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<p>And a drawback of numbers-based admission is that the 90% of applicants who are rejected may interpret the rejection as a judgment by important people that they aren’t smart. Is that more sad-face-making?</p>
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I hope I make the cut of someone to have a drink with. I am actually a lot of fun in person.</p>
<p>But unlike the bar scene, there is a team. Looking for the right combo in the kid and in the class.</p>
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<p>Jonri,</p>
<p>I find it bewildering you’re taking offense at my presenting historical verified fact which has been written about at length by historians, social scientists, journalists, education critics, and even many folks within academia over the last several decades. It’s out there with a mere google/online library search. </p>
<p>While current elite private colleges no longer practice this as blatantly*, they did so from the early 20th century up until sometime into the late 50’s and even '60s. In the greater scheme of world/human history, several decades or even a century is very recent. </p>
<p>It was a reason why certain religious groups founded colleges/universities of their own when the mainstream American colleges refused them admission on discriminatory grounds that would be unacceptable today. Two examples off the top of my head are Boston College in 1863 and Brandeis University in 1948. </p>
<p>It was also a factor in how CUNY/CCNY became known as the “Ivy league of the proleteriat” from the 1920’s till the end of the '60s as they accepted anyone who met their then high academic standards for admission without regard to race, class, ethnicity, or creed. </p>
<ul>
<li>They still practice a modified form of legacy admissions for children of really wealthy and/or well-connected alums.</li>
</ul>
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<p>University of Pizzagirl, releasing admissions decisions next week. FA application consists of indicating whether you need her to pay for your drinks (so you need to be darned good if you want to check the FA box – no need blind admissions).</p>
<p>After admissions are announced, we can play a rousing game on CC of “How did HE/SHE get in?”.</p>
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<p>Here we go again! Yet another proposal to reduce the admissions decisions to a simplistic formula that is supposed to be based on “objective” data. Objective requiring quotation marks as the criteria would --to please the “observers”-- require the removal of the interpretation of the grades and standardized tests and … remove all contexts. </p>
<p>Thus, according to this favored system, there would be no difference in a 2300 SAT obtained by an Exonian and a 2100 obtained by an immigrant in Texas’s impoverished valley! And please do not insult our intelligence by pretending that such proposal is not directly meant to attack the current system that establishes such differences! </p>
<p>However, as it has amply been demonstrated over and over on College Confidential, discussions about racial or SES preferences do not go ANYWHERE. 10,000 or 100,000 more posts will not change one bit to the ingrained positions. </p>
<p>What would be a LOT more interesting is to ascertain where the highly competitive students who happen to be rejected by “beloved” XYZ school end up enrolling? We all know that not everybody earns an admission as his or her “dream school” but aren’t there plenty of schools that should and could fit the criteria? Especially for those “creme de la creme” applicants Beliavsky would like to … support further! </p>
<p>Years ago, in light of the growing claims of AA discrimination, I ran a few simple numbers that compared the students who earned more than 700 on the Verbal SAT and plugged the results into an admission table of the USNews first page. One could only guess when the pool was exhausted! Do the same by upping the scores and distributing the scores around the races, and one can easily conclude of silly and ridiculous the claims that the “top students” are facing incredible odds. </p>
<p>Our country might have 99 problems, but getting the academic “superstars” into a great and highly selective school is surely not one of them. Some of course have disagreed and not hesitated to sue one of the HYPS because they had the audacity to admit someone who had (slightly) lower scores and force the poor soul to attend … another member of that elusive four-lettered group!</p>
<p>I’m fun in person too!</p>
<p>Would it be need or merit based? Would admission be need aware of need blind?</p>
<p>I’m fun, too. And I have the keys to Headquarters.</p>
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<p>If part of UPizzagirl’s holistic admissions criteria is to “have a sparkling personality” and not be a “robotic drone”, the Goths, Huns, Vandals, and other barbarian groups certainly won’t have problems in that department. </p>
<p>Then again, they’re not the types to bother with waiting for invitations or admission letters. </p>
<p>And they won’t need to bother with the FA box for the fine foods and spirits. They just need to sweep in, grab all the fine food & spirits, toss UPizzagirl’s board/admins/Profs/other students & admits up and down like pizza pies for amusement’s sake, and run off with their UPizzagirl diplomas printed up with exquisite transcripts. :D</p>
<p>Then again, I do wonder whether they’d care for what they may consider strange delicacies such as Chicago style deep dish style pizzas, Pierogies & Polish sausages, southern fried chicken, or bourbon whiskey & mint juleps. :D</p>
<p>If they feel up to it, they can even throw an impromptu musical recital with drums accompanied by a thunder bass and one or more thunder lyres and some full-throated yelling. :D</p>
<p>I really have no idea what joke you’re trying to make, cobrat.</p>
<p>We all choose who we hang out with, befriend, marry, etc. based on holistic criteria. (Well, OK, I bet Bel had a spreadsheet for his wife and for his friends.) Heck, even our choices of what colleges to apply to are holistic in nature - you visit two campuses and you happen to spark to this one and not to that one for whatever reason. Trying to pretend that this doesn’t exist – frankly - THAT’s lacking in humanity.</p>
<p>Well, not sure I got Xiggi’s either.</p>
<p>How many robotic whatever’s would you invite to the party? How many on that long car ride? Want your kid to marry one? Maaaybe. Maybe not.</p>
<p>No this isn’t marriage. But it is a community. Not meant to be uniform culture ala those times in those non-western lands cobrat discusses.</p>
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<p>Lookingforward,</p>
<p>Last I checked, the Western Roman Empire and the areas the barbarian groups lived/moved around in were not “non-western lands”. </p>
<p>As for communities vs uniform culture…there’s always going to be a unique campus culture of some kind for every college. </p>
