“A top 1% unhooked applicant’s chance to get into Harvard? 32,000 top 1% of unhooked applicants going for 40% of 2,047 acceptances or 818 spots = 2.5%, roughly 1 in 40.”
We all know that there are far, far more “smart, deserving kids” (however one defines smart and deserving) than there are spots in top / elite schools. Got it, this is both intuitive and data-based, a win-win.
So, given that smart, deserving kids are filling the top schools AND then “overflowing” to the rungs below, it seems self-evident that the reaction should be " well, that’s great! the kids in school #30 are pretty much as good as the kids at schools #1-10 - the differences are at the margins – no harm, no foul!"
Yet there’s still this reaction of “oh no! I didn’t get into schools #1-10. The sky has fallen!” as if there aren’t incredibly talented, successful people all up and down the food chain.
Why is that? Why do some of you think that way? It makes no sense.
My point was people shouldn’t be so quick to jump to the conclusion that any specific group is discriminated against because it’s incredibly long odds even if you are in the top 1%.
As far as getting clues from the acceptance rate, I often read comments that that includes many kids who have no business applying to elite schools but do so anyway. I wonder what percentage of the applicant pool comprised of such kids. I’m inclined to think that those who get <2240 SAT 3.75UW GPA tend not to apply to such schools rather than “just apply and see what happens”, unless they are hooked, i.e. an overwhelming majority of the applicant pool is likely to comprise of 98th/99th percentile kids.
post 181:
In my own experience, your assumption, while logical, is unfortunately not true. Increasingly, unhooked students in the 3.5-3.7 GPA range are applying to HYPSMC + Stanford + even MIT. It is simply not true that
There’s a great deal of denial out there, believe me. There is also quite a bit of mythology regarding the “forgiving” of non-stellar grades & scores by sheer amount of activities or by spending 6 months on an essay which still doesn’t persuade.
However, it is completely true that students from many different groups who do have quantitatively stellar ingredients are rejected by elite schools.
It is not a “theory.” I am telling you what my personal experience is, factually – IOW, the difference between 10 years ago and today. That is my area of the world. Whether that is replicated in other areas I am not privy to. I am giving you factual history about my local area which I would be able to document.
Supporting data would help change it from theory to “fact”. It will take more than a single personal experience. It may also have been more accurate to state “In my area…”
epiphany wrote:
Increasingly, unhooked students in the 3.5-3.7 GPA range are applying to HYPSMC + Stanford + even MIT.
[/QUOTE]
A quick check on my son’s high school Naviance (competitive NJ high school; ; ~80% Caucasian) revealed many apps for Princeton, Cornell, Penn and Michigan in this range; not so many for HYS and MIT; the town has a big emphasis on sports, so I do not know if all those red X marks had any hooks (real or perceived). Anyway, there were no green boxes for grades in the 3.5-3.8 range; perhaps there is another misperception floating around that Sports+ EC’s + great essay is the ticket…
I’m so glad I am not in the college counseling business.
Maybe this will help. I hate using GPA because it’s simply impossible to compare across schools. But Stanford reports the number of applications and acceptances by SAT range.
I’ll use the critical reading SAT score (CR) as a measure. Last year, Stanford got 42,500 applications and admitted 2142 (5% overall admit rate). Here are the stats by CR score -
Score % of Applicants Admit Rate % of Admitted Class
800 10% 12% 22%
700–799 35% 8% 52%
600–699 36% 3% 23%
Below 600 19% 1% 4%
So, there were about 8075 applicants with CR < 600, of whom about 85 were admitted. I think it’s fair to say these admits were mostly recruited athletes plus a few other hooked candidates. (Stanford fields some pretty good Division I teams; I think they have somewhat over 200 athletic recruits per class. The average SAT composite of the football recruits was 2100, or about 600 on the CR, so half the football recruits fall into this bucket).
I’d draw a few conclusions:
Admittedly it’s a little harsh to say, but I’d call almost all the remaining 8,000 applicants with CR < 600 who weren’t recruits “No-Hope” applicants. That’s about 20% of the applicant pile. This data doesn’t let us see students in the 600-699 bucket, but there are probably a few “No-Hopers” in there too. Maybe 10,000 applications total, or about 25% of the pile are “No-Hopers”. (Too be fair, some of these applicants might be international non-native English speakers, so the 25% might be more like 23% or so).
The 25/75 CR percentile range for Stanford students is 680/780. Let’s say that SAT-scorewise anyone with above a 680 can easily fit in academically at Stanford. That’s about 50% of the applicant pool.
It’s probably wrong to say that “an overwhelming majority of the applicant pool is likely to comprise of 98th/99th percentile kids.” The 98% of SAT CR starts at about 740, so a crude estimate would be 1/3 of the applicant pool and 60% of the admits fall into this category once you switch to SAT composite.
Having an 800 helps. But there’s still an 88% reject rate.
Stanford also has data for their applicant pool from 7 years ago. There’s really no significant difference in the percentage breakdown by SAT score or GPA. But the raw number of applications has almost doubled. There are simply more students applying to Stanford across all GPA and SAT ranges. Perhaps this accounts for what @ephipany is seeing.
regarding reply 185.That’s just unfortunate if you think you should have the privilege of private data about my students over a 10 yr histor order to accept a mere honest revelation about consistent trends in my region. Whatever you thought I wa suggesting in the earlier post I clarified in the subsequent one . My local colleagues report a similar experience, verifying my own. I also have overseas students who are following that same expectation &effort. I’m sorry if you interpreted my post as claiming a national scientific sample. Perhaps our region is an anomaly. It is nevertheless a large & very significant region relative to elite college applications . Have a nice evening.
