I know that I am stating the obvious here, but as far as elite school admissions go, I think the “problem” is that there are way too many applicants for the number of admission slots. When I applied to colleges in the mid 1980’s most all of the top students in my class got into elite schools I can remember kids from my class (sometimes multiple kids) going to Yale, MIT, Penn, Northwestern, Williams, Georgetown, Brown, and Columbia to name a few. The admission’s formula was something like 50% grades, 40% SAT score, and 10% EC’s. Pass a certain threshold, and you got in. Maybe not everywhere, but at least one or two Ivy-level schools. That doesn’t happen anymore. Put those same kids in a time machine that brought them to 2024 and a lot of them would end up at schools like BU and the University of Rochester. How do you “fix” this? The only way I can think of is force elite schools to dramatically increase the size of their student populations, which I don’t see happening.
That is true—for our area the recruited athletes are the biggest “dip” but that obvious dip is onlh for some sports(as in 1200 SAT , median GPA, and average courses, in at ivies for certain sports). Other recruited sports and other hooks(desired background /group) is just a notch down from unhooked, with top20% rigor and rank and 1400s getting in).
The unhooked range for T10s almost always needs top5-10% rigor, 1500+ AND leadership/impactful ECs.
Legacy lately seems nonexistent due to some kids being deferred then rejected or flat out rejected ED despite at the top in everything.
A couple of my friends with very strong legacy kids at private schools are going through this now. Rejected or deferred despite outstanding everything. The exceptions (they have told me) are among legacies with a strong history of giving to the school - not necessarily $1mm type giving, but donating at the $10,000 level year in and year out. That being said, two of my kiddo’s friends did get into Cornell as legacies (one a 5th generation) and while they are fantastic students with good ECs, they didn’t have anything else otherworldly nor are their parents big donors (but this was from public school, not private).
I’m older than you… none of the top women in my HS class were admitted to Yale because… Yale wasn’t accepting women. or Princeton. etc.
It’s easy to long for the good old days. But if you open up your college to 1/2 the population (i.e. the female half) it’s only arithmetic that it’s going to be harder for the men to get accepted. And if MOST black kids (not all, but most) were discouraged from applying to these elite schools (there were subtle quotas even into the 60’s and 70’s) you’ve taken another chunk of the population out of the applicant pool.
This isn’t a problem to be “fixed”, it’s the natural consequences. Some might say evolution. A college which started as a way to prepare young, wealthy, white men for the ministry evolves into a different institution which no longer has a systemic “shut out” process for those who are not wealthy or white. And as a result, the scions of the elite in our country (whether tippity top elite or merely the top ten percenters) feel like it’s a problem that needs fixing.
"Put another way, college sports at elite schools are a quiet sort of affirmative action for affluent white kids…
What makes this all the more perplexing, says John Thelin, a historian of higher education at the University of Kentucky, is that “no other nation has the equivalent of American college sports.”
It’s a particular quirk of the American higher-education system that ultimately has major ramifications for who gets in—and who doesn’t—to selective colleges."
(full text: https://archive.is/ypfdt)
Students at elite private schools are already pre-screened. They are all in the top 10% already. Plus they are better prepared, by orders of magnitude, better advised, and yes are also better packaged. And, selective schools would prefer to admit an equally qualified but more disadvantaged student over them.
Or expand the definition of elite.
@Chekov I am not sure how you can argue that the system of college admissions is broken when both of your kids got into and attended MIT. Wasn’t that the best school for them? So how was the system broken for them? Was it because they didn’t get into every single school they applied to? Or because you didn’t know the outcome ahead of time? Neither of the latter two arguments is remotely persuasive.
Does the WSJ have gift links? Couldn’t read the article.
paywall
One BIG thing that isn’t being discussed here is the growing imbalance in academic performance of boys and girls in this country and it’s impact on college admissions.
There are close to 3 women for every 2 men currently in college according to this NYTimes article. If gender based affirmative action were eliminated and all admissions decisions were based strictly on academic merit, it’s very likely that the imbalance between the number of women and men at many top colleges and universities (with the exception of engineering focused schools) would be even larger than what we are experiencing now. Beyond the failures of our primary and secondary education system wrt boys, that sort of outcome would not be in our national interest.
I copied the gift link. Hopefully it works.
Because @Chekov is concerned not just about is own kids, but all the kids, just as I am. Yes, we “won” at the system, and can still admit the system is terribly broken.
Maybe having experience with other systems changes our perspective. It doesn’t need to be this way.
I don’t believe I personally used the term “broken”. (I did call it “brutal”) It worked out well for our kids, and we are grateful for that. But if I were to say “see, my kids got in, so it’s the best possible system”, that wouldn’t have been an easily defensible position either.
I do like to think that MIT is playing a cleaner game than some other places, in terms of at the very least not doing legacies, not yield protecting, not giving outsize athletic preferences…
But I would have liked more transparency throughout the process everywhere.
But how do you know kids aren’t ending up where they should be? In terms of elite admissions. It’s not like kids rejected from T20s fall off the face of the earth. They go on to attend a T50, or T75 school, and do just fine.
(There’s a sub-discussion going on about whether highly qualified kids are being rejected from their state’s flagship, and I cannot comment on that, because I do not know about that).
I’d love an example of a kid rejected from CMU who ended up folding sweaters at the Gap for the next decade. Or the kid shut out of Princeton who ended up getting a surgical tech certification from the local CC instead of becoming a surgeon.
Indeed- they do NOT fall off the face of the earth. They go to great colleges and then go off and live their lives!
That is likely true regardless of process. A lottery would also yield acceptable results. A process that breeds mistrust, opaqueness, stress, and undesired expenditure of time and resources is in my opinion broken, regardless of the results.
LoRs have their own issues with consistency (as in, how good a LoR writer is the teacher or counselor?) and fairness (see threads about LoR rationing and other issues).
The elite prep schools presumably have the most advantages in LoRs, with college counselors who help students pick the best LoR writers for them without overloading any one teacher, and teachers who are trained how to write good LoRs.
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