enough to graduate had they majored in a humanities or social science. But many of those majoring in humanities or social science, including me, never could have graduated if they had majored in a hard science.
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I guess it depends on what you mean by doing āfineā.
I definitely knew STEM majors at my fancy college who really struggled with things like the papers and exams in just the basic required HASS courses. To my knowledge they passed, but it was not easy for them and I think if they had tried to major in those areas it would likely have gotten even worse for them as they got to the advanced classes where almost all the students had actually excelled in the basic classes in their major.
For that matter, I taught a HASS subject at a large public (as a grad student) where I got a lot of engineers and pre-meds and such fulfilling a requirement. Again, they passed, but I could often see them struggling too. In fact, I had one pre-med kid lobby me repeatedly for better than the B grade they got (to the point they basically told me I was ruining their life by giving them their first non-A grade), but of course that would have been unfair. And I definitely would not have encouraged all of them to try to major in my subject, where instead of some sympathetic grad student teaching an intro class designed for non-majors, they would quickly be hitting the real professors teaching advanced classes with more uncompromising standards.
And of course this is all AFTER these colleges set academic requirements for their admits that were intended to make sure all their majors can handle whatever gen ed or distributional requirements they might have.
Like, even MIT is going to make you take HASS classes, they are not particularly interested in students who are going to really struggle in those classes, and so they end up with a 25th SAT EBRW of 730(!). I think there are a lot of MIT applicants with like a 790 or 800 SAT Math but sub(for MIT)standard SAT EBRW that MIT immediately weeds out, and sometimes they canāt understand how that is happening to them. But the basic explanation is MIT has so many 790/800-type Math applicants that it can choose almost all people who have those Math scores AND also very high EBRW scores too.
OK, so I actually donāt think it is true at all these colleges donāt care about your qualifications for HASS classes and then just dumb down their HASS classes until everyone passes. I think they care about their HASS classes being taught to a high standard, and then weed out the sorts of STEM students who are not reasonably good bets to do at least reasonably well in the required HASS classes. And then further look for HASS admits who will be good bets to actually be standouts in the upper-level HASS classes in their majors, not just do āfineā in intro-level courses for non-majors.
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Letās get back to topic please
I have plenty of STEM majors who take my humanities classes to fulfill gen-ed requirements and have trouble with papers that require a much more rigorous discipline-specific standard of evidence and analysis than they expected for an introductory course. They assume it should be easy, but itās not.
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While our S did not have any real trouble meeting the demands of these type courses, he did have to invest more time than he first thought necessary. In the end he enjoyed the classes and expanded his horizons.
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To get back to the topic, then, to my knowledge all the most selective āliberal arts traditionā colleges (which includes the likes of MIT) are looking for exactly this when applying their academic screens. Not everyone has to be a potential future major in every conceivable subject, but to my knowledge they are all looking for applicants who will actually do reasonably well in, and find the benefit in, taking courses outside of their intended subjects.
And for the most selective colleges, this means even the successful STEM intenders have taken high-level HASS courses and done well, have quite high Reading/Writing test scores if submitted, and so on. And conversely even the successful HASS intenders have taken high-level STEM courses and done well, have quite high high Math/Science test scores if submitted, and so on. The groups will vary in their very strongest academic attributes, but very rarely do they actually have less than excellent qualifications in any major area.
So in that sense, I really do not think the OPās asserted premise that āacademics is the ugly stepchild of highly selective universities,ā the premise that has framed this entire discussion of the diversity goals of these universities when doing admissions, is actually correct. All these colleges first and foremost are looking for applicants who meet their high academic standards, and not just in their intended field but across the board.
And then once they have cut down the potential pool to just those people, then they start seeking to put together a diverse class across many dimensions, some academic and some non-academic.
But the broad academic excellence part is always the biggest single dimension.
But if that were the case, none of these colleges would have any āremedial levelā catch up classes. Since they typically do, it looks like either the academic bar is too low or that they allow too many routes around the bar. So, I guess that the key word is ārarelyā.
Right, sorry if I was not being clear, but I am talking about unhooked admits.
There are going to be recruited athletes who only have to meet a lower set of academic qualifications. I think they will typically say they wonāt admit anyone they think cannot graduate and such, but some recruited athletes may need help to get there.
I think sometimes a few performing arts admits can be in a somewhat similar category, although I think that is usually a lot fewer admits.
Then there are also going to be ādiamond in the roughā sorts of admits who they think have a lot of potential but have not had the same sort of college prep advantages as their unhooked admits. Again, some of these sorts of admits may need help making the transition to a successful college experience.
These categories are only going to add up to a relatively small fraction of the overall admit class at universities. Recruited athletes might be a somewhat larger (although still minority) percentage at some LACs, but then they seem to tend to have somewhat stricter academic screens for most of their athletes.
But in any event, the majority of their admits do not fall into those categories. And so these universities and colleges are definitely not treating academics as the ugly stepchild in any general sense. But yes, they may be willing to admit a minority of students who might need some extra help getting up to speed with the majority of students, meaning all the students coming out of high-level college-prep backgrounds in which they excelled.