Well, there are some test based magnet high schools that are not or almost not “holistic”, e.g. Stuyvesant and TJ. Do they yield a particularly wealthy-skewed student body, more so than the current HYPS? I think that instead of SATs, consideration of high level achievements of ECs truly favors the wealthy. Traveling around the country for competitions, years and years of piano lessons/recitals/performance and trips to foreign countries for volunteering work are a lot more expensive than buying a few paperback SAT books on Amazon and cramming hard on them. I think part of the reason why the middle class kids are not doing as well as upper middle/wealthy kids on SAT is the lack of awareness on how to improve it (which doesn’t have to be private tutoring!) and the lack of confidence in SAT’s “power”.
Interesting examples about Stuyvesant and TJ. We may also add Cal, and Caltech to the set of similar examples (but at the college level.) But some may argue that Caltech is too STEM-focused. Some may even argue that the merit used for the admission to Stuyvesant and TJ may not be the same as what top private colleges may value. If we want to go even further, the traditional merit in academics may not be what the top education institute (or any education institute) may value. Then, we really go into a very grey area.
We all know the over-emphasis of ECs truly favors those who are above average in the family SES. Then, what kind of merit, the quality of ECs or the traditional merit in academics should be more valued in the admission to the tippy top elite colleges?
Actually, I noticed that, even at the med school level, the students at the very top private med schools in general do not “own” those students at slightly lower tiered med schools on the standardized board exam step-1 (maybe with the exception of some more “traditional” med schools like wustl and UPenn - traditional in the sense of their emphasis on the first 2 year grades and traditional written tests.)
Then, for the admission to some very top residence programs in major cities, the standardize test scores (like step-1), while important to a certain degree (i.e., still need to be above some threshold), do not carry as much significant weight as some may think it would. That is, it is rumored that the scores are just used as the “screening” purpose, or the students from HMS could more easily get into their own or comparable prestigious residency programs without a higher test score. (The average score at HMS is not significantly higher than that at , say, a top 10-25 school.) Subject factors like LOR (who you know) and ECs, once again, could be even more important (as it is rumored).
So, in many aspects of life, the traditional academic merit as measured more objectively could not be as important as some would like it to be.
197 "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+)."
I would say that a big difference in the immigration to California would be immigrants and inter-state transplants wanting to be part of thee Silicon Valley tech gold rush. Silicon Valley (and S. San Francisco Biotech) offers the allure of changing your status in life by using your noodle. Of course now there are lots of opportunities back in China as well.
Both are also in California, where the demographics are significantly different from the rest of the US (as is New York city).
In addition, the California public university systems have a mission to be accessible to more disadvantaged students, which manifests itself in relatively good in-state financial aid, UC consideration of overcoming obstacles and such in holistic admission reading, and good transfer pathways starting in the community colleges.
The kind of ECs that admissions readers are impressed by can affect the SES composition of the admission class. For example, are the admissions readers more impressed by a student who plays on a lacrosse team that regularly travels (more than day trips) to games, or by a student who works for pay, in the family business, or in caretaking for younger or senior family members to help support his/her low income family?
There are lot of sweeping generalizations that get made on these subjects, and our point of view depends a lot on our vantage point. We all live in our own respective echo chambers I suppose. Here are a couple of recent examples in this thread.
206 - "So you want to give a boost to people who spend all their time studying?"
211 - "If "merit" just means who gets the highest GPA and highest SAT, it would be a boring class indeed."
I could see how if your frame of reference is limited to selective prep schools or even competitive urban magnets, where the average kid is very capable student and things are really competitive, the top of the class could be perceived this way. But I would submit that a high stats kid a truly average American high school (and by average I mean a school where the bell curve of standardized tests scores closely conform to the national average) is rarely that kid in my experience. He or she doesn’t spend all their time studying. School comes very easy to them and they mail it in. The classes have to move at a pace and depth that the rest of the group can keep up, even in AP courses and the like, and that student is typically not just one but two or three steps ahead of everyone else.
Such a kid could have the personality of the boring grade grubber you want to imagine. Or maybe he or she just lives in a part of the country where the only EC anyone is passionate about is football or basketball, and there just haven’t been opportunities for exploration. We see what we want to see it seems to me.
Another generalization is the idea that most of the kids obtaining these top scores are doing a ton of focused preparation. Again, we have to get outside of our bubbles. The typical kid who is getting these scores doesn’t get that, and doesn’t need it. The combination of ability, previous academic preparation, and becoming familiar with the format of the test is all that is needed. Prep can help a kid maximize his or her potential score, within their range of ability. But it doesn’t allow a kid with average ability, or even just your average “smart” kid, to get a 1% percentile type of score. That just isn’t going to happen, any more than it is going to be possible for the average HS basketball player to make it in the NBA.
I fear that some of us don’t spend enough time relating to people of all ranges of academic ability to have a good sense of awareness about what average/good/exceptional truly look like.
Intellectual curiosity.
To be honest, @LOUKYDAD, when I read on CC that applications should be read “on the merits,” it usually means that the poster thinks that kids with the highest grades and scores should get in, period. If that’s not what you meant, I apologize. If you just meant that you don’t like affirmative action, well, I don’t agree with that, either, but it’s a different point that’s been hashed over pretty thoroughly.
