“If colleges truly wanted to be transparent about what they looked for”
@roethlisburger They ARE transparent about what they look for.
Ivies look to build a class, which means they look to admitting a certain amount of athletes, musicians, scientists, actors, literature students, math students etc.
In addition, they look for students linked to great wealth (they always have) the ruling class (they always have) and – priding themselves on educating future power brokers – unusual leadership qualities (they always have).
It’s silly, naive or obtuse to pretend we don’t know this.
@katliamom , you have just made the argument against AA, and against the Ivy’s in general. I don’t think anyone- or group of them- who took out a $9 trillion loan - that’s almost $30K per person - and stuck us with the bill is anything but brilliantly incompetent (or worse).
If I’m obtuse or naive, I’m in good company with a lot of other posters. You see debates endlessly on this forum about how much benefit there is to various hooks, some posters questioning whether certain hooks exist at all, how demographics affects admissions, how going to a BS or elite public magnet hurts or helps admissions, how much weight schools give to interviews, and what are the interaction terms between all those variables. A well designed study with an appropriate data set would answer all those questions. The only downside is we might not have anything left on CC to discuss.
If they are transparent, then why would Princeton feel the need to argue in federal court, against the Department of Education, documents about its admissions process are highly confidential and will cause it substantial damage? How could telling the public what it already knows, cause Princeton substantial damage? If you consider your admissions process highly confidential, you’re almost by definition not being transparent.
So before they had all those athletic teams, the Ivies were chopped liver?!!
I seriously find that hard to believe…especially considering several of those colleges continued/thrived for a century or more before sports teams were introduced.
Another thing to keep in mind is that up until the early 20th century, Harvard and other Ivy/peer elite colleges used
academic entrance exams to determine who would be admitted.
Only the influx of too many academically talented “undesirables”* and fears they would displace scions from wealthy WASP families…especially multi-generationed legacies caused them to resort to implementing what we now know of as “holistic admissions”.
Mostly Immigrants who happen to be Jewish or Southern/Eastern Europeans.
While some of the resentment/stigma against those admitted with a hook might be due to feelings of being displaced, that wasn’t where most of that resentment/stigma came from what I’ve observed among HS classmates in my graduating/overlapping classes and older alums.
In actuality, the ones who had the worst resentment/stigma were those admitted to comparably elite Ivies/peer elite colleges(IME, mostly Harvard, Yale, MIT/CMU/Caltech and peer elite alums). And their reasoning was more to do with the feeling that someone being admitted with “lower academic performance”…especially legacies/developmental admits whose performance was lower than theirs despite having the benefits of high SES privilege “cheapens” their own admission accomplishments/degree.
It’s a dynamic not too far removed from the mentality many career military officers in my parents’ country of origin had for conscript officers like my father and a few uncles who managed to commission as second lieutenants with the same privileges despite never having attended the full 4-year military academy course* or from what I’ve heard from older US veterans, contempt some Federal Service Academy graduates had for officer colleagues who gained their commissions from ROTC or OCS who were not prior-enlisted before/during WWII.
In the case of my parents' country of origin, this resentment wasn't helped by the fact the contempt went both ways due to the fact the military academies in their society at the time had lower academic admissions standards than the universities so the conscript officers also had a fair amount of contempt for the career military officers who were superior to them while in the military, but once out in the civilian world were regarded as inferior to their university counterparts for being hired into mid-senior level civil service/private sector* positions.
Tended to be dominated by university graduates...especially from NTU.
"IF… and I repeat IF…(because I don’t really think it’s true)
Obama got into Harvard Law (or even Columbia) as a URM… wasn’t that a BRILLIANT decision? Wouldn’t that make Harvard/Columbia look like incredibly smart and prescient universities?
And wouldn’t that just prove that affirmative action WORKS? That it should be applauded and continued?"
Most times in life we simply cannot prove or disapprove a counterfactual—we never know what would have happened if the elite colleges always used objective standards to select future leaders. Its probably true that had those standards been in place Trump, Kushner, Obama and Bush would probably not have gone to Ivies, perhaps taken different life paths, not reaching the White House… Would the country be better off if someone else were in their places? Who knows.
In most developed countries around the world elite institutions do not use hooks in selecting students who would also go on to become leaders. Are they having worse political, financial and cultural leaders than us? Are their societies less egalitarian than us? Who knows.
Do they not factor in hooks of any kind in university admissions? I know China has geographic ones, which are sort of a proxy for wealth/position, for instance.
I think the only hook the ROC(Taiwan) universities that a HS classmate and one relative benefited from was if one was applying as an “Overseas Chinese”* or as an international student. However, this is limited to being held to somewhat lower cutoff scores for each given university/major.
