The students attending Oxford are an interesting, well-rounded and diverse bunch who put on plays, play sports, and converse about philosophy. All of them were selected on just academic merit. Academic merit does not yield clones
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Right, I understand the current reality. Iâm fully onboard with seeking academic quality and a peer group. But Iâm saying that reducing the number of Common App slots would go a long way toward restoring those same schools to being targets and likelies as they were before, since youâd be removing many of the high-reach/longshot apps AND the ninth-choice safety apps from the admission pool.
Just recently, one of the forums here on CC included an applicant who was admitted to a selective flagship (over many other disappointed applicants) but indicated that the school was near the bottom of his list. This is now common, from what I can tell on the internet. But if this student had been required to restrict his applications a bit more (or been required to start over with an entirely separate application through the school itself), he likely wouldnât have even applied to this school, making it marginally easier and more predictable for the students who genuinely want to attend. The effect of large numbers of students having to make those same decisions would ease the competitive level across the board.
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I donât know specifics for Oxford but generally think of them in the same bucket as Harvard. They get more âperfect scoreâ kids than they could even admit - so yeah, they do go to other non-quantitative criteria.
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Is there? Seems like much of the purpose of these forums is about getting into colleges that are not easy to get into, even though there may be many others that satisfy the typical basic parameters (affordable, have the desired academic offerings) without being that hard to get into.
Even less selective colleges shape their classes based on constraints on the number of students that can be in each major. For example, normally open admission community colleges may be selective for oversubscribed programs like ADN/RN programs.
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And most students I know do just that. They might apply to 3 or 4 Ivy+ schools but theyâre not shotgunning. Theyâre also not applying to 5 safeties. Itâs schools with higher than single digit/teen admit rates, yet with solid reputations and great programs (particularly for CS, engineering, business, etc) that are seeing a large increase in applications from these kids.
When a high stats kid canât be sure of admission to their in-state very popular flagship, then theyâre going to apply to many more schools than they otherwise would have.
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I have no issue with schools defining their own criteria for students that they want to admit. For schools like MIT and Caltech, some relatively high minimum bar for math and other STEM fundamentals makes perfect sense. On the other hand, if HYPS take into consideration athletic ability, musical or literary talents, the perspective of some high achieving kid from Appalachia, who is to question whether what they have built is their optimal class.
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If we were the UK (standardized national curricula; A levels, O levels, etc.) with what was until recently a relatively homogenous population, we could create a system like the UK.
But weâre not. Local school boards yell and scream at even the slightest suggestion that they standardize their curriculum. There are parts of the country where reading Eli Wieselâs Night and Diary of Anne Frank are considered important part of social studies- and parts of the country where those books are banned. There are parts of the country where learning genetics, evolution, what is DNA is considered a core component of science- and parts of the country where these are relegated to âsome people believeâ (as if genetics is like the tooth fairy or Santa Clause).
Youâre going to create a national standard? Good luck!
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You canât have an orchestra of only violinists, though.
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Regarding oboe and football playingâŠ
Oboe is music, and music is offered as an academic major at many colleges. So wouldnât it be considered an academic extracurricular that is relevant to the applicantâs academic merit, like extracurriculars in math, science, writing, debate, politics, engineering, etc.?
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And is it essential that every school have an orchestra, or a soccer team? Or maybe they could state their primary mission is academic instead? That music is considered only for those potential music majors, not historians?
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Even non-holistic admissions are often not very well understood. It is not rare to see posts asking for chances at places like Arizona State University, where the admission thresholds for the campus and each major and a scholarship estimator are posted publicly on its web site.
However, it is also the case that some non-holistic admission schools are less transparent than they should be. For example, among the California State Universities, SDSU and CPSLO are less transparent than SJSU and CPP are about prior year (competitively-determined) admission thresholds for each major.
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If an applicant wants a system that is standard, based solely on test scores, GPA, and national entrance exams, then apply to college in another country which handles college admissions using entrance exams, not the United States. I sort of see it like going to Taco Bell and getting upset that itâs not McDonaldâs. If you donât like whatâs on the menu, then vote with your dollars and apply to places that use the criteria that you prefer.
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Depends on your philosophy of education and your beliefs about the role of colleges and universities. I believe we had a thread about this recently? Personally, I believe that college is about far more than gaining proficiency in a few core subjects. I believe the other offerings - music, sports, theater, clubs - are a big and important part of the college experience and of the experience of self-discovery for students entering their young adulthood. Iâm sure opinions vary greatly on that matter.
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My kids did, thanks. Just pointing out that my tax dollars help support a system that is opaque, broken, and causes great stress, and that is not inevitable.
Somehow European young adults seem to develop interests in culture, sports, etc, outside of university and do just fine-better than most Americans in terms of cultural awareness and fitness.
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@hebegebe I read the subject header as implying that the collegesâ admissions processes are broken, as a problem with those institutions. I am not sure their processes are broken. That is the context of my post.
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The really ridiculous thing is we canât even know if the kid in the cited thread is high-stats or not, given grade inflation. Another part of a broken system.
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We would also need a ratio of population to number of spaces in the most desired universities that is more similar to that of the UK. The US has about five times the population of the UK, but Oxford + Cambridge enroll about twice the number of undergraduates as Harvard + Yale.
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I agree wholeheartedly. What would be the goal of a university where all of the students were homogenous and the curriculum offered only academics and more academics? What do those graduates look like? What kinds of lives do they have?
Academics are important, yes. But thereâs so much more to life than class, and Iâm glad that schools recognize this, not just in their campus offerings but in admissions, too.
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They would look like the college graduates in most of the world-in other words, quite good.
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I wasnât aware that universities outside of the United States reserve extracurriculars to people majoring in those topics.
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