Does Relative Excellence Matter for Highly Selective Colleges?

Applying to College
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And supposedly sometimes filling more than one bucket can be seen as a positive, but that can be increasingly hard to pull off the more selective the buckets might be. Like, being seen as a good enough prospect to fill the dancer-but-not-dance-major bucket may be a lot harder at some colleges than others, and so it might be harder to combine at those colleges.

Speaking of multifactor analysis, I have never understood most of these colleges to be uninterested in attracting prospective CS majors. But I do think they typically want their sort of other-bucket-filling person who is also a CS major. So conditional on being such a person, being interested in CS could well still be a plus sometimes, or at least neutral.

Which I assume is already raising red flags for CS kids who are maybe not so confident in filling one or more of those other buckets. But this is definitely not unique to them. Like, at these colleges at least, being an intended Classics major alone is also unlikely to work. You still need to address that bucket thing, because everyone does in one way or another.

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But would some of the colleges be concerned about the CS major bucket overflowing, so they may now be adding a negative preferences to CS applicants even if they nominally do not admit by major (beyond the admission readers being bored by reading so many CS major applicants that may seem too similar)? Some of the wealthy private universities (like Stanford and Harvard) have rather huge enrollments in their CS classes, and some LACs (like Swarthmore and Pomona) have been rationing entry to CS classes or the CS major, which is typically something more commonly associated with large schools at the selectivity level of popular state flagships.

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It’s not that the school would be uninterested in CS students but rather that there is a voluminous amount of them in comparison to most other majors.

You can see at Oxford the admission rates and the breakdowns for each and every major. There are far more applicants for CS than there are for Classics for instance. Filling multiple buckets is not really relevant here though I will say that it’s likely far more of a must for a CS student or it might be that the CS student will have a higher need to score a 1 in some category than it would be for a Classics student though filling multiple buckets may be a must for both. I do realize that Harvard and Oxford are not the same but the point is that intended majors likely do have some impact even if it’s an unconscious bias when reviewing essays.

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At highly selective colleges with open major enrollment, CS is usually either the most popular major or 2nd most popular major. In the 2023 graduation year, CS was 2nd most popular at Harvard, after econ. However, this CS popularity is a relatively recent change. Back when the lawsuit sample occurred, CS was a far less popular major at Harvard than Psychology. In early years of the sample, CS was a less popular than English. At the time of lawsuit sample, the most popular majors at Harvard all fell under the social sciences grouping, which was the major grouping with the highest personal ratings regression coefficients.

I suspect the different average personal ratings by intended major has more to do with self selection. Students who favor majors/careers that emphasize studying people or interacting with people on average rate higher in measures correlated with interactions with people. Students who favor majors/careers that emphasize calculations with numbers or code over people are more likely to rate lower on such dimensions. Note that these are relatively small differences in the overall average, and there are many exceptions to these generalizations.

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Yale students have posted with some granularity as to what their actual admissions folder looks like. On the first page along with demographics is SAT and GPA. Most relevant to this conversation, not just GPA but GPA in comparison with the highest GPA from that school that year. What more direct expression that relative excellence in academics is “a thing” at Yale than that? Yale could have compared the GPA with the school’s 75%, the school’s median, the school’s average. No, they compare with the highest. Now others have to devalue this fact by saying “well being valedictorian doesn’t guarantee Yale admission”. I can’t see how that’s the same thing, but it sure seems that Yale will notice if you are the top academic student in your school by GPA.

Of course AO’s talk about generalized academic excellence and their individual and institutional role in reading essays and letters and their freedom to select whomever and whatever qualities they value. It is part of the same diversity lingo my friend got from the MIT admissions director. Look at the 25% math SAT at MIT among admitted students and the acceleration most students have in STEM and we can conclude MIT does not value relative math excellence with “over 70% of applicants being perfectly admissible”? Maybe we should look at (anecdote aside) who actually gets in. The reasons for emphasizing this viewpoint serve institutional and diversity goals, but as has been discussed recently on CC on multiple forums, such statements have to be considered in that light.

What you see right on the first page of Yale’s own process is that Yale takes note of relative excellence in academics. Even if the high school itself doesn’t rank, Yale notices relative academic performance.

And isn’t that what most high school students see played out year after year in real life? It’s not the top 5% students who are accepted. It’s the valedictorian or someone in the “top 2 or 3” at least for unhooked students from large public high schools in suburban USA.