P.S. I have no idea where mathprof lives. I am reporting on my own, combined with a large sample of colleagues with identical experience and similar records.
By definition, any school that has sufficient sample size of applications to elite schools (enough to be meaningful on Naviance) is already likely upper middle class and not representative of the nation as a whole.
Certainly. I think I mentioned that possibility above. But that does beg the question - is a student with less than a 600 SAT CR score a viable admit just because they’re international (I’m not saying they’re not bright, but can they contribute to the intellectual life of the University at the required level without good language skills?). I think you can argue they are “No-Hopers” too (on average, of course).
But I don’t know how big an effect this is - I do know that at another elite school many of the top countries that international undergraduate students (not applicants or graduate students) come from are English speaking countries like Canada (if that counts as international ), UK, Australia, etc. And many internationals received their high school education in English, either in the US or in their home countries. Just a guess based on other data I’ve seen - I bet it’s no more than 1/3 of the < 600 CR pool.
Just one data point, but telling with respect to the above. One of my kids’ friends was admitted to Harvard,Yale, Penn, Brown, Columbia, MIT, and Cornell with a 640 CR score. That was from her second test; on her first test she had 400 CR. She had 800s on the math test both times, and 800s on all of her STEM-y SAT IIs (but 700-something on what was then the English SAT II, which she took 8 months after her last SAT I). She was ranked third in her class by GPA, studied a fifth language, and competed successfully in science competition programs.
The fairly obvious reason for this was that English was her fourth language, and she arrived here at the age of 14, a refugee from a fairly horrific civil war. When she took the SAT for the first time, she had less than two years of English, and less than three at the second test. By the time she actually entered college, of course, she had about 60% more time speaking English than she had when she took her last SAT I.
Having met her a number of times, I was confident there was no question that she could contribute to the intellectual life of any college. She wasn’t merely “bright”; she was bursting with ideas and ambition, and gaining in skill daily in her ability to communicate them. She just finished her MD/PhD program.
As for the question concerning low CR scores, it brings up an interesting point. The United States does not have an official national language.
As a teenager (a very long time ago) I worked at a driver’s ed facility in Chicago. The number of different versions of the “Rules of the Road” amazed me…English, Spanish, German, French, Polish, etc.
I only speak/read English. (I took 4 years of Latin.) I can’t imagine taking a reading or writing test in a 2nd or 3rd language. How colleges factor English language proficiency in admissions might be an interesting topic for discussion.
While I think it’s true that there are many immigrants who are both very bright and very hard-working, I have to note that it is kind of a newbie thing to apply to all of the Ivies in the first place, even if you are a top-notch student. So I don’t find this a particularly useful data point.
So in what year are we predicting that the 35% Asian student percentage population at Berkeley will trend down to equal the population in California 15%.
A few generations after patterns of immigration stop selecting for Asian immigrants of significantly higher educational attainment than other immigrants or non-immigrants. Of course, that is if that happens, and California’s Asian population may not be 15% then.
Take a look at Hawaii. The population is 38% Asian, and 23% multiracial (many of whom include Asian). Yet no one sees Hawaii as a place of high concentration of elite students or elite schools (K-12 or university), and bachelor’s degree attainment is only slightly higher than the US overall (30% versus 29% for people age 25+). But patterns of Asian immigration to Hawaii were and are much different from that to California and other mainland states, and the Asian population is not as biased toward immigrants and their kids in Hawaii as it is in California and other mainland states.
They absolutely do. Not sure if you were trying to be ironic, but admission of “First Gen(eration)” students is a very hot topic right now. Last I saw, about 15% of the students at HYPSM were First Gen, but to be honest I don’t know how international students count. That’s about 1,100 across these 5 schools.
That may seem like a very small number. But I’m not so sure. IMO, one issue is that there might simply not be that many of First Gen students who have the academics. Here’s some interesting data for the pool of high SAT scorers from the College Board -
The top 10% of students taking the SAT are those with Math + CR of 1300 or above. There are about 160,000 of these students every year. Of those who filled in the survey,
[ul]
[]57% report having at least one parent who attended or completed graduate school.
[]Another 28% report have at least one parent who has a bachelor’s degree.
[li]Another 11% have at least one parent who attended post-secondary education but got an associates degree or no degree.[/li][/ul]
It certainly suggests that the level of education of a kid’s parents is a very strong influence on whether they are in the >= 1300 pool. It’s quite a bit stronger than income.
So that leaves only 3.8% who don’t have at least one parent who went on beyond high school. That’s only 6,100 kids in the entire country each year.
About 15.4% of kids with SAT >= 1300 don’t have at least one parent who has at least a bachelor’s degree. That’s only 25,000 kids in the whole country.
But if you analyze this problem further it gets more complicated.
[ul]
[]There’s strong indication that high-achieving students “hide” the fact that their parents aren’t well-educated and don’t fill in survey data. So the above numbers might be way too low.
[]Many First Gen students are also low-income, so there’s a strong confounding effect.
[li]Family income is a strong influence on having a > 1300 SAT score. But Asians are a notable partial exception to this. Low income status doesn’t seem to affect them as much.[/li][/ul]
Another interesting fact - there are many reasons why low income but high-achieving students don’t apply to a selective college. But one of the biggest determinants isn’t race or financial aid. It’s rural versus urban. Low income but high-achieving students who live in a city seem to have an easier time getting the information to find their way to a selective school, while rural students are much more disadvantaged.
Some of this is from memory, so I certainly might have gotten some facts wrong.
), UK, Australia, etc. And many internationals received their high school education in English, either in the US or in their home countries. Just a guess based on other data I’ve seen - I bet it’s no more than 1/3 of the < 600 CR pool.