Yes, it as stated before, there are more qualified candidates than spots. It’s easy to want things easily measured, but that kind of meritocracy is a myth.
There will never be a perfect way to evaluate college admissions. My own kid went to a private college prep school, we paid for Kaplan to help with his SAT, and he applied ED. Do I think he was more deserving of his college acceptance than a kid who maybe scored less and didn’t have the rigor of classes, but didn’t have those advantages? Absolutely not.
You do realize those companies recruit extensively overseas and employ thousands of foreign grads, even sponsoring them for employment in the US, due to their superior skills?
The idea that the US has the corner on superior college grads ended a long time ago. Graduate students, maybe, but half of those are foreign born.
Honestly, the only people who think US college kids are superior are those kids themselves. Not elite employers.
Totally realize that there are many foreign born employees. But that wasn’t my point. My point was that things in addition to pure smarts are needed if you are going to create something that changes the world. As a rule
I will just say that this sounds like you’re suggesting foreign born students and workers are not imaginative or creative, but purely academic. This reminds me of the Harvard lawsuit/Asian stereotypes.
Ok, looks like I am late to the party, having just been summoned by @fiftyfifty1 on a minor tangent :), but I will just go ahead and say it, come what may.
Some of you who know me from other threads might remember that I am an American by choice who is, shall we say, not the biggest fan of the American holistic college admissions system.
Some of you may also know that both my kids were admitted to MIT.
But here’s the deal. I shouldn’t have had to sweat it this much.
Fortunately employers are more attuned to merit-based hiring than colleges are to merit-based admissions.
Of course the current college system breeds mistrust. We know it was misused by some of the premier schools in the country to disadvantage certain groups. Why would they trust it now?
Right there with you, @Vulcan. I had a kid admitted to the number 1 university ( if you believe such rankings) on each of 3 different continents. No sour grapes here. We understood the system, and she delivered. And she will tell you the process is totally screwed up.
No, I blame it on poorly-timed family vacations creating sparks of interest and a student with broad academic interests and no focus.
Lesson learned. Be careful where you vacation in high school.
A dear friend who is a CC is very candid that this is a huge part of her job - more with parents than kids. She also says she occasionally has a kid that she knows will get in anywhere. (She also, btw, has impeccable qualifications for this job, so having been an AO at a number of different schools over the years and being well-connected in the industry, she understands how an application is read.)
Our own experience at a BS with a terrific college counseling staff was that there was a lot of this upfront with each student. There was also a lot of community education (parents and students). I shudder to think how our family might have gone through the process without that. And don’t get me wrong, it was still stressful as heck! But everyone in DS’ class went off to a college they could afford, with a couple transferring a year later but most feeling happy with their choices.
I don’t feel like the process is broken, but I do think that it’s hard to understand, and that it has a lot of different pressures on it. There are also things baked into the system at a higher level, from sports to uneven pre-college preparation, that are complicated and complicating. Way back when, colleges did have their own exams, and wealthy families sent their kids (okay, mostly sons because these schools admitted men only) to prep schools that prepared them for those. We’ve moved on from that!
It’d be awesome if this could be done like medical residencies or Questbridge matches, where you rank your choices and attend the highest one that wants you, but I don’t see that happening.
And for all the complaints about kids applying broadly, this means that almost all colleges are accepting more kids because they are yielding fewer.
But none of this makes it less stressful because every family is doing this for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, with their oldest.
It does. And I’ve explained this vicious cycle on multiple threads. But I don’t know what other approach a high stats, highly accomplished unhooked kid should take, if s/he wants to go to an academically strong school.