Even seen through the lens of preservation of prestige which is another institutional goal of many colleges, they want to be seen as taking only the “best”. To be clear, no one is saying relative academic excellence is the ONLY thing or always the DETERMINATIVE thing. Despite specific facts both at Harvard and Yale, however, there are those who don’t want it to be anything or in some lights a bad thing.

Take, for example the issue of self-studied AP classes. Most schools have very regimented and bureaucratic processes in regard to acceleration to prevent the school from being embroiled with acceleration that doesn’t work out. Self study of AP chemistry for example with a 4 or 5 on the AP however would allow an interested student to take more advanced DE courses which on this very thread an application reader noted that their highly selective college does in fact value significantly. How do we expect students to get to those higher level classes if we snip their self-study ambitions in the bud and instead send them to museums, the coffee shop or out on a carefree stroll? That’s actually the carrot. The stick is “AO’s will think you are a drone”.

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Our large suburban high school is excellent. It offers dozens of AP and IB classes for anyone wishing to load up (no restrictions on who or how many), as well as access to unlimited DE options. There is an option for super-accelerated math, allowing students to start earning college credits as early as middle school. It produces dozens of National Merit finalists. Yet we almost never get an unhooked student into Harvard.

But this year we did. It wasn’t one of the top scoring students. It was a nationally awarded poet and short story writer. I have no idea whether this student wrote any of the short stories in a coffee house, however, or worked out any of the poems in their head while strolling, as many poets do. So I can’t speak to your specific concerns on that front.

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If a school doesn’t rank, Yale would not know the highest GPA in the class. Yale would only be able to see the GPAs of students from said HS who applied to Yale.

Most HSs in the US don’t rank
around 1/3 of HSs still rank, many/most are in TX. Most HS school profiles don’t show highest GPA (if they do, it would be from the prior year’s graduating class, not the current class applying with their six-semester transcripts. Many HS profiles only show median or mid 50% GPAs, again, from the prior year’s class.)

Regardless, I do expect Yale looks at relative academic performance in the cohort of applicants from a given HS
but they will not have the full picture of the academic performance of that entire HS class.

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I think it is interesting that the highly rejective privates actually restricting access to CS in some way are much more the exception. As another poster noted, others have just supported CS becoming a very popular major.

They could secretly be limiting CS intenders in admissions, of course. I just wonder if they really find that necessary in light of the other components of holistic review as practiced by these colleges.

Like, imagine a crudely simplified version of Harvard admissions where to get admitted, you needed to also be one of Newspaper Editor-in-Chief, Student Body President, or Varsity Captain.

Some CS intenders would survive that cut. But is it necessarily relatively more than Harvard admits today? I don’t know, I just think it is not obvious that Harvard has to do anything other than what it normally does anyway to get to the observed level of CS majors.

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I think it is true that Yale and others at least often look at relative performance in your HS when forming an internal academic rating.

I don’t think this observation is inconsistent with the idea that such a rating mostly plays a “good enough” role in their admissions decisions.

I think the complexity comes from the massive variety in school curriculums, grading systems, grading norms, and so on. And then there are many other factors they also may consider in forming an internal academic rating.

So guessing what sort of relative GPA you would need to get a good enough internal academic rating at Yale is often going to be tremendously difficult. But if your HS collects data like that, and has a large enough sample, you may get some clues from that data.

As usual, I am not sure there is anyone arguing otherwise. Like, I have frequently referenced the SCOIR data available to me for our HS, and have specifically discussed what it seemed to be suggesting about the competitive ranges for different colleges.

Obviously everyone understands this is only directly indicative for that HS, but I don’t recall anyone suggesting this was pointless for applicants from that HS. Quite the opposite, whenever someone is asking about chances, and it is apparent they go to a similar HS, usually multiple posters will suggest they should really be working with their HS college counselors, who have this sort of data and other information they can use.

By the way, I didn’t do a formal study, but I would say what I saw in our SCOIR data was broadly consistent with the good enough model.

Often there would be a more or less detectable range where inside the box (high enough GPA and test score) the frequency of admissions was decent. But it was not the case that all the highest people in the box were accepted. The data really doesn’t have enough depth to be sure what happens in the box, but it definitely was not inconsistent with all the applicants in the box having roughly the same chances.

Then outside the box, acceptances were rare, rare enough to be mostly just hooked. Not good enough.

The details were the more interesting part. Some colleges seemed to have tighter boxes and harder boundaries. Others were much more fuzzy. I think the most natural interpretation of that was some colleges had a stricter sense of good enough than others, at least for our kids.

