<p>Why is this any different from how we hire people? I hire people from a pool of – too many qualified applicants, too few seats standpoint as well. I don’t just look at where they went to college and / or their GPA (indeed, past the first job, who cares?) – I evaluate them holistically on smarts, assertiveness, flexibility, ability to work well with others, leadership ability, whether they are just plain interesting to work with and whether they will be a good addition to my work community – really no different from how an adcom evaluates, except I get to do it in person and they work off an app. This is normal, common sense. I don’t owe anyone an “explanation” of why I didn’t hire them, nor do I have to have a “process” that is transparent to the outside.</p>
<p>It’s like those of you who don’t understand holistic have never interviewed or evaluated anyone for a job before.</p>
<p>So if your kid attends Harvard and brings home a graduate of U of Illinois and proudly says, “She’s the one!” are you going to focus on how disappointed you are that this person likely has a lower IQ / will make less money / etc based on a statistical average of everyone who goes to U of I versus Harvard … or will you evaluate the person in front of you? Do you look at people first and then the stats of the group to which they belong, or stats first and people second?</p>
<p>Beliavsky, that says nothing about intent–only about opportunity. Someone whose network consists of people from similar backgrounds is likely to fall in love with someone he/she meets within that network. Of course there are people out there who are shallow enough to care about where someone went to college (and within that group, to care about pedigree) but I do find it ironic that you despise the admissions process at selective schools and yet you are unwilling to encourage your kids to forge paths that would better recognize their “non-holistic” strengths. What are you going to do if it doesn’t work out for them?</p>
<p>PG, I still say that there is a difference between selecting a single person, vs. selecting a group of 1000+ (even leaving aside the “community creation” aspects of the latter).</p>
<p>I will essay a guess that you and your spouse had SAT totals within 60 points of each other (if you both recall them), without knowing anything more about either of you than what I recollect from your posts here. Of course, that wasn’t what you looked for initially, I am sure. But I would actually be surprised if your SAT totals were more than 120 points apart, even though that is “nothing” in many regards, even on the 1600 scale that probably applied when you took the SAT.</p>
<p>Not meaning to be overly personal, but I think the point is of some relevance to your analysis.</p>
<p>What kind of world do you live in where there aren’t plenty of perfectly “acceptable” people who went to a directional for a multitude of reasons – finances being the major one, but also a need to stay close to home or simply a background that wasn’t as expansive as those of us who took a more national view? Whatever world it is, it’s not particularly appealing - nor does it bear any relationship to reality.</p>
<p>Beliavsky: You are willing to send your kids to a selective college because you believe it will help them professionally and socially. Many parents on this board feel the exact same way. Your personal beliefs, however, seem almost antithetical to the campus culture of most selective colleges. How will you deal with this conflict when you send your kids off to selective colleges? It seems to me you put your children in a pretty good position to marry someone whose family doesn’t share your values. Will you change your personal beliefs if doing so facilitates social mobility?</p>
<p>Given the super-selectivity of Harvard, it is likely that most Harvard frosh have some AP or IB or college courses in high school, as these are the most demanding course selections at most high schools. Exceptions would likely be those from super-elite high schools with unlabeled but equivalently or more rigorous courses offered. Those not in these categories would likely not be a significant number of students among those who would gain admission to Harvard – i.e. there are not many “common mortals” at Harvard to compare against.</p>
<p>Probably that’s true - I doubt my H knows his SAT scores and he’d probably laugh at the fact that I do remember mine. But all that means is … “I wanted to be in a pool of smart people to choose from” … Not “I set criteria of finding the smartest people I could possibly find and in choosing between multiple potential spouses, made their SAT scores (or GPA) the deciding factor.” </p>
<p>Goodness, I dated two people seriously in college – one a chemical engineering major and one a biology major (=eventual H). They both were smart, but in different ways, but I didn’t compare them on their SAT’s or GPA to determine who to marry. @@</p>
