For hiring out of college, something like 70% of employers used a GPA screen to prioritize applicants for interviews. But the most common cutoff GPA (about 60% of employers) was 3.0, so one needs to be merely good (rather than elite) in college to pass that screen. Once past that screen, GPA is unlikely to be a big factor compared to others considered at the interview stage.
You are not thinking of all kids, you are thinking of a system based on academic stack ranking which aligns with your (narrow) definition of âmeritâ.
Yours is a system that could be easily implemented but is rejected by the institutions which you would impose it on because it does not align with their definition of âmeritâ.
The system being different than what you prefer does not make the system âterribly brokenâ. It is just a system that defines and weighs âmeritâ differently than you do.
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True. But I will always remember why it was once rejected, and what it meant for kids like mine at the time:
âTo prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way which is at the same time straightforward and effective, and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admissions authorities.â (Abbott Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933)
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Well, it works quite well for most of the worldâs kids, and I have repeatedly stated I suggest it for public universities only. Private schools do what they want. Not much complaint about the alternative auto system at UT Austin. No, it is not perfect, but most seem to prefer it to the other choices, and it is both transparent and predictable.
My kids got into their top choice. Neither wanted a public school. It matters personally to me not one little bit. I just donât think the stress and expense I see around me is a good idea for anyone. I think public institutions need to build trust, and one way to do that is transparency. We know some very bad things have happened without transparency.
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So if they reject ~90% of this schoolâs unhooked applicants with A-A+ GPAs and SAT scores in the 1500s, that means they accept ~10%. That doesnât sound like such bad odds to me. At our excellent public school I would guess that itâs 1% admit rate for unhooked kids with these stats.
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No, it doesnât matter, it is the price of playing the âgameâ per se.
A system which has 20 applicants for every position and of those 20 applicants at least 15 are completely qualified for the position virtually always gets it ârightâ in terms of putting a qualified person into the spot.
The stress is caused by societal, cultural, and peer pressure because people donât understand that their amazing child is not uniquely amazing but has many peers across the country and globe. 25,000 kids are top of their class every year just in the US. 16,000 kids are top 1% on the SAT. Amazing yes, unique not at all. And, there are tens of thousands of kids right on their heels equally deserving because they were close enough to the top as well. And that is before you get to kids with different but also worthy talents.
What is broken is people feeling that they deserve to be at these schools and that anything less is a failure or that they somehow lost to a lesser. They didnât, they lost to the numbers.
The tippy top grades, test scores, and ECs are the price of admission to the field, they are not a guarantee of success and people need to recognize this. It is stressful, it is frustrating, it is expensive, but it is the price required if you want to âgive it a shotâ. And those 10âs of thousands who donât make it go on to populate other incredible schools, creating other incredible peer groups. People also need to understand that the result of this is that there is far less difference between the top 50 or so schools than people assume.
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One more time, I am talking about state public universities. States can identify their top residents. They can come up with transparent criteria for each state school. Texas did it
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And that frustration is compounded when people view things like learning in their high school classes and pursuing ECs as merely a means to college admissions and not valuable and worthwhile endeavors in and of themselves.
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If a student doesnât value learning for learningâs sake, I donât know how to fix that.
But all this pursuing of ECs as merely a means to college admission would be gone immediately if schools didnât reward it. In other countries, students still do sports, music, charity etc, but they do these only if they truly want to. It would be such a relief. So much more honest. So much healthier.
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Young men as a whole are clearly falling behind. Women now outnumber men in applying to and attending formerly male dominated professional schools as well. Roughly 57% of 1st yr medical and law school students were women in 2022. All Ivy League schools outside of Dartmouth reflect this gender imbalance. In particular, last year Brown had almost 12000 more women applying than men with a 4% acceptance rate for women while men had a 6.7% acceptance rate.
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In the last two states where Iâve lived, there are a number of instate public options that are auto admit. They just arenât the flagships. There are also guaranteed transfer pathways from CC to the flagships.
I have college age family in TX. Their auto admit system for UT causes itâs own kind of angst and stress for kids. And even with auto admit, there is no guarantee that a student will get into their intended major.
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As a Florida public high school teacher, I canât even imagine how that would work. I envision parents storming the school board over the criteria that determined their kid to be number 62 in a class of 600 and just missing the top 10%.
I am quite sure kids in the top 10% or even top 20% of high school kids in Florida getting into a state university. They just wonât all get into UF.
There is also incentive for Universities to have representation from all over the country. Florida recently signed a bill where many OOS students get in state tuition if they have a grandparent who resides in Florida.
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I agree with you on this, I think that State flagships should be held to a different standard regarding accessibility for top students within their states.
The UT system isnât perfect and causes some unfortunate behaviors but it is far better than the current UC system which caps or strips anything that signifies academic excellence then tries to pretend that the top 9% get automatic admission to the UC system by equating UC Merced with UCLA and UCB.
In the Bay Area I see many high performing kids opting out of even applying to the UC system because there is no rhyme or reason for admission. The valedictorian of the local Public High School was 3.95UW, 4.5W, 1520 SAT, National Merit winner with solid but not at all unique ECs. She was rejected at UCLA, UCB, UCI and finally got into UCSD from the waitlist. In my view her parents had every right to be upset with that outcome but no reason to be upset with her rejections from Stanford and Penn. Disappointed yes, feeling âcheatedâ no.
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Is there gender based affirmative action anyplace but engineering schools where there is a huge disparity?
Any program that has a huge disparity may place the thumb on the scale for the under-represented gender. Women are underrepresented in the very competitive engineering and business programs (particularly finance). Men are underrepresented in the very competitive nursing programs as well as at most LACs.
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And many high paying employers with clients- love to hire athletes. In my hiring group there was a guy in there who was the son of a client but his claim to fame was he played some level of golf- no idea what it was- pro? No clue, but he was out all the time playing with clients with the partners.
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3.7 uw, which is what I normally cite as C24âs stat. But class rank at their school is based on weighted GPA, afaik. ETA the school allows unlimited APs, and gives them a full point bonus (a=5), honors course get .5 bonus.
so that is,in effect a job requirement-ability to socialize with clients in the game of their choice. That does seem relevant to job selection.
True. That is another problem altogether, that ACT/SAT have such a low ceiling that they label this many kids as essentially academically indistinguishable.
But it suits colleges well, because they can say: âhey, look, we have SO. MANY. qualified applicants!â - and then select whomever they want.
But hereâs the deal. If âeliteâ academic institutions have too many applicants who can âdo the workâ, maybe they should raise the level of their work?
America is not competing in a vacuum.
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Are you saying the top 5-10% (or more, depending on state) of in-state students are not getting into their state flagship?
I donât mean top in their high school, top X% in the state.