For argument’s sake, let’s assume Harvard could charge $2M/ year and be at capacity. In a few years, nobody would want to go.
Elite institutions are elite because they attract the best and brightest. The moment perception changes, the focus would be on finding the best deal. Flagship state schools likely would inherit the scandals and focus (more than now). Human nature finds a way.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Things to add to the list to move on from: denigrating any particular college, defining terms such as “elite” or “sour grapes.” Additionally, if your proposed post starts with “Not to debate, but…” “Why aren’t you answering me?” then you should probably forgo making that post.
Some of it is pure intellectual snobbery. I see so many threads here espousing the idea that kids can only really be challenged, really be educated and really grow at an elite college. These threads talk about how people should value education for its own sake and that it should not be about getting a job. They talk about how their high stat kids would be uncomfortable at a place where their stats are above the median. The common response is to try to comfort these people with tales of “honors” colleges where all the elite stat kids can gather together and enrich each other.
Is it any wonder that kids who are raised to believe that they can only truly thrive among others just like them are devastated when they don’t get in?
This is the best comment on elite college admissions, from an admissions officer, that I have read during all this fallout from the admissions scandal:
https://nyti.ms/2W3FxvE#permid=31092396
Basically, that high grades and board scores are what you need to be considered-- and the other things (urm, geography etc) are what get you admitted.
gallentjill - great comment!
I get the impression the popular focus is on Olivia Jade because she seems to be a ditz. The content of her success is off-sides, non-academic, not about community good, but all about her, not in any way related to what top colleges search for. But she was dressed up as a valid recruit and that (apparently) worked.
Did she “take” a position from another great kid? Maybe. That denied kid could have been a valid recruit. Maybe that other kid does get in via the front door (based on the holistic review of his/her app, not athletics.) Maybe not.
But the point is, again, that these families cheated. Not what someone thinks admissions should be. Not about legacy or the few uber donors whose kids are qualified and get in, (but you assume not qualified enough.) Not about percentages of top scorers or wealthy families at some college. Or costs.
And remember: the quotes about so many applicants being “qualified” to do the work at College X is NOT an indication they are true contenders. There is a lot of room in the Common App, supp, and even the choice of LoR writers, to flub. By your own hand.
Btw, the link in 2623 is not to an article written by an adcom. It’s the author’s opinion piece and apparently she went to Cornell. Ther comment by “Lynn” on March 16 gives an idea of the comparisons made, but doesn’t name the college this one works for.
@cinnamon1212 I think that article is quite elitist in its own way. Here is a first generation college student who GOT IN to Cornell – in other words, her hard work was rewarded. She is complaining that one student she met didn’t seem to have worked as hard as she did. She complains that this student seems to have gotten in because, for generations, her family had been showing loyalty to the school through donations. Those donations are probably what allowed her to attend at a greatly reduced tuition. This author is complaining about the system that, in this case, worked perfectly as designed. It seems truly ungrateful to me.
“This is rich…perhaps because Universities don’t feel they need a lottery to construct a class. This is what certain parents feel, but parents don’t make admission decisions lol.”
I suppose if one’s student benefits from the University’s current decision-making, flawed as it is, one might agree with this statement.
There are others ( both those whose students got in and those whose students did not get in under the current system) who feel differently. They may feel that way because a fair and transparent system is better for everyone, even if it doesn’t necessarily benefit their child in particular. Some variation of this has been stated repeatedly on this thread by parents whose own children (and/or themselves) have been admitted to elite schools, only to be met with animosity ginned up by the misperception sour grapes.
Then again, there are universities, both public and private, who consider their service to taxpayers part of their mission because taxpayers help pay the bills. It’s no different than protecting the interest of current and future alumni and donors. Some of them might also have a self-less reason to serve the greater social good. It’s possible that a fair and transparent process would be helpful in the PR department when the “system” need it most - like now, during this crisis that could blow up even bigger.
For the above two reasons, the search for a more fair and transparent system should be debated on its merits, not dismissed as sour grapes.
That is a laudable record of academic achievement! Your family has much to be proud of. So tell me, with such a broad and deep record of academic achievement in your family, why should your child receive essentially a 15 -20% boost in his/her application to highly selective colleges, versus any other applicant?
As for evidence regarding the fact that most people of color admitted to top universities are NOT the descendants of people who were slaves in the US, please see the article entitled, Top Colleges Take More Blacks, But Which Ones?, published in the NYT 6/24/04. The point of the article is that the beneficiaries of racially preferential admissions (and if you need evidence of exactly how large those preferences are, there’s plenty of evidence for that, too), are largely people who are NOT the descendants of US slaves.
But that is not the point of this thread. The point of the thread is the exposed corruption in admission to highly selective colleges. And my point was that the root of the problem is exactly the way that the institutions are handling admissions. When people can buy their child a seat with a large donation, when athletes receive preferential admissions (unless we’re going to admit that college sports have become pro-sports), when people whose families spent one generation in Latin America while fleeing the Holocaust are admitted under racial preferences because they are supposedly “Hispanic”, when the children of highly educated, wealthy, two-Nigerian physician families are admitted with racial preferences because they have dark skin, you have to acknowledge that the entire system of admissions to highly competitive colleges is corrupt! So who could blame a huckster and his co-conspirators for trying to get in on the action? It’s the poor schnook kids who work so hard to establish super-human high school records, who never had a chance of getting in, that I feel so bad for.
and yet there is one highly highly selective school in pasadena that gives no preferences based on race and no preferences based on geography, athleticism and has been doing it for many years
What exactly does it mean when people say that students “didn’t get in.” I am assuming we are talking about high stat kids who didn’t get into one or more of the top elite universities. However, I am willing to bet that all of those kids got in to some fine school.
