Yale has gone on record for several years now that it no longer tries to interview every applicant. They say that interviews are only given for those from whom they need more information. It is my speculation that there are very few accepted students who are not interviewed. Yale has also been open in its podcast that they are doing an initial screen by 1 senior admissions officer to reduce the workload of first readers.
You realize that what youâre saying is that 80% of all Yale applicants are, in essence, not âwell preparedâ enough to get in?
1 Like
No, I am not saying that 80% are not qualified â I donât know how many the senior AO culls in the first cut, but after that there is a first and possibly second reader evaluation that further narrows the pool. it has always been the case that less than 10,000 applicants (maybe half of that) even make it to Committee and only about 2,200 that are ever accepted. Granting interviews is just part of a sequential culling process out of a larger set of qualified students. I would further add that some judgment of âsoft skillsâ has already been applied in the culling. That is where ECâs, essays and LoRâs give the AO some context of the applicant beyond grades, courses and test scores.
1 Like
A reminder that College Confidential is not a debate society. The users above are welcome to continue their conversation via PM if they wish.
Getting back to BrooksâI do think a lot of his article fits into a genre of Op/Ed that basically amounts to angrily telling some person or institution to do something they are in fact already doing.
But I do not think he is actually clear or consistent enough to even figure out what he is really saying US colleges should be doing these days. He talks a lot in terms of vague principles, but I sincerely do not know what he has in mind in practical terms (with only a few limited exceptions).
Which is a related but different genre of Op/Ed that I like to think of as the âDo better!â Op/Ed. I see a problem, I am not sure how to fix it, but I think it is your fault, so . . . do better!
And although I am being a little snarky here, I sincerely believe there are parts of Brooksâs piece that are doing a good job identifying problems. And even a few identifying some possibly helpful measures, although not so much as to colleges.
But that is then wrapped in all sorts of strange history, partisan political arguments, telling people to do things they are already doing, telling people vaguely to do betterâjust a lot of noise to get through in order to see the signal.
4 Likes
100% correct.
This belief that students who test well are all uncreative robots is the last refuge of the frustrated & disappointed prestige-seeking parent.
4 Likes
Except that itâs not an Op-Ed. Iâm accustomed to reading David Brooks op-eds in the NYT as well as his snippets of live interviewing on the PBS News Hour. They can all be safely summed up as Cassadra-like.
However, the Atlantic piece wasnât meant to be read on the morning commute to work. It certainly took a little longer to digest than his usual newspaper writings. I thought the historical detours were fun even though the subject matter was serious. Beats trying to plow through Walter Benjamin:
Walter Benjamin - Wikipedia
1 Like
I agree it wasnât supposed to be.
Yeah, thatâs the point. Heâs dunking on selective/rejective schools with research mostly derived from selective/rejective schools. Heâs not using research from mid-tier state universities. The author is something of a hypocrite.
2 Likes
Well, thatâs not a new criticism of Brooks. Heâs a former Republican, so basically, every op-ed heâs written for the NYT for the last 8 years is fair game for people who think heâs being hypocritical.
Maybe, but not everyone here is an avid follower of Brooks. Iâm sure thereâs more than a second helping of seemingly retroactive hypocrisy in the body of his work, but in the context of last weekâs article, itâs just kind of an ironic observation to say selective schools broke America using data from those very same schools.
Not here to debate, just Brooksâ long-windedness offered me a sweet opportunity to quote a U2 song. Enjoy the morning. 
Enjoy the morning.
Brooksâs crititique of meritocracy isnât new. It is made in these recent books he has cited in his piece, but it ultimately goes back to Max Weberâs âiron cageâ in which the modern world, he said, found itself when religion departed and left only bureaucracy, credentialism, and the unremitting demands of work. Brooks is always attempting to find and fan sparks in this gray world. lncoherence not infrequently results.
In an interview he gave a few years ago to the Chicago Maroon, the UChicago student newspaper, he described how as an undergraduate he had had a âroad to Damascusâ revelation while sitting in Regenstein Library and reading Nietzscheâs âBirth of Tragedy.â As he described it, it didnât sound intellectual so much as emotional, a sense of being completely absorbed and swept deeply into the thought of a writer otherwise alien to his own way of thinking. He saw this sort of experience as exemplary, and he went so far as to say that it was what college was all about - plunging us into strange intellectual worlds, rearranging our pre-established thoughts, and so on. Not the slow building of a resume, not the methodical acquiring of credits and credentials, things that will come when they come but are not the essence of the experience.
One can agree or disagree with this, but at least his view was coherent to that point. But thatâs never enough for him; in that brief interview he immediately pivotted away from this paradigm to say, whimsically, that, after all, maybe it was better to simply set the books aside, leave the library, and go out and have fun with friends. He has critiqued his alma mater for being deficient in the latter opportunities. That hasnât, however, prevented him from accepting election to its Board of Trustees.
Heâs a guy who doesnât get bothered by contradictions. But then, as Nietzsche observed, itâs a contradictory world.
5 Likes
I have to say all the flak heâs catching in this article because of his forays into American history make me want to go back and factcheck it. I thought it was entertaining the first time around but maybe Iâm missing something 
.
