As a parent, I would like to know the academic composition of the class of students to which I would be sending my child. Universities publish SAT/ACT statistics on the middle 50 percentile. Why is so much information veiled here?
As a parent, I would like to know the values placed by the university on different hooks versus academic credentials prior to deciding whether to have my child apply to or attend the university.
There is certainly a possibility that different university are doing quite different things in regards to (1) and (2), and this could be a significant factor in the decision-making process.
There could be legal issues as shown by the current Harvard AA lawsuit.
If there is nothing embarrassing here, there should be nothing to hide. Saying that it is “nobody’s business” is a way of saying that universities are using admissions procedures that they would be embarrassed to have the public know about.
@observer12 I am not aware of what happened at UPenn. For my son’s sport, I know the exact number of recruiting spots available every year and it is always consistent with the number who are actually recruited. The numbers add up. Again, there are so few recruiting spots at these schools that it’s fairly easy to keep track.
-Not everyone goes to college.
-And those that do certainly do not all have the academic profile of the normal USC student
-3.3mm students a year graduate HS
-the “top schools” represent say 30 to 50k students as a guess. Probably less.
-the math says that would be the top 1 to 2.5 percent of all
-are not the top 1% to 3% of income levels, tennis players, electricians , Girl Scouts or whatever be called “the elite”?
I guess if one has a son or daughter at Yale etc the rest of the academic world seems pedestrian.
But USC is darn good school. Hollywood fraudsters and Yale soccer coaches and Penn basketball players and Harvard lawsuits aside.
I don’t know one person ever who went to USC and my d turned them down. So no hometown fan here.
“I imagine that USC has much larger rosters and coaches have more leeway than the Ivies, so to lump sports at USC with Ivy League sports is not apples to apples.”
Very good point. There’s several important differences.
At Yale, a coach may recruit 10 players a year but only have 4 “tips.” So the other 6 kids (although recruits) have to get by the admissions office without a tip. Second, all the athletes at Yale are subject to the AI index system spreadsheet. So you’d think a completely bogus athlete with very weak academic credentials would be hard to slip by.
Which probably explains the Penn hoops player. He was actually a hoopster and did stay on the team during college. He just didn’t play. No idea how strong/weak the kid’s acedmics were. Maybe he only needed a little boost. Regardless, whatever academics the kid had would be baked into the spreadsheet and so the coach had to suck that up in otherwise filling out his roster.
In contrast, so long as USC is meeting NCAA elgibility requirements, it can do whatever it wants in terms of how many and what kind of athletes it wants to admit. Unlike Yale (who has to account to the other Ivies and vice versa via the AI system) USC doesn’t have to account for its actions to UCLA or Stanford.
Plus, the Loughlin kids came into the womens rowing roster – lots of available spots (due to title ix) and not many recruits (due to low numbers of HS rowers in the U.S.).
So definitely easier to do a fraudulent womens rower at USC than a fraudulent soccer player at Yale.
@privatebanker Certainly looking at the entire population, you are correct in what should be deemed “elite.” However, a few students at my kid’s New England private HS go to USC every year, and they are typically in the middle of the class stats-wise per Naviance.
@northwesty Do you have a link to an article about the Penn player?
@privatebanker Thank you for your consistent voice of reason. If anyone would bother to actually compare current freshman profiles, which are readily available, and not rely on old stereotypes or biases, they will find very little (if any) difference in any of the elites being discussed here. Look at the numbers, they are real.
On another part of the conversation, if I were Olivia Jade, I would be hiring Kris Jenner to manage me. If anyone can turn crap into sunshine and $, she can.
Your kid’s New England private school is probably pretty elite to begin with, so middle of the road for that is probably akin to saying someone is middle of the road at an Ivy. Certainly way above the average college applicant/student in the US.
I’m sure it’s been posted somewhere, but middle 50 scores for USC enrolled freshman SATs are 1360-1510. It might be a bit low vs the Ivies, but it’s way above the average of around 1000 for the US.
“Only my school is elite” is sure an elite attitude. Not sure why another school being perceived so highly is such a threat, but it is not the topic of this thread.