Also, I’m not sure you’re right about what the “typical” kid who gets top scores is like–is the kid more likely to be the “natural,” or highly prepped? I think there are some of both in the group. It would be interesting to know the breakdown–and whether colleges think they can spot the difference. (This is one area in which I think it is possible the selective college admissions officials may have a bias against Asian applicants–they may believe that Asian applicants are more likely to be highly prepped, and thus they could discount high scores, especially if ECs aren’t strong.)
Why are we talking about the 99th percentile? That’s the sort of silly exaggeration which is all too common on CC. To look at Harvard’s Common Data Set, the 25th to 75th percentile of admitted students lies between 700 and 800 on the SAT on all three measures. Roughly, somewhere in the top 5% seems to be sufficient.
There’s also the false dichotomy of those who only study, and those who are hooked by geographical diversity, sports or whatnot. This is not true for the majority of admitted students. Lots of characteristics correlate. It’s possible to have great test scores and great extracurriculars, and also be able to charm adults.
Preparing for the college application process is much easier for college-educated parents, though, because they have been through the process themselves.
They are also more likely to stimulate intellectual development from an early age, like encouraging reading rather than watching television, and encouraging kids to aim high from an early age.
Having been through the process before may not fully make the parents aware of how much more selective and expensive many colleges are now. They may be surprised that the college they got into with a 3.0 GPA and which they worked their way through with no support from their parents and no financial aid grants is now only realistic for students with a 3.7+ GPA and is too expensive for a student with no parental support and no financial aid grants to work his/her way through.
My point of the prior post is that if a college only considers academics the “merits” including GPAs and test scores, most likely it will not yield a more wealthy-skewed student body than it currently has. It is actually many of the factors in the “holistic” realm that skew the student body to the wealthy, whether it’s ECs that require years of consistent effort, Julliard qualifying music talents, national ranking searchable athletic competition records, legacy, development case, or even high achieving URM recruiting.
Re #229
Pure GPA and test scores do correlate to family wealth. It is not surprising that, in the whole range of colleges combined (as opposed to specific colleges), those from wealth are much more likely to attend and graduate.
post#230: Of course, everything related to bringing up a child is related to wealth. We are talking about whether theoretically switching to an academics based merit system would yield a wealthier student body than they are currently as formed through a “holistic” admission system.
Re #231
Over the whole universe of colleges combined, probably no significant difference (and note that most moderately and less selective one are basically stats based anyway). Individual colleges may change in this respect, though. But cost, financial aid, and scholarships may be a bigger factor than admission for most students in terms of how family wealth affects their choice.
Panpacific, US colleges already made a huge shift to merit-based admissions systems, away from legacy-based systems. It came about decades ago when they started using the SAT. At that time, many brilliant, deserving students were accepted to the Ivy League, etc., on the basis of their test scores.
Of course, many became relatively wealthy after graduation. Their children are often able to offer high test scores, extracurriculars, legacy, and the ability to pay tuition.
(Note that the SAT at the time was prior to being recentered, and considered to be closer to an IQ test than the present version.)
If highly selective colleges moved to focus more on grades and scores, rich kids would get higher grades and scores than they do now. Instead of spending $$$ on ECs, their parents would spend more on tutoring and prep. I don’t think anybody would be better off if this happened.
“Preparing for the college application process is much easier for college-educated parents, though, because they have been through the process themselves.”
It is TOTALLY different now than it was 25 years ago. We didn’t have online applications. We had general ideas of how kids did on SATs in our school and maybe a few other nearby schools.
It’s information overload, plus the online forms are MUCH harder than the paper forms they used to have.
As for preparation is easier, my parents did NOTHING to help me before. I think they filed FAFSA, that’s probably it.
The whole college prep process, other than yeah, our kids should take the hardest classes they qualify for and take classes that will relate to what they want to study in college, was unknown to us. Kid #2 and so on will benefit from that.
I’ll agree that it is easier for college-educated parents to help their kids apply to college, but it is not because they went through the process before. It’s because by going to college, they learned how to deal with difficult situations and look at the big picture. I know people who have not gone to college who have the same skills, and once they realize they can apply them to their kid’s college app, their lives are much easier.
Well, at least we had filled out an application, took the SAT, etc… I think my dad went to college after his high school principal told him he should go ahead and go to Tech. It was pretty informal.
226 - I am just worn out by people who are intent on convincing us that race shouldn't matter by insisting that race constantly has to matter.
The very premise of this thread is kind of ridiculous to me. No disrespect to anyone, just my own values and how I try to live my life, but I can’t think otherwise when I see this kind of thing. Why are Asian students over-represented on the rolls of academic achievement? Who in the world knows! As far as I know and care, there are as many answers to that question as there are Asian students in America and whoever you want to compare the group to.
It is the people who still care that annoy the heck out of me. And then they presume the right to preach to me about it, and explain to me why because of their superior values I am just incapable of understanding why increasing the number of X has nothing to do with decreasing the number of Y (#203).
When my daughter brings a young man to the house one of these days, the color of his skin is going to be as irrelevant to me as the color of his car. What I am going to be deeply interested in is his character, his lifestyle, what he values and devalues, and how he is going to treat my daughter.
Excuse me, but I’m confused. Isn’t the current claim that they are actually underrepresented?
The claim is that although they are overrepresented in terms of their share of the population, they should be even more overrepresented because of their higher-than-average qualifications. It is a bit confusing.