I have the puckish thought, @circuitrider , old friend, that we on cc are so deep-dyed in the culture of meritocracy that we find it somewhat hard to seriously entertain critiques of that culture.
2 Likes
Marlowe - I think youâre the only person on this board who understands the difference between hypocrisy and irony.
How dare someone criticize the system that has served me personally so well!
I definitely donât think it is impossible to make many valid criticisms of how âmeritocracyâ works in practice in US society. I do, however, think it is possible to do better than Brooks did in this article.
And yes, I recognize that claim, in light of my prior post, is at least one of ironic or hypocritical. But I will let the leading scholar of irony, Alanis Morissette, determine which.
2 Likes
Well, Iâve re-read it, taking your views into consideration and actually using them to help me speed up the process of identifying particular points of interest. FWIW, it is a long article; someone in a different publication printed it out and it came to over thirty typewritten pages. So, itâs target rich, to say the least.
If youâre like me and youâre used to only reading Brooksâ NYT op-eds, it comes as something of a surprise that heâs actually capable of weighing both sides of an argument, something thereâs not always space to do in a medium that favors epigrams.
Thus,
Conantâs reforms should have led to an American golden age. The old WASP aristocracy had been dethroned. A more just society was being built. Some of the fruits of this revolution are pretty great. Over the past 50 years, the American leadership class has grown smarter and more diverse. Classic achiever types such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pete Buttigieg, JuliĂĄn Castro, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Indra Nooyi have been funneled through prestigious schools and now occupy key posts in American life.
Is coupled with:
Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford measured Americaâs economic growth per person from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that up to two-fifths of Americaâs increased prosperity during that time can be explained by better identification and allocation of talent.
In terms of this,
Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coasterâcongratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you donât keep succeeding by somebody elseâs metrics, your self-worth crumbles.
Iâm not sure why itâs controversial. We argue about this all the time right here on CC: Is tiger parenting the norm among upper middle class parents? - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums
And lastly,
The history of the meritocracy is the history of different definitions of ability. But how do we come up with a definition of ability that is better and more capacious than the one (James B.) Conant left us? We can start by noting the flaws at the core of his definition. He and his peers were working at a time when people were optimistic that the rational application of knowledge in areas such as statistics, economics, psychology, management theory, and engineering could solve social problems. They admired technicians who valued quantification, objectification, optimization, efficiency.
I kind of think this is whatâs really setting peopleâs hair on fire. It comes across as an attack on quants. My feeling here is that had he used the word âtinkeringâ or manipulating or something else to describe what he really meant to convey (what ever happened to just plain, old ordinary chutzpah?) he might have lost fewer readers. At least among those who stayed with him that far into the piece. Yes, what follows is an extended discussion of one set of tinkerers - largely, Harvard and other Ivy League social scientists - as they do a number on another set: Harvard and other Ivy League quants. That, IMO, is the real political battle underlying the article.
Ok, now I have to actually find time to read this.
1 Like
Did anyone else get this in their emails today? I think I signed up for something called, âstory alertsâ when I was trying to download Brooksâ full article (thank you to all the gift posters!), but it certainly reads as a sort of apologia for all the documentation and footnoting that went into the bulk of his original:
Dear Reader,
The diploma divide is driving American politics. Donald Trump surged back into power with the support of millions of high-school-educated voters who are furious at the college-educated elite.
But the diploma divide isnât only a political divide. Itâs a social divide. High-school-educated people die eight years younger than college-educated people, on average. They are much more likely to perish from opioid addiction, to have children out of wedlock, to be obese, to say they have no close friends. The academic-performance gap between kids who come from affluent families and those who come from less affluent families is greater than the academic gap between white and Black students in the age of Jim Crow.
There is a chasm dividing American society, and it is defined primarily by education levels. For the past year, Iâve tried to understand this chasmâwhere it came from, and what can be done to close it.
I learned that this chasm didnât just happen. It was created. A group of well-meaning college administrators decided, in the middle of the 20th century, that they would segregate America by intelligence. They defined intelligence in a very specific and narrow way: the ability to perform well in academic settings and standardized testing.
Students who had these skills were admitted into elite universities and then funneled into jobs at the commanding heights of societyâin finance, law, government, and media, and atop large corporations. They married other people with these skills, invested massively in their children, who then went off to the same elite universities, and prestoâyouâve got an inherited caste system.
Is todayâs leadership class governing well? No. Is todayâs leadership class trusted and respected by a wide swath of Americans? No. Has todayâs leadership class used the system to lock in its privileges? Yes.
The meritocracy needs to be transformed from top to bottom. In my new cover story for The Atlantic, I describe what a more humane, just, and democratic meritocracy could look like. Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of the presidential election, the problem is not just Donald Trump. Itâs the way we as a society sort people, putting some on the escalator to affluence and tossing others out. In my essay, I try to imagine a better world.
If you would like to support stories like thisâones that not only examine how we got here but also envision where we could go nextâI encourage you to subscribe to The Atlantic. Thank you.
David Brooks
Contributing Writer