Anyway, my point again is just that I don’t think there are many, if any, people here arguing that relative performance in your HS is never a factor in highly selective college admissions.

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Yes and that’s what I thought might be the case since it was mostly STEM but there is one exception - Biology. Yes, Biology falls under STEM technically but unlike the rest of the categories, there are more females in Biology and it’s a subject that is about studying the living system not calculations. For instance, when you ask Biology majors what would be their second choice of major, it will often be Psychology more so than Chemistry. I would think that Biology would not follow the STEM trend which is mostly dominated by males but it doesn’t. It is a popular major though as Psychology would be. Again would be interesting to see the rate of admission for majors.

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As said here not infrequently, are you willing to consider that your anecdote of n=1 may not be representative especially in a school for whatever reason generally not on a school’s radar?

My guess is that student also fared better and got more credit - in terms of relative excellence - than the students who made it out of the states but without national recognition in that same national writing competition. It’s nice to assume that the student entered that competition purely out of a virtuous love of writing and without regard to any effect that winning the competition might have on her chances of college admission. It would also be nice to assume that this writer gained such standout composition ability as you mention while strolling and not, as most professional authors I have seen speak, as a result of hours of reading and daily writing practice meticulously honing their craft.

The passage you quoted was about GPA, you mention that relative excellence in Poetry (another academic pursuit) is also potential advantage. Those two can’t both be true?

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I expect part of the holistic process does involve filtering students based on intended major. It would just be one of the parameters of admission hidden behind the word holistic. Yes, Harvard increased their size but there is no reason to make the assumption that the size was increased relative to the number of desirable applications to the area. While Harvard has tons of money, they would still need to hire faculty and make sure they have the other resources available - tutors, labs etc in a very short window of time to meet demand. I expect there would be a mismatch to some extent. On top of this, I don’t know if the school would want to increase the size of the incoming class to that extent when it knows that CS is one of those boom and bust fields. Right now CS may be popular but after the last boom before 2001 look what happened? Far less went into CS. Would they have wanted to hire a large number of faculty to accommodate the size of a boom class only to likely be under-enrolled during the bust cycles?

There are other problems with over-enrollment besides this issue. There are only so many facilities available and I expect this would affect STEM areas which require lab spaces more than other fields such as humanities or a STEM area such as Math. Often, when a field starts growing in popularity as Engineering has done, in order to accommodate students, new facilities need to be constructed.

Also schools do not want to flood the job market with graduates from one field who then can’t find a job so I would expect they grow classes more gradually than follow demand trends. Anyway, I see no reason to assume that the number of applicants to slots fills in naturally during some holistic process, especially as the data we have from Oxford or from state schools here suggest that certain majors are just harder to get into than others.

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This statement could be made of nearly any achievement of any type in High School outside of outlier recruited athletes, medalist mathletes, Regeneron Finalists and other very rarified goals.

It is true that being a class officer (with more credit being given to Presidents), being a varsity athlete (with more credit given to team captains - perhaps in another metric), more community service hours will all correlate positively with admission in exactly the way that you suggest with the most involved students beyond a threshold being more likely to be admitted. Just like students above a threshold SAT or GPA also being much more likely to be admitted.

What is different, are the responses that reflect the virtue hierarchy. If a kid wants to volunteer for 100 more hours, get a second or third job, lean into their lacrosse, absolutely no one says “why would you do that? you’re already volunteering 200 hours and there is no statistic that says that 100 extra hours will get you into Princeton. There’s a threshold and beyond that you’re wasting your time!”. No one would say, “that extra job won’t matter! You already have a job, and you already interact with customers, and a second job is beyond the job threshold, and it won’t guarantee your admission to Vanderbilt”. Certainly no one says “you’re already a varsity lacrosse player. Put down the stick or AO’s will think you are a boring, jock drone”. The desire to set ceilings in academics are palpable.

That’s the virtue hierarchy that it really doesn’t take much to see. And it’s also a false hierarchy.

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In my son’s class, a kid outside the top 25 (they didn’t rank but named the top 25 - something they don’t do today) - that student went to Princeton
how?

The Valedictorian was rejected at Tulane. Attended Vandy.

Most the top 25 attended state flagships or regionals - a few unknown Christian schools like Lee U.

My daughter’s valedictorian with the 36 ACT applied to 16 top 20s. Rejected to all. Goes to UTK.

We are from the wealthiest county in our state and highest rated school district.

I don’t think anyone can dissect enough to determine who gets in and why at the most selective.

And I don’t think anyone should alter their life in hopes of doing so.