<p>I have posted some references about this issue on countless threads about AP. Here’s one such reference, and I am sure that googling Philip Sadler will yield to plenty more. Other references can be found by checking some dialogues on the website of that education duffus who writes for the WaPo and produces the “best hs” in the country non-sense. </p>
<p>I think the bigger question is whether the children would feel empowered to bring home someone who doesn’t “satisfy” Bel’s criteria for admissions selectivity, GPA, SAT’s or so forth but who is a really good person who makes the child happy.</p>
<p>Gator - We were talking about our own criteria / choosing process for our own spouses. Bel in #440 brought his desire for his children to achieve social mobility into it.</p>
<p>Sure they can, in most states, unless your “type” is a class protected under the federal Fair Housing Act or state or local anti-discrimination laws. Most landlords don’t particularly care about these things because they just want to get the place rented to someone who looks like a good prospect to pay the rent on time and it not likely to tear the place up or use it for unlawful purposes, but often in owner-occupied rental situations, the owner will be much choosier about who his tenants are going to be because they’re also going to be his own neighbors. In a way co-op board screenings of potential buyers are just a special case of this, because what the buyers are buying is just a share of the co-op and a lease on a particular unit. That’s one important reason so many high-end buildings in NYC are held in co-op form, because the co-op board has much more power to screen buyers (tenants) than does a condo association; in a condo, the individual unit owner can sell to whomever she pleases. When the co-op board does that screening, it typically does so holistically (though admittedly, there might be a few constipated-compulsive quantitative types out there who might insist on constructing a rigid “objective” metric).</p>
<p>And an employer can hire another job applicant over you for all sorts of holistic reasons without owing you any explanation whatsoever, so long as it doesn’t involve discrimination against a legally protected class. If you ask, they’ll typically give you some vague response like, “We thought the other candidate was just a better fit,” though in fact they probably have more detailed reasons that they don’t care to share with you, e.g., they thought the other candidate was better spoken, or more energetic, or had a more engaging personality, or seemed to have more of a certain skill or talent than you exhibited, or had shown great character in overcoming obstacles to get this far, or was a better writer, or had more directly relevant experience in the industry, or all things considered seemed to have more upside potential. None of which do they, nor can they, reduce to quantitative metrics. And that’s often true whether they’re hiring one person, or a hundred.</p>
<p>Gee, it sounds a lot like holistic college admissions, doesn’t it? Life’s messy that way.</p>
<p>There are more schools that have not bought into the AP/IB gospel. Not all such schools are super elite high schools as defined above. They might simply believe that their “old” curriculum is superior to the mile-wide and one inch deep AP rote based course and that the glorified AP is not the best program available. And, fwiw, the IB scientific program is even worse than its AP richer cousin. </p>
<p>Of course, they do not account for a significant number of schools, as they are mostly private. The AP/IB model has been hard to resist in the public sector which is always seeking a new fad to offer even more schools-within-a school to its customers.</p>
<p>That topic wasn’t initiated by alh–rather by Beliavsky in #440 (last sentence) or possibly earlier.</p>
<p>Sorry: Cross-posted with a large number of posts, partly due to crummy internet service. My comment was intended as a response to Gator88NE, post #450, although it probably looks cryptic here.</p>
<p>I still don’t think that the situation of picking a single individual (spouse, single hire for a position) is comparable to the situation of picking 1000+.</p>
<p>Well…let’s see… that would include, women, disabled, minority, LGBT, the elderly, and a few other victim classes I’m sure I’ve missed…that means about the only legally UNprotected class is the white male. Yup, sound right.</p>
<p>Granted, this doesn’t happen very often these days, but occasionally an employer will hire 1,000 people at a time, and they’ll still hire holistically. That happened a few years ago when Google opened up a new branch office in Ann Arbor to run its Ad Words advertising system, which is now based there. They hired 1,000 within the span of a few months. They hired the people they liked and thought would do the best job and had the most upside potential and were the best fit for the company’s culture, based on all sorts of holistic criteria beyond college GPAs. And they didn’t owe an explanation to the people they didn’t hire, as I’m sure they had well over 1,000 applicants for those jobs.</p>