There are definitely shenanigans around getting kids over that graduation threshold, but I had 4 students last year who did not graduate. More the year before. I’m one teacher who had 3 sections of seniors.
By that logic, you can’t find many smart students at Caltech since nobody at Caltech was in the top 100 on Putnam. Many students can find an intellectually challenging environment, even if the college does not have many Putnam math contest top scorers or focus on math contests.
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No flagship offers everything, and we were talking about top students having a place to study in their states. CU is a good flagship, but if you want equine science you go to CSU, petroleum engineering to Colo School of Mines, culinary arts to Metro State (school of hospitality). Not flagships, but if those are subjects top students want to study, there are programs available. If you want to study Hungarian, you are probably out of luck.
Many states also realize they can’t offer it all so partner with other states and if your state doesn’t offer a certain major you can go to a state/school that does for a discount. In the south there is the market exchange, in New England there is a program to get a tuition break for a subject your state doesn’t offer. In the west there is WUE, and you can apply to schools you like better even if your state does offer that same major.
But no state is going to offer everything because they don’t have the demand to do it or the funding to do it. Petroleum engineering not offered? Study civil or chemical, and do a semester at another school on an exchange (or go to Wyoming at a bargain price even for OOS for probably less than your instate would cost you anyway as a top student would get the full Brown and Gold scholarship, plus an engineering scholarship)
We can’t make life perfect for every student, but that doesn’t mean the system is broken. Not every 8th grader gets selected for the All City Orchestra or the school of the Arts, but that doesn’t mean the application process is flawed or unfair, just that there isn’t enough room for everyone. Or we could make it fair by doing away with the program and then no one gets a School of the Arts.
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Thats a PECULIAR analogy. Same sex marriage was a matter of time, the people in office, and a pen.
I don’t understand your point? I specifically stated that I believe students who are USACO platinum, Regeneron ISEF top 3 and the like do benefit from going to school with peers at their level. Certainly future Putnam winners are in the group. Here’s a reminder of the part of my post you chose to ignore…not sure why:
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And where are the girls? That is more depressing than the colleges.
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I thought the same thing, but I don’t know that I want to read the responses…
I’m not sure on gender for some names, but there might be more Benjamins then there are women.
To be perfectly honest?
I committed the sin of responding before reading the entire post.
Then I noticed the rest, liked it, and wanted to say I entirely agree with the second part, but figured that wouldn’t have been too much of an informative post.
Where that leaves us, I do not know.
It’s just that as a parent of kids in that category you described, I craved for more predictability in the process of placing them into an appropriate academic environment.
But it all worked out in the end. So… the system works? Maybe. It did for them, and for that, I am grateful.
Binwei Yan.
ELIZABETH LOWELL PUTNAM PRIZE
I am not insisting Putnam is the only measure, or a perfect one. But it is a meaningful one to us personally in looking at schools.
Caltech is an interesting animal. Riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I think it might just be too small of an undergrad cohort. I can’t speak to how it affects the culture, but it must somehow.
DS20 wrote in his “what would you like to accomplish with your Caltech peers” application essay that he would like for it to give MIT the run for their money at ICPC. He got admitted, but went to MIT. And so it goes.
At essentially every school except MIT, the number of Putnam high scorers is a negligible portion of the overall student body – not just Caltech. For example, suppose a student was deciding whether to attend Cornell, Penn, or Purdue for engineering. The totals were as follows.
Cornell – 0 in top 100, 1 in top 200, 7 in top 500
Penn – 0 in top 100, 1 in top 200, 4 in top 500
Purdue --0 in top 100, 1 in top 200, 4 in top 500
At Penn 0.04% of undergrads were Putnam top 500 compared to 0.03% at Cornell and 0.01% at Purdue. Is the difference between 0.01%, 0.03%, and 0.04% a good way to evaluate whether “smart students can find similarly smart students” at the college? I can understand being interested if you want to pursue Putnam and other math contests and hope to have a strong team, but it seems like a near useless way to evaluate whether you’ll find a lot of “smart students” in your classes.
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Correct.
But it’s not so much the portion that is of interest, but also the critical mass.
And you’re right. Few schools have it (HYPS, CMU, maybe Columbia) and there’s no contest with MIT. But while Harvard in 2nd place might surprise some, it shouldn’t.
…I want to briefly address another related point that many posters concede: that top private universities should be able to admit whomever they want, and that no one should unduly focus on these few schools anyway.
The problem with this is that despite what I think is well-earned criticism of their admissions policies, they do end up, collectively, admitting a significant share of the very top students like these, and for someone who is looking for company of such students, it is entirely rational to apply where they can be found in larger numbers.
I am not saying that is what drives every HYPSM application. But it is also not always a blind pursuit of prestige.
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Dartmouth reinstates standardized test requirement. The explanation as to why can be found in the NYT.
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A step in the right direction. Hopefully, other selective schools follow. It is an additional data point that adds color to the academic strength of the candidate. When people say lower SAT scores are correlated with lower income, one should remember correlation is not causation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/briefing/dartmouth-sat.html’
The actual study data is here-
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And there people were saying it could possibly only be true at MIT, and some even doubting their conclusions when they reinstated the tests.
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Thank you for your list and your further discussion of the points you raised. Interesting reading.
I had a question regarding number 10. Are you referring to any instance in which a family engages a non-school provided resource? Or, more specifically, the type of paid resource that was the subject of the thread Is the college admissions process broken? - #6 by vpa2019.
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It doesn’t much matter to me whether they define it as “paid resource” vs. “outside-of-school resource.” I would prefer the latter, but either definition will serve to decrease the amount of packaging that applicants receive. I know too many cases of application essays being written by someone other than the kid, and hope to cut down on unfair advantages such as this.
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I know one parent (who has a PhD) who was helping her college son write his papers. She would then rage about how she was never getting As on those papers.
Help doesn’t always mean better outcome.
P.S. She also complained about how disappointing his college admission results were. After she “helped” with that as well.
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Agreed that help doesn’t always mean better outcomes, but on average it probably does.
Do you think AOs would be less likely to accept a student who checked yes to the box?
It doesn’t seem to me that apps from students who use IECs are any more
‘packaged’ than students from private HSs (technically a student is paying for that counselor’s help). Also seems if one asks that question, one might also want to ask who had a private academic tutors during HS, test prep tutors, exec functioning tutors, even extra time on tests (we know that one can’t be asked).
I did work as an IEC for 5 or 6 years, and most IECs are not looking to ‘package’ their clients. They are helping students who have inadequate college counseling (which goes far beyond under-resourced schools), or helping to brainstorm essays and the like.
Note NYU did add this question to the common app this year, and quickly pulled it (within a week). I have my thoughts as to why they pulled it, but not sure, so won’t speculate here.
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