And yes, there is a bit of resentment/stigma/dismissiveness*** directed towards beneficiaries of this hook by many domestic applicants.
One HS classmate who opted to do his undergrad in the ROC admitted that if he was applying as a regular ROC citizen attending their K-12 system, his national college entrance exam scores would have only entitled him to attend the #3-4 university’s engineering department rather than NTU’s.
And yes, he was ribbed a bit(more friendly teasing than anything else) for it by some classmates and later on, by barrack mates when he did his obligatory 2 year military service.
Heard Japan, Mainland China, and South Korea have similar policies regarding their overseas nationals/international students.
An ROC citizen who spent most/all** of his/her life outside of ROC controlled territories.
** If born abroad and parents registered the applicant’s birth at the local ROC embassy/consulate within a short period of time.
*** Somewhat similar to how male HS classmates who opted to attend Vassar back when I was in HS ~2 decades ago were regarded in contrast to their female counterparts because it WAS much easier for male applicants back then to be admitted with much lower stats than their female counterparts. As such, female classmates who opted to attend Vassar were well-respected…their male counterparts who did the same…not nearly as much.
Of course it seems oh-so-tough to decipher what the Ivies want when you’re trying to de-code it from USNews or stats percentiles. Lol. Or CC.
“If they are transparent, then why would Princeton feel the need to argue in federal court?” What should they have done, capitulate? They don’t want to reveal the individual applications, but still speak publicly online. It’s just that so many kids never get that far to look and try to piece it together, um, on an Ivy level.
How many of you could write a good Why Us? Or have seen what a range of kids put forth? Even if they have high stats and went to Lax camp.
Well, we already suspect that even an evaluative alumni interview means absolutely nothing, contrary to what some colleges claim, since plenty of CC folks have come on here to post that their alma maters totally ignored their interview assessments. As in totally ignored, since several posters claimed that their college had rejected the kids they thought were stellar but admitted the one student they had warned against. And as history related to Jewish students would indicate, the essay likely still exists as one aspect of a holistic admissions system partially designed to protect universities from legal challenges regarding the racial and other non-academic preferences schools wish to maintain. So no, it’s not a transparent process.
Further, having sat in on several application essay workshops at colleges, I can say that sometimes what adcoms claim are their assessment criteria are not actually their criteria when faced with an essay they really want to like. The shining example of a great essay they present to the workshop audience fails to do what they say they want the application essay to do, yet they lift it up as exemplary. Nope, no transparency there either.
Re: The “alumni factor” article discussed by @TheGFG in #70. There’s something wrong with this. It talks about a database of colleges with over 10,000 undergraduates, but apparently Harvard, Penn, and Cornell are in the database. Only Cornell among those three has more than 10,000 undergraduates. Penn is just short, with 9,700 and change. Harvard has about 6,000 undergraduates. I don’t know if this means the points being argued are wrong, but it sure calls into question the quality of the author’s information. And, by the way, I would characterize those three colleges as having a strong athletic tradition, too.
Re: Obama and Harvard Law School. Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. At the time, merely to be a member of the Harvard Law Review, you either had to be in the top 4-5% of the (very impressive) class in first-year grades, or you had to win a brutal writing competition with 100+ people competing for a very limited number of slots. Many of the write-on people had great grades that only barely missed the automatic cut-off. The election to be president is a brutal cage-match process with only one’s classmates voting in the final round. I know more or less well a bunch of people who were HLR presidents and people who were among the last to be eliminated in the election, and every single one of them is dazzlingly smart, at least. (Many of them are not particularly nice people, by the way. It’s a popularity contest of sorts, but it’s not about being everyone’s friend.)
I don’t have comprehensive knowledge, but I don’t think there was ever a HLR president who did not get his law review membership on grades vs. writing on. Everyone knew who was in which group, and the automatic members based on grades had 80% or more of the votes. So, whether or not Obama was an affirmative action admit to Harvard Law School, his performance there, in class and as a law review member, could not possibly have been less than stellar.
(I’m using the past tense because, while I knew a lot about the Harvard Law Review 20 years ago, I have no idea whether the membership criteria or election processes have changed since then.)
The alum interview is an “eyes on,” not a decision. You don’t know they’re “ignored,” just because an alum’s short interview wasn’t enough to pull through what otherwise may have been a less stellar app.
Sure, but given the alleged excess of qualified candidates for the elites, why take someone for whom an interviewer expresses a strong criticism or dislike? Unless the alum is expressing true discriminatory views, this makes no sense.
What kind of feedback can an interviewer provide from an hour meeting other than a general overview? If I were an adcom, I wouldn’t be happy if my decision could be overridden by a volunteer interviewer.
