Is spike absolutely necessary for Stanford/Harvard/Ivys?

OITB1
Wed, 11 Dec 2024 21:12:28 +0000

Couldn’t possibly like this post more.

There are two or three students with the OP student’s general profile at every high school in America with class sizes larger than a couple hundred. Ultimately, there are probably around forty thousand spots in the freshman classes at the T20 schools a lot of folks here obsess about, a couple thousand of which go to international students with a few thousand more earmarked for recruited athletes. Meanwhile, there will be around 3.6M graduating high school seniors next Spring, more than 25,000 of which will graduate as valedictorian.

A generation ago, the access ways to our most selective academic institutions were very few and narrow for all but about 10% of the population, there were a third less kids, and the arms race of making extracurriculars (which are supposed to be leisure) an immensely important part of every high achiever’s profile hadn’t gotten in to full swing. It was a little more understandable in 1995 to say that a kid with top of the line grades and course rigor, top .5% test scores and unique extracurriculars should get into one of those Ivy type schools if they wanted to. If we’re going to treat admission to an “elite” college as an achievement to notch on a belt or validation for something (which Lindagaf eloquently labels a mistake in the first place), then the least we could have done was expand the definition of “elite” to match today’s numbers and circumstances. In other words, we should stop imposing our own outdated concept of what schools are uber impressive to get into on today’s kids living in today’s world of college admissions.