As to the question of a rigorous academic bar, a head of admissions at a HYPMS school just last week told my best friend that “out of 25k applicants, we feel that 18k could handle the academics”. An academic bar that 72% of all applicants pass doesn’t really sound like that high of a bar.
So yes, it would appear that academics is the ugly stepchild. Even a 1600, 25 AP’s with all “5”‘s, 10 DE classes, a gold medal at the IMO won’t get you in. In fact, many here repeatedly say that having those academic credentials actually hurts your admissions chances because you are a presumed “academic drone”. To the predictable reply that “the best students often have the best EC’s”. To the predictable reply with skepticism that anyone working that hard can be “authentic” in their pursuits or a “well-adjusted person” because they haven’t worked shifts at McDonalds. This is the kind of debased conversation we have - questioning students’ authenticity or character who we haven’t met - and drawing negative inferences from academic excellence - that is another consequence of the mist of “diversity”
Academics are devalued or worse, but hey, if you’re a good violist or play the trombone, we might have something. 10x more the situation for recruited athletes who, it is well known, don’t meet the academic bar. So we are left with the whim or political proclivities of the specific AO reading your application. That counts more than the thousands of hours of dedication that leads to those academic achievements - or non-academic achievements unless you are John McEnroe or Yo Yo Ma.
The Admissions Director who my best friend spoke to put it this way: “A lot of it comes down to luck - who is reading your file”. After all of the planning, work , anxiety, sweat and hopes expressed by students and parents on CC, is the admissions system supposed to be so arbitrary? “Diversity” allows this to continue to be so.
Yes the operative word is applicants. That is the word I used. That is the word that was used by the Admissions Staff, and that is the only word that makes sense in the context of 25k. And 72% of applicants being able to pass an academic bar in their evaluation is a meagre academic bar.
What you mean by “fly-by” applications, I’m not sure. In the era of test-optional and the common app, both led to big spikes in application numbers, some would argue by less qualified candidates.
Setting the academic bar so low (72% of all applicants are a good academic fit), you leave the most possible space for “diversity” and its cadre of secretive, contradictory, arbitrary and capricious factors.
Being a IMO gold medalist is a hook and students with that credential are very likely to be admitted to one or more HYPSM. But absent that (or another similarly prestigious academic award) a high performing unhooked student isn’t going to have great results most of the time. Going into application season I was pretty sure S24 would not do well at T20s because other than outstanding academics he is just a nice well rounded student with solid but typical ECs. I was proven correct as he was rejected or WL at all T20s.
From your last two responses, I just want to make sure we’re speaking effectively.
Application and Applicant, in my mind, is the action and person of someone submitting her record to a university as a prospective student.
Admission or Admitted, in my mind, is a positive result after the process of evaluating the submissions by all students is completed.
The academic bar is where students’ records are evaluated as to the strength of their grades, scores and rigor. Part of the evaluative process after applications are submitted.
I always thought this was the most disingenuous comment AO’s from selective schools make. Since they are admitting students (usually athletes) at well below the 25th percentile (500’s /600’s SAT and below 3.0 GPA in the latest Harvard CDS) they have set a pretty low bar for “handling the academics.”
I would say that I valued having classes and socializing with fellow students from diverse backgrounds, geographies, politics and interests both from an academic and life’s lessons perspective. Personally, I don’t think the demographic makeup needs to match the general population’s to achieve the benefits of diversity, although a certain critical mass is probably required or certain groups would just opt out.
That is exactly the problem. A small fraction of students at the T20 schools is a nationally ranked anything, nor an IMO gold medalist. I’m pretty sure there are entire threads on this website discussing how being an IMO gold medalist is itself no guarantee.
Most of the students at T20’s are, in fact, exactly like your S24. So why not him? That answer gets buried under the secret sauce of “diversity”. Some are hooked. Most are not. So what happened?
I think students and parents deserve more than “everyone is great. you are great. don’t call us, we’ll call you”. I’m sure your son is great in ways that are unique from every other strong student in his class. But apparently that didn’t matter that year to T20’s. Beside the point that your S24 almost definitely enrolled in a great college. But he applied to the T20’s meaning he did want a shot. And I think that shot should be a lot more transparent.
In other words, we could spend all day trying to evaluate the credentials of students who were rejected by HYPMS or we could stick with evaluating the kids who actually matriculate and form the actual student bodies which, presumably, are the subject of the discussion. Am I wrong?
Not insofar as we are discussing the actions of admissions officers that serve the goals of “diversity” whatever they are. Most discussions in the “Applying to College” section here are about that step and not about what these kids do after they’re in college.
You need to be careful with statements like that. What we know from things like data in the Harvard lawsuit, CDS disclosures, and other statements AOs have made is that at least for unhooked applicants, they tend to impose a tighter initial screen. Statements like the one you are citing tend to make room for various hooked applicants, but in practice most successful unhooked applicants have to clear a higher academic bar.
So, for example during the time period covered by the Harvard lawsuit, we know that unhooked admits usually needed a Harvard 2 for Academics, which was generally defined as “Magna potential: Excellent student with superb grades and mid-to high-700 scores (33+ ACT).” This requirement was consistent with what Harvard reported in CDSs from the era (and the other data in the lawsuit).