<p>Depending on changes in the pool of admitted students, there could be continuities or jarring changes which break with the previously prevailing campus culture. </p>
<p>One example are the Ivies’ and peer elite colleges’ efforts to change the holistic admissions practices so it placed much more emphasis on academic merit, considerations of lower SES, and eliminated the egregious use of discriminatory racial/ethnic/religious quotas which existed till then as a means to prop up numbers of the then preferred wealthy well-off WASP familes. </p>
<p>Another was the admission of women into many elite colleges as almost all of them were previously all-male and similarly, admission of men into previously all-women’s colleges like Skidmore and Vassar. </p>
<p>As with some of the MIT or Columbia SEAS alums grousing about the perceived change away from what they felt was the “hardcore engineering/CS nerd culture” they loved and wanted to preserve for future alums rather than the fear that it will turn into disdained institutions where being able to play the social skills game and having a “personality spark” became what they perceived as the greater priority…like Harvard or Columbia College respectively. </p>
<p>While I felt they were too narrow-minded, I understand their feeling as I’ve seen the same types of grousing from older alums because of perceptions the current admins are trying to move away from our college’s quirky radical-left politically activist neo-hippieish campus culture to change it to one more similar to mainstream East Coast LACs. </p>
<p>In short, some of the angst may be coming from alums seriously concerned that their college’s unique identity as a “safe space” for non-mainstream students whether it’s hardcore STEM nerds…especially of the engineering/CS variety or concerns an LAC viewed as a safe space for those who want to perpetuate a neo-hippie revival or be around others sharing radically-left politics and penchant for political activism or safe space for other non-mainstream identities are being eradicated. </p>
<p>I don’t know if I am expressing it in the most clear manner…especially considering I don’t share most of that mentality personally. However, I can understand why they feel that way. Especially considering most of them come from communities where their non-mainstream identities/attitudes gave them much grief precisely because they weren’t willing or able to conceal that identity for the sake of seeming conformity to the mainstream majority in their home communities.</p>
<p>I would like to buy you all a round at the Mos Eisley Cantina. Cheers!</p>
<p>cobrat, That is sad to hear that MIT alumni would “disdain” Harvard (engineering types , I assume?) because of their “social skills”. Not every kid with high math and science aptitude wants a “hardcore engineering/CS culture.” Neither of my kids wanted that. It is a stereoptype that all high math/science kids are “nerds.” Both my kids are socially skilled. athletic, were popular in high school,etc. S1’s lowest math score was a 780 on the SAT (which he was bummed about), everything else with SAT ll, AP with math/science was 800/5’s. Places like MIT ,Caltech (who contacted him for a sport),CMU (his dad’s alma mater), held no appeal. Yes, I guess I am bragging but trying to make a point. There are many kids out there who have high aptitude that WANT places like Harvard,Duke, UVa,etc. for engineering. Kids with social skills AND math aptitude probably are appealing to many companies.</p>
<p>I agree with Cobrat that “robotic” and “uninteresting” may be in the eye of the beholder.</p>
<p>PG and I were both very well dressed sorority girls. PG was much smarter. I graduated High School with a solid C average. Senior year of HS I dated a med student who had been a college athlete. And then broke up with him. My mother was disappointed for years. Freshman year of college, I dated a former fraternity president and a current editor of Law Review. When he proposed, I refused and that was that. They were both very nice young men, but not for me. In the meantime one of my sorority sisters eloped with her fascinating History Professor and I was extremely jealous. I raised my grades to 4.0 so I would qualify for honors seminars (a 3.5 was needed) and could meet the sort of men in whom I was interested. I lusted after the ill dressed, badly groomed, textureless grinds. This story has a happy ending. ;)</p>
<p>I think the thread has become extremely interesting lately–perhaps because I haven’t been contributing!</p>
<p>Just wanted to make two comments. Then I will read only:</p>
<p>1) lookingforward raised a question many pages back about whether some B students might be better off going to universities that were not quite as demanding as the top tier. My comments about classes in foreign languages/history/literature/math were obliquely directed at this: to say that in some fields, a student might learn exceedingly little from classes that were over the student’s head. (I used myself as an example, to avoid controversy.) </p>
<p>I was not downplaying the difficulty of history. Indeed, I have seen history classes with reading lists I am not certain I could get through, if I were taking nothing else!</p>
<p>My point was merely that a student who was over his/her head in history could still learn quite a bit, rather than nearly nothing, despite not meeting the actual goals of the course. (Not so for me in advanced Italian, for example.)</p>
<p>2) Pizzagirl thought that 2300 could equally well have been substituted for 2400 in the MIT commentary about people who just knew how to grind. Actually, I don’t think so. There are numerous references on the MIT site, in the official blogs that deal with the “magical 1600” (olden days), “dialing toll-free,” and multiple 800’s. (Look for a blog post by Bryan Nance, and then the interaction with Momchil.) No objections to Bryan Nance’s post, although he too is talking about 2400 SAT/36 ACT. Some doubts about Momchil.</p>
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<p>I do not recall trying to be humorous or attempt to crack a joke. Well, except for that quip about MIT forgetting to let their number of applicants known this year.</p>
<p>Well then,xiggi, You better get cracking! :)</p>
<p>Cobrat, I was referring to eastern culture, which you so often discuss. Non-western. I left without saying the Cultural Revolution.</p>
<p>I do know what changes many top schools went thru, through personal connections to some, the simple fact I am older and lived through some of those times- and the particular school I attended, when women’s “place” and opportunities had their big energy shift. Not to worry.</p>
<p>I, like some others here, am not completely overwhelmed by the “proof(s)” offered by anecdote- what happened to one person, a contact, in some school system, etc, is not representative, to my way of thinking. So be it.</p>