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Yet this is one of the principal questions that brings students to this website. It’s not a question of guarantees, it’s a question of what can and does matter. And setting an arbitrary threshold ONLY for academics is a pretty transparent method of making academics largely not matter. Which is inaccurate.

The enemy of any attempt to find meaning is anecdote.

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I think your perceptions do not meet reality when it comes to this topic. I can not imagine even one poster here who would encourage students to do more volunteer hours or get a second or third job or lean into their lacrocsse in order to get into a brand name school. In fact, I have not seen a post which asks people on this forum about whether they should add more volunteer hours or play their sport more in order to get into a brand name school. I think the difference here is that there are some posters who do ask will it help me to get into a T20 if I self-study Calculus? The answer to that question is no it won’t. Had the poster asked will help me get into a T20 if I do 100 more volunteer hours guess what the answer would be? No, please don’t waste your time doing more hours if the only reason you are doing so is to get into a T20. The same with lacrosse or whatever other activity you want to ask about.

If someone had asked the following quetion - would it help me to get into a T20 if I become so good at Lacross that I am recruitable or would it help me get into a T20 if I self-study Chemistry with the goal of participating in ISEF and winning? The answer would probably be yes it can but it’s nowhere near a guarantee so if your sole reason for doing the activity is to get into a T20, and you’re still not likely to make your goal, do you really want to invest your time and energy into this ie. are you truly interested in the activity for its own sake because if not, most posters would probably advise that you probably should do something else with your time.

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[/quote]
I guess you feel very authoritative in speaking for every student in every school in every situation with making this very dogmatic statement. There is at least one active commentator here whose child did self-study Calc, used that advancement to engage CS / Engineering research and ultimately attended MIT. So to the question of whether self-study of anything can help - in your words “no it won’t”.

I would disagree with you that the multifactorial admissions process and its uncertain outcomes should lead to nihilism (apparently according to you on every front) - Nothing matters because nothing is a guarantee.

If students don’t lean into squash, get a job or start nonprofits with any eye that it will help with brand name admissions, well there are a lot of coaches, companies and groups that should be out of a job. I guess we shouldn’t strive for anything right? You’ll get what you get and not get upset!

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Again I am not sure whose voices you are purportedly representing.

Speaking for myself, if a kid loves doing some academic activity, I would not encourage them to stop and do something else for the sake of college admissions.

If a kid instead is doing something they don’t love but because they think it looks good for college, I might encourage them to see if they can find something else they would love. And that would be true whether it was academic, non-academic, and so on.

And finally, when it comes to what sort of person any given college wants, what buckets it has to fill, or so on, I would encourage ignoring that. Be the best version of yourself, then find a great college that wants that. Don’t try to be something that isn’t the best version of yourself because some particular college might prefer that thing.

All these are consistent sentiments. And they are not telling kids they can’t love academics, if in fact that is what they love.

But if you then ask me what Harvard seems to look for, I will tell you what I believe is a good answer to that question. Not because I believe you should then do that. But because that is the question you asked.

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Some do. Have a 3.0, in at ASU and U of Arizona should you have completed the proper hs curriculum.

Others are holistic. I remember one year Chicago showed a 20 ACT amongst the admit. Was it submitted for admission or after admission when they asked for data.

Holistic = their rules.

Some schools don’t track interest. Yet they have ED which is for exactly that purpose - and I don’t believe them otherwise.

This is a safe whose code can’t be cracked.

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Who said anything about nihilism? I’d prefer the term “realism”. I don’t feel S24’s academic accomplishments were wasted because he didn’t get into a T20. Because of them he was a credible applicant and while I wasn’t surprised he got WL/rejected, I would’t have been shocked if it had gone the other way. I do think that if a kid is unhooked, and comes from an area of the country that is very well represented at T20 schools, their chances are not great even with stellar academic credentials. Does that mean, don’t work hard or strive for academic excellence - no. It’s just that when a school accepts 4% of applicants you have to be realistic because even if you have a better than average chance of acceptance, the odds are still heavily against you. And not for nothing, a student with a great academic profile is going to have many, many good opportunities at colleges even if doesn’t end up being a T20. S24 is at UVA and he is already a year ahead in credits which will allow him to finish in 3 years if he wants or to have plenty of room in his schedule for a double major or to go abroad etc. His hard work did pay off even if it wasn’t exactly in the way he planned. So yes, academics are critically important - both in terms of college acceptances/opportunities and by giving kids the skills they need to be successful once they are there.

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