At that time, Harvard was typically getting in the high 30Ks for applications, and around 40% got the necessary Academic 2. Since then their application volumes have gone up, but we know the number of applicants with such qualifications are unlikely to have scaled up proportionately. So while we don’t have the same sort of hard data, it is very likely that the percentage of applicants that Harvard is scoring that highly for academics has gone down from 40%.
Of course, again it is not just Harvard imposing this screen, most college-bound kids will opt out of even trying when they see they don’t have competitive numbers for Harvard and have no other special case for admissions.
OK, so continuing the example above, after applying that de facto academic screen for unhooked applicants, Harvard still had approximately 8 times as many applicants in that academically-competitive pool as they were going to accept. Meaning they were only going to accept approximately 12.5% of the 40% who had gotten that far.
At that point, what is true is Harvard was not necessarily going to accept, say, an unhooked 1600 SAT applicant over an unhooked 1550 SAT applicant. Instead, they were going to also look at factors like activities (including non-recruited athletics), and what they called their Personal rating.
But unhooked applicants who did not meet that academic threshold were very unlikely to be admitted. As an unhooked applicant you typically needed all of these things, high scores for academics, activities, and Personal, to get admitted.
So, Harvard was not ignoring academics, indeed it was arguably the strongest single factor once you account for people simply not even bothering to apply with too-low numbers. But it wasn’t ONLY using academics. And that meant it would sometimes select a 1550 over a 1600, and so on.
I can’t answer for what you think other people have said, but what you stated here is certainly not accurate. Having high academic credentials helps because it can get you past that high academic screen.
What is different but actually true is that if you ONLY have high academic credentials, you might not get sufficient ratings for activities and Personal characteristics. But high academic credentials are not mutually-exclusive with such ratings, and indeed that is what Harvard was (and likely still is) looking for in their unhooked admits, the applicants who have it all.
But sure, if you are the type of person who ONLY has high academic credentials, who is not also going to get an outstanding rating from Harvard AOs for your activities and Personal characteristics, that might indeed be a problem for Harvard and other similar colleges.
All these colleges have written internal policies and practices, more senior AOs supervising more junior AOs, and then admissions committees where the actual decisions are made by a combination of AOs and other representatives of the college’s stakeholders.
The reason the outcome of that process is so hard to predict is that these colleges have no one sort of applicant they want to admit, they are trying to bled together different sorts of students to create an overall community. So just knowing your own characteristics (and people typically don’t actually know some critical things like their recommendations) isn’t sufficient for predictive purposes, it is all contextual in ways you have no way of predicting in advance.
Realistically, though, you can normally have a good idea if you are going to pass that initial academic screen as an unhooked applicant. And again, many people who would not simply do not apply.
But if you are among the rare few college-bound kids who actually does have the academic credentials to be competitive as an unhooked applicant to these colleges, whether you will end up among the 1 in 8 admitted or the 7 in 8 not admitted out of that competitive group is the contextual part you typically cannot predict.
It really pays to understand “difficult to predict” does not mean arbitrary. The admissions committees at these colleges do not make arbitrary decisions. They do make difficult to predict decisions. And understanding that difference is rather critical.
My bad. I thought we were discussing “Diversity. Why is it good?”
Maybe the answer is buried under the very concept of a T20 college or university. Who set that threshold? Why not T50? Or, T100? It’s a little like applying to an exclusive club and then complaining that you didn’t get in.
Yeah. So did I. If we’re not, that’s fine too. I’ll gladly close the thread if the conversation is exhausted. One is certainly welcome to start a new thread for topics unrelated to diversity.
I am letting the OP sort of dictate the flow, without granting all the OP’s many premises.
So, the OP has essentially equated “diversity” admissions policies with “arbitrary” admissions policies, but what the OP is actually talking about is “difficult to predict” admissions policies.
And I do think “diversity” is not the worst word for those difficult to predict admissions policies, in the sense it is true these colleges are looking to put together a lot of different sorts of students and not just one type, and that sort of goal makes it very difficult to predict what will happen to any one individual applicant.
And given all that, I do think discussions of why some colleges end up more difficult to predict for high numbers kids than others is relevant, because the OP has drawn a plausible connection between that observable outcome and diversity policies.
S24 had several things working against him (in my estimation) - he’s UMC, comes from a state that tends to be well represented at T20s already (Mass) and didn’t have some kind of quirky or interesting ECs that would make him stand out. I’m sure he passed the initial academic screen everywhere (3.98UW/1580 SAT) but as these schools aren’t rack and stack, that meant relatively little. It is what it is, and going into things I was well aware that his chances weren’t great - of course, I wouldn’t have been shocked if he had been accepted because he did have a really strong application but that wasn’t the way it went. In a different year he might have had different results - you just never know. He’ll be attending a great school that he likes (UVA) so everything has worked out just fine.
It’s no big mystery. The colleges with the resources to scatter their AOs across the country to recruit and then later support kids from distant population centers happen to correlate with the most popular colleges in the country.
As am I, but only to an extent. It’s unwieldy when the discussion turns into “What is a T20?” as an example. So nobody should be surprised when a post suddenly disappears.