A place to discuss our views on whether the current admissions process is broken, however we consider that-in terms of cost, transparency,outcomes, whatever.
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Any system that requires insider information to successfully navigate meets my definition of broken.
This is true for rich students and poor students, for high stats students and low stats students, and for students in between.
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See the related post about paid college consultants. When one quarter of Harvard admits using them, there is a profound problem.
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@roycroftmom where is that thread?
“Inventing the perfect college applicant”
Hopefully the school profile will put all of that into context. Her GPA should be compared against her peers, not against other schools that have grade inflation.
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The good news is there are a lot of colleges, and when she ends up at the right one, she will soar in comparison to her classmates with supposedly higher grades from inflated schools.
ETA outside of maybe a dozen schools, I truly dont think the college matters much. One can get great education and great jobs from the top of almost anywhere.
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I think that the system is not very good. I suppose that it could be worse, but it also could be better.
One issue is that we put way, way too much pressure on our high school students. Our high school students are under a lot of stress, and way too many of them are being treated for stress related illnesses. Some private high schools might be even more stressful, although public high schools can be plenty stressful.
A big part of this stress comes from a university admissions process that is unpredictable and that at least appears to be based on a lot more than just merit.
I am not sure that I am a fan of AP classes and DE classes. This seems to be part of the model that whatever your high school student is doing is not enough. A’s are not enough. A’s in honors classes is not enough. A’s in AP classes is not enough. Your ECs are not enough. You need to do more, and quite likely still won’t get into your “dream” school.
Speaking of dream schools, I think that people put too much emphasis on attending “big name” universities. There are a lot of very good universities out there. Perhaps the “big name” universities have to create the allure of being special since they are so expensive. If your in-state public university is very good, why would we spend two or three times as much to attend an expensive private university? I think that I get it for graduate school which can in some cases be highly specialized. I don’t get it for undergraduate education.
Years ago when my older daughter was looking for universities we visited BU. One thing that was mentioned was that BU had reduced the number of students accepted. I was puzzled. Why would they do this? A few weeks later I saw a university ranking that had BU only a few spots ahead of U.Mass Amherst. I think that I might have figured it out. BU had to stay more selective than U.Mass. If U.Mass Amherst were to ever pass BU in the rankings, then why would anyone pay the big bucks to attend BU? It seems like other private schools might have a similar incentive to remain “selective” so that people will see them as special.
In contrast I am tempted to look to the country to the north where I originally grew up. In Canada the vast majority of universities (probably anything that you have heard of) are public. As the population grows they just get bigger and accept more students. If you are academically strong enough to survive at Toronto or McGill, then you are likely to get accepted. Growing up we never worried about university admissions because if we belonged at a university on this level, we would get in. ECs did not matter. Taking a particularly challenging set of classes did not matter. Straight A’s were not needed. We pretty much just needed to figure out which university would be a good fit for us, apply, and go there.
I do however feel that education is very important. There are a huge number of things that we take for granted every day that would not be possible without a large work force of people who are responsible, intelligent, and highly educated. The Internet and the World Wide Web are examples. PET scans and some of our treatments for cancer (robot assisted surgery, external beam radiation treatments, …) provide more examples. Cell phones. Netflix. Self driving cars…There are huge numbers of other things that we benefit from that are only possible because of high tech and/or biotech.
High school students are under enough stress just growing up and being teenagers and figuring out about “dating” and “what do I want to do with my life”.
I also do not have the answers.
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The tippy tops which are the schools that have the process that most people complain about just have limited seats vs the number of applicants. If these schools want to “shape” their classes, whether through diversity in academic interests/talents, geography, social economic status, other talents… in short practice holistic admissions, there will always be issues of transparency because subjective judgements are being made by AO’s and outside observers like parents have no idea what is in the application folder of students competing with their kids.
Much of the stress and uncertainty is rooted in the ridiculous admissions rates, and the problem is in the denominator. Anecdotally (and knowing that a key stat that HYP keep track off is cross admit yield) there seem to be a significant number of kids who get multiple acceptances to T10/20’s. It seems to me one of the easiest things we can do to reduce application stress is to categorize schools by admit rates and limit the number of applications an applicant can make in each category, e.g. one can only apply to 3 colleges with a less than 10% admission rate and 5 between 10-25%.
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Except we can see from CC many parents complaining that what they thought, at least, were their high performing kids, are getting rejected from their state flagships, much to their shock. I think the problem extends beyond the T20.
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I think that students just don’t know where they stand. Having more clarity would help, but I’m not sure most schools would go for it.
For state schools they should adopt systems like Texas and be the first/best stop for residents.
For the privates, they should just come out and require minimum GPA to be considered. Some privates should also require SAT and also have minimums (maybe based on majors)to even apply.
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I’m not sure it’s the admission process that’s broken. I think we live in a society that’s broken, where we pretend things are about merit and make noises about there being many, many schools where kids can succeed, while willfully ignoring that graduates of Ivies and similar schools hold power and wealth far disproportionate to their percentage of the population.
And sure, the vast majority of college students will never go on to be the CEO of a large company, or a member of Congress, or sit on the Supreme Court. But there will always be a huge supply of people who feel it’s their duty to keep the windows to that kind of success open to their kids for as long as possible. How can we reasonably blame them for that?
WRT public flagships, this is one thing I really like about my state. There seems to be little to no snobbery about the public university system here – students happily enroll in UNC Charlotte, ECU, App, UNCG, Wilmington, etc. Chapel Hill and NC State, while great, don’t seem to be the be-all-and-end-all in the eyes of most families.
(that all said, my kid didn’t apply to a single in-state school, with my blessing. It’s not that we think them too good to go here; it’s just that our legislature wishes they and kids like them didn’t exist, so they’re getting out of dodge).
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States could have a mix of such schools, and elite flagships with stricter entry standards to cater to their top students, particularly those from donut-hole families that can’t afford private schools.
There needs to be a Georgia Tech, and a UMich, etc.
Btw, this thread was spun off from the story of this mom.
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Agree totally. And the students would have a better idea on where they stood.
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In general, that’s because of where many of the students come from, their circumstances, their families, their wealth, their connections…not because of the school they went to. Generally. Not always.
For example, data have shown FGLI students do benefit from attending highly rejective schools.
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Very true, but isn’t that our whole millionaire/billionaire problem in a nutshell? That people buy into the idea that if they just do the right things, send their kids to the right schools, they too can be millionaires (if only those pesky (insert target du jour) people didn’t keep taking their spots/jobs/opportunities).
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That’s way beyond my pay grade 
Sorry, apparently I’m feisty today.
Could have written this post! Before we even selected a magnet program, I read an article that essentially said these schools tend to “hurt” chances for top schools. But my kids wanted to be challenged- they had gone through elementary and middle with straight As no effort. Tested in top percentile for every standardized test out there. They did get challenged, at the cost of serious pain (and as you said, growth). But I’m confident if they’d gone to a “normal” school, they’d have gotten 4.0s to match the high SAT and would fare better in the admissions game. Kids in our “regular” school who my kid was tutoring in middle school have in some cases outperformed in college admissions game. I’m still glad they did it due to personal growth but that doesn’t mean I don’t resent the process. Part of me wishes they had gone to less rigorous school, but then maybe they’d be challenged for the first time away from home during a major transition.
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