I clearly said I was making the numbers up. But I will submit that tippy top colleges do like to have a certain % of Internationals. If for no other reason, they can be full pay. But perhaps they divvy up the ‘international slots’ by country – no different that desiring a student from all 50 states. Sure, a tippy top college maybe inundated with apps from China, but maybe not too many from say, Afghanistan.
Disagree. There have been threads on cc that say, ‘Anywhere but Rutgers’, for years. Any state educator can take on that challenge, if nothing else, to improve the perception of thier instate Flagship.
@bluebayou ,
I posted specific numbers that prove :
To be an international applicant at the elite colleges is Anti- hook ( much lower acceptance rates vs rest of the pool,
MIT’s 3,1% vs 7% & Dartmouth’s 3,4% vs 8,6%). I am sure in all top 25 National Unis and top LAC
the same is true
The % of Internationals admitted in these schools (with almost full ride FA ) is higher that the one of the
US students. Therefore, clearly the reason for recruiting them is not their full pay ability but rather because they
are very stong students academically ( except for athletes wich is a separate pool anyway).
One other funny thought is around other students fraudulently subbing in to on SAT/ACT tests and the Mark Riddell taking several tests for many students and how this skews a College/Universities published test averages.
My niece graduated from a school in Florida this past year and said she knows of a few students who paid others to take their tests (she said they’re all at FSU, so no worries to the elite colleges out there).
So the person has someone else take their exam and now their 1000 goes to a 1400. They get accepted and the university publishes the average SAT score as being the 1400 skewing their numbers upward. Then they move up in the rankings!
@charpen good info even if it’s anecdotal, it’s true somewhere.
And I am not in any way saying this is your view. But just a generally thought on what you heard from from your kids.
even these test frauds hurt. A lot.
FSU is a really solid school for a lot of hardworking and smart students.
And someone most likely had a spot taken from them. Today, with merit available that move up in score is actually grand larceny. Even if it didn’t cost someone a spot.
Try stealing 100k in merit money over 4 years from a bank vault and lets see how that goes for the criminal.
Admission to an Ivy league school as an athlete is governed by the rules the Ivy schools choose to live by - the AI index, the limited number of spots to athletes, and sometimes limited by sport, no athletic scholarships, etc. Basically, the schools are limited to about 200 athletic admits by agreement and those athletes have to have an AI of about 170. No one with an 18 ACT or 2.5 is getting in. The schools do limit the number of slots/tips the coaches can give because that’s the agreement those schools have made.
The other elite D1 schools only have the restrictions their admissions offices put on them, plus the NCAA rules which are pretty low as far as stats go. If USC wants to admit 500 athletes and thus have fewer spots fornon-athletes, it can. If Duke wants to admit 16 basketball players with the minimum NCAA stats, it can. Stanford and USC answer to the Pac 12 in sports, but those schools choose to have higher than minimum stats for it’s athletes. Whereas Yale does care if Harvard admits athletes that do not meet the AI, Stanford doesn’t care if Oregon does. No need to sell athletic seats.
This conspiracy was about coaches selling the athletic seats, or in one big case, the asst. athletic director. Lynn Swann, athletic director at USC, said how it was done was the coaches gave a list of their recruits for a slot to the A…A.D, and if there were 5 names on the list, the A.A.D… just added the ‘buy a slot’ kid so submitted 6 names to admissions; the coach might never have known. Remove the name before giving the list back to the coach and the coach doesn’t know that name was ever on the list, doesn’t expect an extra kid at the first practice, doesn’t give the name to a captain to contact about housing. The ‘buy a slot’ isn’t getting a scholarship so it doesn’t hit the coach’s budget. The admissions dept doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary with having a list of 200 names or 205 names because there is really no limit. The number of recruits with sub-academic stats is just an agreement between athletics and admin.
There is a difference between a student who rejects the in-state flagship that is affordable and has the academics that they are interested in (the “anywhere but Rutgers” attitude that seems common here, typically among high SES NJ residents), and a student whose in-state public schools are not affordable (more common in some states like Pennsylvania and Illinois than in other states).
David Sidoo (A Canadian) paid:
$200K for someone to take SATs and Canadian high school graduation exam for older son, who went to Chapman
Another $100K for test-taking replacement for Jordan Sidoo who went to Berkeley.
I’m for naming names and making it about all involved, not just the 2 getting the most press.