I have seen posts where a student was rejected at Princeton but accepted at 3 other Ivie’s including Harvard, complaining that the system is broken. They talk about how unfair it is that some athletes from their school got in and declare the system rigged. They conveniently ignore the acceptances as evidence that the system works. Show me the high stat kid who applied to a reasonable range of schools and didn’t get any decent acceptances and then I will be much more likely to see the system as broken.
The system has vulnerabilities and was hacked by unscrupulous people. Those holes need to be plugged. That doesn’t mean you tear down the entire thing.
The link I shared was someone’s comment on a nytimes OP ed piece. (“Lynne”'s comment), to clarify.
A different take on the “front door” – also rife with gamesmanship, not surprisingly.
"Maybe that shortcut to admissions — what Singer allegedly referred to as the “back door,” as opposed to the “side door” he offered — was too expensive for the families accused of paying for his services. We should prosecute Singer and his clients, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves: These families are a red herring, a drop in an ocean of purchased advantages. And even without Singer, the students who come in through the “front door” at elite colleges, by simply applying and being accepted, have also often bought their way in.
Rich parents spend millions on their children to make them “better” than others. They send them to private schools with squash programs and crew teams and ballet classes that increase their chances of college admission; they pay for bassoon lessons that help serve a “critical need” for university orchestras. They pay so high schoolers appear truly extraordinary, with richly financed expeditions helping to bring fresh water to poor foreign villages, or use their social connections to set them up with summer positions at places like the United Nations. Parents deploy their wealth to make their children look interesting and have the right “talents.” It works: Children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend elite colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent. "
Seems kind of like how donation / development admissions works.
Gotta quit relying on articles from 15 years ago. And treating NYT or other media as authorities.
And assuming nothing has changed, wealthy equals better or even more assured of a spot. Or that wealthy urm applicants are favored. This is a chunk of what I mean about becoming better informed. Not just spreading something you heard or read. Sheesh.
"What exactly does it mean when people say that students “didn’t get in.”
I meant “didn’t get in to an elite school” – the kind that people would bribe scammers to get into. Given the context of this thread, I didn’t think it needed to be said.
I’d be surprised if people are paying $500,000 to get their kid into a match school, or a fall-back school.
Of the “other things” beyond test scores and high school record, most people here appear to assume that visible factors like URM and geography are the most important factors in college admission. However, they are among the least important of the various factors listed in CDSes of colleges generally: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/22078865/#Comment_22078865 .
Besides high school record and test scores, some of the more important factors are those which admission outsiders have no way of knowing how they compare to a college’s applicant pool: recommendations, essays, “character/personal”. At the “average college”, these are likely to swing the admissions reading evaluation much more than URM and/or geography.
Also note that the high school record factors are more important than test scores, but posters on these forums appear to believe that test scores are more important.
@parentologist I personally believe that it is hypocritical of people to express moral outrage, call a system rigged, and advocate for its destruction based on it affording benefit to students for attributes not reflective of the applicants merit or potential contribution to a college community (like legacy status), when they have sought exactly that sort of benefit for their own family members. As a theoretical example…if someone were to apply to an Ivy League college and expect and anticipate a “bump” based on legacy status, I would find it distasteful for them to call the entire system bankrupt once their kid didn’t get accepted.
Under such a theoretical scenario the real cause of outrage would be the “rigged” system didn’t work they way The legacy parent thought it would benefit them, while the true answer is the system worked perfectly weeding out undeserved biases.
@cinnamon1212 says:
“This is the best comment on elite college admissions, from an admissions officer, that I have read during all this fallout from the admissions scandal:
https://nyti.ms/2W3FxvE#permid=31092396
Basically, that high grades and board scores are what you need to be considered-- and the other things (urm, geography etc) are what get you admitted.”
Did you actually read the article? It didn’t speak of URM or geography getting you admitted. It spoke of development and legacy cases. Presumably because the writer was a 1st generation student. People tend to talk about groups they aren’t a part of. She spoke of how standardized testing is biased against minority test takers, etc…
No that doesn’t make it corrupt. It’s flawed but not corrupt. Look most colleges are more than just academic endeavors. Yes, the classroom stuff is paramount, but they believe a well rounded class of scholars, athletes, musicians, writers, actors, band kids, and kids from different backgrounds provides a robust learning environment.
So a rich African American kid brings perspectives that a poor rural white kid does not, a cello player whose application was tipped into the accept pile because the orchestra leader needed a talented cellist is bringing something valued to the school. Schools are looking to accept more than just an academic resume - so a smart athlete or a smart theatre kid or a smart debater offers the school something to round out their class more than just a smart kid. As for legacies and ED, I have no problem with that as long as the kid is well qualified. A lot of schools like to build a sense of community and those practices enhance that. Some schools use ED because they want to insure that they have a lot of kids on campus thrilled to be there. That affects the vibe of the school positively.